Lorelei followed her gaze. “He’s cute, right?” she said.
Zari’s teeth severed the tip of a french fry. “I heard him making fun of your hair earlier,” she said, holding back a smile as Lorelei’s fell.
Lorelei looked back over her shoulder at the boy’s table. The look of worry wasn’t caused by her irregular eyebrows this time.
* * *
Lord, the newcomers looked little.
Sister Maria Hest had been principal at St. Michael’s for fifteen years and was a teacher for two decades before that. During her adolescence, what seemed like centuries ago, the now-sixty-year-old nun had been a student herself. How strong and wise she had seemed to herself then. Surely one of her withered old teachers had passed her at some moment and marveled at her smallness, too.
As the first day of class came to an end, Sister Maria stood in the hallway near the main doors, watching as the students departed, and noticed two boys: Davidek and Stein, the pair Ms. Bromine had complained about, escorting a lovely young classmate between them. Davidek was chattering at Lorelei, who was ignoring him in favor of locking eyes with Stein.
Sister Maria noticed the girl hesitate at the giant doors, then trip forward with a small cry. It had almost seemed deliberate. But why?… Sister Maria looked behind her, but the only other witness was that white-eyed crucifix over the trophy cabinet.
She might have understood better if she had seen the small smile of relief on Lorelei’s face when both Stein and Davidek reached out to catch her.
FIVE
We should be afraid.…
Sister Maria turned around in the empty hallway, as if she had heard those words spoken aloud, but no one was there, of course. The students and teachers were long gone. It had been an exhausting first day, and Sister Maria stood there alone, her eyes closed, listening to the distant drips of the school’s many leaks. The stairwell. The third-floor girls’ bathroom. The second-floor history classroom. And finally, the computer room, which would cost them dearly if the water ever touched those expensive machines.
Then she had heard those words. We should be afraid … over how easy it is to go wrong, trying to make others do right. These were words first spoken to her when she was a teenager in these same halls. It had been the saying of Sister Victor, who’d been the principal when Maria Hest was a teenager at St. Michael’s and had inspired her, in fact, not only to join the sisterhood but follow the same vocation as an educator as well. The words had always haunted Sister Maria, though she never fully understood what her friend and mentor had meant. Afraid?
That was a word she heard a lot in the halls these days.
There were others, too: Hazing. Initiation. Teasing. Torture. A little harmless fun.
Sister Maria had heard the upperclassmen talking, almost gloating, about the only thing that seemed to excite them about returning for their final year at St. Mike’s—the ritual of welcoming the freshmen by making sport of them.
It had already started. At lunch, she had seen a pair of large boys racing through the hall from opposite sides, like demolition balls, bashing together into crowds of freshmen boys, whose arms and legs jabbed in every direction, like crushed insects. She had found the seniors, scolded them, and they had smiled and said, “C’mon, Sister.… It’s our turn!”
Our turn.
It was supposed to be just fun and games. That’s what the faculty and parents and alumni association believed, which was why the tradition persisted. Hazing was regarded as a healthy bonding exercise for the freshmen, and no graduate who endured it thought anyone who came after should be spared. True enough, it was hardly a violation of the Geneva Conventions for the freshmen to serve a few days as butlers and waitresses to the senior class. A few pranks … maybe a snowball fight or two … the Hazing Picnic, with freshmen drafted into a series of sketches and songs designed to blur the boundary of being “laughed at” and “laughed with.”
When Sister Maria became principal, she’d seen things getting more extreme. Maybe there was just more anxiety—to get into college, get into the right college, and find some way through the spartan landscape of scholarships, grants, and loans to pay for those futures. It was easier to be afraid now, easier to be angry. Meanwhile, St. Mike’s had changed. Hungry for tuition dollars, it had begun to collect no small number of students who were kicked out of public school for violence, drugs, sex, and assorted other acts of delinquency, while the number of especially devout Catholic parents seemed to increase as well, filling the halls with their holier-than-thou (and painfully isolated) offspring. Hazing was always a pressure valve, but that pressure had become unbearable. As Sister Maria saw it, the tradition had turned into a form of sanctioned bullying.
Now came this new hunger: Our turn … As if these upperclassmen had suffered worse than any who came before. Our turn …
She thought of the boy on the roof last year, and what had made him snap. St. Mike’s was a place that tried to do right, but as Sister Victor’s voice reminded her … it was easy to go wrong that way, too. It was getting harder to make excuses to the people of the church.
Sister Maria stood at the school’s first-floor side entrance, where there had once been a corridor leading to the great chapel of St. Michael the Archangel. Now the glass-and-steel door overlooked only a grassy field.
For almost ninety years, the red-stone chapel had stood on that ground, towering and majestic, with a steeple that cast a sundial shadow across the surrounding neighborhood. It had been built by the town’s early immigrant families—the steelmen, the glassworkers, the housewives, the rail operators, the stonemasons, housepainters, barbers.… They had labored in poverty a century ago to build St. Mike’s—a sanctuary for their families, a place for their children’s weddings, their grandchildren’s baptisms, and their own funerals.
It was meant to stand forever, but like so much from when Sister Maria was a girl, the chapel was gone now.
A fire had destroyed it before dawn one Christmas, several hours after a packed Midnight Mass. It had started on the fifty-foot pine trees decorating the altar, and faulty light strands were the official cause. The trees were dry, brittle, just waiting for a spark to become twin columns of flame, which quickly devoured the interior of the church.
Later that morning, as the smoke still rose, parishioners celebrated holiday Mass in a makeshift chapel in the school’s basketball gymnasium. In his sermon from the free throw line, Father Mercedes, the parish’s longtime pastor and a son of the school himself, vowed that St. Michael the Archangel’s would stand again within the year. That had been four years ago.
In that time, the scoreboard and bleachers were removed. The retractable stage, previously used for school plays, became an altar, and a thin carpet was nailed over the pine flooring of the basketball court. Worn pews had been salvaged from a church in McKeesport, which was among several shuttered by the diocese as part of a series of parish closings and consolidations due to the shriveling population of the region’s faithful. St. Michael’s was not rebuilt, but it was the beneficiary of many secondhand baptismal fonts, pipe organs, choir loft risers, and assorted gilded candelabras.
Father Mercedes regularly explained to the restless congregation that he could not persuade the bishop to reconstruct their burned church when so many others were being forced to close their doors.
The gymnasium church remained, and it was there Sister Maria ended her after-hours walk.
She found she was no longer alone.
A slouching figure, clad entirely in black, knelt in the church pews.
* * *
His back was to her, his face turned up at a ceramic statue of the resurrected Christ, salvaged from one of the shuttered churches, suspended from the ceiling with its arms extended in the shape of the cross and a peculiar neutral expression on its face—less the throes of agony than the boredom of a minimum-wage employee at the end of a long day: Don’t ask me, I’m going off shift.
The dark figure in the pews looked bac
k at Sister Maria, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. His eyes were shadow pits, his thin gray hair neatly combed across his scalp, though a little damp with sweat. His face had a similar expression to the impatient Christ.
“Good afternoon, Father Mercedes,” she said.
He smiled, and the cigarette bent upward toward his nose. “Sister,” he said. “Let me guess—bad news?”
She walked toward him down the central aisle of the church. “The ceilings are leaking again—four of them,” she said. “You’ve seen the problems, I take it?”
The priest’s unlit cigarette danced as he spoke. “Oh, that and a lot more.”
He held a gold-plated Zippo in his hands, sparking the flame, touching it to the tip of his cigarette, and exhaling a corona of blue haze into the air. She despised this about him, smoking in a church. He did it all the time when no one was around—no one he cared about, anyway.
Father Harold Mercedes was only seven years older than her, but always seemed much more ragged and tired. Many parishioners found his roguishness charming. To the students, his bad habits made him a maverick, a fellow rebel—the priest who bought rounds of beer at the P&M Bar, placed bets on the Steelers, took annual vacations to Vegas and Atlantic City, and occasionally let slip a curse word. His Friday-night poker buddies would tease the priest, “Ah, better go to confession, Father!” And he would close his eyes and say: “I forgive myself.”
Behind his back, the older parishioners called him Diamond Hal. The kids called him Father Pimp.
“We’ll need money to repair the damage, Father,” Sister Maria said. She reminded him about the eroding brick and the past failures of temporary fixes. He smoked his cigarette and let her talk, not really listening. When she finished, he rose from the pew and shrugged. “Why bother fixing a school that may not exist in another year?”
The nun crossed her arms. “I don’t think that’s very funny, Father.”
The priest blew smoke through his nose. “That’s because it’s not a joke, Sister. When I ask for things, when I ask for extra money—a special pass of the collection plate—our parish council tends to ask two questions. First is: ‘Why are we supporting a school that only causes humiliation for the parish?’ And the second question is: ‘When will we finally rebuild our burned church?’ My answer to the second one is, ‘We can’t afford it yet.’ And so the parish council’s response is to repeat the first question—‘Why, why, why’…,” he said, exhaling smoke again. “… ‘Why are we supporting a school nobody wants?’”
In the twelve years he’d served as pastor, Father Mercedes had proved himself adept at wielding the parish council like a bludgeon. He didn’t need the panel’s approval for much, but it was always easy enough for him to manipulate them into whatever cause he supported.
The nun’s shoulder’s sagged. “Shall I control the weather in the meantime?” she asked.
“I’d prefer you control your students,” Father Mercedes snapped back. “What happened to the emergency funds I secured for you this summer?”
Sister Maria sighed. “You know the answer to that.” That money had been scattered by the Boy on the Roof. Settlements, medical bills, pain and suffering payments for the staff injured that day. Money for secret scholarships for the hurt students—secret to prevent every enrollee from claiming psychological scarring. Luckily, the child who was most seriously wounded—the boy Davidek and Stein had rescued—came from a family with a near slavish devotion to the school, and they had helped coordinate the legal arrangements to keep everything hush-hush. It was a wealthy and influential family (made more wealthy by the payments they arranged, of course), but they had helped suppress the full story in the local newspaper, shielding the school’s reputation … somewhat. That had cost a significant payout, too.
Only one student involved in the incident hadn’t returned, and he was the one Sister Maria knew she had failed the most—The Boy on the Roof, himself. Mr. Zimmer had been the one who saved St. Michael’s in that regard, and not just by grabbing the boy in the midst of his plunge. He had arranged something for the boy and his family that no one else could. He had settled the ugliness once and for all. The boy had disappeared. The boy’s family was satisfied. St. Michael the Archangel soldiered on.
But they had paid for it. Paid mightily. Now Sister Maria was asking for more money.
“So how many more deranged students should we budget for this year?” Father Mercedes asked. He stubbed out his cigarette on the bottom of a pew, then looked in vain for a place to dispose of the butt.
“I thought perhaps, given the circumstances, the diocese might consider offering us a small—,” Sister Maria began, but Father Mercedes cut her off.
“The diocese isn’t going to give us any more money; it collects money. And we are becoming more valuable as real estate. Would you like to see St. Michael’s become another community theater, or a Taco Bell?” The dead ember in his hand wavered near her face.
“The school is St. Michael’s identity,” the nun said quietly.
“The empty field out there is our identity now,” he said. “St. Michael’s is the church without a church. The parish that could not rebuild itself.” His eyes scanned the gymnasium chapel with unmasked disgust. “If you want to keep this school, you’d better force these students to become something worth saving,” he said. “Frankly, a lot of parishioners believe you’re the worst principal we’ve ever had at St. Mike’s. Do you like the idea of being the last one, too?”
The nun closed her eyes. The priest was waiting for an answer. “No,” she said finally.
“Good.” He nodded. “Then we’re going to see some changes around here, yes?” He reached out his hand, and the nun shook it reluctantly. “Take care of that for me,” he said.
As the priest left her, the silence of the empty school returned, that great after-hours stillness she had once found calming. For the first time, Sister Maria felt lost there—and, finally, afraid.
She sat down in the pew, opening the hand that had just shook the priest’s.
In her palm was the blackened stub of his cigarette.
PART II
Our Turn
SIX
“I was dead,” said a kid at the freshman lunch table. “These senior guys slammed my tie in a locker and then put on the lock!” Davidek didn’t know the name of the boy telling the war story. School was just a couple of weeks in, and he still didn’t know everybody.
Green did: “Well, what’d you do, Mikey?”
“I was screaming for help, and the old French-teacher nun came out and made them unlock me,” the kid told the serious faces around him. “If she hadn’t come out, I would’ve been stuck there for good.”
Stein was chewing a cookie. “Or until you figured out you could just loosen the loop around your neck and slip it off.”
The boy telling the story hung his head. “I didn’t think of that,” he said quietly.
The freshman boys had finished their lunches, but no one was leaving the table. It was cool down here in the cafeteria, and safe—while outside, in the scorching September sun, the seniors had started a recess ritual of capturing freshman guys and swinging them by their ankles around the parking lot. They liked to make the human pinwheels slam into each other.
Anxiety had overtaken the newcomers. Everyone knew about the hazing, but no one was sure what to do about it, or how bad it would get. “Mr. Zimmer said if we just go along with it, they’ll get bored,” Green said. “And it won’t last long.”
“Nuh-uh, it lasts all year,” said another kid, J. R. Picklin, a self-professed graffiti artist who bragged that he spelled his name JayArr when he tagged objects around town. “And at the end of the year, there’s this big gathering where they put you on a stage and really fuck you up.”
“What do they make you do?” said a small voice. It was a girl, the only one at an empty table next to the one jammed with boys. The girl was tiny and abnormally thin, with a narrow wedge-shaped face that almo
st put her eyes on opposite sides of her head, like a fish. Her whitish blond hair fell in short, straight lines and she breathed through drooped lips. A small gold cross dangled from her neck, like the bell you’d attach to a cat.
JayArr shrugged at her. “It’s some end-of-the-year picnic thing. I heard from my older brother that they march you out in front of the crowd, and everybody’s chanting and yelling shit at you, and throwing stuff. And you’re, like, the entertainment.”
Stein asked, “So what? You sing a song or tootle on a kazoo, or something?”
“That’s not scary. Just sounds lame,” Davidek said.
“Yeah, but then they pull down your pants or make you wear girl’s underwear or put ants down your shirt while you’re doing it,” JayArr emphasized. “My brother says there’s no mercy.”
“They can’t do any of that,” Davidek said. “The teachers wouldn’t let them do that.”
The fish-faced girl spoke softly again. “They did it to Jesus on the crucifixion.…” But the weird religious invocation just made everybody squirm.
“All seniors got their asses decapitated when they were freshmen, and it boils in them for years. Now they’re gonna give it back,” JayArr said. “My brother and his friends got stomped all year long. Then came the big finale—this picnic, which is so bad, they need to have it at a park away from school grounds, just so St. Mike’s can’t get sued, or something. The teachers pretend they don’t even know about it.”
“So what exactly did your brother say happened?” Davidek asked, wondering what his own brother, the marine deserter, could have told him about all this—if he were around.
“My brother and some other guys got covered in chocolate sauce and whip cream and had cherries dumped on their head. The sicko seniors turned them into a damned banana split! I’m not joking. All the people in the audience were pelting them with fruit and nuts and shit.”
Brutal Youth: A Novel Page 6