Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  Lorelei covered her mouth and stepped back, but Ms. Bromine didn’t do anything for a long moment. “What did you just say to me?” she asked.

  Stein leaned in, raising his voice over the music. “Nothing. You must be hearing th—” But Ms. Bromine grabbed his wrist before he could finish, bending his arm back. Her nails sank into his skin. Tears blurred her eyes, flickering in the spinning lights of the DJ’s disco ball. “What did you say to me?” she said softly. Stein tried to pull his arm away, but she kept twisting it, repeating, “What … did you … say?”

  The music kept playing, but everyone around them had stopped dancing.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Davidek was standing in the exterior stairwell leading up to the parking lot. He’d come out here following Hannah and Smitty, but they disappeared into the snow—maybe together; he didn’t know. Stein’s dad was already waiting in the parking lot, standing around in front of his headlights with some other parents, singing old songs from their own high school dance days.

  A lot of kids were already leaving. He watched Mullen and Simms bumble past him, looking giddy and reeking of Kmart cologne. He was watching them go when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Lorelei.

  “Hey,” Davidek said.

  She was pulling on the bulky sweater she’d hidden upstairs in her locker. “Hey, yourself,” she said.

  Davidek patted his hands against his sides because he didn’t know what else to do with them. “So … that’s cool you and Stein are back together.”

  “He just mouthed off to Bromine again,” she said. “Nice of him to drag me back into trouble right away. I didn’t stick around for it this time.”

  “He really cares about you.”

  “You dance with anybody?” Lorelei asked.

  “I can’t dance.” Davidek shrugged. “I just came to hang out.”

  Lorelei nodded, still standing there, though they were fresh out of things to say. “I bet you could have if you’d wanted to,” she said, and began walking up the stairs. At the top, she turned around. “I want you to know … how things are turning out … this isn’t what I wanted.”

  Davidek looked up at her from the bottom. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m glad things are this way. I mean it.” And he did.

  A pained look crossed Lorelei’s face, as if there was something he didn’t understand, or couldn’t. When she was gone, Davidek kept staring at the empty space she had left.

  * * *

  Mr. Mankowski wrapped his hands around Bromine’s wrist. “Gretchen,” he said. “Gretchen, it’s okay.” He loosened her grip on Stein, and she released the boy into the crowd of faces looking at her, noticing her.

  Mankowski walked the guidance counselor to the corridor behind the bingo stage, and as soon as they were out of sight, the tears gathering in her eyes began to stream down her face. Her heart raced with terror at what she’d just done. What she had almost done. “These little shits can really push the limits,” Mankowski said. “Don’t let him get to you.” He tried to put an arm around her, but his shoulder didn’t work very well ever since he dislocated it during the incident with The Boy on the Roof.

  Bromine closed her eyes, and imagined the clumsy embrace was from somebody else, one of those boys who used to want to kiss her—not the kind who would do it for a joke, and then laugh and lie about it.

  * * *

  Once he was free from Bromine, Stein didn’t wait around for one of the chaperones to grab him for more questioning. He shot toward the exit, where he found Davidek standing alone on the outside stairs. “You see Lorelei?”

  Davidek pointed upward, lamely. “She took off.”

  Stein kicked over a blue recycling bin full of empty soda cans, which jangled and scattered out across the bottom of the concrete stairwell. The side of the bin read: PROM FUND.

  Davidek stood it upright and began gathering the cans back into it. “You know, you’ve got three more years here with Lorelei,” he said. “You don’t have to Romeo-and-Juliet yourself because one night ended badly.”

  Stein snorted. “You know a whole lot about romance for a guy who spent the night standing alone by the trash.”

  They got into Larry Stein’s truck and rode home in silence. Halfway to the Tarentum Bridge, cars were backed up more than a mile and some police cruisers swept by, followed by an ambulance.

  Larry looked at the boys. “You want to sleep over tonight, Pete? I can turn around here, and just take you home in the morning.”

  When they got back to the little white house in the woods, the phone was ringing in the dark kitchen. Larry answered it, then handed it to his son.

  “Hey…,” Lorelei’s voice said, sounding tired.

  “It’s her,” Stein whispered to Davidek.

  “Who?” Davidek asked.

  “Her,” Stein’s father intoned from the kitchen, making his hand flutter against his chest.

  “I thought you couldn’t call from home?” Stein whispered into the phone as he stretched the cord out to his bedroom and closed the door. Lorelei explained she had gotten a ride home with some friends, and they were at Eat’n Park to grab some french fries. She was calling from a pay phone, and only had a few minutes.

  “Who’d you go with?” Stein asked, knowing she wasn’t on the best terms with any of the girls in their class. “And why’d you ditch me?” He started ranting about Bromine, how he was sick of her picking fights with him, how she had looked like she really might lose it tonight—

  “I love you,” Lorelei cut in. “That’s what I called to tell you. I was afraid to say it in person, I guess. I love you.”

  Every thought in Stein’s head evaporated. Lorelei breathed on the line. “Just … I want to go slow. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said. Okay, yes, anything.

  She was silent. Then, a small voice, almost a whisper. “I liked kissing you.” There was a muffled sound, the clatter of the phone on her end. Then she said, “And you’re handsome.”

  “I agree,” he said. And when she didn’t laugh, he added, “And arrogant.”

  There was a pause. “So we’ll go out again?” she asked.

  “The two of us?”

  “Maybe with Davidek or somebody else?” she said. There was commotion again on the line; she was covering the phone and saying something.

  “Is somebody else there?” Stein asked, and Lorelei responded, “Yeah, just … I’m gonna go now.”

  “But—” Stein heard the click of her line, but held the phone to his face for a long time afterwards.

  Outside in the living room, Davidek sat beside Stein’s father, watching a late-night rerun of a sitcom about a family who lived with a smart-ass alien. Stein’s sister, Margie, bleary-eyed and stumbling around without her contact lenses in, had emerged from her bedroom to ask them to please turn that crap down because the laugh track was giving her a migraine. Now that the phone was free, Davidek got up to tell his parents he was staying the night. As Stein sat down on the couch, his dad noticed the huge smile on his face. “Well, somebody’s glad to be watching Alf,” he said.

  * * *

  Inside the Eat’n Park restaurant, groups of old couples dressed in colorful square dancing costumes were pestering the waitresses for more decaf, while teenagers from the public school were making a ruckus and ruining the salad bar. No one else from St. Mike’s was around. Thank God, Lorelei thought.

  She was sitting in the glass corridor between the restaurant lobby and the exit, where the pay phone and cigarette machine were. She spun around as she hung up the phone. “You idiots!” she said. “You tell me, ‘Say he’s handsome’? He could’ve heard you!”

  Mullen and Simms, old Asshole Face and Sandmouth, were leaning on opposite sides of the cigarette machine. Simms shrugged. “My voice was low enough.”

  “Because I covered the phone!” she exclaimed.

  “We did what we had to,” Mullen said. “Now, let’s get out of here before somebody sees us together.”

  They led Lo
relei outside and she slumped in the front seat of Mullen’s 1982 Plymouth Volare—a forest-colored piece of shit known to other students as the Pea Green Love Machine. Mullen got behind the wheel and Simms crawled into the backseat, gnawing on a Smiley Cookie from the restaurant’s bakery. “You want a bite?” he asked, extending the half with the eyes to her.

  She had no one to blame but herself for this. Lorelei had sought them out as protectors that day in the cafeteria just before Christmas. She had been desperate, and they had promised to make the others leave her alone—all she had to do was help them in return. They wanted to hurt Stein. Badly. But that was okay. At the time, so did she.

  At the time.

  She wasn’t even sure what the plan was. Mullen and Simms wanted her to stay with Stein just long enough to humiliate him, maybe by simply dumping his sorry ass again. They wanted to really get to him, to hit him in a way that would hurt a lot worse than any kick or punch. By devastating the untouchable Stein, they would prove their worth to the other upperclassmen—and Lorelei would do the same.

  Out there on the dance floor, feeling his fingertips brush her midriff, Lorelei began to doubt what she was doing. But then Stein had gone and pissed off Bromine for about the seven hundreth time, almost dragging Lorelei into that mess again, too.

  Maybe the son of a bitch did deserve this.

  As they drove her home, Simms said from the backseat, “You sure you don’t want to come back here with me? I like that little shirt of yours. You have a cute belly.”

  Lorelei pressed her face against the cool glass of the passenger window, feeling her skin crawl. She said to Mullen, “If your creep friend comes on to me again, I’m going to barf in your car.”

  Mullen laughed. Protecting her from that idiot was easy. Protecting her from the other seniors?… That was nothing he could promise, though she apparently didn’t know that. Only through pleading with Audra and menacing the Grough sisters had the boys secured her a bit of peace in the month since she approached them. They didn’t intend to keep that up forever. When they were done with Lorelei, she was on her own. Nobody in the school liked Stein, but they didn’t like her either. Let the bitch and the fucker destroy each other.

  “No more flirting with Lorelei, Simms. She’s off-limits,” Mullen said, grinning in the blue glow of the dashboard lights. “Remember—she’s our little sister now, you pervert.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A list was circulating. Nothing written, just rumors of names—people Hannah Kraut was singling out for special treatment in her notebook. LeRose heard he was on the list. So did a lot of other people. No one knew if the list changed as word of it passed from room to room, collecting new names the way a bee gathers pollen. No one wanted to talk about why they might be on the list, but everyone was eager to theorize why others could be.

  After a long détente, Hannah found herself the object of open hatred once again. In a rare lunchtime appearance, Hannah had been sitting at an empty table in the center of the cavernous, lime-colored cafeteria, one hand carrying the occasional french fry to her mouth, with the other splaying a paperback of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

  “Fuuuuuuucckksssssllluuuuuttttt!!!”

  The call came from far away, some anonymous drone who bellowed it and hid his face before anyone could spot him. Davidek thought it came from the junior section.

  Hannah looked up from her book and turned toward the yell. Then, from the other end of the room, a girl’s voice snapped out the word loudly, like a sneeze: Fkslt!!!

  JayArr Picklin and Charlie Karsimen, two freshmen too crazed to know they should hide themselves, tried to join the bandwagon by chanting “Fuck-slut! Fuck-slut!” as they thumped on the table.

  Davidek could hear the word murmured now by other voices, low, swirling around the cafeteria … fuckslutfuckslutfuckslut, underlined by hidden giggles.

  Davidek watched his beautiful redhead senior stand up and place one shoe on her chair, stepping up onto the lunch table, her mismatched eyes gazing around the room. “You think I don’t see you,” she said softly. “You think you’re hidden.”

  Her voice silenced the whispers like a knife slicing a throat.

  She pointed in the direction of the juniors, toward a guy with a thick neck and a handsome all-American-boy face that was perpetually smeared with a smirk. “John Hannidy,” she said.

  Hannidy shouted back in protest: “I didn’t say anything!” He glared at another boy at his table, one who had been calling out the name.

  If Hannah realized this, she didn’t care. “Go ahead and lie, but I know what you’ve done, Turkey Baster. Did you think the people who knew would lie for you? Did you, John?”

  Hannah turned toward the senior tables, where the fkslt!! sneeze had originated.

  “Nora Dalmolin,” Hannah said, as the girl turned to her best friend, Beth Weitz, asking what the hell Hannah was doing. “Beth Weitz,” Hannah said, still pointing. She lingered before turning again. All she had said were their names.

  But a panicked Beth and Nora began babbling at each other in a pitch like dolphins trying to talk their way out of a fishing net.

  “Who wants to be next?” Hannah said, spreading her arms wide to the faces staring up at her. “Who wants to be singled out?”

  Ms. Bromine strode over toward Hannah’s stump speech, flanked by Mr. Mankowski and Mrs. Tunns. They were approaching cautiously, unsure what was happening.

  LeRose stood up from his table, hair falling down in his face as he shouted: “We don’t have to take this. We can crush her if we all stay together. Don’t—”

  “Carl LeRose,” Hannah said, silencing him. “How’s Daddy?”

  LeRose sank into his seat, jaw clenched, sweat boiling on his forehead. “You’re not allowed to say anything about my father,” LeRose said flatly.

  “Hannah Kraut, step down from that table immediately,” Ms. Bromine said, looking at her fellow teachers for justification. “It’s … unsafe.”

  Hannah, still holding her hands out, nodded once. But before she stepped down, she scanned the faces of the room one more time. “EVERY. SINGLE. ONE OF YOU,” Hannah said. “Don’t you dare doubt it.”

  No one knew for sure what she meant, but no one was saying a word. Hannah walked out of the hushed room with the unmistakable feeling of triumph.

  Let them hate me, but in silence.

  * * *

  If it was possible to become more radioactive, Hannah accomplished it. People fled from her, moved away from doorways if she walked near, and didn’t speak if she was around—mostly out of fear she’d imagine them talking about her, even if they weren’t.

  The students of St. Mike’s focused their unhappiness on Davidek. They only wanted his help, but there was menace in their outreach.

  “Davidek, what do you suppose Hannah meant when she mentioned my dad?” LeRose asked, sidling up to him in the lunch line the next day. LeRose had a saggy, sad look in his eyes and offered to buy Davidek’s lunch if they could sit and talk. Davidek said he didn’t have to pay but stopped objecting when LeRose opened his billfold for the clerk, revealing a seam of green like coal strata in a mountainside.

  They found an empty table, but soon Green and then Stein came and sat with them. Neither liked each other very much anymore, but they both liked Davidek when the other wasn’t around. “This is a private conversation,” LeRose told them. Stein said, “You can go talk about your privates somewhere else. This is a freshman table.”

  “It’s okay, LeRose, these guys are friends. You can trust them,” Davidek said.

  “Plus, he’s just going to tell us everything you said later,” Green added.

  LeRose laid his arms open on the table, mulling his words. “You know my dad’s a big deal, right?”

  Davidek chewed. “So you keep saying…”

  “Well, he’s a really big deal.”

  Green said cautiously: “Isn’t he a funeral director?”

  “Creepy,” Stein said. “Dead bod
ies and all that?”

  “He’s a town selectman,” LeRose said. “And a member of the parish council. He owns apartments and commercial real estate all over this valley, and—yes—we also own the LeRose funeral home, which my father inherited from an uncle. We do not involve ourselves with the bodies, for your information. Okay?”

  “You don’t get involved?” Stein said. “So it’s more of a one-night-stand kind of thing for you and the bodies.”

  LeRose blurted, “Does Hannah say anything about my dad in her little book?”

  “How do I know?” Davidek asked.

  “Well, has she shown you any of it? Or told you about it? People have seen you two talking, and you don’t exactly look like you’re standing up to her or anything.”

  “What’s he supposed to do?” Stein demanded. “Piss her off, like you did yesterday?”

  LeRose kept his eyes fixed on Davidek. “You’re her freshman—but you can use that position to look out for your friends. Protect us.”

  Davidek’s throat felt tight.

  “Even if you don’t fight her, let us know what she’s got,” LeRose said. “It’s probably lies, but I want to know. All of us—we want to know. To prepare ourselves.”

  “What’s there to know about your dad?” Green asked. “What does he care about what a high school girl thinks of him?”

  “Nothing. Nothing in the least,” LeRose said, leaning back in his chair. “But as with any successful businessman, people like to spread lies about him.”

  “Like what?” Davidek asked.

  “I’d prefer not to say.…”

  “I doubt Hannah even knows who he is,” Davidek said. “I mean, your old man is just another nobody, like all our dads.”

  “A nobody?” the sophomore laughed. Carl LeRose was not the kind of person who could control an emotion like pride. “My father is a good, hardworking man, and he has always done the right thing,” he said. “But the right thing, and the legal thing … sometimes aren’t the same. He’s got some enemies.”