All Good Children - Catherine Austen [13]
“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 class, 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 place—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 shoreline was cleaned up.
It came too late. Even today, one in three babies born in Freaktown has deformities. Nobody visits the city anymore. Strangely enough, nobody 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 documentary 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