Brutal Youth (31 page)

At first, Lorelei’s mother didn’t react at all. Then she smashed her daughter across the face with her prosthetic arm.

The teenager fell back against the kitchen table, spilling the plastic Roger Rabbit tumbler full of booze across a stack of unopened
PAST DUE
mail. Miranda fell on top of her daughter, hooking Lorelei’s cheek with the blunt steel clasp, pulling her down like a hooked fish as the girl mewled. “I thought you learned a lesson when I caught you stealing my cigarettes, but you’re not a very good learner, are you?”

Lorelei’s father dropped his wooden spoon on the floor and began pulling at his wife, like a small dog trying to hump a hippo. “Stop it, Lorelei!” he was yelling, as if his daughter were in control of this. “Stop it right now!”

“You’re
still
stealing from me,
begging
me to send you to that school. Spending
my
money—so you can
whore
yourself out…,” her mother hissed.

Lorelei began to cry. The chrome hook pulled back her cheek, exposing a skeletal amount of teeth.

“That teacher knows…,” her mother’s chapped lips said, hovering over Lorelei’s eyes. “Everybody
knows
what kind of girl you are now.… What you
do
with those boys you rut with. And you want to keep
lying
?…”

“I’m
not
…” The girl drooled, pinching her eyes shut against the tears, hands hovering delicately around her mother’s prosthetic, desperate to pull it away, but afraid that might take part of her jaw with it.

Miranda Paskal yanked up her daughter’s skirt with her hand, fingers grasping at the elastic band of the girl’s underwear. “Let’s prove it, then,” her mother said, pluming sour drunken breath into the girl’s face. “Let’s see if you’re lying. Let’s see if you’re
intact
.… Then we’ll know what these boys took … or what you gave away.”

Lorelei’s stretched-out mouth moaned as she forced the clasp out of her mouth, and donkey-kicked her mother across the room.

Miranda sprawled backwards against her husband, who slammed into the open pantry door, crushing the spice rack as little bottles clattered around them like an overturned chess set. Lorelei’s mother lurched forward as a cylinder of paprika shot out from under one foot, dropping her to the floor as her prosthetic slashed for support against the counter, yanking down her small portable television, which exploded on the floor in a belch of glass.

Lorelei sat up, gasping. Her eyes darted around the room—She lunged for the telephone, crying, and got to
9
and
1
before her mother yanked the drooping, curly pig’s-tail cord and the phone vanished from her hands like a magic trick.

Her father had backed against the sink, knocking the faucet on. “Go!” he said, jabbing a finger toward the living room. “Now!” He was about to do the same.

Lorelei turned to run, but her mother was already staggering to her feet, swinging the fallen phone like a mace. For a moment, the flat banana handset was weightless, spinning in the air below the tiny sun of the kitchen light. Then it was shattering against the back of Lorelei’s head.

As she collapsed against the stove, her shoulder struck the saucepan handle, catapulting a streak of marinara against the floral wallpaper. She slid to the floor, legs splayed, too blinded by splinters of white light from the back of her head to feel the scorching flecks of sauce on her shoulder and neck. Her mother swung the cracked receiver down onto her back three more times, each one a heavy
whap!
Lorelei’s arms pulled her beneath the shelter of the table, and the last thing she saw before passing out was the phone hitting the corner of a chair and disintegrating into a knot of multicolored wires and bits of plastic.

Then the world faded to a blur.

*   *   *

Lorelei didn’t know how long she was sprawled beneath the table. Maybe minutes. Maybe hours. When she opened her eyes, the room was still, except for the gushing water faucet.

The kitchen door was open to the night, and her father was nowhere in the house. Lorelei turned the burners off on the stove and went upstairs.

She found her mother passed out on the floor beside her bed, a stain of saliva and blood from her cut lip seeping into the tattered carpet. Lorelei tried to lift her, but couldn’t. She unclasped the battered prosthetic from her mother’s forearm, like she was unholstering a gun that might still go off, and tucked it beside the sleeping woman like a teddy bear. When her mother woke, she hated to have to search for her arm.

Then Lorelei pulled a blanket from the bed and draped it over her mother, tucking it in around her feet, which were stained on the bottoms with tomato sauce.

Downstairs again, Lorelei walked to the long cupboard by the basement and took out a broom and dustpan. She bent over to begin sweeping up the mess, careful not to let the pain in her battered back show on her face, even though no one was there to notice.

THIRTY-ONE

Stein returned to St. Mike’s on a stormy Monday.

His week of suspension passed in silence. Stein spent a lot of that time in the basement, tinkering with his father’s old weight set, or sitting in his room with the lights off. Whenever his father or sister would look in to check on him, he pretended like he was sleeping.

On the morning he returned, Noah awoke to a heavy gray rain smattering his window, as if trying to scratch inside. His father sang along to the radio as they drove toward St. Mike’s, some idiotic tune about a guy who was too sexy for this or that. “
I’m
 … too sexy for this coat … too sexy for a boat … too sexy for my dog … too sexy on a log…” He nudged his son’s leg, trying to make him laugh. “It’s kind of like Dr. Suess, isn’t it?” But Noah Stein just stared ahead silently, clutching his book bag in his lap.

As they rolled into the school parking lot, the truck’s brakes groaned to a stop and the windshield wipers worked triple-time to slap away the downpour. “Try to have a good day,” he told his son. It seemed like he should say something more. Noah looked at the dashboard a long time, and then at his father. “You’re a good dad,” he said, and kissed him on the cheek.

The storm had dragged darkness back into the early morning as great clouds of purple and black spun overhead, dumping waves of white rain across the earth. Thin waterfalls cascaded down the brick face of the school, rippling over the windows.

As he drove out of the parking lot, Larry Stein looked back at his son, walking alone toward the school’s front entrance. That night, Larry Stein would fall on his knees, sobbing, bathed in the sterile glow of the Allegheny Valley Hospital lobby, and hug Margie’s knees as he thought back to that moment with Noah in the rearview mirror as a last, lost chance to save him.

*   *   *

As Stein approached St. Mike’s, a dark shape lurked under the eave beside the school’s front doors.

It was Davidek, coatless, with his hands jammed under his arms for warmth, his white shirt dampened by the splashing rain and his shoes squishy with water as he stepped forward and grabbed Stein’s arm. “Come on. Let’s get out of here,” Davidek said.

Stein didn’t move. “You’re out of uniform, Davidek,” he said, smiling faintly. “Don’t you know enough to come in out of the rain?”

Davidek wasn’t playing along with the big-brother act. He kicked at the fractal swirls of oil on the wet asphalt because he couldn’t quite look his friend in the face. “You can’t go inside, Stein,” he said. “They’re … waiting for you.”

“Mullen and Simms?” Stein asked.

“And everybody else, too,” Davidek said, pulling at his friend’s arm again. Something solid shifted in Stein’s book bag.

“What about Lorelei? She okay?”

Davidek was slack-jawed, shaking his head. “Who gives a
fuck
about her, dumb-ass? She’s the
cause
of this!”

“Is she here today?” Stein asked hopefully.

Davidek paced through the rain. “You know what?…
No,
she’s not!! She hasn’t been here since … since … fucking…!
Fuck!
” He ran both hands through his dripping hair. “Just listen to me this
one time.
We’re skipping school today.”

Stein lifted his eyes toward the shimmering glow of St. Mike’s waterfall windows. When he looked down again, his face dripped with rivulets of water. “I can’t run away,” he said. “Anyway, there’s nowhere else to go.”

“We can go to the bowling alley over at the mall, for Christ’s sake,” Davidek told him. “Who cares? We’ll spend the day in the Dollar Store eating candy from two Halloweens ago.”

Stein put a hand on the brass handle of the door. “And what about tomorrow?” he asked. “Transfer to Highlands? I already got kicked out of there. Should my dad move us to a new town? And what happens when they find out there?”

A golden light from inside spread across Davidek’s face as the door opened. “I’ve lived with this thing a long time,” Stein said. “But after today, I won’t have to anymore.”

A warm gust of dry air inhaled Stein, and Davidek lingered in the cold morning darkness. “Fuck,” he said to no one, and followed his friend inside.

*   *   *

Stein hung his head as he pushed through the hall, and Davidek caught up close behind, glowering at the onlookers as they whispered to each other, watching the boy who had once set a fire that took his own mother’s life.

In the north staircase, crowds of students were flowing down in gleeful alarm as a red, sandy fluid coursed down the walls from three stories up. Davidek’s shoulder brushed the side and came away sticky with decomposing brick. “The leaks are getting worse. It wasn’t this bad when I went outside,” he said.

The lights flickered off as they pushed their way up the murky stairwell against the crush of descending students. Another freshman, a harmless moonfaced boy named Justin Teemo, slammed into Stein, nearly knocking him backwards. He had been pushed by Morti and the Fanboys. “Look at the face of the guy who hit you!” Morti cackled, but Teemo hurried away with a hand up to his cheek, as if he didn’t want Stein to recognize him.

When the lights flickered back on, another figure had appeared behind Davidek and Stein—Smitty, who stopped when they stopped, and started moving again when they did.

Davidek had seen him earlier with Hannah down near the boys’ bathrooms, talking in the awkward, icy way Davidek had seen them conversing at the Valentine’s Dance. Smitty hadn’t looked happy to be cornered by Hannah. But then, no one ever did.

“You in on this, too?” Davidek snapped at him. He could hear whispers passing up the jammed stairwell:
Here … Stein … He’s here.…

Mark Henson, a skinny freshman who never had much to do with Davidek and Stein, was standing just ahead of them, looking like he was ready to pee his pants. There was a thick streak of red lipstick on his cheek, and two juniors—John “Turkey Baster” Hannidy and his snarling girlfriend, Janey Brucedik—grabbed the quavering Henson by the shoulders and spun him to face Stein, so the big red check on his cheek would be clear.

The lights flickered again briefly. Almost all the faces around them had that thick, red ink mark on their cheeks. The ones who didn’t were passing red markers back and forth, hurriedly streaking their faces with the mock scars. The gasoline smell of Sharpie markers wafted through the stifling humidity of the stairwell.

Stein looked from face to face in the hallway ahead—everyone was smiling, or laughing. Davidek was still behind him, getting angry and pushing people away, telling them to fuck off, and launching his shoulder at them to clear a path of escape.

“Do you know what your mother would say if she were here today?” a voice boomed from overhead. Davidek looked up to see a group of snickering sophomores.

“Ssssssss…,”
came the hissing answer from every face around them, momentarily drowning the sound of pouring water. A lot of kids started jiggling their bodies, like bacon in a frying pan.

SSssssss! SSSSSsssss!!!

Davidek surged higher on the stairs, pulling Stein, whose eyes looked at nothing, whose voice was flat, and hollow. “Where did you say they were?” Stein asked.

“Who?” Davidek demanded.

“Mullen and Simms.”

Davidek shook his head. “I’m not looking for
them,
Stein. I’m trying to find some fucking teachers!”

They discovered them all on the third floor—panicking.

*   *   *

Iciness seeped into Davidek’s feet as he and Stein reached the third floor. An inch of crimson-colored water was coursing around their shoes.

“Downstairs!” Bromine snapped at the straggling teenagers in the hall, her eyes crazy with alarm. “This is an
e-mer-gen-cy
!” She dragged out the last word as if no one listening would understand English.

Behind her, a chunk of plaster fell loose from the ceiling, plunging to the floor with a comet trail of water behind it.

At least five showers were sprinkling rose-colored water from the arched ceilings of the hall. The floor was a low river in both directions.

Sister Maria stood at the center of the maelstrom, fluffing her drenched blouse to prevent the translucent material from sticking to her bra. Mattings of iron-gray hair hung down in her eyes as she tried to direct a bucket brigade of faculty. Mostly, she fretted. “I told them we needed to replace the entire roof—not these patchwork fixes.” No one was listening. Mr. Mankowski, Mr. McClerk, Ms. Marisol from Algebra, and the Spanish and part-time Latin teacher Mrs. Tunns, were stumbling around with wastebaskets, trying to catch as much water as possible before it hit the ground, like contestants in some strange game show.

Davidek tried to tell them about all the kids with scars on their faces, and that they should stop it—but no one was listening to him either.

Students stood all around them, some eager to prove their worth and help out, others just enjoying the sight of this wrath-of-God chaos. Zari was on the periphery, jewelry jangling as she aimed her yearbook camera at the recovery effort, pumping the hallway full of flashes.