All Good Children - Catherine Austen [18]
The Asian boy picks up his bag while everyone’s distracted. He speeds up and over the edge of the bowl, past us, down the sidewalk, out of the park.
Dallas laughs. “I guess this is the time for flight.” He turns to Washington and shouts, “We want to learn to skate like that kid!”
Washington looks around the park, shakes his head and swears, checks his watch.
Tyler rubs his hand up and down the railing and says something rude to the girls. Then he mutters to Washington and they walk away.
The skaters keep their eyes on me and Dallas. The girls wait for something to happen.
“We should get to school,” Pepper says.
Dallas puts his arm around her. “What would happen if you got caught off grounds?”
I pull her out of Dallas’s embrace. “Imagine the shame,” I say.
Pepper walks away from both of us. “I don’t like trouble.”
Dallas and I hustle to catch up with her. I don’t remember when this competition began. Our other contests are clear— who’s fastest, who’s tallest, who played better in the last game. But with Pepper, we’re both convinced we’re winning.
A guard awaits us at the school gates, no doubt tipped off by Tyler. Pepper slips behind a shrub and glides into school unseen while Dallas and I crawl to the principal’s office. Coach Emery is there with Mr. Graham. “I need these boys at practice,” he says. Instead of detention, we’re assigned hall duty during the afternoon break.
It’s humiliating. We wear striped yellow vests and peer around corners for loiterers and contraband. All the kids who clapped my back after history class now laugh in my face.
High school is a fickle arena.
“Dad’s upset with you for missing two weeks of practice,” Brennan warns me in the football trailer.
“And our first game,” Bay adds. “Which we lost.”
“I know,” I say. “He called me a pig-dog and a lamebrain.”
Coach Emery sticks his head inside and shrieks, “Get your midget ass out here, Connors!” He makes me fill the water bottles and carry out the benches. Traditionally that’s the job of ninth graders. I was looking forward to lording it over them this year. Instead, they survey me with ridicule.
Brennan grabs one end of the bench I’m dragging, but his dad shouts, “No helping! He didn’t help you at the last game, did he? Let him do this by himself.”
The coach pretends he’s tough, but I know he loves me. His exact words to my mother at the end of last season were, “Don’t worry. He’ll turn out fine.”
Unfortunately, he doesn’t show me the love at practice. First he makes me sprint, drop and do push-ups up and down the field. Then he lines us up for chute drills and pairs me with Bay. After beating on trees all summer, I was looking forward to slamming into humans today. But with Bay, there’s not much difference. I’m in a sweet sort of agony by the time we split into practice teams.
Mr. Reid, the assistant coach, leads my team. We used to have two assistant coaches, but Bay’s father found a job and no one else volunteered. I’ve seen Xavier’s old movies about small-town high school football with stadium seating and floodlights and uniforms that match, where half the town comes out to watch the games, girls drop their panties for all the players, and coaches review plays in screening rooms after hours. That is not New Middletown football.
Maybe that still goes on in public schools in open cities, or maybe it only happens in movies, but it doesn’t happen here. We don’t have the money anymore, and if we did, we’d upgrade the chemistry lab. We are the academic elite of a crumbling empire. There may be fifteen-year-olds beyond the walls who risk their ligaments for sport, but we will never meet them—although Dallas will invent the vehicles that carry the lucky few to their games, and I’ll design the factories and prisons to house the rest of them. We’re not sloughing off brain cells for a long shot we don’t require.
As a consequence, the New Middletown Northeast Secondary junior football team really bleeds. We’re called the Scorpions but