All Good Children - Catherine Austen [1]
She groans to her feet, pats my ass none too gently and motions me onward. I dress in front of a thousand eyes that glitter like glass under the terminal lights.
I follow my angry mother to the boarding gate. New chairs, same wait. Same blend of stale gum and subtitled 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 face—“Rock! Paper! Scissors!” and “Wild Wild West!”—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 anticipation. 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 grass 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 sad—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 God’s own palette.
It was glorious until cruising altitude, when Mom received a notice about a prank bomb threat sent to my school from our apartment complex that morning. She snatched 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 password 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 seen—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 carcasses.
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 expenses—hence the family airplane ride, the week of hotel breakfasts,