Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  Davidek took a deep breath.

  * * *

  Stein was still laughing at lunch as he imitated Davidek’s answer: “‘Is it, like, a perverted midget?’” he said, falling against Lorelei, who was cracking up, too.

  They were standing out in the parking lot, though Davidek had left his winter coat inside and was freezing in just his blazer. “I couldn’t remember!” he said, opening his arms to the cold. “I thought the imp was maybe the dude who got buried under the floor.”

  March had struck the Valley, and the weather turned schizophrenic: sunny one day, freezing the next. The daffodils and tulips in the school’s gardens were fooled. Lured by the spring sun, they popped their heads from the earth only to have them bitten off by frost.

  When the day was warm, and students who hadn’t left to eat off-campus gathered again in the parking lot, Stein and Lorelei stayed inside the basement cafeteria. When it was bitter cold, and everyone was huddled indoors, they bundled into their winter wear and lingered outside. Davidek hadn’t told them about Hannah and the Jeep. He prayed to God no one ever found out about that, even his friends. Especially his friends.

  It was getting harder for Davidek to hang around with Stein and Lorelei. Sometimes he felt lonelier with them than he did by himself. Even wrapped in their heavy coats, the couple couldn’t keep their hands off each other. They were always leaning into one another or nudging each other or kind of still-dancing with his hands on her hips and her arms over his shoulders. The snow-frosted statue of the Virgin Mary looked down at them with her hands out, like, What is this shit? Davidek felt the same way.

  Something moved in the window of one of the upstairs classrooms and Davidek looked up to see Mullen and Simms duck away from the glass.

  Lorelei noticed them, too, but before Davidek could say anything, Lorelei exclaimed: “My hands are cold!” And she pressed them against Stein’s cheeks.

  “Now my cheeks are cold,” Stein said, and Lorelei leaned in and kissed each one.

  “Now tell her your crotch is cold!” Davidek joked, and Stein grabbed a chunk of ice off the Virgin Mary and tossed it at him. “Get outta here, you perverted midget.…”

  * * *

  “We have to be careful,” Lorelei said. She wasn’t allowed to have long telephone calls with boys, but after her mom went to sleep—or passed out—and her father sank into some late-night cable movies and a six-pack, she was able to sneak the cordless phone into her bedroom and call Stein. It was still a risk she didn’t like taking. It amazed her that Stein’s family didn’t object to these midnight calls, but his father and sister had stopped even answering the phone when it rang that late. They knew it was for Noah. His secret girlfriend.

  She would call him only a few times a week, though he wanted to talk every day, and sometimes rang her house against Lorelei’s wishes, which made her mother suspicious. “It’s just homework questions,” Lorelei explained to her parents. “He’s my study partner in Biology.”

  “Maybe I should call his mom and tell her he needs to start his homework earlier in the night,” Miranda Paskal had threatened, and Lorelei derailed her anger by saying. “His mother is dead.”

  “Dead?” Lorelei’s mom didn’t like to be trumped in tragedy. “How’d that happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Lorelei said, which was the truth.

  Stein wasn’t the world’s greatest conversationalist in their late-night talks. Mostly he just told her how much he wished he was beside her in her bed instead of separated by miles of wire. God help Lorelei if her mother ever picked up the phone and heard a boy say something like that to her daughter.

  “Being around you is the only time I can stand being around myself,” Stein said. Lorelei didn’t like hearing that—for a lot of reasons. But such flattery was nice in its way. The more time she spent pretending to like Stein, the more she actually did.

  They still snuck away to make out during school, though that space outside along the rectory and convent hedges was now packed with snow. “Let’s find somewhere warmer,” she had suggested, and they began skipping class to find hideaways in St. Mike’s many basement stairwells and corridors. Lorelei thought kissing Stein under false pretenses would be weird, but Stein was a great kisser—not pushy or slobbery, the way she imagined other boys to be. He was gentle, and careful—for a change.

  Sometimes they’d just sit on the stairs facing each other, their legs tangled across the length of a step. He talked about strange things, like whether you could love someone without knowing the worst thing about them. Stein could be morose, but she saw it as typical teenage moodiness, and when it got too weird, she would just kiss him again and he’d be his old self.

  Even when it was all over, she could never know for sure what she truly felt about Noah Stein. Lately, she wondered if the only ones she was fooling were Mullen and Simms.

  Life at St. Michael’s had finally become what she wanted. She had a boyfriend in Stein, and she also had a best friend—of sorts—in Davidek, someone she could confide in, who cared enough to rescue her from trouble. The other freshman girls no longer objected to her sitting at their table from time to time, and even Audra Banes and her other former acquaintances in the senior class no longer actively tried to attack her—she had, after all, been somewhat pitied when word began to spread that she’d gotten Asshole Face and Sandmouth as her seniors.

  Maybe she could escape this trap she’d set up. Just tell Stein the truth, warn him what Mullen and Simms were planning, and he could protect her from whatever fallout came after.

  * * *

  There was no way Lorelei’s mother would let her go out on a date, but she was permitted to meet Stein at the Peoples Library in New Kensington—a long way for Stein’s sister to drive, but walking distance for Lorelei. They were translating a passage of Don Quixote for International Day, which was coming up a week after Easter break. Freshmen, still struggling with the rudimentary aspects of their new language classes, were only required to write papers for the festival and bring a dish for the big potluck lunch. Davidek had been working on an essay about French bread, and methods for making it—further isolating him from the Español students Stein and Lorelei.

  “I think this story is sad. He’s so lost,” Lorelei said as they copied passages from an English translation, getting just enough of it wrong in their papers to make it seem like they translated it themselves. Stein disagreed. “He’s seeing what he wants to see … and it makes him happy. He’s forgetting the bad stuff from his past.”

  “The bad stuff is what makes us who we are,” she said.

  Stein was quiet. “You really believe that?”

  Lorelei looked up at him, smiling. “I don’t know.… I was just talking.”

  There was something Stein wanted to tell her. He’d been waiting a long time to tell anybody. In the night-darkened picture windows of the library, his reflection spoke while hers listened, and neither one moved until he was finished.

  * * *

  Mullen and Simms had lost.

  Defeat was familiar territory, so they saw it coming. Lorelei had been brushing them off for weeks as they pressed her for information, and they were powerless to change it. No one respected Asshole Face and Sandmouth, and when Lorelei began ignoring them, no one was surprised they couldn’t even control a little freshman girl.

  Richard Mullen’s and Frank Simms’s undistinguished careers at St. Michael the Archangel High School were fizzling to an inauspicious end. They’d be ejected with a diploma and the lowest possible grade-point average. No one would remember, except maybe that Mullen was the dude who got stabbed with a pen. Simms would just become whatsisname. If they truly wanted to humiliate Stein, maybe they should have thought through their plan a little more.

  Now it was over. They knew it.

  So just before Easter break, when Mullen and Simms heard their freshman “little sister” was looking for them, they knew what was coming. The Big Tell-Off, when even Lorelei Paskal, once one of the
most helpless of all St. Mike’s students, would instruct them to go and eat shit.

  That night after Stein’s confession in the library, Lorelei had parted with him on the street and whispered, “I love you,” after kissing him good-bye. This time she meant it. Even later, she believed that though that made the rest only more unfathomable, even to her.

  Lorelei asked around for Mullen and Simms, but got only shrugs. Between classes, she passed silently through the crowded hallways of chattering students—searching. No one spoke to her, but that was okay. Maybe that would change.

  When she found them by the vending machines, they were ready for the end.

  What she actually said, she said freely. Unforced. Unafraid. Aware. If the motive baffled her, maybe she didn’t want to know the real reason. Easier to believe it simply made no sense.

  Lorelei told them, “Would you like to know how he really got that scar on his face?…”

  PART V

  La Verdad y Nada

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sister Maria stood at the podium on the Palisade Hall bingo stage and announced to the assembled students: “Buenos dias. Bonjour. Wilkkommen. And—welcome—to St. Michael’s International Day!”

  There was mild applause, and then the hundreds of kids sitting in their school uniforms ignored the rest of her speech about what a long-standing tradition this event was at St. Mike’s, blah, blah, blah. They just wanted the free food.

  Freshmen had already turned in their papers. Davidek got a C+ on French bread; Lorelei and Stein fared an A- on their plagiarized Don Quixote passages. The day’s festivities belonged to the upperclassmen, and each class had separate duties.

  Everyone brought some kind of dish, but the sophomores supplied the main courses for the afternoon-long festival. LeRose bragged to everybody who would listen that he pumped intestine-scorching levels of Vietnamese hot pepper juice into his chimichangas. “Give ’em a try, man. You’ll shit a jet of blue flame!” But that was a bad sales pitch. His ripening little prank coagulated untouched at the end of the long buffet, while the students devoured crepes and baguettes from the French classes, sauerkraut and weiners from the German students, and a dump truck of spaghetti cooked by the handful of seniors participating in a special college-level Latin course.

  Juniors were responsible for decorating Palisade Hall, mostly poster-board displays with facts about French impressionist painting or Germany’s autobahn freeway, but there were always a few enterprising kids who tried to build miniature Spanish galleons out of Legos or a Popsicle-stick Eiffel Tower.

  The seniors supplied the entertainment by writing, directing, and acting out skits on the auditorium stage, with most of the dialogue pantomimed so that everyone could understand the foreign-language action. In between the little plays were some song-and-dance numbers. The French class always lip-synched to an old record—“Aux Champs-Élysées”—while twirling parasols, and the teachers always acted surprised when the students would pull them up onstage to dance with them.

  The day had an unusual sense of joy about it. Davidek laughed along with some seniors when they saw Mr. Mankowski enter the proceedings dressed in the puffy white shirt and emerald green leiderhosen of an Oktoberfest dancer—and Mankowski laughed along with them, giving his be-socked legs a twist and a tap for their amusement, in on the joke for once.

  Zari floated around the periphery, snapping pictures for the yearbook—a duty she had been pressed into by her mentors, the Groughs, who gave her specific instructions of whom not to photograph. She didn’t care, and just shot whatever she wanted.

  Hannah Kraut was one of the French students, and before the “Aux Champs-Élysées” number, she sat on one end of the stage with her feet dangling over the side, her downy blue cancan skirt drooping like a giant predatory flower choking on a pair of legs. She saw Davidek and winked at him. “Hey, Playgirl,” she said, making him look away.

  “Come on, Stein, let’s go sit in the back,” Davidek said, weaving through the crowd.

  “I need to find Lorelei first…,” Stein told him.

  He spotted her in the corridor leading backstage, where the Spanish seniors were gathering for their performance. She seemed to be arguing with Mullen, who was holding a giant piñata shaped like an airplane.

  “If that guy is giving her shit, I’ll bust that piñata right over his fucking face,” Stein said, and Davidek held him back as Lorelei pushed through the crowd toward them. “I’m not feeling well. Can you take me upstairs?”

  “What’s wrong?” Stein asked.

  She shook her head, frustrated, as if he wasn’t listening. “I don’t feel well. Will you please take me upstairs?”

  “Sure, sure thing…”

  But Ms. Bromine had been watching them and stepped forward as Lorelei’s hand slipped into Stein’s. “No touching on school grounds!” Bromine barked.

  “She’s sick,” Stein said. “I’m taking her up—”

  “Are you the school nurse now?” Bromine said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Davidek put a hand on Stein’s shoulder. “Come on, man.”

  Bromine smacked his fingers, a little hard. “No touching, Mr. Davidek,” she said as she led Lorelei away.

  * * *

  The Spanish teacher, Mrs. Tunns, was bitter over having to once again follow Sister Antonia’s terrible dance number, and hurried the French students offstage as she scowled at the slow-moving Spanish students hauling their props. This year’s Spanish show was whipped together at the last minute, and she was worried it would be a mess. She had wanted a translation of Hamlet’s “Murder of Gonzago” scene, but some of her lowest-watt students, Mullen and his pal Simms, had persuaded the other kids to do a stupid, slapsticky public service skit instead.

  The stage was set to look like a room with a table and chairs and a bed. On one chair, they placed a bulging white sack with an oversized plastic nozzle affixed to the end. PEGAMENTO LOCO, its label read in fat, hand-drawn letters.

  “What’s that mean?” Davidek asked, peering around heads from where they sat in the middle of the audience.

  “Uh … loco means ‘crazy.’ I don’t know what the other word means,” Stein said.

  “I think it means ‘glue.’ It’s Krazy Glue,” LeRose spoke up from the row behind them.

  “Ha, ha,” Davidek said flatly. “Hi-larious.”

  The Spanish teacher took the microphone at center stage and ran a hand across her goatish head to smooth any loose hairs. “St. Michael’s senior Spanish students would like to present: a public service announcement. Parada, Gota y Rodillo or, in English: ‘Stop, Drop, and Roll.’ The skit will be performed with an English translation.”

  As Mrs. Tunns walked off, the actors marched into formation onstage, led by a girl in a shawl who wore an enormous brown wig that looked like a lot of small animals sewn together. Behind her came the infamous and revolting Mark Carney, one of those scumbag types who rarely bathed and thought pulling down his pants to light farts at parties was a good way to impress girls. Now he stood before the whole school, sucking his thumb and stretching the life out of a pair of Winnie-the-Pooh footie pajamas. He waggled his tongue at the audience as he bent over, pointing at his ass, and asked, “Where’s the hatch on this thing? I gotta poop!” which drew furious laughter from the crowd, but made Mrs. Tunns jab a finger at him from the wings of the stage and snap “Non español!”

  “It’s weird,” Davidek said. “The seniors are up onstage doing the kind of dumb stuff we’re all terrified of at the Hazing Picnic. And they love it.”

  Stein shrugged. “It’s different when you choose to be the idiot.”

  The show’s translators walked out to the podium: Asshole Face Mullen and a stout, disgruntled-looking girl named Beth Bartolski, each wearing a birthday sombrero from Chi-Chi’s restaurant. Beside them, Carney’s little-boy character plopped down on a pillow and pulled a blanket over himself. “¡Mamasita! ¡Mamasita!” he called out to the actress with the critter wig and shawl, w
ho sat beside him, knitting.

  “Mommy. Mommy,” Mullen translated from the podium, a satisfied smile on his lips as he faced the audience.

  “¿Sí, mi hijo?” the girl playing the mother responded.

  “Yes, my son,” Beth Bartolski translated in monotone.

  Carney wobbled forward on his knees—his way of playing a little kid. “No soy sonoliento,” he said.

  “It is bedtime, but I’m not sleepy,” Mullen echoed in English.

  You have too much energy. You must be in bed before your father returns home, the mama said, and the little boy began to wail and throw himself around the stage in a comical fit. “¡Déjeme acabar mi piñata!” the boy shouted. I want to finish building my piñata!

  The girl playing the mother pretended to look to the audience for parenting advice. “Let him play!” a girl shouted, followed by a round of applause. “Spank him!” another voice yelled, this time to bigger applause.

  “This is kind of hilarious,” Davidek whispered over his shoulder to LeRose, who nodded enthusiastically. Davidek elbowed a smile out of Stein, who was sitting quietly. “Yeah, it’s funny,” Stein agreed.

  Onstage, the mother agreed to let the boy finish his airplane piñata, and Carney’s bizarre man-child grabbed the gigantic, fake tube of glue and held it over his head triumphantly as the crowd cheered. The mother warned him in Spanish: Be careful! That glue is very flammable and very dangerous.

  Then, as Carney continued to cavort with the glue and piñata, the girl playing the mother laid herself down on the make-believe bed and closed her eyes. Oh, I am so tired from caring for this little monster! she said

  Carney stage-whispered to the crowd: This piñata needs more glue!

  Then he huffed, and puffed, and squeezed the cardboard bottle until his face turned crimson, the whole time barking: “¡Más pegamento!” The audience began to chant it along with him. More glue! More glue!