Brutal Youth: A Novel

by Anthony Breznican

  Stein nodded, slowly, as if it hardly mattered anymore. “She deserves heaven, I think. Silly as that sounds. I hope she got there. She never hurt anybody.…” His voice drifted so low, he was hard to hear. “But I’ve hurt people.… I’d have hurt those guys today. All for a girl.” He snorted a laugh, but it could have been a cough. “One I couldn’t even … tell the truth to.”

  “You can tell everyone the truth now,” Davidek said. “It’s overdue.”

  Stein looked up at his friend, his arms still squeezed under his jacket. His voice broke, just a whisper. “You tell them for me … Okay?”

  Davidek rolled his eyes. “Come on, man,” he said, reaching down. But Stein’s legs slipped against the floor. There was something beneath him, a darkness, spreading.

  “Oh shit,” Davidek said. “Oh fuck…”

  He dropped Stein, whose hands fell out of his jacket and flopped against the tile in great scarlet splatters. The belly of Stein’s white shirt, hidden before by his folded arms and dark blazer, was soaked black with blood, seeping into the top of his khaki pants.

  Davidek tried to hold the cuts on his wrists closed, but couldn’t. The slashes were long jagged streaks reaching all the way up Stein’s forearms, glinting with flecks of broken mirror glass.

  * * *

  Davidek didn’t realize he was moving. In his mind, he remained rooted to the spot by the door, not cradling his friend, not watching Stein’s arms flail against his neck and face as he dragged the boy, screaming for help.

  The bathroom grew distant in the dark hallway. Then he was in the rain. Someone was shaking him, grabbing his jaw and turning his face. He stared dumbly up at Sister Maria, whose eyes bulged, as if a giant fist were squeezing her. “Stay here!” she screamed. “Stay here!”

  Then the nun appeared in front of him in a little burgundy car. Davidek was looking down through the back window at Stein, sprawled on the backseat, his blood smearing the gray cushions. I’m sorry … sorry … sorry, someone was saying. Maybe Stein. Maybe Davidek. Maybe both.

  Then the car was gone, and Davidek was alone. He stood so long in the rain, staring at where his friend had gone, that the water pouring through his bloodsoaked clothes washed him clean.

  THIRTY-THREE

  It was midnight by the time the storm faded, retreating in threads through a moonless sky. Sister Maria’s little red car cut through the low mist on the street outside the convent and jerked to a stop with one tire perched on the curb. The nun got out and closed the door quietly, folding her arms across a blouse that had been white that morning but now bloomed with patches of dark brown, like a garden of dead flowers.

  Behind the convent, the lightless monolith of the school cut a black square through the array of stars beyond it. Sister Maria looked next door to the priest’s rectory. Father Mercedes’s home was also dark, and she watched it in silence.

  A window in the shape of a cross in the convent’s front door cast a glowing T across the floor as Sister Maria entered and crept upstairs, careful to avoid the steps she knew would creak. Feeling silly, like a teenager—sneaking home after curfew.

  The nun felt along the wall of the hallway rather than turn on a light. Her housemate, Sister Antonia, was asleep, tucked neatly beneath the covers in her bedroom. Her white hair, usually hidden by a black habit, flowed out on her pillow, and a rosary was clutched in her hand, like a body laid out in a funeral home. The image filled Sister Maria with sadness. The convent once housed seven nuns, but someday, probably soon, she would be alone here.

  In her own bedroom, Sister Maria clicked on the small reading lamp, and the taut pastel sheets over her mattress tempted her to slip between them and close her eyes. As she removed her ruined blouse, dried specks of blood fell from the buttons to the wood floor. She studied herself in the dresser mirror. It wasn’t her mirror—everything in the home belonged to the Sisters of Saint Joseph. The mirror had been there when she arrived, and it would remain after she was gone. Only the reflection was hers—this old woman, flesh spotted and gray. Weak. Frightened.

  This is who she was, though her faith taught that the body was just temporary. A rental, of sorts. The soul was all we truly owned. Sister Maria got down on her knees, the floor creaking along with her joints, and prayed thanks to God for letting the boy live.

  But her work was not finished, and she asked Him to help her with that, too.

  * * *

  The nun crossed the moist grass in the front yard again, now wrapped in a warm, fresh sweater beneath a black peacoat. She passed under the pine trees bordering the priest’s home and walked up the rectory steps, where she knocked on the front door and waited. Then she rang the bell and waited some more. Heavy footsteps and groaning complaints descended the stairs inside. Father Mercedes’s hands fumbled with the strap of a terry cloth robe as he opened the door. The nun had known him a long, long time, but had never seen his skinny white legs before.

  “Did I wake you?” she asked. A stupid question.

  The priest pursed his lips, and asked one of his own. “Where the hell’ve you been?”

  Sister Maria felt her pulse quicken, thinking: This is how guilty students feel when they stand before me trying to lie their way out of trouble in the principal’s office. “We had a terrible tragedy today,” she said, then waited to see what he’d say next.

  “I’ll say you did,” the priest told her. He was trying to focus his eyes in the darkness of the porch, but had forgotten his glasses upstairs.

  “Did you … go inside to see any of it?” the nun asked, praying that he had not.

  The priest groaned. “I spent all day in Pittsburgh at the bishop’s biannual, explaining why our parish can’t match last year’s goal in the Vatican Advancement fund this year. You knew that—”

  “Did you go inside … when you got back?” Her voice was small, hopeful.

  The priest shook his head. “Saducci said I’d need a wetsuit. And it was late. And I was tired, Sister. Anyway, I can’t can’t clean up all your messes,” he said. “I’ll see the damage tomorrow. If I must.”

  Sister Maria held back a hallelujah. “Thank you, Father. I just wanted to make sure you were properly informed.”

  The priest began to close the door and she thought that was the end, but he swung it open again for one last dig. “And where were you all day? Saducci and Mrs. Corde spent the afternoon in the church office, making appointments with contractors for tomorrow. Without you. Make sure you’re available to meet them.”

  “I will, Father,” she said. “I just had to manage a small crisis today. The Stein boy.” Part of her wanted to say everything, right here and now—confess everything.

  “What’s he got to do with this?” the priest asked.

  Sister Maria backed away. She raised one hand from her coat. “Nothing, Father. We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said, smiling faintly. “No need to burden you more tonight.”

  The nun descended into the yard, slipping around the side of her house, where she waited until the rectory lights clicked off again. Then she headed toward the school.

  * * *

  She had made a promise at the hospital, but wasn’t sure she could keep it until now.

  Orderlies, nurses, and doctors had swarmed the boy as they retreated into the emergency room with his body, which looked like a gruesome doll on the white gurney, shriveled, unmoving. Sister Maria had knelt beside the vending machines, praying the rosary by memory, and at the start of the third set of Hail Marys, the boy’s father stormed into the waiting room. The nun gushed apologies, begged forgiveness. When the boy’s sister arrived, they all held hands and prayed some more.

  Doctors came and went. They gave no predictions, no comfort, certainly no promises. Two police officers entered sometime later. Sister Maria repeated what she knew and answered their questions. It was self-inflicted, yes? Was there anyone with him?

  Sister Maria thought of the boy—Davidek. No, she lied. No one else.

  The police talked with
the family, going over the boy’s history, his mother, the fire, his troubles at the school. A psychiatrist was called in to speak with the family about the boy’s mental state.

  When the police officers departed, Sister Maria walked with them outside. “This will follow him, won’t it?” she asked. “All his friends at the school, other people in the town … How much time does he have before your report goes public and the newspaper picks it up?”

  The police officers seemed embarrassed. They looked at each other and the equipment around their belts jangled restlessly. One said, “We do have to file a report, that’s the law.” And the other said, “Of course, we’ve got a lot of work to do.” The nun didn’t get the insinuation. He smiled at her. “Do you understand, Sister?” the cop asked. “We have a lot of other work to do. Real crimes—these personal tragedies … those reports go to the bottom of the list. Sometimes they stay there, or get misfiled. Unless something dire happens…”

  His partner said, “That wouldn’t necessarily be a sin, would it, Sister?”

  “No,” she said, and reached out to touch both their faces. “It’s mercy.”

  Inside the emergency room, she found the boy’s father and sister again. They wanted to pray some more, but she had other business to discuss with them. If Noah Stein survived, there was something more they could do to make his life a little easier.

  * * *

  Sister Maria found everything she needed in the janitor’s storage room, which Mr. Saducci had left unlocked in all the pandemonium during the flood. That was good. That meant anybody could have gotten ahold of these items, even a student.

  In the boys’ bathroom, there was more blood streaking the floor than she expected. Her flashlight didn’t reveal all of it to her at once, which was probably for the best. She might have stopped right then, overwhelmed, but she had made a pledge. It was time to fulfill it.

  She positioned the flashlight on the window ledge and hung her coat on a hook inside the third toilet stall, then rolled up the sleeves on her sweater.

  The crowbar from the storage room was almost as long as a golf club, and so thick and heavy, she could hardly raise it. She wondered how Saducci would even use it, but it was so rusted and cobwebby, she guessed he didn’t. The nun raised the crowbar high over her head and let gravity do the rest.

  The solid steel hook bit into the thick white lip of the sink and shattered it, dropping crumbled pebbles of porcelain like a shattered jaw, gushing a clear drool of water. She turned to the opposite wall and raised the prybar higher this time, turning her face aside as her frail arms pounded the hook against the first urinal, shattering it into ice-white chunks.

  She tapped the crowbar against the flush handle a few times, sending a cascade of toilet water across the floor, flooding the bathroom and dissolving the thick trail of blood smeared across the tile, which swirled in a wide, brown galaxy as the brass drain embedded in the floor swallowed it.

  Sister Maria closed her eyes and used the blunt end of the hook to crush out the remaining glass in the mirror Stein had punched. That might have been enough, but something in her wouldn’t stop. She hammered dents in the metal stalls around the toilets, cracking away round disks of paint, six decades thick. She caved in the towel dispenser, then swung at the plastic soap dispenser like it was a baseball, popping it in a plume of pink ooze.

  When Sister Maria finally stopped, her lungs heaved furiously, her peppery hair hung in her eyes, and sweat beaded on her face and back. She leaned against the crowbar like a cane, flexing the numb fingers on her hands. A soreness clawed at her throat. She didn’t realize she had been screaming.

  This was enough. She left the crowbar standing in one of the toilet bowls. That’s how a vandal would abandon it, she figured.

  In the janitor’s closet, she had also found a box of spray paint—all different colors, though black seemed to be the appropriate one. She pulled the canister out of her peacoat pocket and aimed the flashlight toward the wall with the shattered urinal.

  Keep it simple, she thought. Use an old standard.

  FUCK YOU, appeared on the green tile in long, dripping lines. She held the nozzle so close to the wall that black droplets bounced back and stained her fingers.

  Sister Maria stood back, admiring the block letters. “Fuck … you,” she read aloud. It was the first time in her life she’d ever said those words, and it felt disgusting—bitter in her mouth.

  She turned to the opposite wall, with the fractured sink and the smashed-out mirror. She needed something different here. How else would a crazed fifteen-year-old unleash his fury on his school? He would attack the people who had driven him to this, but Sister Maria knew she couldn’t single out any particular students, however much they deserved it. She raised the spray can and said each letter aloud as she wrote: “Ess … Ayy … Eye … Enn…”

  Sister Maria stood back to scan the words with her flashlight: SAINT MICHAELS

  Then she spritzed an apostrophe between the L and S. The kid was supposed to be furious, not a moron.

  Now what? Saint Michael’s … Drop Dead? Too tame.

  It had to sound like a boy, not some fussy old nun. Everyone had to believe the story—a kid with a history of behavior problems had turned violent, trashed a bathroom, cut himself (accidentally) in the process, and was now suspended. The story might have a few little holes, but it would hold together. She just needed it to look legitimate.

  SAINT MICHAEL’S …

  “… Sucks,” she said, and began painting the word, cutting across the mirrors. Kids say that all the time. This sucks, that sucks, you suck …

  Sister Maria raised the paint nozzle once again, but hesitated, hovering in front of the letters. She had already committed to sucks. But what sucks? What did that word mean anyway?

  The nun thought of the drain, guzzling water, and porcelain chips. That sucked, in the literal sense, but the slang referred to … Funny, she had never thought about it.

  Penis, she thought. Fine, she had unleashed the word in her mind. But penis was too clinical. She had never heard an angry student say, “Suck my penis!”

  Pecker? That was good. Pecker—she mentally added it to her list of euphemisms, but it felt a little too jaunty. Wang or Ding-dong seemed too … what? Juvenile?

  The nun agonized over this longer than was prudent.

  Cock. That was a good one, right? Cock.

  But no. A kid might use that word, but she would not. Too lusty.

  Cock. She tried to forget it, but the word kept insinuating itself.

  “Dick,” she said, and it fit like a puzzle piece. The nun said a quick mental prayer of thanks. Strange to offer an Our Father for a word like that.

  SAINT MICHAEL’S SUCKS DICK appeared on the wall.

  As she finished spraying the downward line on the K, Sister Maria’s arm absently let the hand holding the canister fall to her side, her finger still pressing the spray button, which hissed black mist into nothingness until it finally slipped from her shaking hand.

  The bathroom door was open, and a shadow stood there, watching her.

  Sister Maria’s foot clattered the spray can away as she stumbled backwards, grasping for the flashlight on the windowsill. The whiteness of a face stared at her from the darkness as she spun the light toward it.

  The nun leaned back against the radiator, clutching a hand to her thundering heart. Thank you God, thank you, oh God oh God oh God.

  Peter Davidek stepped forward into the dim light, looking ill, his face pale, his hair matted and knotty. The navy blazer hanging over his shoulders seemed too large.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” the nun asked, overwhelmed with relief that the person who had discovered her was the one person at St. Mike’s she needed to include in the lie anyway.

  Davidek looked at the walls, and the runny black curses sprayed across them.

  “I guess I could ask you the same question,” he said.

  * * *

  The homes of Tarentum w
ere just glowing windows hanging in the mist as Sister Maria’s car rolled by in the darkness. Whenever the car passed under the cone of light from a streetlamp, Davidek’s eye kept being drawn to the backseat, where streaks of blood were crusting on the gray upholstery.

  “So … he’s alive,” Sister Maria said, hoping for some sign of cheer from the boy. “We should be grateful for that.”

  “How bad?”

  She didn’t want to answer. She didn’t want to upset him. But she didn’t want to lie. “You know what you saw,” she told him.

  Each of the boy’s questions seemed to take a long time to arrive. “Will he be okay?”

  The nun knew that if she and this boy Davidek were going to fool everyone else, they needed to be honest with each other. So she didn’t answer that one.

  “You saved your friend’s life,” Sister Maria said. “But now we need to protect him some more. No one knows about this except us. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  Davidek kept his face turned toward the nothingness outside his window. “I bet you would,” he said.

  Sister Maria slowed to a stop for a red light at the Tarentum Bridge. To the right was a ramp leading down to where Hannah had taken Davidek for her little trap with the disposable camera. “The mess in the restroom was camouflage,” the nun said. “It will be better for him to be gone from school for that reason, rather than…” She didn’t finish the thought. The light turned green, and they were rolling again. “We all deserve to lose our mistakes. Maybe have a second chance? This will protect him if—”

  “If he lives?” Davidek interrupted.

  “If he comes back,” the nun said.

  Davidek lowered his head. “He’s not coming back. Not to St. Mike’s.”

  “That may be true,” Sister Maria agreed. “But he’ll be somewhere. This doesn’t have to follow him.”

  “And what about the people who caused this?” Davidek asked. “Mullen and Simms? Smitty? Lorelei? You act like you’re doing Stein a favor, but nothing happens to them. They don’t even get to feel guilty. You say, ‘Oh, I’m protecting Stein.…’ But you’re protecting them, too.”