Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  JayArr crossed his arms, leaning back in his chair. “And when my brother got to be a senior, you better believe he and his friends did the exact same thing to their freshmen. It’s called revenge, dudes.”

  “Except the guys your brother squirted chocolate sauce on weren’t the guys who did anything to him,” Stein pointed out. “Sounds to me like he got his just desserts.” He leaned back, smiling proudly, awaiting accolades from the table for his cleverness—but nobody got it.

  “I think you’re getting hung up on the banna split thing,” JayArr said.

  Stein rolled his eyes. “No, I mean, what your brother did to those freshmen is not revenge. It just means your brother is a dickhead, same as the guys who did it to him for no good reason. Karma just happened to catch up with him ahead of time.”

  JayArr squinted. “What the hell’s karma?”

  Stein considered explaining, then shrugged. “You’ll know it when you see it, pal.”

  At the head of the table, the large blue-eyed boy who always sat in the back row of class exhaled a loud, bored sigh. He was usually silent, his head hung—maybe listening to the others, maybe not. Davidek heard teachers say his name a couple times. Jim, or Jeff, or something.

  The hulking boy’s icy eyes glittered. “You know … I knew pussies had lips, but I never knew they could talk so much,” he said.

  The table went silent. Not only was the blue-eyed boy a head taller than most of his classmates, but he was also broad-shouldered and muscled in a way that made his thin-armed, scrawny-legged fellow freshmen look like stick drawings. The buttons of his shirt seemed taut, as if he had outgrown it that morning, and his rolled-up sleeves constrained python arms. He reminded Davidek of his old action figure toys: G.I. Joes were one size, and Star Wars toys were just a little smaller. You couldn’t fit a big G.I. Joe in the little seat of a Star Wars X-wing fighter, and that was how the blue-eyed boy looked to him now: a bigger toy stuck into the universe of a smaller playset.

  “You sissies whine and cry,” the blue-eyed boy said. “But you’re only scared because you can’t protect your own self like—”

  “Like what?” said a voice from behind him. It was an older boy, a grinning senior orbited by other upperclassmen who’d come in from the parking lot in search of their absentee prey. Davidek recognized him by the dime-sized pucker scar in the center of his cheek: it was Richard Mullen, the kid he’d seen stabbed through the face with a pen.

  “So you know the secret of survival, huh, big boy?” said Mullen, jabbing the big kid in the back with his index finger. His horse-toothed friend, Frank Simms, who had once run out of the boy’s restroom hurling a jar of preserved tapeworms, darted forward to make an impression. “Answer him,” Simms demanded, swatting the huge freshman’s head. “What’s your name?”

  The blue-eyed boy regarded them coolly, the muscles in his large shoulders shifting under his shirt. “Name’s Smitty,” he said.

  “What happened, Smitty, to put such a big boy like you in a class of little boys?” Mullen asked. “You, like, a retard or something? One of those fat-fuck dinosaurs with a peanut brain?” The upperclassmen fell into each other, laughing so hard. Clusters of curious sophomores and juniors began wandering over, intrigued by the sight of conflict.

  Smitty looked up, outnumbered, uncertain. The other freshmen—those he had just dubbed “talking pussies”—were chuckling a little, too.

  Smitty pointed toward the neighboring table. “While we’re making introductions, what’s your name, skinny?” he asked.

  The scrawny, fish-faced girl sitting alone had frozen. She pointed at her chest with a questioning expression.

  “Yeah, I meant you,” Smitty said, refocusing the attention of the threatening upperclassmen.

  “I’m … Sarah,” the skinny girl replied in a milky, half-swallowed voice.

  “Sarah,” Smitty repeated. “You got a last name?”

  “You got a first name?” Mullen snapped at him, feeling his moment in the spotlight slipping away.

  “John,” Smitty answered curtly. “John Smith.”

  “John Smith? That’s original,” snorted Mullen’s friend Simms, but nobody thought that was funny.

  “Now, Sarah, you are one skinny little thing!” Smitty said. “I mean, deadly skinny. Goddamn, it’s like somebody just took a slice out of you—lengthwise.” Smitty made his hand into a blade, squinted one eye, and filleted her in his field of vision. “It’s like you’re a goddamn fraction,” he said. “Seven-eighths of a person. Am I right?”

  He looked around for support, and the seniors who had just been menacing him were nodding, laughing, and agreeing wholeheartedly. The girl, meanwhile, seemed to be looking for a way to draw her arms, legs, and head inside her body. “Please,” she murmured, almost too low to be heard. “Please, don’t…”

  Smitty’s face softened in faux concern. “Hey, listen … you’re not sick, or anything, are you? Like … you’ve got that hatchet of a face because you’re diseased?”

  The girl’s fingers twined around her gold cross necklace. She shook her head back and forth—no—which made Smitty lean backwards suddenly. “Whoa! Whoa! Watch where you swing that thing!” The upperclassmen roared laughter, and Smitty’s face broke into a victorious smile, like a sheet of ice breaking off a mountainside.

  Mullen leaned in and put a finger in the girl’s face. “That’s your new name—Seven-Eighths! Got it?” He looked around at his friends. “Seven-Eighths, right?” Everybody was dying, repeating the name to each other.

  “Hey, I got a nickname for you, too,” piped up a voice from the freshman table. It was Stein, and all eyes fixed on him. He tapped the spot on his cheek where Mullen’s puckered scar was. “How about Asshole Face?”

  Mullen shoved aside some chairs to get close to him. “What the fuck did you call me?”

  Stein tapped that spot on his cheek again. “Asshole Face. How’s that? Cute, right?” Simms shoved in front of his friend, overbite hanging open in outrage, and yanked Stein out of his chair. “You best apologize, shithead.” Stein’s face reeled back, staggered by the bad breath.

  “What’s going on over here, boys?” asked Mr. Zimmer, appearing out of nowhere to walk over to the table. Simms let go of Stein’s shirt, and the older boys began to sidle away. They were repeating the nickname to each other—not “Seven-Eighths,” but “Asshole Face.”

  Mullen leaned in close to Stein. “You got some nerve with your face full of scars, worse than mine, even.”

  Stein nodded, his fingers tracing the pink tendrils running along his jaw. “Yeah,” he whispered, his mouth near Mullen’s ear. “But mine doesn’t look like a … butt … hole.” Mullen shoved him—straight into Mr. Zimmer, who stepped in to separate them, herding the group of seniors back outside. Stein sat back in his seat, waiting for them all to clear; then he stood up and walked off with his tray. Seven-Eighths had vanished without anyone noticing.

  Green glared at Smitty with contempt. “That what you meant by protecting yourself? Picking on some helpless girl instead?” The remaining freshmen grumbled agreement.

  Smitty flashed a bemused expression at their after-the-fact outrage. “You were all quite the heroes when you were scared of being the next one to get picked on. I did what I had to do.”

  “You had to be a dick?” Green asked.

  Smitty stood up, walked over, and leaned his arms on Davidek—not Green. “I like this kid,” he said, ruffling Davidek’s hair. “Keeps his mouth shut, lies low, and stays out of trouble.” He walked on, looking up at the ceiling. “Now, the other guy—Stein? My hat’s off to him, but I don’t get the whole kamikaze thing.” He shrugged. “Maybe he thinks old Seven-Eighths will let him put his fingers in that other narrow place of hers!” Smitty laughed at his own joke in the otherwise quiet cafeteria. “But you…,” he said, smiling and gesturing toward Green, like a lounge singer crooning to a fan in the front row: “You’re Mr. Fucking Nice Guy—once all the trouble is gone. Makes you look l
ike the hero, while I come off as the villain, right? Well, you and me are the same, Nice Guy,” he said. “Except I’m not pretending to be tough to win friends—friends who will be very disappointed in how brave you are later, I’m sure.”

  Green tried to protest, but the school bell drowned him out.

  Smitty, still the lounge singer, winked and pointed at Green as the others rose from their seats. “Just remember, boys, you always know where you stand with an honest asshole,” he said, laying one hand flat over his heart. “It’s the fake do-gooders you gotta watch out for.” He turned his palm out and blew Green a kiss—then shoved the hand into Green’s face as the boy was standing up, sprawling him backwards over his chair and onto his ass. Davidek rushed over to help, but Smitty backed him off. “You try and help, you’ll end up on top of him. I promise,” Smitty said, almost politely. Davidek hestitated, looked down at Green, and waited in silence as the heavy boy squirmed and got up by himself. Smitty tipped an invisible hat at them and whistled as he walked away.

  SEVEN

  No rain fell for several weeks, and the leaks in St. Mike’s walls dried to dusty stains. The only thunderous rumblings above the school came from the stub-fingered janitor as he dragged his metal tub of tar and tried to patch weak spots on the rooftop. All of September burned hot and dry, toasting the Allegheny Valley until the river went still, and the rolling hillsides of trees wilted like baked lettuce.

  At the weekly faculty meetings, teachers suggested suspending part of the dress code so students could go without their blazers and sweaters (names for clothing that took on new meaning at such temperatures). Sister Maria was inclined to approve it, but Ms. Bromine argued that students who dressed better would behave better, and presented an article from a psychological magazine to back up the claim. Sister Maria, thinking of Father Mercedes’s warning about discipline, decided to keep the uniform code intact.

  Many students went without the blazers and sweaters anyway. Sister Maria instructed teachers to show no leniency, and since they were just as miserable in the heat, few were merciful. That led to a rash of daily detentions. There were more requests to leave the broiling classrooms and visit the water fountains and bathrooms, and fraternizing in the hallways and restrooms led to more conflict. Tempers rose along with the heat, punches flew more quickly, insults were sharper. Behavior worsened at an alarming rate.

  The school had no air-conditioning, but it did have an industrial fan in the bay windows at the end of the third-floor hallway, which hauled a current of stale, hot air through the building, replacing it—mostly—with hot, stale air from outside. The squat steel drum jutted from the building like a jet engine, and the dirty propellers had become a tool of amusement for a particularly thuggish element of juniors known as the Fanboys, who clustered around it before class began each day. They had discovered the fan would flash sparks and utter an angry electrical wail if a fistful of pocket change was thrown through the protective grate into its churning, blurred maw. The gashed coins would flash out into the morning air, dimes and pennies and quarters pattering softly into the grass of the vacant church lot. Inside the hall, the screams of metal quickly drew teachers into the hallway, but it was too late to catch anyone in the act.

  Led by a junior named James Mortinelli, the Fanboys spent every morning shaking down freshmen for coins, but they happily fed whatever—pens, tie-clips, math homework—through the blades if spare change wasn’t available. They had found an ally in the large, intimidating freshman, Smitty. Rather than fight with the Fanboys, he had ingratiated himself by pointing out his classmates who had jangling pockets, or girls who kept small change purses in their book bags.

  Impressed by the way Stein had stood up to him, Davidek told Smitty he thought he was being an asshole. The next day, two of the Fanboys were pressing Davidek’s face against the fan grate, while Mortinelli searched his pockets. Morti was stubby, with little shoes and little hands. At seventeen, his hairline was already receding, which further enlarged a forehead that was already big enough to show a movie on. His eyes were like raisins sunk close together in a mound of bread dough. “Christ, what are you, on fucking welfare?” he said. “This is the third time I’ve turned out empty pockets on you.”

  Davidek said he had five dollars in his front blazer pocket. The whirling blades in front of his face chopped his syllables into vibrating staccato.

  Morti spun him around, snatching the bill out of the pocket and holding it in front of the freshman’s face. “This ain’t a damn stick-up,” he said. “We want coins, dumbass.”

  “Change!” another boy bellowed in Davidek’s ear, filling the air with the smell of cheese curls. Mortinelli kept the fiver anyway. “Let’s hit the cafeteria. They’ll change this out for us,” and the gang retreated down the stairs to the school’s sublevels. Before leaving, Mortinelli’s little eyes narrowed on Davidek, and his little hand tugged at the freshman’s tie. “Really? A clip-on?” the runty junior asked, flashing his baby doll teeth in disgust. “What are you, in third grade?”

  The junior snatched off the tie and threw it at the fan, where it sucked tight to the metal grate like it was magnetized, fluttering against the pull of the fan. As Davidek peeled it off, a girl’s voice said: “Start keeping some pennies in your pockets. Then you can keep your five dollars.”

  Davidek looked up, refastening the clasp to his collar, and saw an older girl with scarlet hair cascading down one side of her face. She was standing about five lockers away, with an open bag at her feet, pinning her brilliant hair back. She stuck two barrettes between her lips, and the tips tilted skyward as she smiled at him. “If you start out letting people push you around, you’ll always be at the mercy of losers like that,” she said, her words muffled by her tight lips. She stuck the barrettes in her autumn-colored hair and fluffed her fingers through it.

  “Well, maybe next time I’ll shove Morti into the fan. See how tough the rest of them are when he squirts out the other side like Hawaiian Punch,” Davidek said, his voice higher than usual for someone trying to talk tough.

  The red-haired girl stepped before him, evaluating his serious expression. She put a hand on his cheek. “You’re adorable,” she said. Then a bell rang and the bustle in the hallway doubled as students rushed to homeroom, and the girl retreated into the crowd, carrying her bag. The spot where her hand had touched him was like a sweet poison melting into his skin.

  Adorable.

  It was better than any other name he’d been called at St. Mike’s.

  * * *

  A week later, the seniors corralled a group of freshman girls for a lunchtime beauty contest. At first, it seemed like pretty lightweight treatment, considering the freshman boys were getting physically pulverized daily. But in addition to the coveted prettiest-girl honor of being chosen Miss St. Mike’s, the other titles were the less-than-flattering Miss Skank, Miss Bug-Eyes, Miss 2-by-4 (for flattest chest), Miss Piggy, and Miss Looks-Like-a-Dude. The one everybody called Seven-Eighths was named Miss Fetus Head because of her abnormally thin hair.

  Lorelei lingered behind most of the other freshman girls who were surrounded for this playground spectacle, keeping her head low. Careful daily micro-grooming had returned her bangs and eyebrows to a normal state, but she was still self-conscious, and when the taunting upperclassmen ordered her to the front, she stood with her ankles crossed, hands behind her back, staring at the ground.

  They sent her back as a finalist for the one non-cruel award, and she smiled as a handful of other pretty girls lined up beside her, and smiled even more as, one by one, they all lost. The older boys hooted and whistled at Lorelei, while the upperclassman girls mostly rolled their eyes. Michael Crawford, the lazy-eyed but otherwise clean-cut-looking senior who served as the pageant’s impromptu moderator, approached her holding an invisible microphone and talking in a rapid-1920s reporter voice.

  “Tell us, young lass—how’s it feel to be the prettiest girl in your class?” Behind him, some of his friends were s
inging, “Here she is … Miss Saint Miiii-Yie-Yikes!”

  Lorelei was looking at the girls she had defeated, who looked disgusted with her, even though it wasn’t her fault. “I’m sorry, I don’t really care who’s pretty and who’s not,” she said, loud enough for everyone around her to hear.

  Michael Crawford smiled, his voice returning to its natural timbre. “The prettiest ones never do.”

  * * *

  The end-of-lunch bell rang, and the crowd cleared after the stupid beauty pageant. As Lorelei joined the throng heading back inside the school, a hand reached in front of her, holding a fistful of plucked marigolds from a Virgin Mary shrine in one of the school’s gardens. A boy’s voice said: “… for the most beautiful girl.” Lorelei spun around smiling, hoping it would be Michael Crawford. But it was Stein.

  “I picked these for you,” he said. “They kind of smell funny, though.”

  Lorelei took them, brushing a lock of fallen hair out of her face. She forced a smile. “That’s very sweet.” She looked at the flowers as long as she could, then back up at him. Stein was definitely cute, even with that weird scar on his cheek. She’d heard about him standing up for Seven-Eighths. She liked that, though it had led to the rumor Stein had a crush on Seven-Eighths. Secretly Lorelei wished he had stood up for her like that, though nothing bad had happened to her yet.

  “I thought maybe we could go out sometime—if you want,” Stein said.

  Lorelei brushed nonexistent hair out of her face again as they walked inside. “How exactly does a date work for two kids who don’t drive and have no money?”

  “How do you know I’m not a millionaire?” Stein asked.

  “Because you steal flowers from the Virgin Mary,” she said.

  Stein laughed. “My sister said she could drive us. I’d just have to do some of her chores.”

  “Okay…,” Lorelei said. “And where would we go?”

  “We could just go down to Riverview Park in Tarentum, walk around, and climb on the war memorial cannons that are pointed over the river,” Stein answered. “Maybe we could get one working and declare war on New Kensington.”