Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  His father said, “Then don’t … just think of other times. Not the end times.”

  His son just stared out the window. Larry didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

  The driveway to their small wooden house curled up from a country road lined with jumbles of pine trees, which hid the home from their distant neighbors. Larry turned off the ignition and watched the snowflakes settle and dissolve on the warm windshield. His son’s face was still turned toward the glass, his eyes closed. Larry reached out to touch him, then didn’t. He listened to the boy’s soft snores.

  Noah looked so helpless sometimes, his father couldn’t believe the heartache he had caused.

  * * *

  Larry had been working in Cocoa Beach, Florida, when it happened. Those had been boom times for an electrician, thanks to a rash of housing development. Sun, fun, and sand—it seemed like a bright place for the family to settle after hopscotching around the country so often, following odd jobs and Daphne Stein’s increasingly disturbed moods, which could cause more havoc than her widowed husband liked to remember.

  One Friday night, Larry stopped at the Mai Tiki Bar on the Cocoa Beach pier for drinks with some of the guys from his crew. The warm ocean wind had drifted through the windows of the same truck he still drove through the Pennsylvania snow, only then it had been shinier, sturdier, more reliable. So had he.

  He was avoiding the apartment. It had been a bad time for Daphne, and when they weren’t at war, he was trying to stop her from crying, like a boy trying to plug a leaky dam. His whole life was for her—caring for her, consoling her, talking her back through the anxieties that had refracted darkness through every thought she had. None of it made any sense—least of all to him. Larry felt he had earned a few drinks alongside the other flannel-and-jeans guys, telling dirty jokes and ogling the surfer girls on the beach.

  Margie was a senior in high school and would be home already. Daphne was better when it was just the kids around. Her emotions were more steady around Noah, her little Ark Boy, as she called him. Noah had been ten.

  Cruising back home late that night, one arm leaning out the window and gliding on the current of warm ocean air, Larry Stein had turned up his street and saw dazed faces in robes and sleepwear wandering the warm asphalt, the tall palm trees around the corner pulsing with flashing red and white light, the low clouds overhead tinged with an unnatural orange glow. Mesmerized, he swerved to dodge a screaming ambulance that had appeared in front of him. Black water churned down the gutters, and frenzied firefighters scurried over tangles of turgid hoses. In the background, his apartment building coughed charcoal smoke into the sky.

  His wife was in that smoke. His wife. “My beautiful Daphne…,” he said out loud, and closed his eyes against the Pennsylvania snowstorm.

  Their daughter hadn’t been home. She had gone over to a friend’s place after cheerleader practice at school, writing college admission essays together. But Noah had been in the apartment. He had been inside, trapped, and so had Daphne. They had rescued Larry Stein’s boy, but not his wife. Not her.

  Then came the accusations … and that was as far as Larry would let himself remember.

  As his son got older, he made up ways to explain the burns on his face that didn’t require telling the truth. Larry had heard the fictional campfire fight story countless times.

  After several years, the legal questions were resolved and the family began looking for a new place to start over. Margie made it all happen. Larry had never seen his daughter cry, and Margie wouldn’t tolerate it from him or Noah either. Though she was only eighteen at the time, she became mother to them both. She had handled the move to Pennsylvania while enrolling in nursing school at the University of Pittsburgh. She had helped her father find a steady job, even filled out a lot of the union paperwork, and got him to stop relying so much on booze to wash over the things he didn’t want to think about. She had stayed awake countless nights, rocking her little brother as the boy wailed in his sleep.

  It was Margie who had suggested St. Mike’s.

  Last spring, the vice-principal of Sarver Township’s junior high wrote a letter to the school board, advising them not to accept Noah Stein into the public high school. “He doesn’t so much fight with his classmates as war with them,” the vice-principal wrote.

  Each week brought a new bruise, a blackened eye, teeth marks on his forearm. Once he showed Margie some red skin beneath his fingernails—which belonged to a boy who had made a “Yo momma’s so fat” joke at his expense. Noah had screamed like an animal as a teacher ripped him free of the boy. The school administrators hadn’t understood the overreaction, and Stein’s father chose not to explain beyond saying the boy was sensitive about his mother, who had died.

  Stein’s most notorious schoolyard feud involved Jim Frankin, the leader of a group of twelve-year-olds who made up a song about Stein to the tune of George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set on You,” which they crooned to him in the hallways. “I got my face … Set … On … Fire! I got my face … set on fire!”

  A gym class ended with Stein and Frankin grappling on the ground. Some of the girls said Stein started it, but the larger Frankin scored all the major blows, thrashing Stein around like an empty pillowcase. At lunch the next day, Stein walked up and spit in Frankin’s food—then in Frankin’s face. The larger boy knocked him to the ground and beat him until he couldn’t walk.

  On day three, Stein stalked Frankin home after school and surprised him with a kick to the back. Frankin landed on his porch’s concrete steps, bruising his ribs. He fell on Stein and choked him until his eyes bulged. A woman with a baby stroller stopped Frankin from murdering him.

  After that, both boys had been called to the school district office with their parents, where they were told to quit fighting, or be expelled. Frankin said he would. Stein agreed to nothing. “I’ll stop when everyone else stops singing that song.”

  The next day, a chorus broke out at lunch. Stein tackled Frankin on the stairs and threw three hard punches into his balls. Frankin howled and cried. He hadn’t even been in the cafeteria. Stein was expelled immediately.

  Private school was the only option available to them, although tuition would place a terrible burden on their family. But Margie considered it a blessing. “He would never have stopped,” she said.

  Her father knew it was true.

  * * *

  Tap tap tap.

  Larry opened his eyes. White snow blanketed his windshield. The air in the truck was freezing. “Daddy?” a woman’s voice said.

  He rolled down the window, dropping a sheath of ice to the ground. Noah was still sleeping, curled against the passenger door. Margie, who was thickset and wrapped in an even thicker vinyl parka with the hood pulled up around her head of curls, stood outside his car, holding some grocery bags. “What’s going on, Dad?”

  Larry yawned. “Guess we fell asleep, talking old times.…”

  She pulled back from the window, her mouth twisted. “Old times” was a subject Margie Stein preferred to avoid. “You should come inside now. I’ll make dinner.” Big sister hustled her father and sleepy brother into the house, and as she cooked, she lectured them about the dangers of hypothermia. Larry had his back to her, and was making goofy faces to get a laugh out of his son, but the boy had his head down, and wouldn’t look at him.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Are you going to the Valentine’s Day dance?”

  Stein just blinked. He was looking at Lorelei, but she hadn’t spoken to him in a month.

  “I, uh, I think so,” he said.

  Lorelei smiled, almost a little sadly. She clutched her books tighter against her chest. “I am,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you there.” And then she walked away.

  Davidek wasn’t sure how to explain it. “Did she ever get picked by one of the seniors?”

  “I haven’t,” Stein said. “And they took down the sign-up sheet. Maybe she realizes that it was no big deal after all.” Even Green a
nd LeRose didn’t know for sure, though LeRose thought one of the Groughs had tried to choose her and was told she was taken.

  Stein couldn’t control his enthusiasm. For the first time in a long time, he couldn’t stop smiling.

  * * *

  The night of the dance, a fast-falling snowstorm draped the roads and fields and buildings of the Valley in a foot of frozen whiteness. There was no wind, and the fat snowflakes fell straight and soft, like little dying moths. Headlights cut through the dim wall of falling snow as cars throbbing with music steered into the school lot. Girls and boys wrapped in thick coats and scarves and knit caps huddled close as they tromped through the drifts, making their way into Palisade Hall, which had been festooned with pink and red heart balloons for the occasion.

  Some junior girls were selling carnations at the door to raise money for the prom. On the small bingo stage, the twenty-year-old DJ was getting yelled at by some chaperones for playing Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Do Me!” He switched it to Steve Winwood’s “Roll with It,” which no one danced to.

  Outside, Ms. Bromine stood alone, bundled against the frozen air on the front steps of the school. She didn’t shiver. Her ankle-length black coat made her a shadow against the snow. Ms. Bromine had suggested canceling the dance due to the blizzard, but Sister Maria refused to listen to her—as usual.

  Bromine watched another wave of students pile out of a van and head toward the school, laughing to each other, maybe laughing at her. She knew that sound well. She’d heard it a lot.

  It was strange to face hostility from the cliques she once led. Year after year, Bromine saw her own face grow older, saw gray strands snake into her hair, saw her body thicken and slow, while the students all stayed fresh, and beautiful, and immortal.

  Ms. Bromine had stood on these same steps exactly nineteen years earlier, before any current student at St. Mike’s was even born. Gretchen Bromine had been dazzling perfection then, a smooth-skinned teenage beauty with a lithe body that fit tightly in all the right places of her school uniform. All the boys of St. Mike’s longed for her then, though most were too intimidated to approach her. She liked it that way. The bad boys hungered as she passed them in the hall, and she delighted in denying their attention.

  On the night of her own Valentine’s dance in 1968, the seventeen-year-old had stood in bare legs shivering against the cold in her candy apple dress and short fox-fur coat that had been her mother’s, her calves flexing in sky-high white pumps—bad for walking in snow, but excellent for dancing. She had arrived with some girlfriends but was waiting for Sam Kudznicki, the school’s basketball captain and student council president, who had asked her to be his date.

  After escorting her into the dance and gliding across the balloon-strewn floor to romantic songs all evening, Sam proved himself to be just as disgusting as the other boys she ignored—kissing her too deeply when the teachers weren’t looking, his fingers tracing the edge of her bra, his hard-on pressed against her hip as he held her close. When they left the dance, he proposed they drive somewhere and park, and she responded by slapping him—hard—not just once but half a dozen times, pounding his face as he stumbled backwards in the snow, calling her a bitch, telling her to find her own way home.

  Had she known then that her adult life would be so lonely, that she would go unnoticed and untouched for so long, maybe she would have let those boys like him go a little further.…

  Davidek and Stein were among the last students to arrive at the dance. They walked inside, stepping in the flattened snow prints of the students who had come before them.

  They didn’t notice Bromine noticing them. She blended in with the other stony figures lining the walls of the school in perpetuity.

  * * *

  Davidek’s parents had agreed to drive the two boys to the dance, and Stein’s dad was supposed to pick them up, but when the night arrived, Davidek’s mother refused to go anywhere in the snow and his father just said, “It’s Friday night,” as if the weekend negated all parental responsibility.

  June Davidek turned up the volume on the television to drown out her son’s protests. “I’m not driving all over creation on treacherous roads so you can dance,” she said.

  “You promised you would!” he said. That didn’t matter.

  “I said no,” his mother said, resorting to that aggravating old question of hers: “Do I need to repeat it for you?”

  When the battered white pickup truck belonging to Stein’s father pulled up in front of the Davidek house, they were already an hour late. “I’m sorry my parents flaked, Mr. Stein,” Davidek said when he slipped into the dark cab.

  Larry Stein just shrugged. “Roads are bad, but we’ll make it,” was all he said.

  “Sorry,” Davidek said again.

  Stein was pissed. Lorelei seemed to be undergoing a complete turnaround from her previous standoffishness and moodiness, and he was standing her up. “This is my only time outside of school with her. She can’t date. Can’t talk on the phone unless she sneaks. This is one thing her parents let her do.… Tell your mom thanks for me.”

  “Sorry,” Davidek said for a third time, turning toward the window, more ashamed than ever.

  Stein mulled the silence, looking at the back of his friend’s head. He smacked Davidek’s leg. “Listen. No big deal. It’s good to make her wait. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?” He laughed, and put an arm around Davidek’s shoulder, shaking it until Davidek smiled. Larry Stein was a silent chauffeur, but he was smiling, too.

  * * *

  Inside the toasty cavern of Palisade Hall, Lorelei Paskal lingered near the entrance. When Stein came through, she slid up close to him, and Davidek said, “I’m going to get some cookies,” and made himself scarce to give them some space.

  When they were alone, Stein closed his arms in an embrace around Lorelei’s shoulders. “I missed you,” he said.

  Lorelei scrunched up her face. “Just since this afternoon?”

  He tightened the embrace gently, feeling her warm cheek against his frigid neck. “It’s been a lot longer than that, and you know it.”

  When she pulled back, he admired the bulky brown sport coat tilting across her shoulders. “Interesting look,” he said.

  “It’s Mr. Mankowski’s. He made me wear it,” she said, sticking out her tongue. She peeked over Stein’s shoulder to make sure the girls selling carnations nearby weren’t looking, then drew open the buttoned jacket to show off tight jeans clinging low on her hips, and a lacy white camisole embroidered with a spectrum of flowers stopping just above her belly button, which was like a little swirl in a smooth curve of cream.

  “I wore a big sweater to get out of the house, but I couldn’t get past Mankowski. Not ‘Catholic school’ enough for him,” she said, gesturing toward the bald-headed chaperone standing in the center of the dance floor, policing the romance. “The worst part is, it smells like him.”

  “You make a musty old jacket look very hot,” Stein told her. She didn’t say anything back, though she held his gaze a long time.

  I do care about you, Noah Stein, she thought, no matter what happens now.

  He draped his arm across the back of the jacket and they walked to the dance floor as the writhing students there slowed for a power ballad—Cinderella singing “Don’t Know What You You Got (Till It’s Gone).” Lorelei and Stein placed their arms in comfortable spots and began to sway. He leaned his face beside hers, smelling the sweet, candy scent of her hair spray and perfume and makeup.

  They didn’t leave the dance floor the rest of the night.

  Later, he noticed two familiar faces staring at them from the garden of wallflowers: Asshole Face and Sandmouth. Lorelei turned away as Stein taunted them: “Why don’t you two ladies have a dance. You look beautiful together.”

  Lorelei whispered, “Please, don’t…”

  Stein looked at her, then back to the two seniors, who flipped him off as they walked away.

  * * *

  Davidek spe
nt most of the night beside Green, who spent most of the night schooling him on recent music history, triggered by the random songs on the DJ’s playlist. He heard all about the New Wave movement and the first song featured in a video on MTV (something about the radio killing someone). A Police song launched him into a lecture on reggae and rock fusion, which concluded with Green doing the robot as he sang along in staccato to “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.”

  Good advice, Davidek thought. Near the end of the dance, Hannah Kraut surprised everyone simply by showing up. “Have you seen Mr. Zimmer?” she asked Davidek. “I thought maybe he would be chaperoning tonight.”

  “I think I heard some of the parents saying his car was snowed in,” Davidek said. Hannah seemed disappointed by that.

  Later, he saw Hannah in the corner engaged in an intense conversation with Smitty, of all people. Smitty looked nervous, like he didn’t want to be seen with her.

  Hey, if she pisses him off, she can’t be all bad, Davidek thought.

  * * *

  Stein and Lorelei were face-to-face, lips almost touching, eyes locked. Sinead O’Connor was singing a sad song about eating her dinner in a fancy rest-AHRR-aunt, and Stein’s hand moved inside Mankowski’s monster-sized jacket until the tips of his fingers brushed the firm, bare skin of Lorelei’s hip, hidden in the shadow of the cloak.

  “I wish I could kiss you again,” Stein said. “Like we did before, outside the church.”

  Lorelei’s eyes wouldn’t meet his. Their bodies turned with the music. His touch had made her breathless.

  “Let’s just take things slow…,” she said, and her hand slipped down to stop his caress. “Maybe if—” But before she could finish, he touched his lips to hers.

  That’s when Ms. Bromine pulled them apart.

  The guidance counselor had been wandering the dance floor for the past hour, placing balloons between girls and boys she deemed to be dancing too intimately. “Make room for the Holy Spirit,” she said flatly, wedging a pink balloon between him and Lorelei.

  Stein smiled at Ms. Bromine, and responded by pulling Lorelei to him so quickly that the thin, pink-rubber bubble of air flattened, then burst. He turned to the guidance counselor. “Something tells me no boy ever popped anything on you.”