Brutal Youth (2 page)

Lockers slammed like gunfire. Every student seemed to be hauling both book bags and duffel bags as class changed. Some of them toted dirty sneakers. Gym class had just ended for seniors and was about to begin for juniors.

A chunky kid with greasy black hair staggered by Davidek and whacked him on the side with his black canvas bag. Glass jars clattered together inside. A smaller sack, a Pittsburgh Steelers gym bag, dangled at the greasy kid’s side.

“Cliiiiiink!!” someone in the crowd shouted. A couple of girls giggled. Soon the hallway was a cacophony of voices muttering, whispering, and shouting the same word:
ClinkClinkClink.
All of a sudden, no one was moving. They were blockading him.

The greasy kid whirled around. “I got to get to my
locker,
” he barked.

“Umm, can you help me?” Davidek pleaded to the faces around him, but they were all too amused blocking in the increasingly frustrated Clink. It was Davidek’s first lesson at the school: When people didn’t like you, they got in your way. When they didn’t care about you, they let you get in your own way.

Clink clutched his clattering black bag like a battering ram, shoving through and disappearing as the change-of-class bell shrieked. Everyone still standing in the hall, including Davidek, was now officially late.

The students around him scattered, but Davidek had no one to follow. He had lost track of the scarred boy, but followed in that direction. He found a room 11 on the second floor, but it was an elderly nun teaching French—not Mrs. Apps’s chemistry class.

In an empty stairwell, Davidek found a white-haired janitor hauling a hot tar bucket up to the roof on a retractable steel ladder. Davidek held out his paper schedule and asked, “Could you help me find where I’m supposed to be?”

The janitor glared at him, like he’d been tortured mightily by the children at this school, and was not now about to supply aid and comfort to the enemy. When he spoke, the Pittsburgh accent was so thick, it was almost another language: “Howen da’heckamye sposta know where yinz kids shubbee?” Davidek blinked.
How in the heck am I supposed to know where yinz kids should be.
Yinz. In the South, it was
y’all,
in New York it was
you’s.
Around Pittsburgh,
yinz
was the plural of
you,
the telltale sign of someone born and raised in Pennsylvania’s bottom left corner. The word was invisible most of the time, since everybody used it now and again.

“I’m looking for room 11-A,” Davidek said. “But I can’t—”

The janitor waved his free hand impatiently, counting out on fingers that would soon be separated from his hand.
“A, B, C,”
he said. “Three letters, three floors. Unnerstann?”

Davidek thanked him and descended the steps. The janitor muttered as he carried his acrid-smelling tar bucket up the ladder.

At the bottom of the stairwell, the eighth-grader pushed open the doors to the first-floor hallway. “Lost?” a woman’s voice said.

He turned to see a tall, plump woman in a long, royal blue dress, which swept the floor at her heels. She was pacing outside the closed door of the principal’s office, apparently waiting for entry. He smiled at her, and she smiled back—thinly. He couldn’t guess her age—anywhere from thirty to fifty. She was pretty in a sad way, a faded way. Once-delicate features had gone soft and round, slightly wrinkled, as if they had swollen and then deflated. “Are you a teacher?” Davidek asked. “I could use some help finding—”

“I’m the
guidance counselor,
” she said, as if
teacher
were a slur. “Why are you wandering the halls?”

“Uh, I’m Peter Davidek, I’m—”

“Daffy-
what
?” she said.

“Daff-a-
deck,
” he corrected, with a break in his voice. “I’m an eighth-grade visitor for the open house.”

“I didn’t ask your
name.
Why aren’t you with your group?” Her voice was sharp, annoyed by default. Her eyes narrowed, which with her chubby cheeks, made her look like a grown-up baby.

“I’m supposed to be in 11-A, chemis—”

“Right there,” she said, jabbing a finger down the hall. The nail was also painted royal blue. “You’re
supposed
to be there.”

Davidek was about to thank her and slink away when two boys emerged from the men’s bathroom, both wearing shorts, T-shirts, and tennis shoes. A stout man—completely bald, lacking even eyebrows—emerged from the stairwell, also wearing shorts and a T-shirt (though his was tucked in.) He had a whistle around his neck, and blew it as he tossed the first boy a football and shoved open the bathroom door: “Ten more minutes, guys, out on the field!” The boys with the football ran off, and the bald gym teacher looked Davidek up and down, then turned to the blue woman. “So what’s going on
here,
Ms. Bromine?” he asked, stroking his naked chin.
Bromine.
It was a name like chemicals in the mouth.

“I’m trying to get to the bottom of that myself, Mr. Mankowski,” the guidance counselor sighed.

“Ahhhh…,” the bald man said, acting like this was serious business. “Should I get Sister Maria?” Sister Maria was the principal, and had welcomed all the visiting students in the assembly hall that morning. She had seemed nice. Davidek actually hoped they
would
get her.

Ms. Bromine nodded toward the principal’s closed office door. “I’m waiting for Sister Maria myself—not that it ever matters for much. As you know,” she said, her lips tightening. With a marble-sized mole near the right corner of her mouth, the expression was like a sideways exclamation point. She turned back to Davidek: “We don’t appreciate visitors abusing the rules at St. Michael’s, young man. Tell me your name again?”

“Peter
Daff
-ah-deck,” the boy repeated, for the third time. “And I wasn’t—”

A swell of laughter and a loud, horrified “Oh, God!” echoed from the men’s bathroom, drawing a concerned look from Mr. Mankowski.

“All right,” said Ms. Bromine. “You can go—
this time
. But if you find yourself hopelessly confused again in this simple three-story structure—”

“Stop!”
a boy yelled from inside the restroom.

Laughter erupted again and there was more shouting. Feet scuffled; voices rose. A boy cried out in agony. Mr. Mankowski ran forward and shoved open the bathroom door just as something massive collided against the other side, smashing the door into his face. A clear fluid popped from his nose as he collapsed.

The bathroom door whooshed open and Davidek saw the greasy boy named Clink shamble out, his eyes bulging beneath tangles of hair. His black duffel bag, clattering with off-key chimes, swung around his belly like a disembowled organ. His uniform gray slacks were unbuttoned, and there was a splash of blood on his open white shirt.

A boy with a gaping mouth of crooked horse teeth darted from the bathroom, holding a small glass jar over his head. “Have this back, you fucking freak!” Horse-Teeth hollered, heaving the jar against the wall just over Clink’s shoulder, spraying the brick with putrid yellow fluid.

A new figure emerged from the boys’ room, a kid gushing blood and yelping panicked screams as he pawed delicately at the blunt end of a click-button pen jutting from his right cheek. The tip of the pen, dripping ribbons of scarlet saliva, poked out between his lips like a strange lizard tongue, clicking against his teeth as he moaned for help.

*   *   *

The contents of Colin Vickler’s black bag had been a curiosity at St. Mike’s for months. People began noticing the unusual glass clanking sound around the start of the school year, but whenever teachers had taken him aside and forcibly searched him, they never found anything. The rumors got more and more elaborate: It was a portable methamphetamine lab. Or, maybe was he smuggling bomb chemicals. Sickening theories arose: He carried his own urine in jars, filling them at school and keeping them on a shelf in his bedroom. But for what dark purpose could any of this be happening: perversion, paranoia, witchcraft?

Colin “Clink” Vickler didn’t have a single friend at St. Mike’s, though he had been a student there for three years. As a freshman, he was a lightning rod for the ninety-two-year-old school’s hazing tradition, a yearlong, allegedly good-natured teasing of new students, which the school tacitly approved of as a “fun” bonding exercise for the newcomers. Vickler had carried a disproportionate amount of the torment, with even his fellow freshmen bullying him, usually to impress or distract their own oppressors.

When he was as a sophomore, the teasing hadn’t stopped. In one of the worst instances, a group of seniors ambushed him in the bathroom one day, held his arms, and snagged the rim of his underwear, ripping them off from underneath his pants and tearing into his groin. While he rolled in agony, someone went outside and ran the tattered threads up the school flagpole. For weeks, Vickler’s classmates saluted him and hummed “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

It wasn’t the beautiful and so-called popular kids who did it to him, though they may have been laughing on the periphery. Everyone was, basically. The boys who had attacked him in the bathroom were the most worthless, aimless, and friendless in the school. The cheerleaders, basketball players, theater kids, and science geeks (among countless other cliques at St. Mike’s) all picked on kids within their own circles, venting their frustrations on weaker versions of themselves. Sometimes the cliques turned on each other, but that was rare. When one group did need another to beat up on, they all tended to turn on the same niche—the losers. Clink just happened to be the one the losers picked on.

He became a junior, but even with upperclassman status, the teasing never stopped. The worst were the girls laughing at him, girls he thought were cute. And he was no help for himself—dropping his eyes, muttering, not clever enough to return the insults, not strong enough to fight back. It never stopped. It never would.

Vickler’s only protection was to hide.

St. Mike’s was a strange old building, full of narrow corridors and stairwells curling deep underground in a quiet labyrinth. To escape his jeering classmates when class wasn’t in session, Vickler would sneak into the subbasement and take sanctuary in the science storage room, where he would read comic books or video game magazines. There among the Bunsen burners and assorted carafes of chemicals, he found shelf after shelf of glass containers, each containing a preserved biological specimen: insects, birds, snakes, worms, lizards, fetal pigs, fish, frogs, mice. They stared forlornly at the greasy-haired boy hiding in their midst. Vickler studied them in the darkness. Even the prickly-legged giant centipedes had a mournful appearance, floating lifeless and tangled together in their preservative stew.

These beings could not escape, had no future, and existed only as peculiarities.

Vickler began smuggling away the jars, one by one, taking them to a place in the woods near his home to release the poor deceased creatures for burial. His parents became suspicious about him going to the woods each night, so he had to slow down. He knew he couldn’t explain. He also couldn’t stop. There were hundreds of jars in the storage basement, and he committed himself to removing them all.

The earth around his shallow burials became blighted. Weeds shriveled to brown husks as they absorbed the toxic preserving chemicals. To avoid detection, Vickler began to spread the bodies around more broadly through the woods, which only slowed his progress. Then the science faculty noticed that half their biology specimens had disappeared. Suspicion fell on the janitor for carelessly disposing them, and new ones were ordered from the Nebraska Scientific company. Colin Vickler’s smuggling campaign started all over again.

Throughout this time, not a soul knew what “Clink” really carried in his bag. Not until the day of the open house.

*   *   *

Gym class at St. Mike’s happened only on sunny days. This was because the school no longer had a gymnasium, and phys-ed classes had nowhere to take place when the weather was unkind. The old gymnasium had been converted into the parish’s church when the original chapel burned down four years earlier. There had been no money to rebuild the church, so the gym was made into a substitute house of worship—at first temporarily, though it had since become dismayingly permanent. The old locker rooms had become dressing rooms for the priest and altar boys, so for gym class, the students changed out of their uniforms in the school bathrooms. Their calesthentics and games of dodgeball took place in the grassy field where the burned chapel once stood. (In the winter, or if it rained, they earned gym-class credit at a nearby bowling alley.)

On the day of the open house, while Davidek stood outside in the hallway in the glare of Ms. Bromine, a junior in that boys’ bathroom named Richard Mullen picked a fight with the only kid who was a bigger loser than he was. The bathroom was crowded, and Mullen was standing on one leg, leaning over at an odd angle, pulling at the tip of one socked foot as his open pants slipped down around his ankles. He stumbled backwards and landed hard on his ass, which drew loud laughs from the other boys—including creepy Clink Vickler.

Mullen had only one friend in the school, his dull, horse-toothed companion, Frank Simms—the only boy besides Clink whose existence was more pathetic than Mullen’s. Since he was already so low in the pecking order, Mullen couldn’t abide being laughed at by the shy, fat, fellow outcast.

In the hallway, Mr. Mankowski’s whistle blew and his voice called out: “Ten more minutes, guys, out on the field!”

Everyone was still laughing as Mullen stood up, and he said to Clink, because he couldn’t say it to anyone else: “Is that how your dad laughs when he’s buttfucking you?” Mullen punctuated this with a swift kick to Clink’s duffel bag, causing two glass jars, pregnant with fluid, to tumble out and roll slowly across the tile floor.

A handsome and popular boy named Michael Crawford lifted one of the jars toward the light, and a preserved fruit bat inside slid around to face him and his friends—its mouth open, wings undulating in the shaking water.