All Good Children Part 1

ALL GOOD.

CHILDREN.

CATHERINE AUSTEN.

To Sawyer and Daimon, who are not in this one, and to a boy named Pierre, who haunts these pages as Xavier.

When the children have been good, That is, be it understood, Good at meal-times, good at play, Good all night and good all daya"

They shall have the pretty things Merry Christmas always brings.

Naughty, romping girls and boys Tear their clothes and make a noise, Spoil their pinafores and frocks, And deserve no Christmas-box.

Such as these shall never look At this pretty Picture-Book.

From Heinrich Hoffmann's.

Struwwelpeter: Merry Stories and Funny Pictures.

(1845).

PART ONE.

TREATMENT.

ONE.

The airport security guard is not amused when I drop my pants in front of her. Actually, they fall down when I remove my belt. I don't want to look like a recall, so I play along: fold the pants, strip off my T-shirt, cue my charming adolescent smile. "I'm ready for my pat-down now."

The guard stares at me, blank and bored, hands planted on her fat hips. Broken body scanners, delayed f lights, exhausted travelers, near-naked teensa"they all blend in her muddy eyes. "Are you carrying any liquids or electronics?" she asks.

Beside me, my sister Ally giggles through her own pat-down. She runs across the room to find her shoes and teddy bear. Our mother shields her from the sight of me.

"Lady, I'm almost naked," I say. I point to my shorts and add, "I could take these off, too, if it'll get me through faster. I know it looks like I might be hiding something."

The guard frowns, blinks, reaches her gloved hands up to my neck as if she's going to throttle me. She probably hears that joke twice a day. "Did you place your electronics in the bin?" she asks. Her fat fingers scurry over my bare shoulders, down my breastbone, around my back, as if contraband could be hiding beneath my skin.

My mother's voice booms across the room. "Why is that woman touching my child's body? Is she blind? He is fifteen years old. He's a citizena"" And on and on until every traveler stares at me and my molester.

I pretend this is a normal encounter. I nod to pa.s.sersby. "My mother confiscated my electronics last week," I tell the guard as she strokes my naked thighs. "I'm grounded. Actually, I'm about to be airborne. But metaphorically I'm grounded. I was a bad boy."

She groans to her feet, pats my a.s.s none too gently and motions me onward. I dress in front of a thousand eyes that glitter like gla.s.s under the terminal lights.

I follow my angry mother to the boarding gate. New chairs, same wait. Same blend of stale gum and subt.i.tled news: New York City is still drowning; Phoenix is still parched; transnational corporations are still profiting from disaster. I withstand it all.

I would strip again if it got me home faster, but we're stuck for another hour. Five hundred heads lean into five hundred projections: reading, playing, messaging, leering. Not me. My RIG lies at the bottom of Mom's purse, a Realtime Integrated Gateway to a world my mother won't let me access.

Mom and Ally chant together face to facea""Rock! Paper! Scissors!" and "Wild Wild West!"a"feeble finger-plays Mom learned on the bus to kindergarten when she was young. Now and then she glances at me and asks, "What were you thinking?" as if she really wants to know.

Our flight is called at last. I grab the window seat as a reward for withstanding so royally. My heart pounds in antic.i.p.ation. This will be the second flight of my life, and it'll be even better than last week's, because it's taking me home.

A giddy sense of freedom washed over me when that first plane lifted off the ground. I held my RIG to the window and watched dead gra.s.s and pavement recede into an abstract of greens and browns scarred by rivers and roads. Ally squeezed my leg and squealed, "It's like we're riding a pterosaur!" Even our mother smiled.

My world was shining then, as we blazed toward Aunt Sylvia's funeral, all expenses paid. I didn't pretend to be sada"I barely knew my aunt. I was ecstatic, literally on top of the world. I flew away from the first week of school, left my dull gray uniform in New Middletown and rose above a planet that looked like G.o.d's own palette.

It was glorious until cruising alt.i.tude, when Mom received a notice about a prank bomb threat sent to my school from our apartment complex that morning. She s.n.a.t.c.hed the RIG right out of my hand. "You logged in as Lucas?" she shrieked.

"What makes you think it was me?" I asked.

She rolled her eyes and huffed, as if no other child would break a rule.

"It was a joke," I told her. "He left his RIG in the lobby. His pa.s.sword is Lucas1."

"You used to be that boy's friend!"

I shrugged. "He's a throwaway."

I shouldn't have said that. It's what all the academic students call the trade kids, but I would have gotten my RIG back last week if I'd just held my tongue. Mom dragged me through funeral homes and legal offices, down the unguarded streets of an ungated city, with my RIG bouncing blindly in her handbag, recording nothing.

Atlanta was the first city I'd ever visited outside of New Middletown. It was beautiful in its crazy patchwork sprawl, but seriously marred by poverty. Winds whipped down the avenues into alleyways where people lived in paper boxes. Beggars and thieves lurked around corners or banged on the windows of limousines jammed in traffic until police officers dragged them away. It was hostile and hopeless and deeply unnerving.

But behind the cars and crowds was the most amazing graffiti I've ever seena"huge, vibrant, angry. Ally snuck me her RIG so I could record a few images: a tidal wave crashing into a lopsided skyline, a line of prisoners with empty eye sockets, a salt flat littered with honeybee carca.s.ses.

One day I'll paint a piece like that.

My mother took her time burying her sister. By the third day, not even the art could make the noise and dirt and stink bearable. My cousin Rebecca should have settled everything, but she immigrated to Canada ten years ago and wasn't allowed back. She inherited a small fortune from her mother, but the government seized it. They gave Mom nothing but funeral expensesa"hence the family airplane ride, the week of hotel breakfasts, the evenings stretched out like years on Atlanta's lilac sheets.

Now we're heading home with boxes of worthless fragments from Rebecca's childhooda"hand-written letters, framed photographs, report card printouts. It's like inheriting a recycling bin. But among the memorabilia were sixteen color markers packaged in plastic and three gray sc.r.a.pbooks I've already filled from seam to corner with abstracts of Earth.

I'll post a collage when I get my RIG back: Out of School Withstanding on a Perilous Planet.

Ally grips my hand when our plane takes its turn at the top of the runway. The fuselage rattles, wing flaps flutter, wheels blindly spin. We grip our armrests and fall silent. It doesn't feel close to fast enough. The plane screams and roars. It seems almost silly to try to get off the ground. But suddenly, improbably, we rise. I laugh out loud. We rise above the patchwork city into a pure white blazing light. I wish I could tell my friends, "Look up. See that silver speck slicing the sky? That's me!" But I'll have to wait until I'm home to post about it. By then, no one will care. Once you're in the past tense, you're history, and no one has time for history anymore.

There's a complimentary snack in my seat pocket. The chips taste like mold. I eat them fast, more disappointed with every crunch. Mom pa.s.ses hers and I eat those, too, until I'm deeply miserable. "Can I have my RIG now?"

"No."

Ally unfolds her seat tray, lays down her chips and rests her teddy's head on them.

"Aren't you going to eat your snack?" I ask.

She grabs the bag fast as lightning and stashes it on her lap.

"I'll eat them if you don't want them," I say.

A fat man across the aisle ogles my mother and says, "Kids. They're never satisfied."

When I see men like this, I'm thankful for genetic testing. Whatever my future may hold, I'll never end up a fat bald white man. This one takes up two seats and he's still crammed tight. I point to the chips resting on his belly. "Are you going to eat those?"

"Please ignore him," Mom tells the man.

He covers his chips with his fat white hands and winks at her.

Ally taps my shoulder and asks, in a voice soft and high, "If you're not going to look out the window, can we trade places?"

"No." I fake a stretch and sneak the chips from her lap. I keep my eyes on the clouds as I crack open the bag. I dip into it languorously and pop a few in my mouth. Ally doesn't notice. "Want a chip?" I offer.

"No, thank you. I have my own." She reaches under her tray. A look of panic floods her face. She lifts her teddy, feels her legs, scans the floor, gropes the filthy carpet.

"Lost something?" I ask.

"I can't find my chips!"

"What did they look like?"

She stuffs her hand down the back of her seat. "They were in a red bag!"

I move the chips to the center of the window frame. "With white writing?"

"Yes! Did you see them?"

"Give her back her chips, Max," Mom says.

Ally looks from Mom to me to the chips in my hand.

"Here. Have these," I offer.

"Are you sure?" Ally asks. "We could do Eenie Meenie for them."

"Nah. Just take them."

She smiles at the half-eaten bag. "Thanks, Max. You're nice."

My mother sighs.

The fat man clears his throat. "Lovely children. Are they your own?"

Mom's face is five shades darker than mine and Ally's, and now it turns darker still. She looks him up and down and rolls her eyes. That should end the conversation, but the man is deeply defective. "And their father?" he asks, leering at my mother's b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Our father's dead," I say. "He died in the flu epidemic three years ago. Drowned in his own body fluids."

"Max, please," Mom says.

"So she's single now," I add.

The fat man squirms and mumbles something about being sorry.

The man in the seat beside him peeks around his gut. I groan. It's Arlington Richmond, my best friend Dallas's father. He hates me. He hates my whole family. He didn't mind us when Dad was alive, but his feelings cooled when half our income died. I salute him and turn back to the sun.

I wish I could message Dallas that his dad is surveying me at thirty thousand feet. But I can't connect with anyone without my RIG. On the upside, I can't access my homework. "We were lucky to miss the first week of school," I whisper to Ally.

She frowns. "I like school."

Mom kisses the top of her head. Ally takes Mom's face in her hands and kisses it backa"her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, over and over until the sweetness turns unsettling. "Enough, pumpkin," Mom says.

The Freakshow theme song rises out of the airplane chatter ahead of me. I jerk to attention and peer between the seats.

A teenage boy whips his head around and grunts. Either I have very strong chip breath or he has supreme peripheral vision. He slips in his earpiece and holds my stare. He has ultimate written all over him. Even sitting down, he looks like a giant. His parents must have tested a dozen eggs before they found him.

I am not an ultimate. I'm a best-of-three. Only the rich keep at it until they get a perfect embryo. There are a lot of rich people in New Middletown, so I'm used to competing with ultimates like this kid. They usually win.

Most people are freebies, conceived and birthed at home with just the barest screening for deformities. They talk about ultimates and best-of-threes like we're genetically engineered, but we're not. We're conceived in fertility clinics, but there's no splicing or even much planning involved. It's more like gambling than engineering. Parents pay for a certain number of random embryos. They don't know what they'll get until they read the genes and choose one to grow in the womb. The unhealthy are terminated and the unchosen are put in cold storage to sneak out sometime in the future when infertility reaches crisis proportions. Or maybe they're sold or experimented on or grown for partsa" depending on which conspiracy theory you believea"but they're not genetically engineered.

I'm the cream of a crop of three. It's hard to get c.o.c.ky about that. The kid ahead of me is the cream of a much richer crop. His eyes sparkle as he surveys me over his shoulder. "If it isn't the stripper," he says, snickering. "Nice shorts, recall."

I salute him rudely and lean back, kicking his chair out of spite. "Sorry," I say. Then I kick it again. The security guard glares from his station.

"Be good, Max," Ally says. My sister is not an ultimate or a best-of-three. She's a freebie, naturally conceived six years ago by my baffled parents. Mom says she's a gift from G.o.d. Ally has a big heart and a small brain, which suggests that G.o.d should take a good look at creation before he hands out any more gifts.

"We can't all be you," I tell her.

Dr. Richmond snickers.

Mom glances across the aisle. "Arlington? What a surprise. How are you?"

The fat man turns from Mom to Dr. Richmond as if he has a stake in their conversation.

"I'm fine, Karenna. I'm just heading back from the Global Ed Conference in Texas. I was supposed to take the speed rail, but Mexicans bombed the station. Did you hear about it? Are you coming direct from Atlanta? You have family there, don't you? It must have cost a fortune to take the kids for the weekend."

"Not at all," Mom says, not bothering to explain about the funeral or the lost week of school.

"You should take Dallas to your next conference," I say. "He'd love flying." At least you won't have to put up with it much longer."