All Good Children - Catherine Austen [28]
I keep it simple—blue sky, green field, brown and beige bodies. I restrict the red to uniforms and a wee dab on Chicago’s snot. I swipe with a paper bag and dig in with my sleeves and fingertips before it dries. It takes me into the afternoon, leaves my hands and face stained, my clothes a mess, my mind shining free.
When I get home with the burgled paint cakes thunking at my side, Mom is napping and Xavier is in my living room watching a movie with Ally.
“Did those little kids paint you?” he asks.
“No. Did those big girls paint you?”
“They were very physical.”
“I’ll bet. What are you watching?”
“Stepford Wives.”
“Looks damaged.”
“It’s about a town of men who build robots that look exactly like their wives and then they kill the real wives and replace them with the robots.”
“Why don’t they just keep the robots and get divorced?”
“It’s a metaphor.” He doesn’t hesitate this time.
I have to laugh.
I pause on the sidewalk outside the elementary school and reach out to Ally for a hug. Her arms hang limp at her sides. “Give me a hug!” I tell her.
She extends her arms obediently.
I kneel down and hold her to me.
“I have to act like the other kids,” she whispers.
I glance over her shoulder and through the fence. A thousand zombies line up at the entrance to her school. “They’re pretty scary, aren’t they?”
She nods slowly.
One supervisor hangs out by the monkey bars, gabbing into her RIG. She sees me watching her and takes a photo of me and my sister.
“You do whatever you have to,” I tell Ally. “Stay on their good side.”
She joins the line of zombies facing front. I can’t tell her apart from the rest of them.
“Hey, Connors!” Tyler Wilkins struts up the street, smoking a cigarette. He waves at me with a stained hand. “I saw you at the middle school this weekend.”
I nod self-importantly. “I coach their football team.”
He snickers. “That’s not all you do. I passed by at lunchtime and saw you making some art. I never knew you could paint like that. You should go to a special school.”
“Funny, I always said the same about you.”
He butts his cigarette and holds his RIG up to my face.
I try not to breathe him in as I watch a movie of myself defacing the middle school conservatory. All I can think is, Am I really that short?
“You’re bright enough to pick the wall with no surveillance,” he says. “But not bright enough to look over your shoulder once in a while. I must have been there twenty minutes.”
I sigh. “What do you want, Tyler?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you going to do with the recording? Are you posting it?”
“I don’t know. I just took it.”
“If you’re going to get me suspended for graffiti, I might as well beat the crap out of you first.”
He spits on the concrete, leaves a brownish yellow splatter by my feet. “Why do you have to say that? You think I’d run to the principal with your picture?”
“Then why are you showing me? Are you trying to blackmail me?”
“What have you got that’s worth taking, asshole?” He scowls and shakes his head. “You don’t know anything about me. I don’t want to talk to you, unit.” He walks away flexing his fists.
He hunches and sways, sad and slow, like a crooked little man, and I suddenly realize that he was trying to compliment me. Someone like Tyler never gets to be anybody else. I want to shout, “Sorry!” but I don’t have the balls, and he’s too far away. The word sits inside me like a stone.
I convince Xavier to hack the school surveillance system and take one wall of tenth grade lockers offline. He does it happily—he likes breaking rules he doesn’t believe in. At lunchtime I zoom in on my RIG and watch Montgomery punch in his locker code. Two minutes later, I watch Washington punch in his.
While everyone’s in the cafeteria, Dallas and I open the lockers and transfer their contents. Washington’s beloved photo of a naked woman with a python snaked around her hips now hangs on Montgomery’s door. Montgomery’s construction workers and chorus line