All Good Children - Catherine Austen [7]
“You’re back!” Dallas shouts into his RIG. He smiles—sparkling, mature, ultimate. Dallas and I were the same size until he turned twelve and his expensive genes kicked in. Now he’s the tallest kid in grade ten. He’s broad and brawny, with white skin, black hair and blue eyes. His parents spent a fortune conceiving him and his brother. He’s from a sperm donor, which explains why he’s shining. His older brother Austin is a beast, the true spawn of Dr. Richmond. “Who do you think would win in a fight?” Dallas asks me. “Zipperhead or Juice?”
He must be talking about Freakshow. Kids have crazy names these days, but not that crazy. “I haven’t checked out the show yet,” I say. “I just got my RIG back.”
“I think maybe Juice would win, if he didn’t bleed to death. Zipperhead’s big but slow. Tiger could probably waste them both. I voted for him.” Dallas always supports the feeblest freak with the phoniest life story. He has never won the local Freakshow betting pool, not in all the years we’ve voted.
“What did I miss at school?” I ask him.
“Tyler Wilkins got in a fight.”
“No way. Is he suspended?”
“No. It was off grounds. With little Wheaton Smithwick.”
“Good. Not for Wheaton, but good for me.” Tyler Wilkins is the school psychopath. He slapped my sister across the face last June when she grabbed at a lighter he was holding to a tent-caterpillar nest. I hit him back, of course, but he pounded the crap out of my ribs. I chased after him and tackled him on school grounds, where he wasted my face for an encore, and we both got suspended. It was embarrassing. I’m a stocky football player. Tyler is a wiry cigarette addict. But he’s tall and has mania in his corner. The school took his parents to court when he was eight years old to force them to medicate him. It hasn’t helped.
I gained fifteen pounds of muscle this summer and paid Dallas’s brother to teach me how to fight—all so I can beat Tyler Wilkins half to death when I go back to school tomorrow. Austin is as much of a savage as Tyler, but he supplemented his savagery with Muay Thai and growth hormones. He’s a supreme fighting instructor. A little light on top though—he’s farting in the background right now, aiming at Dallas’s head.
“I have to go,” Dallas says.
Austin sticks his face in the screen and shouts, “Call’s over, faggot!”
I sink into my leather couch and skim celebrity gossip on my RIG while Mom fries bacon for tomorrow’s lunches. I love my rancid peeling home. It’s cramped and flimsy and we don’t belong here any more than the teak tables and oil paintings we carted over with Dad’s ashes, but I am joyous to be back.
Ally stands at the living-room window, talking into her RIG. “I’m calling my best friend Melissa,” she whispers.
“I thought your best friend was Peanut,” I say.
She giggles. “I have lots of best friends.”
I search student journals for sex and violence, but come up wanting.
Ally dissolves her screen with a frown. “They don’t want me calling unless it’s about school.”
I shrug. “It’s late. You’ll see Melissa tomorrow. Eat your snack.”
We take turns eating crackers with cream cheese until there’s only one left. Ally points back and forth between us, chanting, “One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the door—”
I eat the cracker.
“You didn’t wait!”
“Whoever is number two is chosen in the end.” I’ve told her this a thousand times, but she still counts out the rhyme until she’s satisfied that fair is fair.
Mom slips her feet into ugly white orthopedic shoes. “I’ve been put on night shifts for a few weeks.”
“You’re going to work?” I ask. “We just got home.”
She shrugs. “I’ll be back in the morning. I’ll sign out a car and drive you to school. Get breakfast and help Ally pack her bag, would you?”
“Fine,” I say. I hate pouring breakfast and packing lunch.
I stick my head out the window and breathe in New Middletown’s warm dust. It’s eight o’clock at night and one hundred degrees—too hot for September. In this heat, in this apartment, it smells like