All Good Children - Catherine Austen [3]
She frowns. “I like school.”
Mom kisses the top of her head. Ally takes Mom’s face in her hands and kisses it back—her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, over and over until the sweetness turns unsettling. “Enough, pumpkin,” Mom says.
The Freakshow theme song rises out of the airplane chatter ahead of me. I jerk to attention and peer between the seats.
A teenage boy whips his head around and grunts. Either I have very strong chip breath or he has supreme peripheral vision. He slips in his earpiece and holds my stare. He has ultimate written all over him. Even sitting down, he looks like a giant. His parents must have tested a dozen eggs before they found him.
I am not an ultimate. I’m a best-of-three. Only the rich keep at it until they get a perfect embryo. There are a lot of rich people in New Middletown, so I’m used to competing with ultimates like this kid. They usually win.
Most people are freebies, conceived and birthed at home with just the barest screening for deformities. They talk about ultimates and best-of-threes like we’re genetically engineered, but we’re not. We’re conceived in fertility clinics, but there’s no splicing or even much planning involved. It’s more like gambling than engineering. Parents pay for a certain number of random embryos. They don’t know what they’ll get until they read the genes and choose one to grow in the womb. The unhealthy are terminated and the unchosen are put in cold storage to sneak out sometime in the future when infertility reaches crisis proportions. Or maybe they’re sold or experimented on or grown for parts— depending on which conspiracy theory you believe—but they’re not genetically engineered.
I’m the cream of a crop of three. It’s hard to get cocky about that. The kid ahead of me is the cream of a much richer crop. His eyes sparkle as he surveys me over his shoulder. “If it isn’t the stripper,” he says, snickering. “Nice shorts, recall.”
I salute him rudely and lean back, kicking his chair out of spite. “Sorry,” I say. Then I kick it again. The security guard glares from his station.
“Be good, Max,” Ally says. My sister is not an ultimate or a best-of-three. She’s a freebie, naturally conceived six years ago by my baffled parents. Mom says she’s a gift from God. Ally has a big heart and a small brain, which suggests that God should take a good look at creation before he hands out any more gifts.
“We can’t all be you,” I tell her.
Dr. Richmond snickers.
Mom glances across the aisle. “Arlington? What a surprise. How are you?”
The fat man turns from Mom to Dr. Richmond as if he has a stake in their conversation.
“I’m fine, Karenna. I’m just heading back from the Global Ed Conference in Texas. I was supposed to take the speed rail, but Mexicans bombed the station. Did you hear about it? Are you coming direct from Atlanta? You have family there, don’t you? It must have cost a fortune to take the kids for the weekend.”
“Not at all,” Mom says, not bothering to explain about the funeral or the lost week of school.
“You should take Dallas to your next conference,” I say. “He’d love flying.” At least you won’t have to put up with it much longer.”
Mom checks her watch. “Twenty minutes? That was fast.”
“I mean it won’t be long until we get Maxwell’s behavior straightened out at school,” Dr. Richmond says.
I snort but not loudly. Mom holds a stiff smile.
“The new support program’s coming,” he adds. “I’m sure you saw the results with your little girl last week. It provides the motivation lacking in kids like yours.”
Mom’s smile vanishes. “Kids like mine?”
The fat man shakes his head at Dr. Richmond and waits for an apology.
“I’m sure they’re good children,” Dr. Richmond says.
“They’re just different, aren’t they?”
A recording tells us to buckle our belts, store our baggage, raise our seat trays. Dr. Richmond leans back out of view. Mom stares hard at the place where he used to be. The fat man tucks