All Good Children (21 page)

“Verbal and physical abuse are not appropriate responses, are they, sir?” I shout.

“What?” he asks angrily. He looks in my face and backs into his lecture projection. Words and images from history flicker across his face. His eyes glitter in the blue light.

Dallas hustles over. “Our teachers work hard every day to be role models. We owe them our respect,” he says.

I don't glance at him. “Xavier Lavigne is a fifteen-year-old boy!” I shout at Werewolf. I want to rip his beard off with his smirk.

Dallas grabs my shoulder, shoves me to the wall, leans into me. “We are all lucky to go to a school with good role models. We would not be lucky if we had to go to school by ourselves.”

He holds me there to keep me from digging my grave. He's risking his whole act like this, in front of Werewolf and the zombies and the surveillance camera. “We're all lucky,” he repeats. He holds my gaze and nods, over and over, until I nod back.

Werewolf is disturbed and angry, but he doesn't accuse us of anything. He dissolves his lecture and squeezes behind Dallas, scampers to the doorway. He holds his broken hand over the place where his heart would be if he had one. “I don't expect to see you all here next term.”

“He's suspended,” Celeste says. “I'd rather you didn't come in. I don't know what'll set him off.”

Xavier lies on his living room carpet, staring at the ceiling.

“Don't look so sad, Max. He'll be okay. He might just need a new patch.” Celeste pats my arm. “We started an information campaign at the college about the new support program and how they should warn people on other meds to be extra-careful. We might do a petition.”

I try to smile.

She looks over her shoulder at her baby brother. “Sunday's his birthday,” she whispers.

At home, Mom sighs along with the news.

“The New Education Support Treatment will turn the tide in our failing education system,” a government rep is saying. His words are straight from the Chemrose website, all about community improvement, cost savings, the best interests of the child.

“What are we going to do?” I ask. “This is every academic school in the country he's talking about.”

Mom shrugs.

“I have three years left of school,” I remind her. “Ally has twelve. Do you really think you can be there for every shot they give us?”

She bites her lip, shakes her head. “Maybe we should leave,” she mutters.

“Of course we should leave. You're a geriatric nurse in a world full of old people. You can find work anywhere.”

“But your schooling—”

“There are a thousand virtual high schools I could go to.”

“But the quality, Max. I can't afford—”

“We can't stay here, Mom!”

She nods. “Okay. Maybe we can go back to Atlanta.”

“Atlanta, where Aunt Sylvia was murdered?” I remember all the poor people on the dirty streets, the sad ones begging from strangers and lying half dead in alleys, the scary ones hovering in doorways, hungrily surveying the wealthy.

Mom rolls her eyes at me. “Either we stay or we go, Max. I can't change the world.”

“All right. Let's go. A million people live in Atlanta, and hardly any of them are murdered. Right?”

“Right.”

The news shows a labor riot in the American south, where illegal workers are protesting the new universal id cards.

“Can we take Dallas with us?” I ask. “He's losing it here. He puts on an act all day and night.” She frowns, so I poke at her guilt. “You either have to get him out of here or give him the shot. You can't leave him like this.”

She holds her head in her hands. “Okay. We'll take Dallas. We'll take anyone who wants to come.”

Ally plays inside the tent, singing to her teddy, “You find milk and I'll find flour, and we'll have pudding in half an hour.”

I blow off Saturday's coaching to do chin-ups in the park and run down the rich people's sidewalks.

I'm struck by the sight of a woman kneeling beside a two-year-old child and a bucket of chalk. They've covered twenty square feet of concrete with cloudy pastels— scratches and scars from the kid, bold blocks and squiggles from the woman. I jog on the spot beside them. “That's glorious,” I say. “You should color the whole world like that.”

She smiles at me, sincere and well-wishing, and offers me pink and yellow chalk. “Draw something in front of your house.” She has no idea they're going to zombify her kid once he gets to preschool, no idea she'll want them to. I leave them to their rainbows.

I end up at Pepper's house. I draw a pink heart on the concrete slab in front of her door. I write my initials inside it with a plus sign and a question mark. Then I ring the bell.

There's no answer.

I drop the yellow chalk in her mailbox and pretend she might fill in her own initials. There's a jingle in the box when the chalk hits bottom. My fingers find two keys on a metal wire. I close my fist around them.

For the sake of the camera, I ring the bell again. I wait for an answer that doesn't come, then reach into my pocket and whip out the keys like they were there all along. I hurry inside and shut the door.

I don't call Pepper's name because I know she's not here. I can tell by the smell and the static air. This is an empty house.

I tell myself I'll just get a drink of water and leave, but even as I'm thinking the words I know I'm going to search every inch of the place.

Even though it's on two floors, Pepper's house is almost as small as our apartment. There's a living room, kitchen and bathroom downstairs, two bedrooms and a utility room upstairs. There's not much to explore—no clothes on the drying rack, no dishes in the sink. A few dresses hang in Pepper's closet between dozens of empty hangers. There are some T-shirts in the drawers, but no socks or underwear. I've never thought about her panties before, much as I've thought about getting them off. But now that I'm searching her dresser, I wish I knew what they looked like.

I sit on her bed and feel her absence like a ghost. There's a thin layer of dust on her night table, with bare spots where picture frames might have stood.

She's gone. I lie back on the pillow and think those two words over and over.

Before I leave, I peek behind her bedroom door in hope of a flimsy nightgown I could fantasize with. Instead I find a thin strip of wood—sawn-off window trim—that holds the tiniest painting I ever made. It shows Pepper in a skimpy elf costume up on her toes beside a stack of presents, one leg high in the air behind her, her pointed shoe sparkling like a star. I sketched it at the Christmas production last year, worked on it through the holidays, gave it to her on New Year's Day.

I'm happy that she hung it here. Every time she closed her door, she was reminded of me. But then she packed her frames and panties and left my painting behind.

I lift it off its mount. It's not really stealing. She's never coming back for it.

Someone's crying in the tent on Sunday morning when I get back from cross-country. I pull apart the front flaps and find my mother on the couch bawling like a baby, her face twisted and stained, soggy tissues in her fist. She looks up at me and hides her face in her hands.

She won't tell me what's wrong. She shakes her head every time I ask, swats at me when I try to pry her fingers off her face.

“It's Xavier's sixteenth birthday,” I say, but she just cries harder.

I head to the kitchen and butter some toast, sprinkle cinnamon and sugar overtop. I sit at the table and scroll through
Freakshow
's “behind the scenes” clips. Zipperhead and his girlfriend just got engaged.

Eventually Mom comes out and sits beside me. I dissolve my screen and offer her my last triangle of toast. She shakes
her head, clears her throat, takes my hand. She stares at the
table and says, “Tyler Wilkins died last night from heart
failure because of the shot I gave him.”

The bread wads up on my tongue. I'm silent, disbelieving.
I don't say, “You killed him.” I don't say, “You didn't kill
him.” I don't say anything.

I feel all ripped up inside, as if Tyler was my friend.
I try to remember him busting my ribs, slapping Ally's face,
kicking Xavier, all the reeking moments he inflicted over the
years, but every image gets pushed away by the memory of
him storing my painting in his RIG and calling me an asshole
because I thought I had him pegged.

I get up and go inside the tent. I can't sit down. I turn in
circles and watch the walls blur by. I know exactly what I'm
going to paint for the exhibit.

I'll paint children, dozens of them, real ones-Tyler
and Pepper and Xavier, me and Dallas, Bay and Brennan, Montgomery and Kayla, Saffron and Chicago, the baby on the sidewalk yesterday, Zachary and Melbourne from the park, Lucas from downstairs, the high school kids on skateboards, the throwaways on skates. I'll paint all of us doing what we used to—dancing and running and fighting and playing and laughing and being kids. I'll paint us on the walls inside the tent where I'm hiding now, in dazzling hues and luminance. I'll leave the walls outside dull gray, stenciled with a single word. I'll call the whole thing
Withstanding on a
Perilous Planet
. And I'll give it to Xavier as a belated birthday present. I'll tell him it's a metaphor.

ELEVEN

There's a meeting at the high school to talk about concerns with the New Education Support Treatment, but only my mother has any.

“I expected you to be thankful for the treatment,” Mr. Graham tells her. “Your son is an obvious troublemaker— and I don't mind using that word now that it's a thing of the past. Maxwell is bright enough to waste hours of class time with his antics yet still complete his work and earn As. But in exercising what you consider his freedom, he impacts on the freedom of others. He wasted their class time, too, and they needed that time to understand their work. His fun caused his classmates to fail.”

Everyone turns to stare at Monster Max.

I have to admit, it's a good argument. I never thought goofing around might send someone to throwaway school. He should have told me that my first detention.

He blathers about the importance of home support strategies, which he's sure are lacking in my life. “Nesting makes the children receptive to the tools of learning, but it's up to us to shape them into excellent students.”

Mom's hand shoots up. “So is it the treatment or the reinforcement that determines their behavior?”

The principal nods like she's finally catching on. “It's the reinforcement. The treatment makes them open to it.”

“So they would behave in any way we promoted?”

Mr. Graham glances at a black-suited man on the stage behind him, then says, “In a manner of speaking.”

Mom persists. “So we could train them to do almost anything?”

“No, you're misunderstanding.” Mr. Graham smiles. “Let's move on now. We have more to discuss tonight than the concerns of just one parent.”