Free All Good Children by Catherine Austen

brows raised.
    â€œGet out of here,” Dallas says, but the words grate across his throat in a whisper.
    Coach Emery pulls Dr. Richmond aside with a fake smile. Dr. Richmond stumbles and laughs, waves at the cheerleaders.
    â€œOh my god, look how drunk that guy is!” someone shouts from the bench.
    Dallas shudders beneath his padding.
    Austin jogs down from the stands and walks his father back to his seat. “Keep it up, ladies!” he shouts.
    Coach Emery turns straight to Dallas. “You block for Connors. I want you to take all the anger you’re feeling right now and plow it into that big white Devil, number seventy-three. I want him out of this game. You got that?”
    Dallas nods until I have to nudge him and say, “Stop nodding.”
    Dallas is an unstoppable force when the game resumes, one hundred and eighty pounds of unloved shame and fury. Number seventy-three limps off the field after eight seconds of play. When I hit Dallas’s shoulder in thanks, he shoves me away. His face is blank.
    I’ve seen him like this before. When we were eleven, we built a fort in his backyard out of scrap wood we’d found in an abandoned lumberyard. We spent two weeks at it, every day all day, hammering and cutting and measuring wrong and cutting again. It was a feeble fort with a crooked window, but we spent our summer in it, playing virtual games and drinking stolen soda and showing every kid in town what we’d made. Then school began, and Austin had to build a model cottage to scale for applied mathematics. We came home to find Dr. Richmond in the backyard tearing down our fort. “Your brother needs this wood,” he said. Dallas came to school the next day but he wasn’t there, wouldn’t look at anyone, wouldn’t speak. He hit a teacher with a garbage bin and broke his teeth, snapped out of it when he saw the man’s blood on his shoes. He was a nice teacher. Mr. Navarro. Dallas can’t believe he ever hurt the guy. It’s strange how easily you can do things you swear you could never do.
    He’s like that again now—no expression in his eyes, not even hate—but it’s scarier because he’s huge. He could snap bones and shatter skulls. We watch him and tremble.
    â€œPay attention to the play,” Brennan reminds me.
    The moment I get the ball, I know I’m going to score. I feel like that every time I get the ball, but this time I’m sure I’m right. The Devils’ defense spreads too far, and Dallas knocks them over one by one. I scramble my way to some clear field and tear through thirty-two yards, skirting bodies until they’re all behind me. My eyes blur, my heart ignites, my head throbs like a ticking bomb, and I blast into the end zone yards ahead of my pursuers.
    I cartwheel and flip and roar. I wave to Pepper and dance one of her moves. She’s on her feet, screaming, shaking her clacker like she loves this game.
    Dallas doesn’t rush over to celebrate. He paces back and forth through his own field of negative space.
    Sarah kicks us an extra point, and we buzz with the hope of winning.
    When the Devils get their turn, we’re on them like psychotic lovers desperate to get our sweet ball back. They can’t take a step before we put them on the ground. Their plays last three seconds: oomph, crash, crack . The quarterback passes long, and it looks like they might get somewhere, but Dallas heads for the receiver like a bull. Even I want to run away when I see him coming. The Devil fumbles, and Dallas leaps through the air, coming down hard on top of the kid with the ball in his hands. He’s not smiling when he gets up.
    Coach Emery is worried that either the Devils will score again or Dallas will kill somebody. We make it to twenty seconds, tie game, third down, when Dallas says, “I want the ball.” Those are his first words since his father appeared. He doesn’t repeat himself and no one