All Good Children (3 page)

“Good luck to you too,” he shouts.

Before I even cross my threshold, my neighbor, Xavier Lavigne, heads down the dirty hallway toward me. “I told Mr. Reese that our history assignment is a lie,” he says, “and I showed him a report from the free media, but he said I have to go to a disciplinary committee hearing now.” That's Xavier's version of
hello
. He speaks nonstop conspiracy theory to anyone who doesn't walk away, and he speaks it in seventeen languages, including binary code. He gets caught every week for illegal Internet access, but only because he posts his hacked information into his essays. His brilliant brain is defective. He thinks I'm his best friend because I'm not cruel to him, just slightly mocking. Minimal standards of friendship are part of his defect. I don't invite him in, and he doesn't hold it against me.

“Hey, Xavier. Did you sign me up for cross-country like I asked?”

He nods. “I had to forge your attendance to get you in.”

“You can do that?”

He leans against the doorframe and smiles. I take a step back.

The most abnormal thing about Xavier is that he smells delicious, like a human dessert. Today it's orange marmalade.

He's a compulsive bather with expensive taste in soap. He's also the best-looking guy I've ever seen. I don't mean that in a gay way, because I'm not gay. It's just a fact that still takes me by surprise. He looks like an adult. He's six feet tall, broad and sculpted from obsessive track-and-field practice. He has flawless white skin, shiny blond hair and turquoise eyes that sparkle with neurotic passion. His face is perfectly symmetrical. It's jarring against his damaged personality.

“It's easy,” he says. “I forged Ally's attendance, too, to sign her up for soccer. I gave her a seventy-five in a math assessment she missed on Wednesday, and I filled out the nurse's forms for a vaccination she missed on Friday. You better tell your mom.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“Did you take the speed rail? Did you see the bombings?”

“Nah. We flew.”

“I heard it was the Mexicans. They sabotaged our trains because we sabotaged their desalination plants.”

“That's crazy, Xavier. We
built
their desalination plants. It was a militia from Arizona that sabotaged them. They probably bombed the speed rail too.”

“People are dying of thirst in Arizona.”

“So they should bomb the reservoirs instead of the speed rail.”

Xavier frowns. “My parents told me not to say that.”

I laugh. “Afraid you'll get arrested?”

“Maybe. The state restricted the right to protest. Did you hear? You can only protest on your own land now. And they passed the universal id.”

“We already have a universal id,” I say.

“In New Middletown. Now it's coming everywhere. Faces and fingerprints.”

I shake my head. “Everywhere? That'll never happen.”

“Excuse us, Xavier,” Mom says at the doorway. “How are you, dear?”

“They're testing pharmaceuticals on the prison population,” he replies.

Mom nods, smiles, leads Ally to their bedroom to unpack.

While Xavier details the dirty deeds of Chemrose International, I filter seven hundred and thirty-five messages from my week offline. Ads, celebrity news, listserv chatter, history. I'm stunned to see a call from Pepper Cassidy. She's a member of
REAL: Reduced Electronic Activity in Life
. Her messages are rare and beautiful.

Pepper's face shines on my screen: brown eyes, pink mouth, cinnamon skin. “I need you, Max! We all need you!” The camera pans over a line of pretty pouty girls whispering, “I need you, Max.” I couldn't dream it any better. Pepper leans in close, smiling. “There are only two boys in dance this term, and you know they have no rhythm. Please say you'll try out.”

I save the call.

“The children in the trials are institutionalized,” Xavier tells me.

“The dance trials?”

“Drug trials. Will you help me circulate a petition?”

I laugh. “I'm fifteen, Xavier. I can barely circulate peanut butter on toast.”

I sort through ninety-eight messages from Dallas Richmond—that's one message for every waking hour I was offline. Ninety are single-sentence questions beginning with
Who do you think would win in a fight
. Seven are lists of names and bra sizes for the girls in each of our classes. One is a compilation of insulting names Coach Emery called me because I missed football practice. “I'm a limpdick and an asswipe,” I tell Xavier.

He nods without sympathy.

“Xavier! Dad wants you!” Celeste Lavigne glides down the hallway to fetch her brother. She's a softer, curvier version of Xavier. She and I are the only people in the entire complex who have younger siblings. I think that should draw us together. She disagrees.

“Celeste!” I shout. “We're back!”

She ignores me. “Come see what I did to Dad,” she tells Xavier.

I consider myself invited.

Down the hall, Mr. and Mrs. Lavigne hover inside their doorway. You have to use your imagination to see how Xavier and Celeste turned out so beautiful. The Lavignes are unusually large, white and old, like Vikings gone to seed. They're pasty and spongy and they dress in woolen cardigans buttoned into the wrong holes.

Mr. Lavigne looks especially bad today because Celeste has been working on him. His face is scored with black and pink festering flesh, like a burn victim's.

“Royal makeup,” I say. Celeste is a rising star in the special-effects department at the college she attends.

“Come inside, children,” Mr. Lavigne says through crispy lips. “Don't talk in the hallway.” He glances at the surveillance camera in the corner. No one ever talks in our hallway except Xavier. He compensates for a world of silence.

“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 rotting fruit. Down the street, a billboard announces the opening of another Chemrose hydroponics factory this winter, good times ahead, rows of young men and women in blue uniforms and pink smiles.

“Mommy's driving us to school tomorrow,” Ally says. That's a thrill for her—two cars in two days. We probably can't afford the fuel.

Life is lean without a father. We could get a stepfather easily—with sperm so feeble after years of herpes, hormones and heavy metals, the useless men like to marry into children— but I couldn't withstand that. Mom says Ally and I are all she needs. As long as we have each other, we'll be okay.

“I hope we're not in trouble for missing the first week of school,” Ally says.

I kiss her head. “Nah. It'll be fine. Grade one is premium. They'll love you there. Can't you feel it? It'll be great.”

She nods to convince herself. “It'll be the best year ever.”

TWO

Mom drives us to school in a car that smells like a chemical spill. It's glorious not to walk. It's only a mile and I don't have much to carry, but I like pretending we're still rich. Ally sits behind me with a red backpack on her knees, crammed with emergency undies, gym shoes, jump rope, lunch box, whiteboard and twenty fat markers I secretly covet.