All Good Children - Catherine Austen [76]
I’m unsettled in the apartment by myself. I hear noises in the hallway, creaks and murmurs when no one is out there. Yesterday a woman laughed so loud I thought she was in the kitchen. She stood across the hall rummaging in her handbag for a key. I watched her through the peephole. Middle-aged and sagging, with dyed blond hair and a black suit she must have bought when she was thinner. She spoke to a younger woman projected on the wall. “Oh my god, what a bugger!” she yelled, indifferent to the camera and my eyes. “No kidding. They’re all the same.”
I’ve looked and listened for her today. I don’t know why.
I check out the Freakshow tryouts, but there’s no one who interests me. I wish they’d bring back Zipperhead.
I do homework and lift weights until I’m bored senseless. I work up the nerve to visit Xavier.
He answers the door himself.
“Xavier? I almost didn’t recognize you.”
His hair is cut short. He wears white jeans and a blue shirt with a Western motif down the chest. He looks twenty years old, serious, handsome, clean-cut and well rested.
“Hey, Max!” Celeste calls from the living room. She sits on a couch covered in throw blankets, a RIG in her hand. “It’s so nice to see you. I’m in a meeting, but come and keep us company.”
Xavier steps aside to let me pass. He smells like cheap hand soap, a dusting of baby powder over lye. “It’s good to see you,” I tell him.
“Thank you.” His eyes zoom in on me. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t sparkle.
“You know who I am, right?”
“Yes, of course. You’re Maxwell Connors.”
“Good. Royal. You’re doing all right? You look healthier.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You cut your hair.”
“A man should wear short hair.”
I smile. “You’re sixteen, Xavier.”
“Yes. I had a birthday recently.”
I nod. “Mine’s on Saturday.”
He couldn’t care less. “I need to do my homework now,” he says. He leaves me on my own, sits at a little white desk in the corner, posture perfect on a tall pine chair.
“Xavier’s going back to academic school after the holidays!” Celeste shouts over her RIG. “His body chemistry just needed time to harmonize. Thank god. We were so worried. But the new patch works great.”
I lean on the sagging back of the couch and look over her shoulder. A color wheel and four faces float above her RIG. “What’s your meeting?”
“College yearbook club.” She points at me. “You could help with the design! You’re such a good artist.”
I straighten up, unsure if she’s serious, unsure if she’s been treated. She gabs to her friends about the color of stars and spirals in the yearbook sidebars. I stand there, awkward and ignored, hands in my pockets, smiling for no reason.
The room is furnished with odds and ends—glass coffee table, pine end tables, black plastic cabinet in the corner. An abstract art print hangs, black and pink, on one wall beside a huge brown Leonardo in an ornate frame. The place smells like bacon grease and disinfectant. It’s crazy, like their family.
Xavier’s eyes and fingers whip across his screen twice as fast as a normal person’s.
“What are you working on?” I ask.
He stiffens, unhappy with my interruption. “It’s a translation.”
“He translated a whole book last week from English to Russian,” Celeste boasts. “Now he’s doing it in Spanish. It’s his new obsession.”
“What book?” I ask. “Can I see?”
Xavier sighs.
I hover over his shoulder. When he looks around, I hop to his other side just to bug him. I lean into his RIG. “I never knew you read poetry.”
He shifts his chair away from me. “It’s an English poem from a Sumerian text. I’m translating it into Spanish.”
“Gilgamesh?”
He’s surprised I know it. He looks from me to the screen and back.
I shrug. “How many Sumerian poems are there?”
“There are many Sumerian poems.”
I laugh. “I didn’t know that. But Gilgamesh is famous. Pepper rewrote it in Communications last year. What part are you at?”
“I’m half finished.”