Brutal Youth (51 page)

Father Mercedes said, “So you
do
admit there was a relationship?”

“It’s a
lie
!” the teacher shouted, rising out of his seat. He laid his knobby hands on the principal’s desk, looming over her, pleading for her help. “Let’s get her in here. Right now!”

“I would advise you not to confront the girl about this,” Father Mercedes said wearily. “If you challenge her, I will see to it that the police are informed immediately.”

“Sister…,” Mr. Zimmer said. “Sister, please.” The principal turned her face up to him. Andy Zimmer, her old student. Her favorite student. She often wondered what would become of her without St. Mike’s, but where would she be without Andrew Zimmer?

She had sent him to nurture Green, the school’s only black student at the beginning of the year. He had been dispatched on prom night to the Stein house to quiet Davidek.… It had been Zimmer who not only saved The Boy on the Roof, but had also forged the secret compromise that satisfied the boy’s family and allowed the school to continue operating.

This … was just one more thing she needed from him. The last thing.

Father Mercedes and Sister Maria knew the teacher would lose control and didn’t try to quiet him. Mr. Zimmer stood before them like a man drowning in deep water, sinking into darkness, his great long arms cutting the space around him. He yelled, uselessly. He gasped in the stifling silence. Then Mr. Zimmer simply ran out of words. His arms stilled at his sides. His back bent, his eyes probed the floor. He had done nothing wrong, and yet it was over. He couldn’t explain the relationship with Hannah. Even the truth would not exonerate him.

Just as Sister Maria and Father Mercedes had allowed Zimmer’s noise, they now allowed his defeated silence.

“Isn’t there some other way?” Zimmer asked after a long while. But his voice had no strength left. In the end, he took what they were willing to give.

FIFTY

A cheerful anarchy filled the sunny stone halls of St. Michael’s. It was Friday, the final day of the school year. The seniors gone, except for their graduation the next evening, the remaining underclassmen enjoyed a day that was more playful than educational. Report cards were handed out that morning. Those who performed well celebrated a job well done, while those who did poorly—Davidek included—merely celebrated the final hours before he’d have to face the disappointed wrath of his parents.

Outside the school library, some sophomores were pushing each other around on the battered steel book carts. The day wore on, scorching hot, so the boys were permitted to remove their blue blazers. Shirts were untucked and skirts were rolled, baring buff teenage arms and raising hems to dangerous places above the knee. Every time the class bells screamed, more students were left lingering in the hallways.

Davidek and Green would have been in study hall, but two days ago, the students were told Mr. Zimmer had a family emergency and wouldn’t be present. Ms. Bromine was also mysteriously absent, though in her case, the school was told it was due to illness. With no one watching those classrooms, the freshmen filtered elsewhere, fusing with groups of sophomores and juniors—savoring their soon-to-end status at the bottom of the social food chain.

A white van showed up in the parking lot during lunch and delivered two pallets of yearbooks wrapped in plastic, which the students fell upon and ripped open like a pride of lions savaging a carcass. The books spent the rest of the day circulating from hand to hand, as heartfelt messages of friendship were dispatched into the future via the empty pages of the inside cover. Everybody wanted Davidek to sign their book—he was the Hero of the Hazing Picnic, after all. The guy who stood up to Fuckslut. The guy who watched out for them.

Davidek didn’t want to sign. He didn’t even want a book of his own. But they were thrust upon him, and he flipped through the pages, thinking of his long-ago search through last year’s yearbooks for a photo of Hannah Kraut, and finding only scratched-out faces and the line:
YOU COULDN’T REMEMBER ME IF YOU TRIED.
The yearbook committee obliged her this year—there weren’t any photos of Hannah Kraut. Not even her name was mentioned.

As more and more kids handed him their books to autograph, he searched his pockets and found a couple pens, but didn’t need those. He had some coins in his pocket, but they were too blunt. Then his hand found his collar, undoing the clip-on tie. He pulled out the metal clasp and ran his finger along its edge. Perfect.

Davidek never got an official school portrait (there was just a black square where it should have been). But in the freshmen section, he did find one snapshot of him, standing between Lorelei and Stein as they leaned against a wood-panel wall in Palisade Hall. He had no idea when it was taken, but probably early in the year. Lorelei had her head on his shoulder, and Stein stood with his arms crossed, smirking.

After wandering away to sign them, Davidek always gave the yearbooks back with a smile. But he never actually wrote anything.

Only later did the owners of the books notice that strange photo of the three freshmen—the ones with the scratched-out faces. So many yearbooks had it, that everyone assumed it was just some strange misprint.

*   *   *

That afternoon, the outgoing freshman class—now incoming sophomores—stood in the hallway filling trash bins with discarded class notebooks, carefully hand-shredding unwanted love notes and tearing down magazine cutouts of dreamboat celebrities from the inside panel of their locker doors.

At the bottom of her own locker, Lorelei found a piece of paper where she’d once written the new rules she intended to follow to make people like her:
Be pretty.… Get good grades.… Don’t be the class clown.… Sit in the front of class.… Befriend a handicapped person.…

She tried to remember when the page was clean, and uncrumpled. Then she squeezed it into a ball and dropped it in the garbage.

Lorelei was surrounded by her girlfriends, and on days like this, it felt good to matter again. Everyone wanted to be around the beautiful tragic girl. Zari had her camera out and kept trying to get Lorelei to pose for pictures with everybody. “I’ll print up the photos and maybe when vacation starts, we can meet up at your house and put them in an album,” Zari said. Some of the other girls nodded eagerly, but Lorelei was noncommittal, not wanting to risk any of them meeting her mother.

Lorelei noticed a lonely figure at the other end of the hall, and excused herself from the group. The rumor that she had turned on Stein because he smacked her around still made Lorelei feel a nauseated kind of guilt—but not enough to reveal the truth. She finally felt safe. And if she could use her newfound popularity to reward other lonely girls … maybe that would make it all right.

It was like a variation on Rule No. 5 from that squashed-up sheet of paper—“Befriend a crippled person.” Only, in this case, the handicap was unpopularity.

“I enjoyed sitting with you at the Hazing Picnic,” Lorelei said, which made Seven-Eighths’ skinny hatchet face blink. “Maybe we could hang out or something over the summer. Maybe go swimming at the wave pool, or get our nails done or just talk girl stuff, you know?”

Seven-Eighths had been thinking about all the confessions she would still have to do this summer. With school out of session, she had started to worry about whether she’d have anything new to share with Father Mercedes—who was still demanding to know everything he could about the students of St. Mike’s.

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.