All Good Children - Catherine Austen [11]
“Okay. I’ll do chores,” 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 phonetic—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.
“Hello, 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 class,” 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 balls 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 class.”
“Will you run with me?” he repeats.