All Good Children Part 3

"I can get my a.s.signments off Blackboard," I say. She doesn't glance at me. "I was defending Xavier," I add. She just sighs.

When we get to our building, I want to race up the flights of stairs, but I slow myself down for Mom's sake. She yawns and says, "I haven't slept since Sat.u.r.day night."

"Technically, it was Sunday morning."

She stares at me like I'm the biggest a.s.s in the world. And maybe I am. But as I review the fight in my minda"I add an announcer in the background, cameras on the sidea"the crowd goes wild.

I thought I'd spend my suspension exercising and watching Freakshow, but Mom puts an end to that dream when she wakes up in the afternoon. Instead of making me a sandwich, she makes me a list of ch.o.r.es: dishes, dusting, laundry, clean Ally's room, supervise Ally's homework. When I add wipe Ally's a.s.s to the list, she is not amused.

"Okay. I'll do ch.o.r.es," I say. Then I continue watching Freakshow until she stares me down.

I work my way to the bottom of the list by six o'clock. I help Ally with her homework while Mom makes supper. I am not a premium teacher. It frustrates me when Ally doesn't understand her work. It makes me think she's a recall, and I hate that thought because I love her so much.

Her spelling words are strange but simple: duty, job, joy, love, power, help, hurt, good, bad, boy, girl. That's a damaged mix of words, but they're phonetica"except love, which is irregular in every way.

"No!" I say for the fourth time. "It's h-u-r-t, not h-e-r-t!"

"I'll take over, Max. You set the table," Mom says. She smiles at Ally. "Remember that U can get hurt. Not E."

Ally laughs. "An E can't get hurt, can it?"

I arrange knives and forks and feel like a creep.

"There's something wrong with the kids at my school," Ally says when she dissolves her screen. "I think they're sick."

Terror fills Mom's eyes. Four million kids died in the Venezuelan flu epidemic. "Are they coughing?"

Ally shakes her head. "Not sick like that. Sick like their heads are cloudy."

"Are they slurring their words? Losing their balance?"

"No. They're just not right. They're all slowed down."

Mom looks at me as though I might be able to elucidate.

I shrug and say, "I'll look around when I take her to school tomorrow."

I'm ready for Tyler when I leave the apartment in the morning. I have a steak knife in my jacket pocket but no idea how to wield it. Fortunately, he's sleeping in, as all suspended children should be.

Ally chatters about rodents the whole way to school, a stream of useless facts like, "Mice have poor eyesight," and "Chipmunks nest underground." She shuts up as we approach her school, pushes me away when I hug her goodbye.

I linger by the fence and chat with the eight-year-olds who rush up to me, make faces, tattle on their friends, ask who I am.

"h.e.l.lo, Max," Xavier pants. He towers at my side, half-naked, as if he teleported from a gymnasium. He smells like raspberry crumble. "I ran five miles cross-country and now I'm sprinting to school. Will you run with me?"

"I'm not allowed at school this week," I remind him. He looks confused. I raise my swollen hands. "Remember how Tyler tried to waste you and I beat him down yesterday?"

"Yes."

"I got suspended for that."

Four high school girls fall silent as they approach. They gawk at Xavier, who's wearing a pair of shorts that reach his knees, a pair of sneakers that reach his ankles, and nothing else except a sheen of sweat.

I give the girls a wink. They giggle and walk on, whispering and glancing back.

"You should get to cla.s.s," I tell Xavier. I smile like it's premium fun being suspended, then turn back to Ally's schoolyard.

The first graders line up early again. Their ranks have swollen with a few dozen grade twos. Melissa stands near the front, staring at the closed doors. A supervisor walks the line, watching me where I lurk outside the fence. I wave and say, "Hey!" She doesn't wave back.

The older kids play on the jungle gyms, run across the concrete, throw b.a.l.l.s at the fence and try to scare me. When the bell rings, the sour-faced supervisor calls in the stragglers. "I can't wait till next week!" she shouts to another supervisor across the concrete. Ally looks my way but doesn't return my wave. The supervisors yell at her to get in line.

Where the youngest children wait near the doors, the lines are royally neat. No jostling, no hopping, not even pairs of girls holding hands. The line snakes out as it lengthens. The fourth graders at the back are toxic, switching places, yapping, pushing each other down. The supervisors yank on their arms to no effect.

Eventually everyone slithers inside, and I'm left standing with my fingers threaded through the fence, staring at silent concrete. Xavier jogs on the spot beside me. "What are you still doing here?" I ask him. "You're going to be late for cla.s.s."

"Will you run with me?" he repeats.

I laugh. "I have to go home, Xavier. I'm suspended for saving your life."

Xavier can deconstruct my personal mythology faster than I can fabricate it. "I don't like you to fight," he says. "I like you when you're nice."

Sometimes Xavier reminds me of Ally because he's kind and innocent. But once in a while when he's not speed-talkinga" because he looks so old and white and seriousa" he reminds me of my father. It saddens me and I don't know why.

"Go to school before you're late," I tell him. "I can't run with you today."

"Okay. Bye, Max." He sprints away, supremely fast and strong, out of sight in thirty seconds. If he could manage relationships and violence, I'd recruit him into football.

Stray children rush past me, trying to get to school on time. Older teens and adults ride to work on bikes. I watch them for a while. Then I have to admit that I have nowhere to go but home.

"You forgot to put the garbage out," Mom says when she wakes at two o'clock.

I look up from my RIG. "Sorry."

"We'll have too much next week, Max. They raised the fine to forty dollars."

I shrug. "I could dump it in the park."

"That's wrong."

"It keeps people employed."

She digs up a half smile. "Did you do anything at all today?"

"Nah. The only kids online are throwaways and Tyler Wilkins."

"I meant anything useful."

"Oh." I look around the kitchen. My cereal bowl sticks to the counter, the flakes bloated and gummy in the bottom. My pasta bowl sits beside it, crusty with dried tomato. Mom opens the microwave and gasps like someone's bunny exploded in there, when really it's just a bit of spaghetti splatter. "I guess I could clean up," I say.

She heats a cup of water in the dirty microwave and scoops in a spoon of coffee. She taps her foot as she stirs. "You only have a few minutes before you have to get Ally, so you might want to start cleaning now." Tap, tap, tap. She cracks the whip, this mother of mine.

Mom is gone when I bring Ally home from school. The kitchen screen reads, Called in to work early. Be good.

"Want to go to the park?" I ask.

Ally runs to the cupboard and grabs a handful of sunflower seeds for Peanut, her squirrel friend. Mom used to feed peanuts to the squirrels when she was young and lived in the country. She has a lot of animal stories. Ally's favorite is how one fall a bear and two cubs came into our grandparents' orchard and ate apples off the ground. They swallowed three bushels in ten minutes, then had a snooze beneath a tree, the little ones flopped across the mama's big belly. Eventually, when they awoke to eat more apples, my grandfather scared them away with a shotgun. The mama bear nudged her cubs, and they all loped off back to wherever they came from.

Ally loves that story. Mom never tells the ending, where the mama bear gets shot the next place they steal apples and her cubs are put in cages for the rest of their lives. Mom pretends the happy bear family went to a national forest and stayed there, safe and shining, for the rest of their days, telling stories in bear language about the afternoon they ate apples and dodged bullets.

I'd like to think that were true. I tell Ally it's true. But it's not true. Those bears are dead.

Ally would like to see a bear, but she makes do with whatever wildlife is at hand. She saves a worm from drowning in a puddle on the way to the park, picks it up and settles it on the gra.s.s, saying, "There you go," like she helped an old lady across the street.

The park is just down the street from our apartment complex. It has a large playing field flanked by oaks and maples, two swing sets and a jungle gym fit for chin-ups. Two eight-year-olds, Zachary and Melbourne, use it as their gladiator arena. They throw sand, smash heads into monkey bars, knock down baby bystanders, kick and scream. Today Zach pushes Melbourne face-first off the jungle gym. Melbourne's mother jumps from the bench with a hand raised like she's going to swat Zachary. Zach's mother jumps up like she's going to swat Melbourne's mother. Melbourne latches onto Zachary's ankles and yanks him off the platform. The mothers sit down like all is well.

"Hey, there's Melissa," I tell Ally.

Melissa stands on the sidewalk, long skinny legs and arms jutting out of flowery shorts and a frilly blouse. She holds her father's hand and stares at her feet. He leads her to the edge of the play structure and nudges her into the sand. She walks to the slide, climbs up and spirals down without a peep. Her father turns her toward the swings. "Stretch and bend!" he shouts. "Get some momentum going!"

She swings until Melbourne and Zachary shout, "Get off! We want a turn!"

"All right," her father says. "Let's go."

I point Ally in their direction. "Go say hi."

She shakes her head.

"Hey, Melissa!" I shout. "Want to play with Ally?"

Melissa looks at Ally like she never met her before. Her father checks his watch. "I don't know," he says.

"That's okay!" Ally shouts. "We don't have time to play either." She turns her back on her friend as they leave the park.

"Why did you say that?" I ask. "That's not like you, Ally. You hurt her feelings."

She shakes her head. "She has no feelings anymore."

I laugh, thinking it's a joke, but when she looks up at me, she's almost crying. "Hey, hey, what's wrong?" I ask. "Trouble making friends this year?"

"There's something wrong with them. They're fuzzy and slow. They just go along." She looks around to make sure no one's listening. "At first it was just my cla.s.s, but now all the grade ones and twos are strange."

I kiss her little head and twirl her braids. "Don't you have any friends at all?"

She sighs and looks away. "I want to find Peanut."

She sits before the tallest oak tree and clicks from the back of her throat, "Kch, kch, kch." A black squirrel peeks out of its nest, twitches its tail, runs down the tree. "Peanut," Ally whispers. She throws a few seeds on the ground.

The squirrel pauses, twitches, descends, backtracks, finally hops to the earth and inches closer. It cracks the seeds with orange teeth, chews them speedily, glancing up at me with nervous black eyes.

Ally holds the rest of the seeds in her palm. She giggles when the squirrel's mouth nuzzles her skin. She pets its head and calls it beautiful. Peanut stays with her even after the seeds are gone, answering her questions with grunts and trills, until a scream from the swings sends it up the tree.

"Let's go," I say.

Ally rises and waves goodbye to the squirrel. Her eyes blaze with love, and it saddens me that she has to grow up and make friends with humans. I hear the future coming for her. Stomp, stomp, stomp.

THREE.

I spend the final morning of my suspension punching a padded tree, sketching, and reading the Freakshow contestant bios. My money is on Zipperhead, a twenty-two-year-old with a head like a boulder, covered in scars from surgery that separated him from a conjoined twin.

Two of this season's contestants are from New Mexico. That's a rarity. Usually everyone is from Freaktown. I can't remember the real name of the placea"it's been called Freaktown all my life. It was christened twenty-five years ago when two transport tankers spilled untested agricultural chemicals on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River. No one cared much until the birth defects showed up: conjoined twins, spinal abnormalities, missing limbs, extra limbs, enlarged brains, external intestines, missing genitals, extra organs. When the same defects appeared in the babies of agricultural workers all over the country, the poisons were taken off the market and the sh.o.r.eline was cleaned up.

It came too late. Even today, one in three babies born in Freaktown has deformities. n.o.body visits the city anymore. Strangely enough, n.o.body ever leaves the place either.

Deformed babies are sad, but deformed adults are supremely fascinating. Four years ago, a savvy media company started a weekly doc.u.mentary about Freaktown's twentysomethings. They called it Freakshow. It started off as an educational program, but it soon evolved into a contest, with voting and prizes and betting pools. It's called a charity program now. Xavier says it's controlled by organized crime.

I came fourth in the New Middletown Freakshow betting pool two years ago, but I couldn't claim my prize because I was underage and Mom wouldn't step up for me. She says the show is reprehensible. I know the time is coming when she won't refuse any money, no matter where it comes from, so I lay a bet on Zipperhead.

After lunch I do my homework, tidy up and jog to Ally's school for the three o'clock bell. I don't hear much of what she says on the walk home, because I'm on my RIG fighting communism in the Chinese Civil War. I don't play often, not like throwaways, but New Middletown just added the game Underdog to our network. Your ISP marks your alliance, so every American logged on right now playing the 1946 China map is a Kuomintang. Every Brazilian is a Communist. It makes gaming an act of patriotism.

A soldier sp.a.w.ns into my projection and stands there doing nothing for so long I suspect he's a Commie spy. I'm about to knife him when he says, "Stop wasting your youth, Max. Log off and apply for the manual arts exhibit. I'm coming over after football." Somehow Dallas always finds me idling online. I knife him before he exits.

I skim the manual arts application at home and submit my portfolio with an essay on why I should be a representative artist. I lie like a rug, apologize for my three graffiti convictions, flaunt my grades in art and architecture, and claim to be a productive citizen.

Ally tugs on my earpiece. "There's someone at the door."

A redheaded man with a handlebar mustache stands in the hallway holding a bowl of apples. His smile is lopsided and his teeth are blackened, but there's no mistaking his vocals. "They said these apples are organic, but I found pesticide residue on them so I'm sending my samples to a laboratory for testing because they've stretched the certification definitions beyond reason."

I smile. "Come on in, Xavier, and we'll slice them up."

When Mom gets home from a double shift at six o'clock, Xavier and Dallas are lazing on the couch watching an ancient movie about machines that take over the world. Dallas is wearing the red wig and mustache. Xavier is chatting through the action scenes.

"Why aren't you in there with your friends?" Mom asks me.

I point to the kitchen screen, where I've projected Ally's homework. "We're working."

Mom skims Ally's ethics a.s.signment: an evil bunny paints graffiti on the wall of a grocery store, all the nearby plants are poisoned, distracted drivers crash into bikes, the store gets robbed, and all h.e.l.l breaks loose until two tattler bunnies save the day by ratting out the evil bunny, who repents when interrogated. The follow-up asks, What makes a good community member? What should you do if you see someone harming property? "Wow," Mom says. "That's advanced for grade one." She frowns with worry, then sits next to Ally and asks me to heat supper.

I wear my earpiece to drown out Ally's struggle with every sentence. I don't know why Mom won't let her use the speech editora"half the country can't read or write, and they're not missing anything except the odd evacuation notice. They're on question four of ten when I ladle out the soup. "Dallas! Xavier! Want to eat?"

Xavier streams the movie through his RIG and brings it to dinner. Mom hates electronics at the table, but she'd never hurt Xavier's feelings.