All Good Children - Catherine Austen [55]
I try to smile.
She looks over her shoulder at her baby brother. “Sunday’s his birthday,” she whispers.
At home, Mom sighs along with the news.
“The New Education Support Treatment will turn the tide in our failing education system,” a government rep is saying. His words are straight from the Chemrose website, all about community improvement, cost savings, the best interests of the child.
“What are we going to do?” I ask. “This is every academic school in the country he’s talking about.”
Mom shrugs.
“I have three years left of school,” I remind her. “Ally has twelve. Do you really think you can be there for every shot they give us?”
She bites her lip, shakes her head. “Maybe we should leave,” she mutters.
“Of course we should leave. You’re a geriatric nurse in a world full of old people. You can find work anywhere.”
“But your schooling—”
“There are a thousand virtual high schools I could go to.”
“But the quality, Max. I can’t afford—”
“We can’t stay here, Mom!”
She nods. “Okay. Maybe we can go back to Atlanta.”
“Atlanta, where Aunt Sylvia was murdered?” I remember all the poor people on the dirty streets, the sad ones begging from strangers and lying half dead in alleys, the scary ones hovering in doorways, hungrily surveying the wealthy.
Mom rolls her eyes at me. “Either we stay or we go, Max. I can’t change the world.”
“All right. Let’s go. A million people live in Atlanta, and hardly any of them are murdered. Right?”
“Right.”
The news shows a labor riot in the American south, where illegal workers are protesting the new universal id cards.
“Can we take Dallas with us?” I ask. “He’s losing it here. He puts on an act all day and night.” She frowns, so I poke at her guilt. “You either have to get him out of here or give him the shot. You can’t leave him like this.”
She holds her head in her hands. “Okay. We’ll take Dallas. We’ll take anyone who wants to come.”
Ally plays inside the tent, singing to her teddy, “You find milk and I’ll find flour, and we’ll have pudding in half an hour.”
I blow off Saturday’s coaching to do chin-ups in the park and run down the rich people’s sidewalks.
I’m struck by the sight of a woman kneeling beside a two-year-old child and a bucket of chalk. They’ve covered twenty square feet of concrete with cloudy pastels— scratches and scars from the kid, bold blocks and squiggles from the woman. I jog on the spot beside them. “That’s glorious,” I say. “You should color the whole world like that.”
She smiles at me, sincere and well-wishing, and offers me pink and yellow chalk. “Draw something in front of your house.” She has no idea they’re going to zombify her kid once he gets to preschool, no idea she’ll want them to. I leave them to their rainbows.
I end up at Pepper’s house. I draw a pink heart on the concrete slab in front of her door. I write my initials inside it with a plus sign and a question mark. Then I ring the bell.
There’s no answer.
I drop the yellow chalk in her mailbox and pretend she might fill in her own initials. There’s a jingle in the box when the chalk hits bottom. My fingers find two keys on a metal wire. I close my fist around them.
For the sake of the camera, I ring the bell again. I wait for an answer that doesn’t come, then reach into my pocket and whip out the keys like they were there all along. I hurry inside and shut the door.
I don’t call Pepper’s name because I know she’s not here. I can tell by the smell and the static air. This is an empty house.
I tell myself I’ll just get a drink of water and leave, but even as I’m thinking the words I know I’m going to search every inch of the place.
Even though it’s on two floors, Pepper’s house is almost as small as our apartment. There’s a living room, kitchen and bathroom downstairs, two bedrooms and a utility room upstairs. There’s not much to explore—no clothes on the drying