All Good Children - Catherine Austen [10]
I pummel him in the face—hook, jab, elbow strike. Pow, pow, pow. When he returns the blow, I grab his arm and twist it behind his back. I force him to his knees and kick him into the ground, much harder than I intend to. I hear groans from the watching girls and giggles from the gay boys.
Tyler drags himself up and tries to hit me, but he’s angry and embarrassed, and I can read his moves before he makes them. I dodge his blows, hopping away so he has to come at me; then I rush in and trip him. He slams into the pavement, just like Xavier did five minutes ago. The crowd gasps, laughs, narrates their recordings.
I’m ready to beat Tyler Wilkins to a pulp of sodden flesh, but Mr. Graham steps between us with his arms outstretched. Tyler shoves him aside to get at me. I laugh—shoving the principal won’t go over well—and take him down hard with a wrist lock.
Two security guards pull us apart. Bystanders start yelling. “Tyler started it!” “Max started it!”
The principal is shaking, he’s so mad. It turns his stomach to be in a crowd of teenagers. “You are both suspended for the week,” he says through gritted teeth. “Wait outside the front doors until your parents collect you.” He walks away, probably to wash his hands.
So I’m stuck at the front of the school with two security guards and the kid I hate most in the world, waiting to tell my grieving mother about my latest wreckage. My heart thumps. My hands throb. Yet I feel absolutely premium.
They say violence is wrong and such and such, but I have never felt as happy in my life as I do now. I’ve shaken off a future of swallowing Tyler Wilkins’s waste. I have cleared my road with my fists and feet. I can walk wherever I want to now.
True, Tyler and his friends might take out my eyeballs with a spoon tomorrow, but right now he’s bleeding and I can’t get the smile off my face. It widens every time he glances at me, his nose swollen and his eyes miserable.
“When did you learn to fight?” he asks.
I snort and bare my teeth.
He shakes his head and wipes his bloody lip. “I must be out of practice.”
I hope he’ll practice up on me. I could squeeze a beating into my Monday schedule: pack lunch, walk Ally to school, beat the crap out of Tyler Wilkins, get suspended.
My happiness plateaus when my mother trudges up the school driveway. “I just signed in the car when I got the call from your principal,” she says.
I hang my head and hope it looks repentant.
“Is someone coming for you?” she asks Tyler. He shrugs.
The tallest guard steps up to Mom and says, “He has to leave with his own guardian.”
She nods. She knows the guards will regret that rule after they pass the entire school day sitting on the front steps waiting for Tyler’s parents to show. “Okay, Max, let’s go. Goodbye, Tyler.”
“Bye.” It surprises me when he adds, “Bye, Max.” Like we’re friends, like we got into trouble for skipping class together.
“I’ll see you,” I say. I don’t mean it to be menacing, but after I say it, I like the way it sounds.
Mom doesn’t speak on the walk home.
“I can get my assignments 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 Saturday night.”
“Technically, it was Sunday morning.”
She stares at me like I’m the biggest ass in the world. And maybe I am. But as I review the fight in my mind—I add an announcer in the background, cameras on the side—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 chores: dishes, dusting, laundry, clean Ally’s room, supervise Ally’s homework.