Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  The boys were quiet for most of the rest of that day. Mr. Mankowski came to fill in for Sister Antonia, so they couldn’t talk as easily. Davidek kept stealing looks at the clip-on attached to Stein’s collar. In the silence of the library, he resolved that Lorelei would be Stein’s girl from now on, and that was the end of it. He would never interfere—no matter how sappy Stein got with his theories of fate, destiny, missing puzzle pieces, and true love.

  It made Davidek a little sad to surrender the crush, especially before it even got started, but there was something about the sacrifice that made him feel good, made him feel right. He guessed that was what Stein had meant by being happy about your unhappiness.

  * * *

  On the fourth day of suspension, Stein said to Davidek: “You know, I’ve been hanging around with you for two months, and you’ve never invited me over to your house.”

  Davidek wasn’t sure what to say, so he told the truth. “Even I don’t like going to my house. It’s not really fun over there. And my mom … she’s not the best about picking me up and driving friends around.” Davidek told Stein about his brother—the secret family shame—and described his mom and dad as “not really what you’d call happy people to begin with.”

  Stein said, “Sometimes you gotta find your own family.”

  “You mean turn my brother in for the reward?” Davidek joked, and Stein laughed loud enough to make Sister Antonia take notice and hush them again.

  Later that afternoon, while they were eating lunch—again in the solitude of the library—Stein said, “You know, you never asked me about my story.”

  Davidek said, “What’s your story?”

  Stein laughed. “You don’t care what my story is, or else you would have asked it already. But there is something you do want to know. So far, you haven’t had the balls.”

  Davidek mumbled through a mouthful of grilled cheese, “What do I want to know?”

  “Go ahead and ask,” Stein said, drawing a finger from his eye to his cheek, tracing the pink mark. “Everybody always wants to know, but nobody ever asks.”

  “Maybe they think it’s rude,” Davidek said.

  “It’d be rude to say, ‘Ugh, God! That scar is hideous! You poor disfigured creature, may the Lord have mercy on your soul!’ But there’s nothing rude in asking how I got it.”

  “All right, so how’d you get it?”

  “It happened at Vacation Bible Camp,” Stein told him. “This was in Texas, four years ago, before we moved here. You go away for two weeks and hang out with the bugs and spiders and mosquitoes while a bunch of loser counselors tell you how bad Jesus had it, nailed to the cross and whatnot, or wandering the desert. It’s supposed to be fun, but it’s not. They give you endless shit about when to eat, when to do some dumb craft, when to go to bed. Don’t go into this part of the woods, don’t talk back. Everybody gets so fed up. There are a million other kids at the campground, and all of them are idiots. Each troop has its own camp, although they all get together occasionally for sing-alongs and Sunday church services.

  “Anyway, there was this rivalry between us and these kids from Fort Worth, who had started it all by TP’ing our tents, so we went back the next day while they were at the lake and stole all of the toilet paper from their outhouses and burned it in a bonfire.” He laughed. “They had to go around begging to other troops because they had nothing to wipe their sorry asses with!

  “So the Fort Worth kids retaliated by pelting our group with rocks while we were harmlessly sitting around the toilet paper bonfire, telling ghost stories. Freaking rocks! Can you believe it? Coulda killed us.

  “The next night, we snuck over with water guns and sprayed the Fort Worthers while they were cooking dinner. They just walked right up to us, laughing,” Stein said. “‘It’s just water,’ one of them told the others. So I walked out of the bushes, toward that guy, just letting him have it in the face with a squirt gun. ‘Wait’ll you taste that water,’ I said.”

  Davidek scrunched his face. “So, what’d it taste like?”

  Stein shrugged. “Beats me. I’ve never tasted piss.” He leaned back in his chair, grinning. “Well … they went insane. And this one kid from the Fort Worth troop, who was a total dick, lunges at me. Piss-covered, teeth bared, nails out, running full speed. So I step to the side and trip him. Poof! He hits the ground in a big dust cloud. But—it was dumb of me because he landed right near the campfire. That’s when this kid, this dick, grabbed the unburned end of one of the logs sticking out of the fire, and clobbered me with it. Wham! Right in the side of the face. Well, I guess he won that round. Some of the other kids said you could see strings of my skin on the log when I fell away, like melted plastic. So that’s how it happened.”

  Stein knocked his knuckles against the scar. “All better now, though. But I got kicked out of camp for good.… I’m not saying the pee-water thing was the right thing to do, but at least it washes off. I’m stuck with this for life.”

  Davidek didn’t know what to say.

  Stein just shrugged. “I figured since you told me about your family, I’d tell you about the mark.” But Davidek thought it was strange that Stein didn’t just tell him about his own family, and he wondered why.

  * * *

  On the last day, it rained and the boys were temporarily released from the library to help Mr. Saducci mop up crimson leaks in the third-floor hall.

  They hung their blazers on pegs in the boys’ bathroom, rolled up their white sleeves, and opened their collars wide as they worked. Mr. Saducci kept telling them they weren’t going fast enough, but he was glad for the help, and equally glad to tell a couple of punks what to do and see them do it instead of laugh and ignore him.

  A booming voice fractured the silence in the hallway behind them: “So you two are the big troublemakers?” Davidek and Stein turned to see Father Mercedes, clad in a sweeping black topcoat, striding toward them from the stairwell, his eyes shadowed by the brim of a charcoal Borsalino hat.

  “Woody, I’d like a private moment with the boys, if you don’t mind,” the priest said. He lifted the dark hat and ran a palm over his head, streaking back the moist gray hairs.

  The janitor wrinkled his face and pointed at the dribbling ceiling. “We got work here. Can’t yinz talk later, Fawdder?”

  The priest’s narrow eyes suggested they could not. “They’ll be waiting here when you get back,” the priest said, and Saducci looked at the two boys and muttered to himself, walking away and opening the stairway door with an extra hard push. It would have been easy for the priest to ask Stein and Davidek to join him privately in an empty classroom, but just like the janitor, Father Mercedes was the kind of man who enjoyed seeing others follow orders.

  The priest smiled at the boys, a shark’s smile. “I hear you are the two rabble-rousers who triggered all the trouble last week.…” He trailed off, staring them down intently. “But I look at you and, well, find that … difficult to believe.”

  All the machinery in Davidek’s chest was working at double speed, so he could only clutch his mop handle and stare. Stein stepped forward and pronounced, “We didn’t do anything except get pushed around.”

  The priest managed a half smile, partway charmed. He leaned down with his hands on his knees and made his most serious face. “Do tell…,” he said.

  The boys—mostly Stein—spilled out exactly what had happened during St. Mike’s now-infamous Dog Collar fiasco, and the priest listened with a kind of delight. They couldn’t figure out why he was enjoying it so much, unless maybe the priest was just kind of cool and thought they were funny. It made the boys take a liking to Father Mercedes right away.

  “If what you say is true, you two fellows have been scapegoated,” the priest said when they were finished. “Who’s responsible for your punishment this week?”

  The boys looked at each other. “Mr. Mankowski, I guess,” Stein said, while Davidek volunteered: “And Ms. Bromine.”

  “Sister Maria, too?” the priest
suggested. The boys nodded, and that made him smile. “You two have any character witnesses?” Father Mercedes asked. “Maybe I know your family priests. Which parishes do you belong to?”

  “I’m from St. Joe’s,” Davidek said.

  “In Natrona?” the priest asked.

  “No,” Davidek said. “Over in New Kensington.”

  “Ah, Father Higgins.” The priest nodded. “And you?” He looked at Stein.

  “First Evangelical, out near the movie theater in Sarver,” Stein answered.

  Father Mercedes made a sour face. “That’s a Protestant church.”

  “My family are born-agains, actually,” Stein said.

  The priest asked, “So what are you doing in a Catholic school?”

  “Well, what am I doing at an Evangelical church with a name like Noah Stein?” the boy answered, smiling even wider. “And what was I doing at a bar mitzvah two years ago with one Born-Again sister and an atheist dad?”

  “Bar … mitzvah?” the priest repeated, like it was a punch line he didn’t get.

  “My mom, she always wanted me to experience our Jewish heritage—well, my dad’s Jewish heritage. She was born Lutheran.”

  “So what are you exactly?” the priest asked in a tone that suggested he felt distinctly bullshitted. Davidek had that feeling, too.

  “My family is all sorts of things, Father,” Stein said. His face was steady, full of serious intention, and not joking in the least. “My mom, she … I guess she worried a lot. We learned a lot about a lot of religions, I guess as a kind of insurance policy. She believed in angels, in heaven, in God—but she had a lot of doubt in her heart, too. None of us knows what’s waiting on the other side, but … my mom, I guess, she wanted all the bases covered.”

  The priest didn’t know how to respond. The good humor seemed to have drained from him. “Don’t try to make an ass out of me, boy,” he said, pointing his index finger in their faces. Around the finger was a thick gold ring capped with a fat ruby, surrounded by what looked like diamonds.

  The two freshmen inched back, and the priest looked up at the dripping ceiling, which had made a thin pool for them all to stand in. He lifted one shoe, then the other, then found a drier place to stand. “That’s all for now,” he said. “You better get back to soaking up this filth.” He walked away, leaving wet footprints, and they could hear the clack of his shiny black shoes descending the stairwell.

  “You think he’s still on our side?” Stein asked as the footsteps faded away.

  “It depends. Was all that stuff true? About all the religions and stuff you belong to?”

  Stein said it was.

  Davidek laughed. “I’d like to meet your mom, man. She sounds like a nut.” And then, realizing that sounded wrong, sputtered: “I just mean—she sounds weird, but, like cool-weird.”

  “I know,” Stein said. “I knew how you meant it.… I think you’d like her.”

  They went back to mopping, waiting for Saducci to come back, but after a while Stein stopped suddenly. “Davidek, I should have told you right away.… My mom’s not around anymore. She died.” Davidek began to gush an apology, but Stein cut him off. “I know you didn’t mean anything bad. And that’s why I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  Davidek said, “When…?” And Stein just said, “A while ago.” Then he went back to mopping, and Davidek understood. That was all his friend wanted to say about it, though there was clearly more to tell.

  TWELVE

  In their monthly faculty meeting, the teachers sat around the same polished mahogany library table where Davidek and Stein had passed the previous week, and lowered their eyes as Father Mercedes paced around them.

  The priest was berating them over the uproar in the parking lot the week before, an incident he called “a seeping black eye on the institution,” and insisted that something needed “to be done immediately.” Sister Maria explained that the week-old incident was just some roughhousing and didn’t seem like a major catastrophe. The priest said perceptions like that “are exactly the problem.”

  “We’ve got a cancer at St. Mike’s,” he said. “Who’s going to cut it out? And don’t go telling me it was all the fault of those two boys you stuck in suspension. I’ve spoken to them myself, and clearly they’re just too dumb to defend themselves from the blame.”

  Ms. Bromine piped up, “They were causing problems, Father Mercedes, I can vouch for that.” Mr. Mankowski half rose from his chair, eager to claim credit for the collar, but Father Mercedes was grimacing and waving them both away like nagging children.

  “What I’m saying is that it’s Sister Maria’s fault we don’t have thirty more students in suspension with them,” the priest said, and paused to let that soak in.

  Mr. Zimmer looked across the table at Sister Maria, who sat with her eyes lowered to her clasped hands. He kept trying to catch her attention, to prod her into reacting, but she wouldn’t look up, even though she knew he was there. Especially because she knew he was there.

  Zimmer had known Sister Maria ever since he was a student at St. Mike’s, more than a decade and a half ago, when he was a lonely beanpole with the big crops of red acne eating his cheeks and she was a mathematics teacher, not yet saddled with the responsibility of being principal, and with just a touch of the wiry gray that dominated her hair today. She knew the other students could be vicious to him—his nickname was Señor Gargoyle (it originated in Spanish class)—but she admired the way he accepted the teasing with a kind of resigned valor, never getting angry, never fighting back. She got the sense that there wasn’t much love directed at him from home, but he had nonetheless, somehow, turned into a gentle young man, even as a teenager, who seemed to understand that time would free him from this place of peevishness and someday reward his bigheartedness.

  Once she became principal, she had been the one to hire him ten years ago, straight out of college, and it was a joy to see her young friend return to St. Mike’s as an instructor, though she once told him she feared that had been a mistake. Perhaps he could have gone on to something greater, rather than return to a place that had treated him so coldly. But he was glad to be home.

  Sister Maria had always looked out for him. If she wasn’t going to defend herself, Mr. Zimmer would do it for her.

  “Here’s the fact,” Father Mercedes was concluding. “I’m demanding the Parish Council investigate this ‘Dog’ brawl or whatever it was—and any other violent episodes that may follow. If we find a pattern of failure in the leadership here, St. Michael the Archangel High School will—I promise you—be closed at the end of this year.”

  * * *

  After the meeting, the other teachers scurried away to fret and worry over Father Mercedes’s threat, but Zimmer lingered in the library and, once it was clear, put one of his big claw hands on the priest’s shoulder. “Father, I was wondering.… You ever hear about how Sister Maria got picked to be the principal?”

  The priest looked at the hand, but not at the teacher it belonged to.

  Zimmer spoke softly: “It was a long time ago, a couple years before you came on as pastor. Not a lot of people know this story, but there was this kid, an okay student, not great, not failing. He wasn’t popular. Wasn’t good at sports, but he was a good kid.

  “Gradewise, he got a lot of A’s, and had a couple B’s, but only one C-minus. One day when the kid was a sophomore, his dad started to get fanatical. He insisted the boy get perfect grades—‘Straight A’s, or I’m pulling you out of that expensive school.’”

  The priest was looking at him now, and the teacher kept his hand on him.

  “So the kid worked hard, got some extra credit—and lo and behold, pretty soon he was scoring straight A’s. And the father says to his son, ‘You’re not in any activities. What kind of school only focuses on grades?’ So the kid joins the yearbook committee and volunteers to help organize the prom. Then the dad says, ‘Anybody can do that.’ So the kid gets involved in basketball, but the dad says, ‘This team l
oses half the time. What’s the point?’”

  “What is the point?” Father Mercedes said.

  Zimmer’s pockmarked cheeks stretched back in a sad smile. “The point is, the kid’s dad was setting impossible standards. But … why? It turns out the old man had lost his job, but nobody knew. The family was short on money, but the dad was afraid to tell his wife and son. He wanted the boy to fail because the tuition was eating him alive, and all he wanted was an excuse to pull the kid out of St. Mike’s.”

  The priest said, “Whatever you’re trying to say—”

  Zimmer cut him off. “It wasn’t about the money. He could have withdrawn his son at any time. It was pride.”

  A silence passed, and Zimmer waited for the priest to reply. When Father Mercedes didn’t, Mr. Zimmer sighed. “So, these threats about investigating the school … shutting it down. Why do I get the feeling you are trying to make us fail, Father?”

  The priest pushed Zimmer’s hand off his shoulder. “I assure you that’s not the case.”

  Zimmer nodded. “You know something? Eventually the truth came out—about the unemployed father, I mean,” he said. “The wife found out her husband wasn’t working. They had to pull the kid out anyway. You know what Sister Maria did, what made Sister Victor put her in line to be her successor? Sister Maria convinced a group of parishioners to give the kid a tuition scholarship.” Zimmer laughed. “He finished out his last two years, no problem. Graduated right up there near the top of his class. Straight A’s and B’s.”

  “How sweet,” Father Mercedes said.

  Zimmer bobbed his head. “The dad wouldn’t come to the graduation. How about that?”

  “You can stop accusing me in metaphors, Mr. Zimmer,” the priest said. “My intentions here are pure. St. Michael’s simply must begin to function in a way that conforms to basic Christian values.”

  Zimmer shrugged. “All right, Father. No hard feelings.”

  The two shook hands, hard. Both of them smiling, neither of them meaning it.