Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  Margie and her father exchanged an uncertain glance, and Davidek’s words suddenly felt like foolishness. There was some glaringly obvious truth he was missing. “Where is he?” Davidek demanded, and Margie’s face wrinkled, trying to gauge whether the boy’s naïveté was real or only an effort to bait them.

  She walked back to the kitchen and picked up the phone again.

  “I said no police!” her father hollered over his shoulder.

  “I know,” she told him boastfully, like a self-satisfied child showing off a newfound ability to count to ten or tie a shoe. “I’m calling the nun.”

  * * *

  By the time Sister Antonia relayed the message, and Sister Maria made arrangements at the dance to have Zimmer race across three towns to get there, almost another hour had passed.

  Davidek continued peppering Stein’s father and sister with questions, becoming frantic as they ignored him from inside their locked home. A panic had hit him. If Stein were able, he would have mentioned Davidek to his family. He would’ve told his dad and sister about the friend who helped rescue him when he was hurt.… Or maybe he doesn’t trust them, the boy thought. Or maybe Stein now blamed Davidek just as much as he did the others.

  He went around to the side yard and climbed higher into the dogwood tree this time, getting a view straight into Stein’s room, with its bare bed and open, empty dresser drawers. “You can’t just throw his stuff out because he’s sick!” Davidek screamed. He went back to the porch and pounded on the door some more. “Stein!… Stein, it’s Davidek! If you’re here, come out!”

  Stein’s father scratched his head and peered at him through the living room window. “You’re talking to nobody,” he said.

  “I want to see my friend!” the boy said.

  The old man just stared at him with his big stewed-tomato eyes and let the curtain fall back.

  Eventually, the headlights of Zimmer’s rumbling hatchback bathed the Stein house in light as he pulled into the gravel driveway and parked. “Peter … Peter, would you come down here, please?” he called from beside the road. “Sister Maria sent me, Peter. I just want to talk to you.”

  “You come up here,” Davidek said.

  Zimmer didn’t move. “What do you want with these people, Peter?”

  Davidek’s eyes glinted. “I just want to see if my friend can come out and play.”

  The tall shadow walked up into the yard and stood at the foot of the porch steps. Margie peeked through the window at the stranger. “We called the sister,” she said. “You’re not the sister.”

  “I’d like you to come with me, Peter,” Zimmer said calmly. “I know you have a lot you’d like explained, but go down to my car and wait there. Let me talk with them, and I’ll come back to talk to you.”

  The front door opened and Margie stuck her face out. “Where’s the nun?” she asked.

  “Where’s Stein?” Davidek shot back.

  Zimmer walked up to the porch, the wooden steps creaking beneath him. “Sister Maria will be along. The school had its prom tonight. She’s delayed there, I’m afraid. She asked me to come in her place.”

  “Well, she knows us. She’s assured us,” Margie said. “She said the best thing is for everybody to just to leave my brother alone. No phone calls, no visitors…”

  Zimmer raised his palms to her—as though trying to get her to lower a gun. “I’m Andrew Zimmer,” he said. “I teach Computer Science and Phys Ed at the school. Is it all right if I come up?”

  Margie nodded, then pointed at Davidek. “He can’t.”

  Zimmer agreed and they went inside.

  * * *

  Davidek tried to eavesdrop through the windows, but they didn’t talk for long. Zimmer emerged from the front door and put a firm arm around him, steering him toward the steps. “Let’s go home, Peter.”

  “I want to know about Stein.”

  Zimmer sighed. “I explained to the Steins that, yes, you were a friend of Noah’s, and that, yes, you had tried to help, and that Sister Maria trusts you. But your behavior tonight … well … let’s just go now, and we’ll talk about it later.”

  Davidek said, “I’m not leaving unless you tell me now.”

  Zimmer looked up at Margie, whose face registered disgust, then back to Davidek. “His body is recovering, Peter. Doctors have been taking good care of him. They healed the cuts, they stabilized him, but he’s not strong yet. He lost quite a lot of blood—and some of the things that are broken in people can’t be fixed with just medicine. Do you understand?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that, like I’m stupid,” Davidek said.

  Zimmer nodded, and his next words were a slap across the face. “You’re not stupid. You’re just an idiot. Coming here and screaming at these people? That doesn’t help anything. Your friend is gravely ill. He’s not altogether there even when he is awake—which isn’t often. But he’s with people who are caring for him. Far from here. And you can’t keep bothering his father and sister.… You can’t keep asking for more.…”

  Davidek felt the edges of his vision bending away, growing distant. Nausea overtook him. “Where is he?” the boy asked.

  “At a hospital, and it’s out of state. That’s all you need to know. You can’t see him. Even his family aren’t going to be with him, not for a while. They’re sending his clothes and some of his things. If he recovers well, and you apologize to them for tonight, maybe in the future, maybe someday they’ll…” He didn’t finish. There was no promise he could make.

  As they walked down to the car, the boy looked back up to the porch, where Stein’s sister had emerged and was glaring down at him. “You didn’t have to clean out his room. Like he never was.” He thought of his own brother—the AWOL A-hole, whose many stupid choices had resulted in him being erased from the world.

  Margie crossed her arms. Her face was hard. “My little brother is a long list of bad memories that we’d just like to put away for a while.… Don’t tell me that’s wrong.”

  “It is wrong,” Davidek said, starting back toward the house. “It’s his stuff, and Stein was a good person. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as you, but I know that much for sure.”

  “My brother is a volatile, dangerous burden,” she said. “He is very unstable, very sad—and he has a lot to be sad about. And thanks to what Noah did to himself, the care he needs now … the cost … I’m the one who doesn’t have nursing school money anymore. We can’t pay for both.” She shook her head, tears pouring down her cheeks. “So I’m an official dropout these days. And maybe I’d have been a good nurse.… Maybe I’d have helped people—”

  Her father shuffled forward and put his arm around her, pulling her back to him. Margie made a watery sniff. “He took my mother away. He takes everything away,” she said. “And he just keeps taking.…”

  Davidek thought of what Stein had told him, lying with his bleeding arms stuffed into his jacket, the secret he didn’t want to die with him: a confession.… Davidek knew how devoted Margie was to the last religion her mother had clung to, hoping to set her mind right. He wondered if she still believed suicides wouldn’t get into heaven.

  Zimmer started to pull Davidek away, but Davidek wouldn’t go. He wanted to tell them more. Needed to tell them how wrong they were about Stein.

  He wanted to tell Margie and her father that the fire had been a frightened little boy’s desperate effort to protect his family, to stay in line with their roller-coaster religious bullshit, to protect his mother from sorrow he thought might follow her into another life. Even now, all these years later, Stein had let his sister and father believe the worst in him rather than know the truth.

  Davidek pictured his friend on that first afternoon when they were still just visitors at St. Mike’s. Stein planting that crazy kiss on the lips of Ms. Bromine, paralyzing her, while Davidek bolted toward the unconscious LeRose …

  When the seniors had pushed in, jackal-like as they heaped new torment on Davidek, the Clip-On Boy, Stein had loose
ned his collar, pulled off his own tie, and said, Take this, and give me yours.

  Stein stepped in front of other people’s bullets. He let himself absorb the worst the world threw at the people he cared about. Maybe that did make him strange or crazy; Davidek didn’t know anyone else like that.

  But what would that matter to his sister now?

  Stein had intended to keep the secret about his mother for as long as he lived. Since he still did, Davidek would do the same.

  “When you talk to him,” Davidek said, “just tell him I’m wearing his clip-on, okay? Tell him that.…”

  He couldn’t read their faces, which was just as well. He didn’t need them to understand anymore.

  * * *

  Zimmer led him away, and Davidek slumped in the passenger seat of the teacher’s little car. The stolen minivan receded in the darkness. There was still plenty of trouble ahead for him tonight.

  Zimmer asked him for directions to his house, and Davidek told him. “Do you feel like you got what you were looking for?” the teacher asked. Davidek mumbled yes, like it was the most tiresome question imaginable.

  Zimmer used the long drive to lecture him: Sister Maria is taking a great risk in trusting you. Blah blah blah … There are a lot of people who would use this to hurt St. Mike’s. You’ve disappointed us.

  Davidek said “yeah” a lot, and looked out the window.

  Back at his house, the boy had made it in through the front door and almost to his bedroom when his mother grabbed him in the upstairs hallway screaming for her husband, “Bill! Bill! Bill!” like an agitated seagull. Davidek’s father bounded out of his bedroom, cornering his son.

  Davidek’s mother slapped him across the face. When he looked up again, she slapped him a second time. “How dare you?” she said. “How dare you?”

  They didn’t ask Davidek where had gone, or why he had stolen the minivan, or where it was now. That would come later, and Davidek made up as many lies as he needed—he had been trying to run away, got scared, left the car on some random road, and hitchhiked back. It didn’t matter if they believed him. That was all they would get.

  Davidek didn’t need his parents to understand anymore either.

  FORTY-ONE

  The night whispered around Hannah Kraut.

  Hannah sat alone on a ridge of rock jutting over the edge, hidden in the darkness behind the restaurant, away from the buzzing parking-lot lights and the noise of the prom cleanup inside. Her fluffy dress bunched around her. She was a pink spot amid dark blue shadows.

  The only light here was the occasional flash from workers going in and out of the back kitchen entrance. She could hear the other prom-goers leaving the premises, tearing away in their cars and sending trails of dust into the air to float over the river valley like a little procession of spirits.

  From the kitchen, two sophomore student volunteers came out carrying a clattering stack of dirty dinner plates, which they hauled over to the rocks and began hurling one by one over the cliff, cackling with each distant shatter. They each gave Hannah a cursory “What’s up?”—unashamed of their activities. One guy pretended to shoot the flying dishes like skeet while the other explained to Hannah that the restaurant’s big dishwasher was full, so the plates had to disappear or else they’d have to wait around for the current load to finish.

  Hannah had listened, nodding, smiling thinly. Then the skeet shooter said, “You’re not going to tell, are you? You’re not going to write this in that … uh, book thing, right? And read it at the Hazing Picnic?”

  He was trying to sound friendly and goofy, but he was clearly worried. Hannah said, “Maybe you should go now, then,” and they did. Quickly.

  Hannah knew when Mr. Zimmer left the restaurant that he wasn’t coming back, that she wouldn’t get her dance, but she made herself wait around anyway, just in case he did return. Of course, he didn’t.

  Alone now, Hannah unzipped her purse, which matched the cotton candy color of her dress. The only thing wedged inside it was a small framed picture, one she had snapped herself at the beginning of the year, hugging Mr. Zimmer from the side as she held the camera at arm’s length. She had intended to give it to him tonight.

  Hannah heard footsteps behind her and wedged the photo back into her purse.

  A small girl stepped forward to the base of the rocks, looking up at Hannah. “I’m Sarah,” she said, though she was already better known to Hannah, and almost everyone else, as Seven-Eighths.

  Hannah played with the hem of her dress. “What do you want?”

  The girl was crawling up the rocks beside her, wearing the uniform blue pants and white polo shirt of the volunteer underclassman workers. At the top, Seven-Eighths became transfixed by the lights of the valley, not saying anything—but her lips were moving softly. Hannah could barely make out a whisper. She was saying the Our Father prayer to herself.

  Hannah considered scaring her off but thought of that nickname—Seven-Eighths—and held back. As far as nicknames went, it was better than Fuckslut, but something in the girl’s weird fishface, a strange chiaroscuro of light and blackness in these shadows, made Hannah feel a rare twang of mercy.

  “You’re sad,” the freshman girl said. “I can tell.”

  “It’s just puppy love and heartache and all the stuff you hear about in bad songs,” Hannah said. “You’ll feel it yourself when you get older. Teenage bullshit. No biggie. I’m glad to be leaving it behind.”

  A timid smile appeared on Seven-Eighth’s beaklike mouth. Bullshit. She didn’t say words like that. “I saw you sitting here alone. And I saw you sitting alone inside, too,” Seven-Eighths said.

  Hannah began to wonder how much this girl knew about the notorious Hannah Kraut, scourge of the senior class, keeper of hideous secrets, cowardly slut, and blackmailing bitch. “Maybe I wanted to be alone,” she said.

  The girl laughed. “No … You’re Hannah Kraut. You’re the one everyone makes fun of behind your back.”

  Sometimes, when you are feeling your worst, an extra stab of pain doesn’t hurt at all. Hopelessness is a great anesthetic. So Hannah laughed. “Well, they don’t do it to my face, now, do they? That’s something.”

  The young girl’s scissor jaw clenched. “They say it to my face,” she said softly. “They say it about my face.” She looked sideways at Hannah. “But you’re very pretty. They should be talking about how lovely you are, but instead they talk about hating you.”

  “Better to be hated in secret, than hated out in the open,” Hannah said. “At least nobody bothers me anymore. I stopped all that.”

  “You have their secrets, don’t you? That’s why they leave you alone … so you’ll leave them alone.” The girl slid closer to Hannah. “I want to know how to stop people, too.”

  Hannah regarded the river far below. Maybe her troubles were ending at St. Mike’s, but this girl’s were just beginning. “Tell you what, Sarah … tell me who is bothering you, and maybe I can help.”

  The girl took a very long time to answer. Hannah thought she could guess the response: probably Smitty, who had made up the Seven-Eighths name and still bragged about it. Or maybe it would be one of those bitchy freshman girls, like that Lorelei person. Or the Grough sisters—those boars.

  Seven-Eighths surprised her—she said: “Can you help me stop Father Mercedes?”

  Hannah’s eyebrows turned into two little darts aimed at her nose. “Exactly … what … did Father Mercedes do to you?” she asked, expecting the absolute worst.

  Seven-Eighths stared down at the town lights on the other side of the valley. “He makes me pray,” she said, the words beginning to flow uncontrollably. “A lot … I like to pray, but Mother and Father make me do confession every Saturday with my brother, Clarence, and confession is good, but I can’t pray like Father Mercedes wants, all the time, every hour … the prayers get stuck … Do you know what I mean? They keep saying themselves and I can’t shut them off even if I want to shut them off. That’s a sin and you should never
want to not pray, and—” She cut herself off, and her mind raced with a soothing:

  Hailmaryfullofgracethelordiswiththeeblessedartthou …

  The girl’s insect eyes widened; her jaw quivered. “Can you tell me something about Father, please? Something that will hurt him? Do you have something about him in your book?”

  Hannah hung her head for a long time. She searched her memory, honestly … and fruitlessly. “I wish I did, Sarah,” she said. “But I’m sorry. I never paid much attention to him.”

  Sarah shrank back from her. “Are you sure?… Please?”

  Hannah said, “Listen, I’d tell you if I did. From what you’ve said—he’s an asshole—but that doesn’t really make him stand out in a crowd around here.”

  The girl said in a small voice, “If you do learn something, will you tell me?”

  Hannah raised two fingers in the air. “Scout’s honor.”

  The little freshman drew her knees up to her chin. After a while, she said, “So … who’s the boy who made you sad tonight?”

  Hannah laughed. “Nobody makes me sad.… I’m pissed off.”

  Seven-Eighths giggled at the profanity again. “Then who made you mad? Who made you come sit out here alone?”

  Hannah shook her head. In the darkness, Seven-Eighths was looking at Hannah’s purse, where she could see the top of the framed photo sticking out. She cocked her head slightly, studying the faces in the dimness. Hannah didn’t even notice.

  The girl ventured, “Do you know something that will hurt him?”