All Good Children - Catherine Austen [25]
“I don’t need any help from you,” Dallas says. “I hate you. I hate everything about you. You’re a reeking drunk.” He walks away, toward the road.
“I’ll give you and your buddy a ride!” Dr. Richmond shouts.
“Just fuck off!” Dallas shouts back.
It’s amazing the kind of lip a kid can get away with when his father doesn’t have the sperm to make another one.
Xavier is camped in my living room, watching an ancient movie on the big screen while his sister helps Ally with homework at the kitchen table. Celeste’s blond hair cascades over a flowery pink shirt that hugs her breasts.
Dallas poses in the archway flexing his biceps, like she might otherwise overlook someone his height.
“Mom’s not home yet?” I ask.
“She got an extra shift,” Celeste says. “There’s some kind of outbreak killing the old people, something to do with mice. She should be home by eight.”
I kiss Ally’s head. “We won our game. Did you eat?”
She nods and whispers, “The burger made me sick.”
“You want to go lie down?”
She smiles and flees from the table, leaving her homework unfinished on the kitchen screen. I dissolve it before I open the fridge.
“Stop! I’ll order in,” Dallas shouts, whipping out his RIG. “Will you stay for chili and chips, Celeste?”
“That’s sweet of you, Dennis, but I ate with Ally.”
I laugh. “Dallas. His name is Dallas.”
She shrugs like it’s irrelevant to her life. “Come on, Xavier. Time to go.”
Xavier doesn’t move.
“What are you watching?” I ask him.
“Body Snatchers.”
“Looks demented.”
Celeste streams the movie through her RIG and lures Xavier to the door with it.
His face is split by a fake scar that rips from his left eyebrow across his nose and cheek down to his jawbone. “It’s about space creatures that make themselves into clones of every human on the planet,” he says. “They kill all the people and take their place in society.”
“Why not just set up their own society?” Dallas asks.
“Why bother cloning us?”
Xavier rubs his scar off absentmindedly as he processes the question.
Celeste takes his hand. “It’s a metaphor,” she says.
Xavier smiles. “Yes. Exactly. It’s a metaphor.”
“For what?” Dallas asks.
“For what makes us human.”
“Of course,” Dallas says. He turns to me and shrugs.
When Celeste is gone, and we don’t have to pretend to a level of maturity we’ll never attain in our lives, Dallas and I settle comfortably into chili and Freakshow. “Gusher,” he moans when Tiger hits the bottom three. He hugs the couch pillow for comfort.
“Hey, what’s that?” I pick up a slim black RIG that had been hiding under the pillow. “Xavier’s. And it’s connected.”
Dallas hoots and clicks his heels together.
Over the next two hours, we break up couples, match up singles, fire all the teachers in our school, tell a dozen old ladies they won the lottery, and book three days of hairdressing appointments with my chatty stylist.
We’re almost peeing our pants laughing when Mom walks in. She can tell we’re up to no good, but our joy is contagious. “You guys are crazy,” she says.
We send one last message to Mr. Graham to let him know he’s New Middletown’s Principal of the Decade.
“That’s enough!” Mom shouts from the kitchen. “Where’s your sister?”
“In bed.”
“Is this chili?”
“Dallas ordered it.”
“Help yourself,” Dallas says. “I have to head home.”
“Do you want to take it with you?” Mom asks.
He smiles, lowers his eyes, shakes his head. He knows our money is tight but he can’t imagine money being tight enough to worry over a tub of leftovers.
Five seconds after he leaves, he’s back at the door.
“You can’t have it. I already ate it,” I lie.
He smiles. “Thanks for waiting for me, Max. At school, I mean. I didn’t want to go home.”
“I wouldn’t want to go to your home either,” I tell him.
None of our teachers show up for class on Monday morning, but there’s a big sign at the front office congratulating Mr. Graham on his supreme accomplishment as Principal of the Decade. People believe anything