Good Kids: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

idea of meritocracy by concealing their handiwork, helping their children translate the ideas they’d given them for their schoolwork into plebeian English. The baldness of the parental involvement here was notable. But the truly remarkable thing was Khadijah’s composure. It was as if Nancy had not only dictated the content of her presentation but inhabited her the moment she rose to speak.
    “. . . and therefore the creation of new words, an entirely new means of communication. Characters that had once been static in their meaning gained the ability to shift, taking on different meanings depending on their location among other characters.”
    The visual aids she’d constructed were larger, I suspected, than cuneiform tablets. With the madness of an artist, she had created an exhibit that reached beyond the demands of the assignment. She’d decided that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek lettering each deserved a monolith made from four conjoined sheets of extra-large black poster board. When she was done speaking like her mother, she shouldered the massive charts and returned to her seat, her arms full, her head obscured. She leaned the time lines against her desk, and I studied them from across the room. At each notch, there was an empire’s outline, or a glyph, or the sketched face of an ancient despot. They were dark and chunky with effort. They were imitations of Nancy’s art, drawn by a hand that couldn’t move like Nancy’s hand.
    • • •
    The following Thursday, we had the day off from school to participate in the ABC Walk, which benefited the ABC House. ABC stood for A Better Chance. The ABC House was an old Victorian in downtown Wattsbury where poor black and Latino boys from New York City came and lived for four years, so that they could attend Wattsbury Regional. The method of collecting donations was to go door to door pledging to walk ten kilometers through the woods if your neighbor would give you ten dollars. Sophomores wound through the Robert Frost Conservation Center as a cold rain sprinkled the birches. Khadijah walked with twoother girls fifty feet ahead of me and my friends—I could see her scrunchie, apricot today, through white branches.
    I was walking with my father’s backpack held in front of me, bouncing against my knees. I’d left my own backpack at school the day before, so my father had told me to take his from the floor of the bedroom closet. Halfway through the hike, the social studies teacher placed in charge of us cupped his hands around his mouth and announced lunch. Rooting for a bottle of water, my hand closed around a minibar bottle of Sutter Home wine.
    Burbling, abundant love for my father flooded my heart. I unscrewed the top as we sat on stones.
    “You can have some of the wine my father gave me,” I whispered to my two friends, the straight-backed, dark-haired son of a Spanish literature professor in immaculate corduroys and the slightly obese son of an acupuncturist. “Just be cool about it, or people will freak out and tell on us.”
    They each took a substantial gulp. We had a conversation about whose father was chiller about wine. After I’d wolfed my meatball marinara from Subway, I searched all the pockets and compartments in the backpack clinging to the hope my father had included a Subway cookie. In a pocket within a pocket, my hand closed around an unfamiliar form.
    I drew out what looked like a hard candy imported from Europe. It was a round object in thick golden wrapping, with tiny writings on the side and the gleam of an elite continental sweet. I was even prouder of my father now; here was further evidence of his good taste.
    I interrupted my friends and asked if they knew what kind of candy it was.
    “I can’t open it,” I said, which was true. “Maybe you guys can figure out how to get this fancy foreign wrapping off. It’s most likely from France or Italy, or Prague, where they just try to make things prettier.”
    The Spanish literature