Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  The conversation stopped when they saw Peter.

  “This must be the boy! I mean, the young man!” boomed The Big Texan, extending an arm and swallowing Davidek’s hand in a grip that was surprisingly gentle, like a bodybuilder shaking hands with a baby. “Did your parents tell you about me?” the stranger asked.

  Davidek’s father fixed him with a hard expression and nodded his head slightly, so the boy said, “Uh … yeah, I think so.”

  The stranger looked very pleased. “Your mom and dad have been talking with me for a few weeks, but they drive a hard bargain,” he said. “They’re very protective of their little son.… But I think they’ve finally come around.”

  Davidek’s father stared at the floor. His mother kept shaking her foot, like she wanted to dance. The stranger leaned down close, like he was sharing a secret. “Peter, I want you to know that school changed my life. And it changed your father’s life, even if he doesn’t like to admit it.” He put a hand on Davidek’s shoulder. “It’s going to change your life, too.”

  Davidek studied his parents for some sign of what was happening. The Big Texan leaned back and said, “We’ll work out all the dollars and cents later. Cross the i’s and dot the t’s, and all that.” He nudged Davidek, who laughed with him uncertainly.

  Davidek’s father extended his hand, albeit reluctantly, but the stranger surprised him with a bear hug instead, pinning his arms at his sides. “Been too long, Billy boy,” The Big Texan said. “Too long, by half.”

  Moments later, the Porsche was roaring away into the sunset. Hi-yo, silver sportscar, away.

  “Who the hell was that?” the boy demanded.

  Davidek’s father walked out of the room, while Davidek’s mother explained, “That man was from the parish over at St. Michael’s. He thinks you’d be a good student there.”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He’s been calling for weeks,” she said. “He’s friends with your father.”

  “We’re not friends,” Bill Davidek said, storming back into the room.

  The boy narrowed his eyes, not understanding. “But … I’m already signed up at Valley.” He looked back and forth between his mother and father. Neither one looked back at him.

  * * *

  That’s how, on the first day of his first year of high school, Peter Davidek found himself in the rain outside St. Michael the Archangel.

  He and his mother were fighting as she drove him into the parking lot. Not only was Davidek unhappy to be there, but his mother had also failed to buy him a standard uniform-regulation red tie. Instead, June had given him a hand-me-down clip-on from when Charlie was in grade school. “It’s basically the same,” she said.

  It was not the same. It was too short, and too fat, and the little silver clip stuck out at the top, poking into Davidek’s throat. It also hung crooked on his collar, no matter how much he fussed with it. “Please don’t make me wear this,” he said.

  “Everybody at St. Mike’s wears a tie,” she answered, checking her lipstick in the rearview mirror. Behind them, a yellow school bus pulled into the lot, and a cluster of similarly uniformed kids shuffled out, scurrying to the school as they opened umbrellas or held book bags over their heads. “See!” June said. “Those boys have red ties.”

  “Mom, this isn’t like those.”

  His mother pushed a button, unlocking the minivan doors. “Well, if you want a grown-up tie, start acting like a grown-up and we’ll see.”

  “Mom … pl—,” he said.

  “Do I have to repeat that for you? Do I?” This was what she always said to end an argument. If he kept fighting, she’d just keep saying it. She’d keep repeating it—not her original point, but that phrase: Do I need to repeat it for you? Do I need to repeat it for you?

  Davidek stepped out into the rainstorm. He reached up to his collar, clipped on the tie, and faced the school as his mother drove off, and prepared for the worst. The worst, however, was already prepared for him.

  TWO

  Lorelei Paskal awoke before her alarm on that same first day of the new school year. Her eyes opened wide in the dim light, and she listened to the rain hammering an irregular rhythm in the silence. She had seven minutes before the buzzer went off—a good omen. Lorelei sprang out of bed.

  The past two years had been deeply unhappy ones for the fifteen-year-old. They were supposed to be uncomplicated times, seventh and eighth grade—silly, even. Carefree. Hers had been filled with broken friendships, loneliess, loss, ridicule.… Lorelei knew it all sounded melodramatic and petty, which was why she never talked about it. Not that she had any friends to confide in anymore, and adults never wanted to hear about the heartaches of children. They tended to doubt there was any such thing.

  Across the shadowy room was a bulletin board, loaded with pictures of her old classmates from Burrell Middle School. They were smiling at her, many with funny little phrases written over their heads in word balloons painted with Wite-Out. Most of those girls had quit speaking to her long ago, but Lorelei never took their pictures down.

  Lorelei walked barefoot over to the bulletin board without turning on the light. Gray bands of dawn peeked through the blinds of her water-streaked bedroom window, casting bars on the pictures. On the floor beside her dresser was a metal wastebasket with a dent on one side and a painting of a unicorn on the other. Lorelei picked it up and set it beneath the photos, then plucked off a three-year-old school portrait of Allison Ketalwan, who had been her best friend since kindergarten. Lorelei turned the photo in her hands and read the inscription on the back, written with ink that was supposed to smell like peaches: Stay cool, but not 2 cool! Luvs and Hugs Friends4EVER! AK. Lorelei smiled. Then she dropped the photo in the trash.

  Life at home had never been wonderful for Lorelei, but despite that, she had always considered herself a happy girl. Allison had been a part of that, like a sister she trusted with every secret joy or hardship, making each better. Then it seemed like everything collapsed at once. The wrong boy fell for Lorelei, Allison turned on her, and soon after, her mother had a terrible accident, making an already unhappy home a lot more frightening.

  Lorelei and her mother never got along much before that. Her mom acted like both her daughter and her perpetually unemployed husband were two pets she had gotten before realizing she was allergic. It helped Lorelei to have friends outside the house who cared about her, who made her feel like she mattered. And she always tried to do the same for them. When Allison had fallen for Nicholas Barani, the nicest and cutest boy in the class, Lorelei—like any good friend—worked hard to help get them together. A photo of Nicholas in his soccer uniform was tacked to the bulletin board in her room. Lorelei ripped it loose and dropped it in the trash, too.

  “Dating” in the social circles of thirteen-year-olds was a complicated network of protocols, negotiated by friends of the boy and girl, whose respective entourages would haggle and argue and jab their fingers into their palms over the particulars of how much the one liked the other, whether they would agree to “go with” each other (which meant hanging out at lunch and before and after class), and—if the relationship continued to develop—if, where, and when they might actually kiss. One day, one of Nicholas’s friends approached Lorelei with grave news: Nicholas had agreed to “go with” Allison only because she was friends with Lorelei. He truly did consider Lorelei the cutest of all the girls. He wanted her to like him back.

  This flattered Lorelei and her heart soared at the prospect, but her parents didn’t permit dating, and she told the emissary so. On her bulletin board, there was a picture of Nicholas and his guy friends, none of them as cute as him, laughing while stacked in a pyramid on the playground. Lorelei dropped the photo in her trash.

  Allison became furious when she learned of Nicholas’s betrayal, but rather than confront him and give up her hopeless crush, she declared Lorelei a backstabber, a liar, a whore, a bitch, and in one afternoon annihilated seven years of friendship, sleepovers, and barely concealed jealo
usies. Allison, humiliated, began a relentless campaign of ridicule: Lorelei’s clothes, her hair, her makeup, the music she listened to, the cars her parents drove. To Lorelei’s horror, her other friends joined in. They were terrified Allison would make fun of them, too. Kelli, Danielle, Samantha … Lorelei had a picture of the whole group at the zoo with their faces painted like tigers. She dropped it in the trash.

  The nonstop teasing worked. Lorelei was isolated, and Nicholas soon abandoned his infatuation. She became toxic, but began fighting back, dubbing Allison “Chocolate Chips” for the sprinkling of moles on her face. The name actually caught on, and their opportunistic mutual friends were no longer sure whose side to choose for their own safety. For a while, it seemed like Lorelei was gaining the upper hand. She started to matter once more.

  Then came her mother’s accident.

  * * *

  Miranda Paskal worked as night manager at a hardware store, overseeing delivery and placement of plywood, drywall, and plumbing supplies in the back warehouse. She wasn’t even supposed to work the night it happened, but it was February and the weekend shipments had been delayed by a snowstorm. Then they all came in at once. The warehouse roared with incoming trucks and racing forklifts.

  They were overloading the lifts to get it all stacked a little faster. There was still a pending inquiry about whether Miranda Paskal had ordered them to break regulation, or whether it was something the workers did themselves out of haste. That’s why her mother’s settlement turned out to be so small.

  One of the loads shifted when a lift operator backed up while the rack was extended, toppling the vehicle and two tons of PVC fence on top of Miranda Paskal and a twenty-year-old stockroom worker, crushing and killing him instantly, while pinning Miranda back against the sideways forklift, its wheels still spinning against her outstretched arm.

  Six surgeries later, the nurses and doctors tried to tell her how lucky she was to even be alive. Lorelei never forgot the look of rage on her mother’s face when reminded of that during her long hospitalization. Lorelei made the mistake of saying it herself in the midst of one of mother’s more sour moods during the recovery. Her mother had smacked her across the mouth—with her prosthetic. “I never want to hear that from you again,” she said.

  Lorelei’s mother no longer worked, having left on permanent disability, and Lorelei’s father—who had been chronically unemployed well before that—became her mother’s perpetual nursemaid. The teachers at school were very sympathetic. The kids pretended to be, for a while.

  Then Allison began calling Lorelei “Peter Pan.” Lorelei didn’t even understand this. Then the other girls started cackling: “What’s it like having Captain Hook for a mom?” It made no difference when Lorelei, displaying infinite patience for a child, tried to explain: “It’s more of a clamp than a hook.”

  “Don’t touch Lorelei … or you’ll get the clamp!” Allison warned the other girls gravely. “That’s a sex disease. It makes hands fall off.”

  On her most recent birthday, Lorelei sat alone on the back deck of her house, watching a suitcase-sized ice cream cake slowly liquefy in the springtime sun. A handful of the less-hostile girls had said they would come, but didn’t.

  She hated what had happened to her life, to all the friends she used to have. It hadn’t even been her fault. But now there was an escape. High school would be different.

  Lorelei wanted to matter again.

  * * *

  St. Michael’s population was fed by dozens of schools throughout the surrounding towns, though most of the kids in Lorelei’s class were going to Shadyside Academy, an Ivy League prep school closer to Pittsburgh. The rest of her St. Margaret Mary classmates were heading to public school. No one Lorelei knew was going to St. Mike’s.

  That’s when she began begging her parents to enroll her.

  On that rainy first day of school, Lorelei looked at the remaining pictures on her bulletin board, then raked her fingers across them, clearing them all into her trash bin. Within the hour, she was showered, powdered, and dressed in her new uniform—all in near silence.

  Her parents wouldn’t wake for their daughter’s first day of school. Mom tended to be unwell in the mornings, and Lorelei’s father stayed up late and slept most of the day. It had been that way ever since the accident. That was okay. Lorelei was good at being on her own now.

  In the hush of the house, she stood admiring herself in the full-length mirror on her closet door, smoothing the pleats of her skirt and measuring the evenness of the tuck on her white blouse. She welcomed the uniform, having too often found herself unarmed in the fashion wars at her old school. At St. Mike’s, everyone would be the same.

  She pulled her chestnut hair into a ponytail and smiled at her reflection, which did not smile back as sincerely as she hoped. Maturity and poise—she had spent the summer practicing.

  In the space between her old life and this new one, Lorelei studied the elements of popularity. She analyzed teen coming-of-age movies and romantic comedies like an anthropologist, taking note of “the cute stumble,” whereby a lovely and charming actress would trip, dropping a stack of plates or collapsing in a heap within sight of the leading man, who would smile and cradle her back to her feet. It was a chance to display vulnerability and a willingness to laugh at oneself. It always seemed to work.

  Lorelei practiced tripping in front of her mirror, but was never fully satisfied with her technique. What if she cracked her forehead open on a bookshelf while trying to act cute? It sometimes felt like movies just made things up about romance.

  She had scoured the top women’s magazines for guidance, but they were either all about sex or all about recipes. So she crafted her own list of guidelines to make herself beloved:

  1. Be pretty, but not gorgeous. (Other girls don’t like being jealous.)

  2. Get good grades, but don’t act like a genius. (Others don’t like to feel stupid.)

  3. Don’t be the class clown. (If you have to make jokes, try to make them about other people instead.)

  4. Sit in the front of class. (Troublemakers take the back rows.)

  5. Be generous, but don’t be a pushover. (Show what a good person you are by befriending a crippled person.)

  Besides that last one counting as a good deed, a crippled person would also be a greater target for teasing, drawing any ridcule away from Lorelei—though she didn’t want to write that down. It seemed mean. She memorized it instead.

  In the mirror, on the morning of her first day, Lorelei tried to pinpoint her own flaws, anything at all someone meeting her for the first time might make fun of. She fixated on the shape of her eyebrows, each of which had a hard little arch in the centers. If a mean girl noticed that, it could undermine months of preparation.

  She found a set of silver tweezers in the mess of makeup, brushes, and lotions atop her dresser, and braced herself beside the mirror. There wasn’t much time; the bus was supposed to arrive soon. She worked fast. Fresh tears appeared with each pluck.

  Her distorted vision and hurried work prevented her from noticing right away that one brow was noticeably narrower than the other. Damn it.

  She plucked again at the thicker one, but once again miscalculated—attacking the bottom half of the eyebrow instead of the top. They were the same thickness now, but one was higher than the other—making her look permanently skeptical.

  She walked downstairs and then back up, paced the corners of her room, then settled in front of the mirror again. An eyebrow pencil wasn’t solving the problem, so she washed her face and tried something risky.

  Lorelei yanked her ponytail loose. Her hair was all one length, but a small pair of cuticle scissors were all she needed to trim a line of bangs across her forehead. Then, while attempting to curl them, she once again realized the perils of hasty grooming. She had cut too short, exposing the eyebrows anyway—and the line of bangs was painfully crooked.

  For the next ten minutes, she made pass after pass with the scissors, shaving
off dust-sized fragments. Her hands trembled.

  Soon she was sprinting through the misty rain down her empty street, the rows of factory houses silent and dark. She rounded the corner past the warmly glowing windows of Mazziotti’s Bakery, where she had intended to treat herself to a doughnut and hot chocolate for breakfast, if only she’d had enough time. Lorelei raced toward the corner of Constitution Boulevard, waving her arms and calling out as her bright yellow bus started to pull away. The brakes squealed, and the doors gasped open, inhaling the out-of-breath girl. Lorelei thanked the lumberjack-looking man behind the wheel and sulked into a seat—the first row, of course, right behind the driver. (Only troublemakers gravitated toward the back rows.) In the big rearview mirror, her wet bangs fell in something that looked like a chart illustrating economic decline. And they did nothing to hide her weirdly askew eyebrows.

  The rusty little town of Arnold slid by outside her rainy window. Lorelei tried to look happy as the dim morning light cast shadows of trickling water down her face.

  THREE

  First class of the day: Religion.

  Lorelei entered the classroom and found a seat in the center of the front row, placed a notebook and pen on the desktop, and crossed her ankles under her chair.

  Her new classmates shuffled in behind her, and the boy who took the seat next to hers had a web of thin pink scars running from the corner of his eye, right down to his jawline. But he was still kind of cute. It made him look strong somehow, to be damaged.

  Lorelei immediately remembered Rule No. 5 (befriend a cripple), and thought this might be a perfect opportunity. “Can I ask you…,” she said, tracing a finger near her own eye. The boy instinctively touched his scar. “Are you blind in that eye?” she asked.

  The boy leaned in conspiratorially, smiling. “If I was, I’d have sat on the other side, so I could still see you.”