Her little fish mouth broke into a goofy smile. “I’d love to hang out and girl-talk,” she told Lorelei. “And trust me—I’m good at keeping secrets.”
* * *
Someone had picked the lock on the soda machine in the cafeteria, and one of the lunch ladies noticed it too late. She yelled after the group of raiding students as they scampered away through the basement corridors, arms loaded with cans of pop.
At the time of the robbery, Davidek was upstairs, stuffing his duffel bag to the point of bursting with notebooks, tests, and papers, though he no longer needed them. He hefted the bag over his shoulder, thought for a second, then just emptied it all into the trash. From down the hall, he heard Green call out his name.
The heavy boy jogged forward, the throat of his white shirt gaping. The twin red stripes of his undone uniform tie dangled from each shoulder. Green raised his arms in the air, a can of stolen Coke in each hand. “Come on,” Green said, and led Davidek down the hall to the foot of the east stairwell.
Green handed Davidek a can, and they leaned against the steel railing. Since none of the seniors were around anymore, this spot belonged to them now. Green was happy to have traded those friends for Davidek.
Above them, on the midway landing, a stained glass mosaic of the Virgin Mary glowed in the afternoon sun, her arms open and slanting multicolored rays down at the boys. Dust drifting from the hollow space three floors up became fireflies in the light.
“What was the big secret of this spot, anyway?” Davidek asked. “Why did they hang out here all the time?”
Green couldn’t contain his proud and sinister grin. “Watch,” he said, and snapped open the top of his soda. “But you have to keep it just between us. If too many people know…”
Davidek shrugged and opened his can, too. He gulped some of the fizzy pop.
“Patience,” Green said, watching the first-floor doors in front of them and listening for footsteps from above.
A pair of junior girls began descending from the second floor, and when they appeared on the riser just above the boys, Green tilted his head back to take a long swig and motioned for Davidek to do the same.
As Davidek leaned back, the soda biting in his throat, he finally saw the appeal of the stairwell as a hangout spot—it provided a perfect view straight up the plaid skirt of the St. Mike’s uniform. And drinking soda was just the camouflage.
When the girls were gone, Green laughed and pointed at the grinning, mute Davidek. “I never saw eyes that big!” he said.
Davidek told him, “I never saw underwear that big!” which just made the heavy boy laugh harder.
“She was big, she was big,” Green agreed. “The other one was all right, but the hottest one—Penny, I think her name is—too bad she was on the inside. That always happens for some reason.”
The change-of-class bell rang, but Green and Davidek stayed in that hollow between the stairs, talking about their hopes for the summer—sleeping late into midmorning, staying up until dawn, maybe swimming out at Melwood pool, and getting in some quality time in front of the glowing screen of Green’s Super Nintendo. (Davidek didn’t have one.)
The door behind them hissed open softly, and Lorelei Paskal came through, trailed by her newfound friend, Seven-Eighths. They carried rolled-up tubes of maps on an errand to one of the upstairs history classrooms. “Hi, guys,” she said, but the boys didn’t answer. She let the snub pass. In many ways, she didn’t blame them. She understood why they didn’t like her. Lorelei didn’t like herself very much anymore either. “I hope you have a nice summer, Davidek. And you, too, Green. I’ll miss you until next year.” Then she began to climb the steps.
Neither boy responded.
She tried to smile at Davidek, but it made her feel sad that he wouldn’t look back. As she passed by the stained glass window, Davidek took a long, slow slip. Head tilted back, eyes calm, he followed the grace of her ascension; the elegant curve of her calf, and the line of muscle in her thigh as she moved higher. He hated Lorelei like no one else in the world, but couldn’t keep his eyes away. Her legs circled above him like a daydream, the hem of her skirt stirring the shadows beneath.
Green understood the harsh feelings there, and tried to join in Davidek’s disdain. “She’s the devil,” he grumbled softly.
“Yeah…,” Davidek said, wiping his mouth as his eyes still followed her. “But the devil sure tempts.”
EPILOGUE
Davidek was ironing a white shirt and khaki pants for graduation night. The ceremony took place on Saturday evening at the gymnasium chapel, and since there was a Mass associated with it, the school needed altar boy volunteers. That’s how the still-grounded Davidek tricked his parents into letting him go. “It’s a mandatory school event,” he explained, fearing that excuse had worn out its welcome. In addition to being true, however, this time he had documentation: a printed list of duties during the ceremony. “I’m a candle-bearer!”
His parents fought over who should drive him to the church, and his mother lost this time. She had hoped to go to the movies with her friends that night—the one where Whoopi Goldberg played a singing nun had just opened—but instead she was pissed about spending her night in church watching other people’s children accept diplomas. “This came in the mail,” she said, throwing an envelope down on his bed as he ironed his shirt. Davidek’s name and address were printed in block letters. There was a stamp, postmarked Idaho. Nothing else.
She waited for him to open it.
Inside was a single sheet of paper with a fringe along the edge where it was torn from a notebook. The words were nonsense that made perfect sense to him.
I don’t know who I am, what I am, where I am half the time. The other half, I know but don’t want to. They sent me far away to bring my brain closer to home. Good thing I left a forwarding address. Sorry I can’t give you one. Doctor’s orders. I’m sneaking this out, but there’s no sneaking in.
My thoughts are returning one by one. I will too. Then, my friend, compared to a nutcase like you—I will no longer be “the crazy guy.”
Give Bromine a kiss for me.
Davidek’s mother read it over his shoulder. “Who’s that from?”
Her son lied, holding the page for her to see. “I don’t know … it’s not signed.”
* * *
Mr. Zimmer spent the morning at the graveyard, drawing the lawn mower around his family plot, using scissors to snip crabgrass and clover away from his mother and father’s tombstone. It wasn’t even fully summertime yet, and the graves that went untended by family members were already as ragged as meadows.
Zimmer sat against his parents’ tombstone, his T-shirt wet with sweat, admiring his work. Now unemployed, perhaps he could open a landscaping business. He liked being outside, using his body, tending his garden at home. It was spare work he did for elderly neighbors during the off-school summer season anyway.
The thought had appeal. Maybe. But somewhere else.
What happened to him at St. Mike’s sickened him. He kept trying to busy his hands, moving old stones by his house, trimming trees, or clipping the grass out here by the graves. Otherwise, those hands shook.
He didn’t want to attend graduation that night, and the school administration didn’t expect him to go either. In fact, he was probably unwelcome. But he had promised someone else he would be there. The two of them would show up in secret. Hopefully, they wouldn’t even be noticed.
There would be a sign—FOR SALE—in front of Mr. Zimmer’s house in the next month. He had few friends left in the Valley apart from his faculty acquaintances at St. Mike’s, and they all believed he was leaving to care for a distant ailing relative. Maybe they would hear ugly rumors about him next year. Or maybe they’d actually believe their old colleague was simply the innocent victim of cost-cutting. He would be far away, regardless. “I’m sorry, Mom … Dad…,” he said to the emptiness around him. “From now on, your grass is gonna grow wild.”
* * *
The graduating seniors lined up in the school hallway leading to the gymnasium church, shimmering in blue robes and angular mortarboard caps, debating over which side the little gold tassel should hang.
The pews filled with parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins. There were girlfriends and boyfriends from other schools. Most of the freshmen, sophomores, and juniors from St. Mike’s also crushed in to see their schoolmates graduate. Davidek saw Lorelei in one of the back rows. Seven-Eighths sat beside her in silence, listening to Lorelei, who was chatting away with her new friend.
Green was with the school choir on the other side of the church, sitting in what were once bleachers when this had been a basketball court.
During the ceremony, Hannah spent most of the time peeking over the shoulders of her taller classmates, trying to get Davidek’s attention. But he kept missing her waves.
His eyes seemed to be fixed on the loft in the back of the church, a balcony where scorekeepers used to monitor the basketball games or stagehands wielded spotlights when the gym was sometimes converted to a theater for school plays. Now, organ pipes rose there like an explosion of fearsome plumbing—so deafening that no one ever attended Mass in the benches up there.
That’s why the figure up in the loft caught his attention. It was a boy, sitting alone.
Davidek stood at the altar, clutching his candelabra alongside Carl LeRose—who held a tall brass cross. Father Mercedes stood at the lectern, reading from Psalms about times to live, times to die, times to reap, and times to sow. Davidek wasn’t listening. He was studying the boy, but couldn’t make out the face from so far away. Still, he was familiar.
The boy’s hair was shorn close, his face was drawn and white—ghostly. His arms and legs were thin in a white button-down shirt and black pants. He held hands folded in prayer in front of his nose, further obscuring his face.
The boy looked ill, like he had been sick for a long time. And that’s when it occurred to Davidek.
Stein.
LeRose nudged him with his elbow. “Davidek, hey…,” he whispered as Father Mercedes droned on from the lectern. “I meant to tell you … I told my dad all about your friend, and all that business with the seniors.” LeRose traced a finger down his cheek to indicate the fake scars.
Davidek nodded. “Do you see him, too?”
LeRose just blinked, “See who?” And Davidek said, “No—nothing,” not wanting to draw attention.
LeRose smiled slyly and said, “Dad thought what Rich Mullen and Frank Simms did was pretty fucked up and horrible. If you’d told me sooner about how Stein helped me that day in the parking lot, maybe I could have jumped in to protect him, you know?”
Davidek looked back up at the gaunt figure in the loft. LeRose smiled knowingly. He said, “I just wanted you to know that,” and winked at him. “You’re picking up what I’m putting down, right?”
“Right,” Davidek said, having no idea.
LeRose said, “Cool … let’s just keep it between us.”
Davidek was very confused now. Did LeRose see Stein in the loft or not?
But the older boy was trying to get Davidek to notice something else entirely: the two empty seats amid the rows of graduating seniors.
* * *
Mullen and Simms had not enjoyed happy lives at St. Mike’s, but they had found some happiness together.
On graduation day, the two boys sat on Mullen’s front porch in West Tarentum, leaning their feet against the wooden railing and tipping back on white plastic chairs. It was their final night as St. Mike’s students, and they tried to reminisce about some of the better times. There weren’t many. All they really had was the vanquishing of Noah Stein, and no one else gave them credit for that.
“You think you’ll ever go to college?” asked Mullen, who was moving to West Virginia in two weeks to start summer school at Wheeling Jesuit University. His parents would only pay for a religious school, and the school would only accept him if he took early remedial classes to account for his lackluster SAT scores.
Simms shrugged. “Naw … Maybe if I ever wanted to know about medieval times or something, I’d take a class or two.” He already had a part-time job as a bagger at Shop N Save in New Kensington. That paid okay for now, but he was still living at home. “Maybe it’ll lead to something more. Got grocery stores all over, in every town. I could go a lot of places,” he said.
Mullen nodded, his finger absently brushing the button-scar on his face. Asshole Face. That was a name he hoped never to hear again. He raised a can of Iron City, stolen from his father’s basement refrigerator, and the two boys clinked their beers together. In college, Mullen would join a fraternity, his grades would be above average, and he’d meet a lot of new people who didn’t automatically know him as a loser. He’d tell stories about his days at St. Mike’s, about the various ways he and his buddy Simms outfoxed the Powers That Were. As the years passed, on return visits home, Mullen would see very little of his old buddy. Someday, Mullen and Simms would each wonder what had become of the other. But Mullen could already tell that day would come. He knew it on the porch that night. Simms didn’t. But that was okay.
A black-and-white police car rolled by on the street, and they hid the beer bottles below their chairs. When it was gone, they finished drinking and debated stealing a couple more, but it was getting late, and the graduation ceremony at the church would start soon.
They drove there in Mullen’s Pea Green Love Machine, the windows down and their blue robes fluttering on hangers in the backseat. The same police car that passed Mullen’s house pulled up behind them. It had circled his block a few times, and here it was again—so Mullen was extra careful, halting fully at every stop sign instead of gliding through.
“What’s with all the po-pos cruising around today?” Simms asked.
Just then, the squad car’s red and white lights came on and the cruiser gave a single yelp of its siren. Mullen pulled over to the side of the road, the Tarentum Bridge looming just ahead of them. They were about halfway to the school.
A figure in a black uniform emerged from the police cruiser, and Mullen fumbled for his wallet, ordering Simms to find the registration in the glove compartment because they were already running late.
The cop barked: “Hands on the wheel!”
Both boys instinctively threw their palms against the car’s roof.
The police officer’s belt filled the driver’s-side window, fitted with Mace, handcuffs, a nightstick, and a dull gray .38 pistol with the clasp unhooked. A curly black cord ran up his chest to a squawking radio receiver.
“Saw yinz run a stop sign back there,” the faceless cop said.
“Nuh-uh, we didn’t run no stop sign!” Simms protested, and Mullen shushed him. He didn’t think he had run one either, but his dad always said apologize right away to a cop and beg to get off with a warning.
“Sorry, Officer,” Mullen says. “See, we’re going to graduation, and I guess I didn’t realize I was hurrying. It won’t happen again.” He held his license out, although the cop hadn’t asked to see it yet.
Then the cop asked to see Simms’s ID.
Simms balked, “I ain’t driving,” but Mullen motioned for him to just do as he was fucking told.
The cop peered at the documents and said their names out loud. “Richard Charles Mullen and Frank John Simms,” he said. “You boys are from St. Mike’s, right?”
They both said yes, and nodded politely with nervous, wide smiles.
The cop said, “I know a guy who has a kid at St. Mike’s. Nice guy. Good to the city.
A Good Samaritan, you know? He certainly has looked out for me in the past.… He actually warned me there might be some troublemakers on the road today, celebrating a little.”
Mullen gestured to the robes hanging in the back. “Not us,” he said. “Just going to the church.”
The cop stood silently his face still unseen. He said, “You boys been drinking.” It wasn’t a question.
Mullen’s color drained. He said, “No, no…”
The cop leaned down and sniffed deeply, then coughed. He said, “You boys been smoking some illegal substances today, too?”
“NO,” they said emphatically, their words falling over one another. “No, no way. Uh-uh.” The cop sniffed again, looking from one boy’s face to the other.
The cop was in his forties, with a thick, tight mustache and eyes hidden behind silver shades. It was going to be a long night for the boys.
Photos and fingerprints would be taken, and their parents would need to come down to the station, their mothers crying, their fathers cursing in their sons’ faces. The charges would be misdemeanors—traffic offenses and resisting an officer’s orders. They had low blood-alcohol levels, but there was some in their system. They’d get the lesser “driving while impaired” charge, but that was enough to haul both of them in. Plus they were underage. Fines would be levied; a little community service would be ordered by a judge in two months, and then the matter would be logged in their records, complicating school and employment matters for a few years to come. Mullen wouldn’t be starting at Wheeling Jesuit for a while.
Simms, his hands already cuffed, began to cry and laid his face against the roof of the Pea Green Love Machine. “Please,” Mullen said as the cop locked the silver restraints around his wrists. “Look, Officer, what did I do?… I don’t understand! Can’t we … Please, Officer!”
The cop grabbed at his badge and shoved it in Mullen’s ear. A little tag pinned just below it read: CPT. BELLOWS. “I’m not an officer, Asshole Face,” he said. “Show some goddamned respect.”
Brutal Youth: A Novel Page 40
