All Good Children - Catherine Austen [77]
“It’s a poem.”
“Is his friend dead yet? I liked his friend better than him.” I read the English half of Xavier’s screen. “Oh, this part. This is sad.” Gilgamesh is in a tunnel, without a friend in the world, and he has to crawl for hours in total darkness to get to the other side. He’s lonely and scared and he wants to give up. I sigh, shake my head, mutter, “I’ve been there.”
“No you haven’t,” Xavier says. “It’s from the Middle East.”
I smile. “Yeah, but we’ve all been there.”
He squirms on his chair. “No, we haven’t.”
“Don’t agitate him!” Celeste hisses at me.
“Sorry. It’s a metaphor.”
Xavier shakes his head, furrows his brow, frowns at me with the exact expression Ally uses now, like I’m defective. “It’s a poem,” he snaps.
I don’t like his haircut. I don’t like his face with his new haircut. He looks like he was made in a factory. I don’t know why he ever reminded me of anything else. “I have to go,” I say.
He nods and turns back to his busy-work.
“Oh, hey,” Celeste says, glancing away from her yearbook buddies. “Can you take your tent with you? I know it was a gift and everything, but Mom says we don’t have room for it and it kind of smells.”
I think for a second that she’s joking. “You’re giving me back my painting?”
“We really like it, Max, but we don’t have anywhere to put it so it’s kind of a waste.”
I look at Xavier. “You don’t want your birthday present?”
“It smells funny,” he says without bothering to look at me.
Celeste laughs. “It really does.”
I hope they’re all zombified, the whole Lavigne family. I hate their dirty house and their shiny hair and their poor-but-authentic line of crap. Mostly I hate how much I miss Xavier. I don’t bother smiling. “Sure, I’ll take it.”
As I drag my metaphor down the peeling hallway, I feel angrier but happier at the same time. I saved my tent from being stuffed in a closet full of thrift-store clothing and stacks of useless petitions, from a future folded in on itself until there’s no memory of what it ever meant to anyone. To me. This tent is my work, the finest work of my life, and it belongs to me. Besides, I might have to live in it soon.
FIFTEEN
It’s Friday, December 23, the last day of school before the holidays. Dallas is heading inside when I arrive at the high school. He holds his id card under his chin and stares straight ahead. I take my place in line, quiet and cold like the world around me.
I sit behind him in Communications, still waiting my turn. Mr. Ames hands out holiday assignments on “persuasive nonfiction.” Our syllabus used to list epic poetry for this term, but zombies don’t care about fallen comrades. Mail delivery from ancient to modern times is a brain we can sink our teeth into.
“Yum,” I say to Dallas as I read the list of topics.
He doesn’t hear.
“Bring something of yourselves to this piece,” Mr. Ames says. “Any questions?”
We stare blankly.
He sighs. “You children are not what you used to be.”
I try Dallas again at lunch. I shuffle behind him in the lineup and say, “My mother watched a movie about zombies last night. They ate people’s brains.”
He doesn’t look at me. His eyes follow the cheesy macaroni spreading across his plate in a yellow ooze. His eyelids are purple with fatigue, black against the bridge of his nose.
I tap his shoulder. “Did you see that movie?”
He turns to me like he just realized I exist. No smile behind his eyes. No chewing. No clue. “I used to watch movies,” he says.
“I don’t watch them anymore. I don’t know why.” He grabs his tray and sits at the nearest empty chair between two strangers.
Brennan nudges my spine. “Shake it off,” he whispers without moving his lips.
I’m not aware of ordering lunch. I’m sitting at the end of a long table beside Brennan, staring at a tray of food I don’t want to eat—mushy vegetable soup, cold bread, bitter grapes.
Across the room, Dallas chews and chews but never seems to swallow. Eventually he rises and stacks his plates on the trolley. His jacket stretches tight across his shoulders but his pants barely hang on to his ass. He