Read Online All Good Children by Catherine Austen - Free Book Online Page A

umbrella or strains for a better view. Nobody.
    The schoolyard is a silent field of concrete. Twelve hundred children stand before the closed doors, holding umbrellas over their heads and identity cards below their chins, waiting for admittance. They’re thirty feet away from us, but not one head turns in our direction. They stand in long straight lines in the pouring rain, eyes forward, mouths closed, feet exactly the same distance apart, like gravestones.
    One supervisor stands beneath the eaves and stares at us like she wishes we were dead. She digs up a fake smile and shouts, “Alexandra Connors! Come join your schoolmates!”
    Ally walks through the gate with her face in the rain, dragging her busted umbrella. She doesn’t even say goodbye.

FOUR
    â€œLet’s do surveillance on the middle school.”
    Dallas throws me a scornful look. He chases a fourth slice of pizza with a second carton of milk and grows another half inch taller. “Why?”
    â€œI want to see if it’s like Ally’s school.”
    He shakes his head, mystified, but he follows me.
    Everything about the middle school is short and squat, like the kids who go here. “I always hated this place,” I mutter.
    A thousand students in grades five through eight are crammed into three flat-roofed concrete units only three stories high. A single-story addition serves as a music conservatory. Music floating across the barren grounds would be glorious, but the conservatory is soundproof. They wouldn’t want to accidentally inspire a mind.
    â€œYou got in so much trouble here,” Dallas says, smiling.
    I was nearly expelled in eighth grade after my third graffiti conviction. The principal didn’t understand what bare white walls could do to a kid like me. The third time I was suspended, my mother cried and my father raced to the school to see my piece before they pressure-washed it.
    â€œIt’s too hot,” Dallas complains, sniffing his armpits. “Everything looks smaller than I remember. This driveway was miles longer. Who was the kid who always hid in the ditch?”
    â€œWheaton Smithwick,” I say.
    â€œWheaton. Yeah. I haven’t seen him since the first week of school.”
    â€œMaybe he was downgraded.”
    Dallas points to the conservatory. “We climbed that roof to fetch him down once, remember? It looked a lot higher then. And that soccer field was farther away.”
    We walk toward the conservatory behind two eighth graders. One of them is taller than me, skinny, with cropped hair and too much makeup. She pushes her short friend into the ditch.
    â€œSome things never change,” I say.
    Dallas smiles and shoves me over, inches from the drop. We block the path of three fifth graders who wear their ties tight at the collar. “I was never that little,” Dallas says.
    â€œExcuse me,” I tell the tiny white kids. “We’re taking a survey.”
    They walk right by me.
    I grab the last one’s arm, flimsy as a toilet-paper roll beneath his gray uniform. I give him a pat and a smile. “Can I ask some questions?”
    He shakes his blond head. “I don’t talk to strangers.”
    Dallas rests a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Just a few questions, kid.”
    The boy makes eye contact with Dallas’s ribcage. He looks back and forth between us and shrieks, “Help! You don’t belong here!”
    We shrink away from him.
    The boy’s friends turn on us and yell, “Help! You don’t belong here!” A little black girl up the driveway shouts, “Help! You don’t belong here!”
    The eighth graders snicker. “You’re in for it now!”
    The blond boy stares up at Dallas with eyes glazed over like a doll’s. “Help! You don’t belong here!” he yells again. This time a dozen fifth graders join in. Their shrill voices ring off the concrete and burrow into the