All Good Children - Catherine Austen [80]
“There’s nothing on the football field! I can see the whole thing from here. It’s clean. There is no one left in our school who would even think of throwing garbage on this field.” I stumble into him on purpose, banging his shoulder. “No one except you and me.”
He stops walking. “I would never throw garbage on the football field. That’s wrong! Why would you throw garbage on the football field? We’re lucky to have a football field. We should take care of what we have.”
I want to take his head off. I want to rip out his larynx. I want to knee his testicles into a useless pulp. My cheeks burn as I stare up into his eyes. God, I wish I was taller. I could kick his ass when we were small. He tapped out every time. Now he could hold me off at arm’s length while he picked his nose.
There’s outrage in his expression, but it’s the outrage of Lucas and Ally and all the other tattler zombies.
I can’t stand to think of him telling on me. He never told when I broke his dad’s headlight last summer, or when I loosened the lid on Coach Emery’s thermos in grade nine so he scalded himself and had to go to the hospital. He never told when I ran away after Dad died and hid in our empty house overnight, or when I forgot Ally in the yard when she was two and we found her in the core an hour later. He never told on a single wrong thing I did in the past fifteen years. But now we’re almost grown and he’d turn me in for a piece of garbage.
The fact that there is no one in this world who cares about me except my mother is just too much truth to bear. My face starts to tingle like I’m going to cry or throw up. I can’t talk anymore. The field is under surveillance and my tongue is too heavy to move.
For ten more minutes we walk in silence side by side, searching the field and bleachers for garbage nobody believes is there. I pretend the kid beside me is someone else, some new kid whose name I don’t know.
“It’s clean,” Dallas announces when we reach the end of the bleachers.
I have to bite my tongue to keep from crying, I’m so exhausted. My blood washes warm against my teeth.
“Now we’ll check the trailer,” he says.
I don’t go inside with him. I stare at the ground because I don’t want my grief-stricken face on camera. When I reach the back of the trailer, out of view, I start to shake. I bite my lips and wipe my nose and groan and hyperventilate and stomp the ground and do everything I can to keep from crying like a baby. I bang my face on the trailer wall and I like the feel of it, firm but with a little give, so I do it harder and harder, in the dead center of my forehead, and it feels like nirvana is just one knock away. But it’s not a typical zombie move, so when I see Dallas at the corner, watching me in confusion, I know I’m wrecked. He’s going to rat me out.
“What the hell do you want?” I say, sniffing my weakness up my nose.
He stares blankly, silhouetted by the winter sun.
“Come here,” I tell him.
“I am here.”
“Closer.”
He hesitates, but then he takes one step, out of view of the cameras.
I grab on to his winter coat and slam him against the trailer.
“Ow!” he says. “Stop this. I want you to stop.”
“I don’t care what you want.”
He frowns and tries to pry my fingers off his clothing.
“We’re supposed to meet tomorrow at my apartment,” I say. “You’ll tell your father you’re at the library, but you’ll come to my place instead. You told me to come and get you if you don’t show up. Do you remember that?”
He pulls on my thumb but otherwise ignores me.
I shake him, rattling his shoulders into the wall. “Do you remember that?”
“I remember that, but it was wrong. It’s wrong to force someone to do something they don’t want to do.” He gives up on my hands. He unzips his coat and pulls his arms out of it, leaving it empty in my grasp.
He’s walking away, and I can’t accept that. I plow into his back and tackle him to the ground. He tries to roll me off, but I slam my knee into his spine and force his head into the dirt, my elbow jammed in his temple.
“You come over tomorrow morning,” I say. “Or I