All Good Children - Catherine Austen [26]
FIVE
I raise my hand during Communications.
“Yes, Maxwell?” Mr. Ames draws out my name like I’ve been annoying him all afternoon.
“Is there a new principal at the elementary school?”
He lifts his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. He shakes his head, rolls his eyes at me, replaces his glasses.
I raise my hand again.
He sighs so hard his lip flops in the breeze. “What is it now, Maxwell?”
“The kids at the elementary school are different than they used to be.”
“That’s because new children enter the school system every year.”
“Ha ha, good one. That’s not what I meant. They act different. They don’t play. They’re neat and quiet.”
“Ah.” A smile crawls over his face. “Nesting. It’s a new direction in class management. They use motivational leadership.”
I picture group chanting, sweat lodges, shunning— there has to be more than a sticker chart keeping those brats in line.
In the front row Montgomery raises his hand.
“Yes, Monty?” Mr. Ames chirps.
Montgomery swings his legs into the aisle and takes in the whole room with his gaze. “It even works at home,” he tells us. “There’s a third grader in my neighborhood who used to bother me and my friends. She’s toxic with jealousy. I think she’s a freebie. But now she stays in her room all day and does her work.”
“You don’t think that’s damaged?” I ask.
He slaps me a hard look. “I wish everyone was like her.”
Mr. Ames nods like that’s what he wants to hear.
“But you’re not like her,” I tell Montgomery. “You can’t walk down the hall without skipping.”
Montgomery holds up his hands like he’s staging a stinging comeback, but I continue. “And that’s fit. That’s who you are. You play music and make up cheers. You don’t sit in your room doing schoolwork all day. Nobody does that. Why is it good for that girl?”
He laughs. “Because she was annoying!”
“Half the school finds you annoying,” I remind him.
Across the room, Washington snickers. Tyler stares at me so hard I think his eyeballs might bleed.
“I don’t find you annoying,” Dallas tells Montgomery with a smile.
Saturday morning, I withstand on the middle school soccer field watching seventh graders in oversized pads do laps. They have no muscle, no hormones, no anger. The field is equally ill-equipped—no benches, no goalposts, not even a trailer to store the ball. The yardage is marked with pylons. It’s like a game of midget dress-up.
The sun has barely risen, but Mr. Hendricks, the gym teacher, sweats through his third cup of coffee. “Everybody in!” he shouts.
As the midgets trot toward me, I realize I should call them something else because the expensive ones are taller than me.
Hendricks hurries them through the rules of football. He teaches them basics by shouting insults. Then he splits them into practice teams and lets the big kids demolish the infants. “What is wrong with these children?” he asks me.
“They’re twelve.”
There’s only one player who shines—Saffron, an eighth grade girl who throws harder and runs faster than any of the boys. No one can catch her. She reminds me of me at that age.
Frankie and Chicago, two hulking seventh grade ulti-mates, refuse to let Saffron have the ball. They ignore the plays and leave her open, slap hands when she’s tackled. They can’t bear their inferiority to a black girl.
Hendricks mutters, “I can’t wait till Nesting next week.”
“Nesting?” I ask.
“Yeah. Next week. You can’t run a school these days any other way. We’re losing to the competition. We need motivational leadership.”
I look toward the conservatory where two snappy white girls, older teens, bounce a ball against the wall. “I know what you need,” I say.
I swagger over to the girls. “Would you ladies watch the football practice for a while? It’s a new team and they need motivation.”
The blond snorts at me. I think I`ve seen her on the high school grounds but I can’t be sure. She looks like a million others: long hair, short clothes, pink makeup, plump flesh. “Do we look like cheerleaders?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
She rolls her eyes. “We walked my baby brother here. We didn’t come