But the little boy was out of glue. “¡No más! No más!” he cried, and began hunting around the stage for more, opening the drawer of a dresser and finding a cartoonishly large book of matches made out of cardboard and red construction paper.
Carney made his mouth into a devilish little o and flashed his eyebrows at the hooting audience, who cheered as he raised one of the big matches into the air and swiped it across the floor, touching it to the imaginary trail of flammable glue.
A rush of wind threw a flurry of orange and red plastic shreds into the air. It was a neat special effect for fire—designed by Simms—made from a window fan filled with red confetti and hidden behind the bed.
Carney backed away on his knees as two students dressed in orange jumpsuits draped in red, yellow, and orange ribbons leaped onstage toward him. “Raarrh!” one of them said, throwing a fistful of red confetti at Carney, who slapped both hands to his face and vented a howl of distress. “Oh, no!” Mullen translated, his glimmering eyes scanning the audience. “The glue is on my face! I am burning!”
“¡Fuego! ¡Fuego!” the flame-people cackled as they shoved the boy back and forth. Just then, a siren wailed, and boys and girls dressed as firefighters rushed onstage, throwing buckets of blue confetti to simulate water. They scooped up the boy to rescue him, but he reached back, crying: “¡Mamasita! ¡Mamasita!”
The mother awoke from her slumber just in time for the students playing the fire-folk to attack her. “¡Estoy muriendo! ¡Donde está usted, mi hijo!” she cried.
“I am dying,” Beth Bartolski translated tonelessly. “Where are you, my son! Why? Why!”
The firefighters began a clumsily choreographed kung fu fight with the flame-people, and it all ended with the spray of an actual fire extinguisher, burying the stage in a low-floating white cloud. When the air cleared, the flame characters were heaped atop one another, groaning like comic-strip thugs who’d had their lights knocked out.
Carney’s little-boy character sat on the edge of the stage, rubbing his eyes and sobbing melodramatically. Half his face was now painted with red marker to indicate burns. A firefighter girl walked up to him carrying a plastic, glow-in-the-dark Halloween skeleton. “Your mamasita es muerta!” she declared, waving the skeleton mournfully at the son, who hugged it and cried out “BOO HOO! BOO HOO!” as the firefighters shook their heads. (Inexplicably, the skeleton had a rubber snake slithering out of one eye socket.)
Let this be a reminder to everyone…, Mullen translated as all the actors onstage said in unison: “¡No juegan con el fuego, o usted será quemado!”
“Do not play with fire, or you will be burned!”
* * *
The Spanish stars took turns bowing before the whooping crowd. Carney even brought out the skeleton with him for a curtsy. Davidek looked at Stein—who wasn’t applauding, who wasn’t doing anything except sitting still and staring at the stage with blank eyes. At the foot of the stage, a relieved Mrs. Tunns was congratulating Mullen and Simms for authoring the show, proud for once that her two worst slackers had accomplished something worthwhile.
Stein stood from his seat, not hearing anything around him—certainly not Davidek saying his name again and again.
He brushed through the crowd, moving up the aisle. Davidek tried to follow, but Stein went too fast, shoving people as he began to walk faster and faster.
Mullen and Simms whispered at each other, grinning as they peered through the audience. By the time they saw Stein he was already upon them. “Bring back some memories, you fucking firebug?” Mullen asked. Simms was even less delicate: “So when they found your mama, was she Extra Crispy or Original Recipe?”
Stein smashed his fist into Simm’s tombstone buck teeth, staggering the senior back against Mrs. Tunns, toppling both of them over. Mullen flailed his hands in front of his face, so Stein launched a foot into his balls instead, dropping him to his knees, where he kicked him in the center of his chest. Mrs. Tunns was crawling out from under a howling Simms, whose green teeth were dripping red, when Mullen fell on her, too. “For chrissakes, stop him!” Mrs. Tunns shrieked as the closest students, teachers, and even a few parents who had come to help out for the day snapped out of their paralysis in unison.
Stein loomed over the fallen seniors, his shoulders squared against the panels of the hall’s cheap dropped ceiling, heaving breath, hungry for more. Blurred figures rose behind him, pressing forward as if through heavy water. The freshman did not turn toward them and did not resist as they struck, their arms blossoming around his body, swallowing him, dragging him down.
TWENTY-NINE
Lorelei heard the International Day performances unspool from the secretary’s office—the raucous French music, the tepid applause, the muffled foreign babble and laughter rising up through the hardened arteries of St. Mike’s basement corridors to its sunny front office.
After she had feigned illness downstairs, Ms. Bromine dragged her up to sit on the couch beside the school secretary, Mrs. Corde, a tall, boxy woman with carrot-colored hair, who typed with only her index fingers, jabbing them down against each key like someone playing a miniature game of Whac-A-Mole.
Bromine left the door open when she departed, and the sounds of International Day continued wafting up from the basement. Lorelei picked up on Mrs. Tunns’s muffled introduction to the Spanish performance and strained to hear, then strained not to. She heard applause when the Spanish program ended, and there was a brief moment of silence.
Then—an eruption.
Mrs. Corde perked up from her typewriter like a woodland creature detecting distant danger. She turned to Lorelei, as if to verify the commotion, and the sound grew louder, drawing closer, a thunder of movement. “Is that part of the show?” the secretary asked.
Lorelei’s lifelessness evaporated. She sprang from her seat as twin doors banged open in the hallway and what sounded like a beast made of many bodies thundered against a row of lockers. Feet scuffled and squeaked on the tile, and voices shouted desperate, contradictory instructions as the rumble dragged nearer.
Lorelei closed the door of the office and pressed her finger against the brass button in the center of the knob, but the click of the lock felt useless as backs and arms and faces slammed up against the narrow window of the door, like bodies swirling in floodwaters. Mr. Mankowski was orbiting the melee in his ridiculous lederhosen and bright green cap, barking orders at the uniformed boys, all grappling with one struggling figure: Noah Stein, with at least three boys on each arm, pulling them out straight as his flushed neck strained like a clutch of cherry licorice whips, ready to snap.
Stein finally saw Lorelei when his attackers shoved him against the office door. His eyes held her, deep pools of questioning grief, crisscrossed by the wires embedded in the glass. Then they slipped shut and stayed that way, as if to preserve an image of her that would escape if he opened them again.
The Lorelei he knew was a ghost, fading in and out of view. Just on the other side of a door, but gone from him forever. His racing mind made a bargain with the universe: Return the girl he knew he loved and he would forfeit every kiss, every touch, every word, every sight of her. Take her from him, but just let her exist somewhere, and not only have been a dirty trick.
Lorelei’s fingertips brushed the doorknob, but Mrs. Corde grabbed her arm. “Are you crazy? Don’t let him in! We’re safe in here.”
When Stein’s eyes opened again, Lorelei was backing away, staring at him—hard—ready to absorb whatever hatred he could spew at her, but she exuded no pity, no remorse, and he was stilled by it. He opened his mouth to say her name, but couldn’t.
As he was pulled away, the stranger who looked like Lorelei grew small in the window, and Stein closed his eyes again, still trying to preserve the fleeting remnants of that girl from the first day of school, the one with the cockeyed bangs, crooked eyebrows, and big, busted-up heart, which he thought would fit so perfectly with what was left of his.
* * *
Father Mercedes’s m
outh kept twisting as Sister Maria tried to explain what had happened—again. The priest raised a finger to her. “Enough,” he said. “I’ve heard enough.”
He opened the door to the chemistry lab and peered inside. Mullen sat at one corner of the room, and Simms sat at the other. Both boys looked scared, and Simms flashed his icky smile at the priest, who responded by closing the door again. Across the hall in the Spanish classroom, Stein sat at a desk with his head slumped in the nest of his folded arms. One eye, shot with red veins, opened when the priest cleared his throat.
Father Mercedes drew back into the hallway and closed the door, then stared expectantly at the nun. “So he’s a matricidal little firebug, eh? I’m sure the parish council will be thrilled.”
“What happened was an accident, but—the basics are true. I just spoke with his father,” Sister Maria said.
“I guess it was coincidence that these two characters decided to make a mockery out of that sad old story?” the priest said, waving an unlit cigarette like a magic wand toward the room with Mullen and Simms.
“They have a … belligerent history with the boy,” Sister Maria said. “We think the girl tipped them off. They’re her freshman mentors, and it’s possible they threatened her. Or perhaps she had a falling out with the boy.…”
“And she says…?”
“She hasn’t spoken a word.”
The priest scratched at his face. “You can’t make a fifteen-year-old girl answer your questions?” When the nun didn’t respond, he tucked the cigarette between his lips and lit it. “Another very nice mess, Sister … very nice. Now, how do you plan to handle this soap opera?”
“Detention all around. A week of suspension for the Stein boy. What they did was awful, but he turned violent.”
The priest snorted at her, smoke rising from his thin, disbelieving smile.
Sister Maria said defensively: “And they’re getting a D-minus for the theater project.”
Father Mercedes pinched the bridge of his nose as the cigarette ember glowed. “The St. Mike’s community will be glad to hear their punishment was the lowest possible passing grade. Another solid reason to keep this illustrious institution going.”
“Schools have fights, Father. There are a lot of decent kids in this school, and they had nothing to do w—”
“And they suffer, Sister,” the priest said, walking away from her. “While you make excuses for the worst of them.”
* * *
It was dark by the time Stein returned home. Picking him up at school, Larry Stein accepted apologies from the parents of the two other boys, who had been waiting for him to arrive. Stein had been told to apologize to Mullen and Simms in return, but refused, no matter how much threatening and coaxing his father and the principal directed at him.
Margie’s dinner was sitting out for them, cold, when they got to the house. Stein’s father didn’t yell or ask any questions. Margie did, at first hammering her little brother with the usual variations on “Why?” Then her dad took her out onto the porch and closed the door. Their muffled voices rose and fell as Stein sat silently at the kitchen table. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but wasn’t trying. Margie cried for a little while. When they came back inside, his sister reheated dinner, and they ate in silence.
“I’m sorry,” Noah Stein said in a small voice.
Margie set down her silverware but didn’t look up as she chewed. His father did the same, then asked: “For which part?”
“I don’t know,” the boy told him.
Margie stood from the table, carried her dish to the sink, then walked down the hallway to her room and closed the door.
Stein’s father was quiet again, searching for reassuring words, and found none. All he could think was his wife’s name: Daphne … Daphne.
There was no desire for vengefulness in Larry Stein over the accident his son had caused. But in those years after, when his son was still just a little boy and the nightmares would come, followed by loud tears in the night, he often didn’t rush to comfort the boy. A part of him wanted his son to never entirely lose the pain he had caused. That little voice bit into Larry’s mind, buried deep, but still alive. He even had a name for that feeling, a line he’d heard in a song once—the rabid child. It felt like a part of him that was not adult, not rational.
Now their tragic family history had been rediscovered, six years later, and it brought forth that same old feeling. Unforgiving. Animal. Hateful.
Larry and Daphne had never spent more than four years in any one part of the country. They started their romance as nineteen-year-old dropouts in San Antonio, moved on to Seattle for a few years, then began zigzagging America: Tucson, Aspen, Galveston, Boston, Los Angeles …
Moving away was merely running away, a distraction from Daphne’s restless mind, which tended to spin out of control, ruminating on phantoms. The doctors had called it “the baby blues” after Margie was born, but the spells only deepened as the years passed. When Noah was born, it seemed to stabilize Daphne. Around her baby boy, she was often her old self, bright and passionate, quick-tempered and tough, and almost pathologically energized. But by the time they settled in Florida, her anxieties had returned, more ferocious than ever, the fears more acute and irrational. Larry seldom held a job with medical benefits, so doctors, hospitals, and medication were only last resorts. Her moods spiked and fell so rapidly that Larry was never sure which version of his wife he’d come home to. Often he tried not to come home at all.
That’s how it was the night she died. With the teenage Margie away at a friend’s house, neighbors had heard the nine-year-old boy screaming from the smoke-filled apartment. They broke in and dragged him free. But not his wife. They never even heard her, or knew she was there. Larry wasn’t surprised. Daphne’s mood had been bleak that morning, and he left her two sedatives on the kitchen counter (the others he kept with him). But those two pills were enough to knock her into a deep sleep. When the fire his son set while fucking around with model airplane glue finally overtook her, Daphne probably never knew it. That’s what her husband hoped, anyway.
The fire marshal and police had expressed pity over the child’s carelessness. It didn’t happen a lot, but it did happen—a child sets a fire and ends up accidentally killing a family member. Since he was so young, Noah was not detained in a jail, but the courts ordered psychological counseling and medication, which Larry couldn’t afford indefinitely. If that meant the boy’s emotions sometimes punished him, well … maybe that wasn’t the worst thing.
But that was the rabid child talking.
Late at night, Larry sometimes sat alone in his locked room, the brass lid of his wife’s urn by his side as he sifted the gray powder through his fingers. It was sand, really, not even dust. Heavy. He found out later that the remains from a cremation aren’t even ashes, but the pulverized bits of bone that were left over. It was, simply, the only thing the fire didn’t want.
Larry thought of that as he sat at the kitchen table, the boy’s apology for everything and nothing hanging in the silence. He stood and stacked his plate on Margie’s in the sink, then kissed his son on the head, brushing the burned side of his face with his thumb. “Sweet dreams, kiddo,” his father said, and tried to ignore the part of him that wished otherwise.
THIRTY
Lorelei’s body was facedown beneath the kitchen table. A chair was knocked over beside her, and beyond that was the dead socket of a shattered twelve-inch television set, lying upside down near the basement door with a small lightning storm flickering deep inside its electrical guts.
A tang of smoke had risen up to the ceiling, but no one was standing to breathe it. Soon it would trigger a brief squawk from the kitchen smoke detector, and the shrill digital siren would open Lorelei’s eyes.
A streak of spaghetti sauce bled down one wall. A dozen small bottles—paprika, thyme, coriander, cayenne—were scattered along the linoleum amid a battlefield of shattered balsawood from a now-obliterated spice rack Lo
relei had made in summer camp four years ago. The remains of a flat, yellow telephone handset dangled over the back of one chair with a miniature speaker hanging out of its cracked mouthpiece like a detached eyeball.
The water faucet in the sink gushed a steady crystal stream down the drain, unattended.
Lorelei tried to stand, but something heavy on her back broadcast shriveling pain up her spine. She reached back and felt the spot, trying to knock the weight off, but the heaviness was beneath her skin—a thick rectangular welt. Three of them, actually—each in the shape of that flat telephone handset. It took her a long time to push herself up.
Lorelei hadn’t seen Stein after the International Day fiasco. He and Mullen and Simms were sequestered in other rooms, and she left without being part of the big, forced apology when no one could prove what her involvement was. “I don’t know,” was all she said when they asked her why. She wondered what she’d say if Stein ever asked her.
Her father jiggled his knee as he drove her home. He pressed a knuckle against his lips and shifted his eyes everywhere but at her—twitchy as a junkie missing his fix. “How could you do this, Lorelei?” he asked. “To yourself … to me … How could you be so stupid?”
Lorelei looked straight at her father, who kept his thin, unshaven face aimed at the road. “We don’t have to tell her, you know. You could ground me. Take away TV for a month. A year. Whatever. She doesn’t have to know anything. We don’t have to involve her.”
Her father’s defeated eyes sagged with pity, but he still wouldn’t look at her. “Who do you think answered the phone when they called the house?” he asked.
* * *
When they got home, Lorelei’s father hurried into the kitchen. It was already five thirty and he was late getting dinner started.
Lorelei dropped her bag into the corner by the front door. The back of her mother’s head was in the center of the couch, a nest of fading orange hair that had once come out of a box labeled RED PENNY. On the television, a silver-bearded attorney was wagging his finger and vowing that if you’re injured in an auto accident, he charges NO FEE unless he gets money for you. Miranda Paskal’s prosthetic hand rose from the couch with a smoldering cigarette in its chrome claw. She dragged in a cloud of smoke, then exhaled it as the clasp lowered again.
Brutal Youth: A Novel Page 23