Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  Davidek avoided her as much as possible, but amid the construction in that upstairs hallway one morning, they found themselves on opposite sides of a foggy plastic sheet. Lorelei raised one hand, tentatively. “Hi,” she said. Davidek’s face was unreadable behind the opaque sheet. She waited for him to pass around the other side, but he backed up rather than move closer to her, his face fading away.

  She thought of the boy who had once spent every penny he had on a carton of cigarettes to save her from being hurt. “Good-bye,” she said to the empty space.

  * * *

  Ever since Audra Banes came to believe Lorelei was trying to steal her boyfriend, the freshman girl with the sometimes-funny hair was a forbidden subject. Then Audra brought up Lorelei herself, while dining at Wendy’s after a student council meeting that Friday: “So, why do you think she did it?”

  The girls around her feigned ignorance. Who? Did what?

  Audra bit a french fry. “She’s all by herself, but she pairs up with this other weird kid, Noah Stein. Then she cuts his throat. In front of everybody. So—why?”

  There were a lot of theories, most of them already percolating for weeks. Everyone at the table had only been waiting for Audra to open the door to discussion. Someone suggested Lorelei was trying to curry favor with upperclassmen who hated Stein.

  “Then why isn’t she bragging about it?” Audra asked.

  Allissa Hardawicky raised her palms. “Asshole Face and whatsisname are saying they forced it from her. Threatened her.”

  “Gross,” Audra said. “I can’t believe those guys are actually proud of picking on a freshman girl. Weaklings.”

  “What about the rumor that Lorelei had volunteered to be their freshman? Had begged them to be her mentors?” asked Sandy Burk, Audra’s best friend and consigliere. “She chose them because they were at war with her boyfriend.”

  “He must have done something to her. Hurt her in some way,” Allissa suggested.

  Audra shook her head. How Machiavellian. “The girl’s got ice water,” she said, and bit into another fry.

  * * *

  Gym class. Spring had warmed the Valley to a humid sweat, and the trees had just begun to show blooming buds of green.

  There was no longer a need for Phys Ed class at the bowling alley. Mr. Mankowski and Mr. Zimmer organized outdoor games in the old church field, which after the heavy rains was the consistency of chocolate pudding beneath the grass. The boys frolicked in the filth as they played football at one end of the lot, while the girls tiptoed through the sludge around the volleyball net, letting the ball plop into the muck if hitting it required anything more than a slight lean. Many of them slipped and fell a couple times anyway, soaking up the clay-stained mud like paintbrushes. The new school Monitors kept asking Mr. Mankowski whether it was necessary or appropriate for the children to have class in these conditions and then penciled in the teacher’s dodgy, defensive answer in their notebooks while remaining firmly on the dry asphalt of the parking lot.

  After class, in the bathroom, across from the one that was now closed due to Stein’s vandalism, there was a line of freshman girls in underwear awaiting their turns at the sinks. Lorelei was the last. She had dressed quietly in the corner at the start of class, but here at the end she was tired and careless, and she peeled off her grimy T-shirt and shorts and slung them to the ground like everybody else.

  She didn’t stop to think about it.

  Meanwhile, the next class—sophomore girls—had also entered the bathroom to begin changing for their outdoor activities, squawking in protest about the muddy conditions.

  It was Theresa Grough, a sophomore, younger sister of the brutish Anne-Marie, who was the first to notice the marks on Lorelei’s back.

  Theresa’s face was in the mirror over Lorelei’s shoulder, her mouth open. Lorelei didn’t realize what the girl was looking at, but she expected a nasty remark.

  The insult didn’t come, though. Theresa backed away. She was whispering in the corner now, and those girls were also staring at the freshman. Lorelei didn’t care what they were talking about. Just another insult. She was getting used to it.

  But that wasn’t what the girls were doing.

  It had been three weeks since the brawl at her house. The shattered phone had been replaced, the spaghetti sauce stain cleaned. There was no mention of it between her, her father, or her mother.

  But the damage hadn’t healed yet, either.

  She couldn’t see the marks herself, so she didn’t know they were still there—giant seeping bruises blossoming along her spine in clouds of purple and yellow, like fat, toxic clouds.

  Lorelei walked back to her bag, trying to ignore the looks. She slid on her blouse, buttoning it quickly, then pulled up the skirt and slipped into her shoes, walking out the door with her duffel bag hanging from her hand. For the first time, the other girls remained silent after she had gone.

  * * *

  “What do you mean, ‘What do I think’? I think it’s bullshit,” Davidek said.

  “But that’s what people are saying,” LeRose told him. “All the girls in my class. They saw the marks on her back. Everyone says Stein must’ve done that to her right before she sold him out.”

  They were standing near the third-floor exhaust fan, which was loud enough to keep the conversation private. “Are you sure you’d know if it was true or not?” LeRose asked.

  Davidek ran fingers through his hair. “Yes, I’d fucking know. And you should, too, asshole.” LeRose’s husky body squirmed as Davidek jabbed his finger in his chest. “Remember lying facedown out in the parking lot? Who the hell do you think saved you?”

  “You,” LeRose said quietly.

  “Yeah, well, what about Stein? You think he was just standing there? If he hadn’t—”

  Davidek swallowed his words. He thought of that infamous kiss, Stein holding Ms. Bromine’s stuffed-turkey face between his palms and planting a big wet one on her. Stein never wanted anyone to know it was true. That’s called getting away with it, he had said.

  “Let’s just say Stein did his part to help drag your ass clear, got it?”

  “Fine,” LeRose said without really believing it.

  “It’s not ‘fine,’” Davidek insisted. “Lorelei’s a liar and she’s trying to make herself look like some kind of I-am-woman-hear-me-roar feminist fucking martyr, but he never laid a finger on her. All he did was talk crazy Hallmark shit about how he loved her, and they were meant for each other and—”

  “I talked to a bunch of girls in your class who saw the bruises,” LeRose said.

  Davidek closed his eyes. He tried to like LeRose, but sometimes … “Stein never hurt her. Never.” Then a memory came back to him: Lorelei after stealing her mother’s cigarettes, saying she got caught … and the marks on her arms.

  “It’s her mom and dad who made her a punching bag,” Davidek said. “They probably did it this time, too.”

  LeRose squished his chins together doubtfully.

  “She’s a liar, fuckface,” Davidek protested. “Quit looking at me like that.”

  “Well, I’m just telling you what people are saying,” LeRose said, then squinted at him and asked, “Are you wearing his clip-on now?”

  Davidek’s hand shot to the red tie clasped at his throat. “No,” he answered. “It’s mine.”

  “Looks goofy,” LeRose told him, pulling open the stairway door.

  Davidek’s hand fiddled with flaps of his blazer, closing them over the tie as much as he could. “Who cares what you think?” he said. But LeRose had already gone.

  * * *

  “What are you ladies doing?” It was Michael Crawford, standing beside the lunch table where his girlfriend, Audra, and her friends from the student council sat huddled around their pizza slices.

  “We’re talking,” Audra said. “About—” She nodded in Lorelei’s direction without saying her name.

  “Ah, yes,” Crawford said, flashing his JCPenney–model smile. “The only g
irl in school that no boy wants to get screwed by!” He chuckled, but Audra curled her lip in disgust. The other girls looked frightened for Michael’s safety.

  “That joke’s old. And it’s not funny anymore,” Audra snarled. “If you ever laid a hand on me, I’d do the same thing to you.…”

  Michael Crawford took a very long, very slow step backwards. “Uhhhhh,” he said. “What … are you talking about?”

  * * *

  Minutes later, Crawford walked up to a lonely table, where Mullen and Simms were sitting and looking at a car magazine, lingering on the bikini models spread across the hoods. Crawford had a few friends along with him now—reinforcements. “Hey, Asshole Face,” he said, and Mullen and Simms both looked up, though only one of them had been addressed. “Audra wanted me to ask you something.…”

  Mullen and Simms looked at each other dumbly. Michael Crawford said, “Did you jagoffs know beforehand that Lorelei was getting beat up by that kid?”

  Mullen’s face spread in a confused, nervous smile as his eyes slid toward Simms. Crawford lifted the edge of the table, spilling the two dweebs’ lunches into their laps as they scrambled up from their seats in panic.

  “Yeah, you guys are the masterminds, all right,” Crawford said, then took an unopened bag of pretzels off Mullen’s tray and walked away, sharing them with his friends.

  * * *

  In the same lunchroom, a day later, Lorelei sat alone, as she usually did.

  Then a girl from her class sat at the far end of the table. Then two more. Then a whole crowd, and eventually the table was full. It made Lorelei nervous.

  Eventually, she would hear bits of the rumors that Stein had abused her, but the stories would never be complete, not in the detail that spread throughout the school behind her back. She would never have the opportunity to truly deny them. And she probably would have.

  Zari took the seat beside her and began fluttering a deck of tarot cards on her tray. “You ever had a reading?”

  Lorelei looked down at the first card Zari drew: an ominous portrait of crows flying away from a dead tree. “That looks bad.…”

  “No,” Zari said hesitantly, and thought about how to make it seem reassuring. “These crows are together. They travel as one, in a group. The crow card is a sign of friendship.”

  As she laid out the rest of the cards, Zari’s gaze wandered over Lorelei’s neck, trying to peek beneath the collar, to see the bruises the whole school was whispering about. If things with her and Stein had gone differently, she wondered whether those bruises might instead be spread across her own back.

  Lorlei looked around the table. All the other girls were staring—once again. But now they were also smiling. Sweetly. Sincerely. That was the moment of Lorelei’s resurrection.

  It began with looks.

  PART VI

  Prom and Promises

  THIRTY-SIX

  Davidek was dreaming.

  The gritty ground felt hollow beneath him. He was standing in the middle of a flat roof, on top of St. Michael’s, and the low brick walls of the ledge surrounded him. The sky was almost radioactive in its glow.

  The crazy boy from the roof was here, but Davidek could only sense him, not see him. Davidek kept turning around, but the boy was always right behind him. Then the statues of the saints lining the wall began to turn toward him from their guard posts along the wall. They told Davidek that it didn’t matter if he could see The Boy on the Roof—he was here, and he was doing what needed to be done. Davidek could only hear him.

  The unseen crazy boy repeatedly shouted Jump!, and with each cry, one of the stone saints would leap from the edge of the wall and dive downward like rifle bullets. There were people down there. Davidek couldn’t see them, but he could hear them screaming. The dive-bombing saints were shattering the students into shrapnel clouds of stone and bone.

  Davidek kept trying to get closer to the edge. He wanted to see it happening, wanted to witness this, to see them destroyed. But the statue of St. Joseph put its hand on his chest. There is another way down, the figure said without speaking. Davidek looking up at its unmoving concrete face—and pushed it away.

  That’s when he woke up.

  * * *

  He had been grounded ever since the day of the flood, the day Stein had slashed himself, the night he hadn’t come home until after midnight. His parents demanded, of course, to know exactly where in the hell he had been, but Davidek annoyed them by just shrugging and sitting and listening to them yell. Eventually they got tired. Then, when they’d heard about the vandalism at the school, they demanded to know whether their son was involved. “Is that where you were?” his mother shouted, quaking with fury, her face contorted and red. His dad shoved him when he didn’t answer.

  “Do I have to repeat it for you?” his mother said. God, that annoying phrase.

  That’s when he gave in. It was when he always gave in.

  Davidek said he didn’t do anything. “You can ask Sister Maria,” he told them. And they did, and the nun said, “Your son didn’t do anything.” This surprised them. They were prepared to incinerate their second-born, but Sister Maria said their boy only missed his bus because he was trying to stop the Stein boy. She said she drove him home herself when she found him late at night, trying to do what he could to clean up the destruction. Davidek was impressed by how good a liar the nun was. “Without Peter, I can assure you from the bottom of my heart that things would have turned out much worse.” Her eyes met the freshman’s. Those were the only honest words spoken during the conference with his parents.

  Davidek’s parents grounded him anyway. For not telling them the whole story. That was okay. There was nowhere Davidek wanted to go. Green was busy with some little band he was trying to get started with his senior friends. LeRose only nagged him about whether he’d heard anything new about Hannah’s secret book. When Hannah came around, all she wanted to talk about was the upcoming prom—as if he cared.

  Davidek’s parents also took away TV, which was especially bad during the two weeks trapped at home, cut off from everybody, when school was canceled to repair the collapsed roof. Sometimes Davidek would lock his bedroom door, crawl under his blankets, and bury his face in a pillow, where he could cry his eyes out without anyone hearing. It made his head bulge with pressure, and sometimes his eyes itched afterwards. Sometimes he just fell asleep that way, and would wake up the next morning in the same clothes he’d worn the day before.

  At night, when his parents were asleep, he began sneaking into the basement where there was an old telephone near the washing machines. From their bedroom upstairs, they wouldn’t be able to hear him. He called Allegheny General Hospital each night, trying to find out about Stein. Davidek wasn’t part of Stein’s family, so the nurses on his floor wouldn’t reveal much. Davidek thought about lying—maybe saying he was Stein’s brother—but the nurses probably knew if Stein had a brother, and maybe hospitals could trace telephone calls. Davidek had no idea.

  The nurse’s usual acknowledgment was enough. “I can’t tell you anything about that patient.” That didn’t mean Stein was getting better, but at least he was still being treated. At least Stein still was, period.

  * * *

  When school started again, Davidek visited Sister Maria’s office each morning, trying to learn more about his friend’s status, but she was evasive. “Oh, you know…,” she said. “… This isn’t really the best time.”

  It was never the best time. He realized soon that Sister Maria was never going to tell him more, that she still wasn’t certain he could be trusted—though he already knew enough to be dangerous to her. “Sometimes you have to keep a secret by not acknowledging there is a secret,” she told him. “And your friend is not a student here anymore. He is indefinitely suspended. So it would look strange to people if I were giving daily updates to his old buddies.”

  Davidek felt like he deserved more from the nun after the night they had shared.

  Indefinitely suspended.
What did that mean?

  Mr. Mankowski still read Stein’s name each morning during homeroom roll call. Mankowski would say: “Stein, Noah…,” and wait for the response he knew would never come. Then he’d check the boy absent. On the third day of this, Davidek said loudly, “He’s not here, and you know it.”

  “Did I ask you a question?” Mankowski said.

  Davidek told him, “No. You were just embarrassing yourself. He’s gone, not invisible.” And then Davidek was gone, dispatched to Sister Maria’s office for “verbally abusing” his homeroom teacher. The nun sighed when she saw him. “This has to stop,” she said. But it didn’t.

  In the halls throughout the next month, Davidek bristled with violence.

  Mullen and Simms moped by the water fountain, and he wanted to slam their heads into the brick wall. “Cocksuckers,” he whispered, and one of them called back weakly, “Oh yeah?…”

  When he saw Lorelei Paskal, he wanted to bellow in her face, but his nerve always disintegrated when she was near. He couldn’t stand to see her, mostly because she still looked like the girl he used to know, the one he’d sneaked a cigarette with in another life. She had tossed away the rest of the carton. I just saved your life, she had said. And she would have kissed him then if he hadn’t flinched. If he hadn’t been shy, and afraid.

  Most of all, Davidek was tired of seeing Smitty, tired of his ice-cube eyes and his big razor-smile. Davidek drove his shoulder into the bigger boy as he squeezed through the crowded hallway. Smitty wasn’t expecting a hit and lost his balance, bumping back against some sophomore girls.

  “Watch yourself,” Davidek said. The larger boy, stunned, watched Davidek moving away. “How about ‘excuse me,’ shithead?” Smitty shouted. Davidek turned back, still moving, “Excuse me, shithead,” he said.

  A pair of elderly Parish Monitors in the hall noticed that, and began scribbling in their notebooks.