Brutal Youth (7 page)

Green studied his shoes, then looked up at the teacher with great hopefulness. “Can you stop them from making fat jokes, too?”

*   *   *

For a while after Zimmer left the computer classroom, there was only the raindrop sound of keyboards being tapped, and the actual rain, still blasting against the arched windows.

Davidek felt something tap his shoulder, and turned to see Noah Stein leaning across the side of his computer.

Stein squinted one eye, like someone appraising faulty merchandise. “Do you believe in the supernatural? Psychic prophecy? Karma, and that kind of stuff?”

All Davidek could say was: “What are you talking about—ghosts?”

“Nah.” The scarred boy leaned closer, his voice hushed and urgent. “I’m talking about
big
weirdness. Strange coincidences. Haven’t you noticed odd things happening?”

Davidek considered this. “Did a great big, fat bald man from the church come by and tell your parents to send you here, too?”

Now it was Stein’s turned to be bewildered. “I never met any big, fat bald guy, but I did have a long conversation with
her
today.” Stein gestured to a girl in the back row who had a short bob of unnaturally black hair and dark red lipstick that stuck to her teeth when she smiled at them. She wiggled her fingers in a wave, rattling the silver bands around her wrist.

Stein waved back and said to Davidek: “Her name’s Zari, and she’s into all that gypsy-type hocus-pocus. In homeroom this morning, she did a tarot reading for me, turning over all these creepy cards. She says, ‘Sorry,’ and tells me that there are lonely times ahead. That’s her exact words: ‘Lonely times ahead.’ Then she turned over some more cards and said, ‘Your old companions will not finish this journey with you.’ I asked what that meant, and she said that I couldn’t count on my girlfriend or my old buddies anymore. Well, I told her I don’t have a girlfriend and I don’t know anybody at this school.
That’s
when I thought of
you
!”

“Why’d you think of
me
?” Davidek demanded, outraged to be drawn into someone else’s metaphysical grief.

“Look what’s happened to us so far,” Stein said. “Our first class is with that teacher we pissed off—and she starts picking fights right away. You think that’s going to get better the rest of the year?”

“We were bound to run into her again,” Davidek said. Then, smiling, added: “At least I’m not the one who kissed her.”

Stein flashed his eyebrows. “I learned that one from Bugs Bunny.”

Davidek shrugged and sank back in his seat. “Tarot cards?… Forget about them. Don’t those always deal you a bad hand? They always predict lonely times ahead for everybody.”

Stein crossed his arms. “So, tell me, my doubting friend … what would you think if the walls of our new high school appeared to be bleeding?”

Stein gestured like a carnival presenter to the back corner of the room, where the plaster ceiling was bulging downward in a nebula of brown and red stains, and crimson tears trickled down the wall in a slow race to the bottom.

FOUR

The four stairwells of St. Mike’s were like chambers of a brick and mortar heart, one at each corner, pumping a lifeblood of students through the building’s armored body. On the ground level, stone passages led to the basement levels, like smaller capillaries, spiraling below to the subterranean auditorium; the solemn, silent library; and the deep-fried-chicken-smelling cafeteria. Davidek stood beside Stein in a traffic jam of students in one of the polished marble staircases, which curved heavenward along walls glowing with stained glass images of the saints.

Everyone was trying to move upstairs and deposit their books in lockers before rushing back downstairs for lunch. Scores of uniformed shoulders shoved and pushed. People leaned over the railings, trying to look up at the source of the blockade. On the ground floor, peering up through the center void in the stairwell, a group of senior boys sipped sodas casually, smiling and nudging each other over some secret joke.

Red water was trickling down the brick wall above.

“Hey, so, uh, what is this?” Davidek asked as he squeezed by the janitor, who was trying to clean up the mess on the landing between the second and third floors. “I’m pannin’ for gold, smart stuff,” the janitor said, shaking his mop in the air with his good hand. Davidek and Stein looked down at the nubs of the fingers on his other hand, which were still dark and swollen, and not quite healed, even after all these months. The janitor made no move to hide them. “Yinz wanna closer look?”

Davidek shook his head. “No, I mean … we were just wondering what are these leaks? We saw one in the computer room and—”

This news seemed to break Saducci’s heart. “It’s leakin’ on the first floor awready?” he sputtered. “Jee-sus Christmas Christ.” He slapped the mop against a dry part of the wall, making a splatter like someone had been shot in the skull. “Gawdamm roof. Little cracks is all it takes.… Chews up the brick, and spits it back outtagain. And whose gotta warsh it up? Yers truly!”

Davidek and Stein moved up the stairs, leaving the old man behind, not feeling any better that their new school was digesting itself from the inside out.

*   *   *

At lunch, Lorelei was very pleased. She had already become friendly with the pathological flirt Noah Stein, who had found a way to sit by her in every class that morning. Now it was time to charm her fellow girls.

The freshmen were the last to be served in the lunch line, and once Lorelei collected her plate of meat loaf and potatoes, she settled at a table full of skirts, approaching them the way a missionary approaches a group of savages. Lorelei came not to join, but to lead.

The girl beside her was Zari, the tarot-card reader, whom she’d seen cozying up to Stein in homeroom earlier, dealing her devil cards to him. “I love your dark lipstick,” Lorelei said. “Where did you get it?” Zari’s sleepily sarcastic expression perked up as she noticed Lorelei’s peculiar bangs and eyebrows.

Lorelei reddened, but she’d been contemplating a defensive maneuver all morning. “I know, I know,” she said, flipping her fingers casually through the uneven cut. “Looks strange, right?… But my stylist says it’s the latest thing. Symmetry is so
yesterday.
”

Zari said, “You’re lying,” and Lorelei, speaking faster than she was thinking, snapped: “The trend just hasn’t hit Pittsburgh yet.”

Zari rolled her eyes. “
Something
needs to hit Pittsburgh,” she said. Lorelei didn’t realize it was a joke at first. Then she laughed a little too loud. Zari just stared at her.

If she had given Lorelei a chance, she might have found they had a lot in common. Zari had also come from a school where she didn’t have many friends, though at St. Michael’s she didn’t see many people she
wanted
as friends. But Zari had liked the scarred boy—Noah. She liked the mark on his face, which meant he understood pain, and made him different. Plus, that morning as she did his tarot reading, he made funny jokes about some of the uglier classmates. It meant he didn’t think she was one of them.

Her reading for him had been bullshit. When she told him his closest friends wouldn’t continue with him in this school, it was just a trick to find out whether he already had a girlfriend. She told him there would be “hard times” at St. Mike’s and he would be lonely. Then she’d given him her phone number.

The very next class, she had seen Stein become preoccupied with this Lorelei, a much more conventional-looking bobblehead. Zari knew she could never compete with Lorelei’s avant-garde eyebrows and esoteric grooming fashions.

She looked across the aisle to where Stein had settled for lunch at one of the boys-only tables. He was laughing with Davidek, who was irrelevant to Zari, and babbling about something—probably not her.

Lorelei followed her gaze. “He’s cute, right?” she said.

Zari’s teeth severed the tip of a french fry. “I heard him making fun of your hair earlier,” she said, holding back a smile as Lorelei’s fell.

Lorelei looked back over her shoulder at the boy’s table. The look of worry wasn’t caused by her irregular eyebrows this time.

*   *   *

Lord, the newcomers looked little.

Sister Maria Hest had been principal at St. Michael’s for fifteen years and was a teacher for two decades before that. During her adolescence, what seemed like centuries ago, the now-sixty-year-old nun had been a student herself. How strong and wise she had seemed to herself then. Surely one of her withered old teachers had passed her at some moment and marveled at her smallness, too.

As the first day of class came to an end, Sister Maria stood in the hallway near the main doors, watching as the students departed, and noticed two boys: Davidek and Stein, the pair Ms. Bromine had complained about, escorting a lovely young classmate between them. Davidek was chattering at Lorelei, who was ignoring him in favor of locking eyes with Stein.

Sister Maria noticed the girl hesitate at the giant doors, then trip forward with a small cry. It had almost seemed deliberate. But why?… Sister Maria looked behind her, but the only other witness was that white-eyed crucifix over the trophy cabinet.

She might have understood better if she had seen the small smile of relief on Lorelei’s face when both Stein and Davidek reached out to catch her.

FIVE

We should be afraid.…

Sister Maria turned around in the empty hallway, as if she had heard those words spoken aloud, but no one was there, of course. The students and teachers were long gone. It had been an exhausting first day, and Sister Maria stood there alone, her eyes closed, listening to the distant drips of the school’s many leaks. The stairwell. The third-floor girls’ bathroom. The second-floor history classroom. And finally, the computer room, which would cost them dearly if the water ever touched those expensive machines.

Then she had heard those words.
We should be afraid … over how easy it is to go wrong, trying to make others do right.
These were words first spoken to her when she was a teenager in these same halls. It had been the saying of Sister Victor, who’d been the principal when Maria Hest was a teenager at St. Michael’s and had inspired her, in fact, not only to join the sisterhood but follow the same vocation as an educator as well. The words had always haunted Sister Maria, though she never fully understood what her friend and mentor had meant.
Afraid?

That was a word she heard a lot in the halls these days.

There were others, too:
Hazing. Initiation. Teasing. Torture. A little harmless fun.

Sister Maria had heard the upperclassmen talking, almost gloating, about the only thing that seemed to excite them about returning for their final year at St. Mike’s—the ritual of welcoming the freshmen by making sport of them.

It had already started. At lunch, she had seen a pair of large boys racing through the hall from opposite sides, like demolition balls, bashing together into crowds of freshmen boys, whose arms and legs jabbed in every direction, like crushed insects. She had found the seniors, scolded them, and they had smiled and said, “C’mon, Sister.… It’s
our
turn!”

Our turn.

It was supposed to be just fun and games. That’s what the faculty and parents and alumni association believed, which was why the tradition persisted. Hazing was regarded as a healthy bonding exercise for the freshmen, and no graduate who endured it thought anyone who came after should be spared. True enough, it was hardly a violation of the Geneva Conventions for the freshmen to serve a few days as butlers and waitresses to the senior class. A few pranks … maybe a snowball fight or two … the Hazing Picnic, with freshmen drafted into a series of sketches and songs designed to blur the boundary of being “laughed at” and “laughed with.”

When Sister Maria became principal, she’d seen things getting more extreme. Maybe there was just more anxiety—to get into college, get into the
right
college, and find some way through the spartan landscape of scholarships, grants, and loans to pay for those futures. It was easier to be afraid now, easier to be angry. Meanwhile, St. Mike’s had changed. Hungry for tuition dollars, it had begun to collect no small number of students who were kicked out of public school for violence, drugs, sex, and assorted other acts of delinquency, while the number of especially devout Catholic parents seemed to increase as well, filling the halls with their holier-than-thou (and painfully isolated) offspring. Hazing was always a pressure valve, but that pressure had become unbearable. As Sister Maria saw it, the tradition had turned into a form of sanctioned bullying.

Now came this new hunger:
Our turn
 … As if these upperclassmen had suffered worse than any who came before.
Our turn …

She thought of the boy on the roof last year, and what had made him snap. St. Mike’s was a place that tried to do right, but as Sister Victor’s voice reminded her … it was easy to go wrong that way, too. It was getting harder to make excuses to the people of the church.

Sister Maria stood at the school’s first-floor side entrance, where there had once been a corridor leading to the great chapel of St. Michael the Archangel. Now the glass-and-steel door overlooked only a grassy field.

For almost ninety years, the red-stone chapel had stood on that ground, towering and majestic, with a steeple that cast a sundial shadow across the surrounding neighborhood. It had been built by the town’s early immigrant families—the steelmen, the glassworkers, the housewives, the rail operators, the stonemasons, housepainters, barbers.… They had labored in poverty a century ago to build St. Mike’s—a sanctuary for their families, a place for their children’s weddings, their grandchildren’s baptisms, and their own funerals.

It was meant to stand forever, but like so much from when Sister Maria was a girl, the chapel was gone now.

A fire had destroyed it before dawn one Christmas, several hours after a packed Midnight Mass. It had started on the fifty-foot pine trees decorating the altar, and faulty light strands were the official cause. The trees were dry, brittle, just waiting for a spark to become twin columns of flame, which quickly devoured the interior of the church.