All Good Children

by Catherine Austen

  FOUR

  “Let’s do surveillance on the middle school.”

  Dallas throws me a scornful look. He chases a fourth slice of pizza with a second carton of milk and grows another half inch taller. “Why?”

  “I want to see if it’s like Ally’s school.”

  He shakes his head, mystified, but he follows me.

  Everything about the middle school is short and squat, like the kids who go here. “I always hated this place,” I mutter.

  A thousand students in grades five through eight are crammed into three flat-roofed concrete units only three stories high. A single-story addition serves as a music conservatory. Music floating across the barren grounds would be glorious, but the conservatory is soundproof. They wouldn’t want to accidentally inspire a mind.

  “You got in so much trouble here,” Dallas says, smiling.

  I was nearly expelled in eighth grade after my third graffiti conviction. The principal didn’t understand what bare white walls could do to a kid like me. The third time I was suspended, my mother cried and my father raced to the school to see my piece before they pressure-washed it.

  “It’s too hot,” Dallas complains, sniffing his armpits. “Everything looks smaller than I remember. This driveway was miles longer. Who was the kid who always hid in the ditch?”

  “Wheaton Smithwick,” I say.

  “Wheaton. Yeah. I haven’t seen him since the first week of school.”

  “Maybe he was downgraded.”

  Dallas points to the conservatory. “We climbed that roof to fetch him down once, remember? It looked a lot higher then. And that soccer field was farther away.”

  We walk toward the conservatory behind two eighth graders. One of them is taller than me, skinny, with cropped hair and too much makeup. She pushes her short friend into the ditch.

  “Some things never change,” I say.

  Dallas smiles and shoves me over, inches from the drop. We block the path of three fifth graders who wear their ties tight at the collar. “I was never that little,” Dallas says.

  “Excuse me,” I tell the tiny white kids. “We’re taking a survey.”

  They walk right by me.

  I grab the last one’s arm, flimsy as a toilet-paper roll beneath his gray uniform. I give him a pat and a smile. “Can I ask some questions?”

  He shakes his blond head. “I don’t talk to strangers.”

  Dallas rests a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Just a few questions, kid.”

  The boy makes eye contact with Dallas’s ribcage. He looks back and forth between us and shrieks, “Help! You don’t belong here!”

  We shrink away from him.

  The boy’s friends turn on us and yell, “Help! You don’t belong here!” A little black girl up the driveway shouts, “Help! You don’t belong here!”

  The eighth graders snicker. “You’re in for it now!”

  The blond boy stares up at Dallas with eyes glazed over like a doll’s. “Help! You don’t belong here!” he yells again. This time a dozen fifth graders join in. Their shrill voices ring off the concrete and burrow into the ditch.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Dallas says.

  We sprint up the driveway and keep running till we’re at our school.

  “That was damaged,” Dallas says. “I should have recorded it.”

  “They must be teaching kids differently this year.”

  “Yeah. Maybe it’s part of the drama program.”

  “That reminds me,” I say. “You owe me ten bucks for the Freakshow elimination. Juice is history.”

  The football team gets off at lunch on Friday to prepare for the afternoon game. We rub our classmates’ noses in the announcement. They boo us as we leave. This is New Middletown school spirit.

  The primary colors are blazing outside—clear blue sky, severe yellow sun, blood red leaves on the distant maples. It’s dry and dusty and difficult to breathe. The field is hard as concrete and prickly with dead grass.

  Coach Emery works us easy but talks us to death. Do this. Do that. Grind those Devils into dust! The Blue Mountain Devils are the visiting team. They’re from the southeast quadrant— rich kids. They wrecked us in the playoffs last year because Brennan had pneumonia and no one else can throw a ball.

  The Devils descend from their bus in brand-new blue and beige uniforms. Some Devil’s daddy must be a generous football fan. We grumble in our faded black and white jerseys.

  Thirty students straggle out to watch our game. Pepper sits in the bleachers wearing a Scorpions hat and waving a clacker. Every time I look at her, she’s watching me. She’s almost never watching Dallas.

  The Devils left their cheerleaders at home, so ours relax in the absence of competition. Kayla leads three dull songs, then sits on the dirt with her friends while Montgomery shimmies and shouts, “Let’s go, team!”

  It’s a tough game from the kick-off. Two new Devils are as big as Bay and as aggressive as throwaways. We can’t get two yards with the ball before we’re taken down. They pile into Dallas wherever he goes, slam into Brennan each time he raises his arm. We give it right back to them, but they live up to their name and take one to the end zone.

  It’s 7–0 at halftime, and it stays 7–0 till there’s only five minutes left of the last quarter. We call a time-out and kick the crumbs of our mental stamina into a huddle. Kayla revs up her cheerleaders. Go, team, go.

  Coach Emery doesn’t waste time yelling. “We lose the play when the ball’s in the air,” he says. “Get the ball to Connors and help him clear a path. Do not throw it to him. He cannot catch. Just hand it to him and let him run, son.”

  Dallas and I wince at the word son—me because I have no father to call me that anymore, and Dallas because his father reserves the word for Austin.

  As if on cue, Dr. Richmond thumps down from the stands and breaks into our sacred team pep talk. He looks uniformed—black pants and vest, white shirt stained a wet yellow at the collar and armpits. He reeks of alcohol. It’s shocking—it’s barely four o’clock and school policy is zero tolerance. He drapes an arm over Coach Emery’s shoulder. “What these boys need is to pull off their goddamned pantyhose and start playing football!” he shouts. “I’ve never seen such pussies in my life, and, believe me, I’ve seen a lot of pussies.” He breaks into drunken laughter, wheezing and coughing, honking deep in his throat.

  Dallas stares at his father with his eyes and mouth gaping.

  “You!” Dr. Richmond grunts. “You’re the worst one out there. You’re losing the ball to kids half your size! You want Austin to sneak into uniform and help you out?”

  Scarlet blotches bloom behind Dallas’s mask.

  “Or how about that pretty cheerleader?” his father adds, leering at Kayla. “I bet she could get you boys going.” He smiles around the huddle with his brows raised.

  “Get out of here,” Dallas says, but the words grate across his throat in a whisper.

  Coach Emery pulls Dr. Richmond aside with a fake smile. Dr. Richmond stumbles and laughs, waves at the cheerleaders.

  “Oh my god, look how drunk that guy is!” someone shouts from the bench.

  Dallas shudders beneath his padding.

  Austin jogs down from the stands and walks his father back to his seat. “Keep it up, ladies!” he shouts.

  Coach Emery turns straight to Dallas. “You block for Connors. I want you to take all the anger you’re feeling right now and plow it into that big white Devil, number seventy-three. I want him out of this game. You got that?”

  Dallas nods until I have to nudge him and say, “Stop nodding.”

  Dallas is an unstoppable force when the game resumes, one hundred and eighty pounds of unloved shame and fury. Number seventy-three limps off the field after eight seconds of play. When I hit Dallas’s shoulder in thanks, he shoves me away. His face is blank.

  I’ve seen him like this before. When we were eleven, we built a fort in his backyard out of scrap wood we’d found in an abandoned lumberyard.
We spent two weeks at it, every day all day, hammering and cutting and measuring wrong and cutting again. It was a feeble fort with a crooked window, but we spent our summer in it, playing virtual games and drinking stolen soda and showing every kid in town what we’d made. Then school began, and Austin had to build a model cottage to scale for applied mathematics. We came home to find Dr. Richmond in the backyard tearing down our fort. “Your brother needs this wood,” he said. Dallas came to school the next day but he wasn’t there, wouldn’t look at anyone, wouldn’t speak. He hit a teacher with a garbage bin and broke his teeth, snapped out of it when he saw the man’s blood on his shoes. He was a nice teacher. Mr. Navarro. Dallas can’t believe he ever hurt the guy. It’s strange how easily you can do things you swear you could never do.

  He’s like that again now—no expression in his eyes, not even hate—but it’s scarier because he’s huge. He could snap bones and shatter skulls. We watch him and tremble.

  “Pay attention to the play,” Brennan reminds me.

  The moment I get the ball, I know I’m going to score. I feel like that every time I get the ball, but this time I’m sure I’m right. The Devils’ defense spreads too far, and Dallas knocks them over one by one. I scramble my way to some clear field and tear through thirty-two yards, skirting bodies until they’re all behind me. My eyes blur, my heart ignites, my head throbs like a ticking bomb, and I blast into the end zone yards ahead of my pursuers.

  I cartwheel and flip and roar. I wave to Pepper and dance one of her moves. She’s on her feet, screaming, shaking her clacker like she loves this game.

  Dallas doesn’t rush over to celebrate. He paces back and forth through his own field of negative space.

  Sarah kicks us an extra point, and we buzz with the hope of winning.

  When the Devils get their turn, we’re on them like psychotic lovers desperate to get our sweet ball back. They can’t take a step before we put them on the ground. Their plays last three seconds: oomph, crash, crack. The quarterback passes long, and it looks like they might get somewhere, but Dallas heads for the receiver like a bull. Even I want to run away when I see him coming. The Devil fumbles, and Dallas leaps through the air, coming down hard on top of the kid with the ball in his hands. He’s not smiling when he gets up.

  Coach Emery is worried that either the Devils will score again or Dallas will kill somebody. We make it to twenty seconds, tie game, third down, when Dallas says, “I want the ball.” Those are his first words since his father appeared. He doesn’t repeat himself and no one argues. He straightens up and takes his position on the line, eighteen yards from goal.

  “Don’t let him go home like this,” Brennan whispers as we head to our places.

  When the game resumes, Brennan throws long to Dallas, who smashes through the Devils that surround him. He shoves helmets, wrenches hands, nearly takes a kid’s arm off. He rushes the ball to the end zone and scores—wins— with one second on the clock.

  He doesn’t smile or slap shoulders, doesn’t prance for Pepper, doesn’t even play out the game and shake hands with the losers. He walks straight off the field into the showers.

  He’s still there when the rest of us arrive. He stands naked under a showerhead, hands against the wall, hair hanging black over his eyes, water streaming down his face.

  Kids who were on the bench when Dr. Richmond appeared squint and whisper in Dallas’s direction, but they taper off when no one joins in. We wash in silence while Dallas stands there, unmoving. He takes occasional shuddering breaths, but I can’t tell if he’s crying or fuming. I exchange “What the hell do we do?” looks with my teammates, but they have no answers.

  I dress and sit on a bench by my locker until they all leave. Dallas is still in his own private waterfall, blazing white and way too naked. He’s bleaching pale as a corpse, and the whole place reeks of chlorine.

  I walk up beside him, tap his arm. “Hey hey, we have to go. Brennan said I should take you home.”

  He clenches his jaw but doesn’t open his eyes. Hot water bounces off his shoulder into my face. He sucks in a slow breath.

  I can’t leave him here, but I don’t want to touch him again. I don’t know how to manage this, so I fall back on a joke. “Brennan stared at your fat white ass for twenty minutes and then he said, ‘Max, if I was you, I would take that big boy home.’”

  Dallas breaks a tiny smile, snorts quietly. He peeks at me from under his hair and lisps, “I was wondering when you’d notice.”

  I laugh. His blue eyes are bloodshot pools, but he’s better than I feared. I swat his arm. “Come on. Let’s go paint graffiti on the old Home Reno or something.” I cringe as I realize that’s the lumberyard we pilfered from years ago to make our backyard fort. “I don’t know why I said that. I just meant let’s go do something constructive. We could do anything you want.”

  He sighs and raises his head, wipes the water off his face. “I know why you said that.” He turns off the tap and grabs his towel.

  Outside, the grounds are empty. Even Pepper is gone. Coach Emery waits by the trailer, holds the door open while we store our pads. “Good game,” he says.

  Dallas tries to smile. Then he sees his father and brother in the parking lot. Brennan and Kayla wait beside the bike rack. We have to pass them all to get to the road.

  We avoid eye contact, pretend we’re strolling on our own. “Come to my place,” I say.

  “Sure. Maybe we can order chili.”

  Dr. Richmond staggers over and shouts, “You know Maxwell and his mother can’t afford a restaurant. It takes all their money just to send him to school.”

  Brennan and Kayla stare at me like I’m an armless dwarf who’s been beaten up by kindergartners. The only way I could be more pitiful is if I had an asshole for a father.

  Dr. Richmond tries to drape an arm around Dallas, but Dallas steps away, knocking into me, shaking with fury.

  “Why don’t you all come to our place?” Dr. Richmond shouts. He looks at Kayla and winks. “Come have some fun.”

  Brennan shakes his head in disgust. “We have things to do.” Because he’s kind and generous, he adds, “Sorry, Dallas.”

  “You played well today,” Kayla says before she climbs on her bike.

  Dr. Richmond leans forward to ogle her ass.

  “These children are fifteen years old,” Coach Emery says as he leaves. “Remember that.”

  Dr. Richmond’s glance passes over the coach like he’s a servant without a tray, and lands on me like I’m shit on his shoes. “I guess it’s just you left.”

  Dallas looms in front of his father. “We’re not going anywhere with you. Don’t make social plans for me. I am not your little boy.”

  Dr. Richmond steps back, cocks his head, tries to focus his sight. Blink, blink. “Come home with your brother and we’ll order pizza.”

  Dallas moves into his father’s face again, looks down into his watery eyes. “Don’t ever walk onto that field while I’m playing.”

  Dr. Richmond looks from Dallas to me and back. “What were you two doing in the school for so long?”

  Dallas bristles. “Don’t talk to my friends. Don’t talk to my team. Don’t talk to me. Don’t even come to my games. I don’t want you here.”

  “I’m helping you out!” Dr. Richmond shouts. “If I ever saw a kid who needed help, it’s you. I can’t wait till you get the goddamned support treatment because you need it bad.”

  “I don’t need any help from you,” Dallas says. “I hate you. I hate everything about you. You’re a reeking drunk.” He walks away, toward the road.

  “I’ll give you and your buddy a ride!” Dr. Richmond shouts.

  “Just fuck off!” Dallas shouts back.

  It’s amazing the kind of lip a kid can get away with when his father doesn’t have the sperm to make another one.

  Xavier is camped in my living room, watching an ancient movie on the big screen while his sister helps Ally with homework at the kitchen table. Celeste’s blond hair ca
scades over a flowery pink shirt that hugs her breasts.

  Dallas poses in the archway flexing his biceps, like she might otherwise overlook someone his height.

  “Mom’s not home yet?” I ask.

  “She got an extra shift,” Celeste says. “There’s some kind of outbreak killing the old people, something to do with mice. She should be home by eight.”

  I kiss Ally’s head. “We won our game. Did you eat?”

  She nods and whispers, “The burger made me sick.”

  “You want to go lie down?”

  She smiles and flees from the table, leaving her homework unfinished on the kitchen screen. I dissolve it before I open the fridge.

  “Stop! I’ll order in,” Dallas shouts, whipping out his RIG. “Will you stay for chili and chips, Celeste?”

  “That’s sweet of you, Dennis, but I ate with Ally.”

  I laugh. “Dallas. His name is Dallas.”

  She shrugs like it’s irrelevant to her life. “Come on, Xavier. Time to go.”

  Xavier doesn’t move.

  “What are you watching?” I ask him.

  “Body Snatchers.”

  “Looks demented.”

  Celeste streams the movie through her RIG and lures Xavier to the door with it.

  His face is split by a fake scar that rips from his left eyebrow across his nose and cheek down to his jawbone. “It’s about space creatures that make themselves into clones of every human on the planet,” he says. “They kill all the people and take their place in society.”

  “Why not just set up their own society?” Dallas asks.

  “Why bother cloning us?”

  Xavier rubs his scar off absentmindedly as he processes the question.

  Celeste takes his hand. “It’s a metaphor,” she says.

  Xavier smiles. “Yes. Exactly. It’s a metaphor.”

  “For what?” Dallas asks.

  “For what makes us human.”

  “Of course,” Dallas says. He turns to me and shrugs.

  When Celeste is gone, and we don’t have to pretend to a level of maturity we’ll never attain in our lives, Dallas and I settle comfortably into chili and Freakshow. “Gusher,” he moans when Tiger hits the bottom three. He hugs the couch pillow for comfort.