Brutal Youth (20 page)

“She was just hanging around during the game. Some of the other girls are wondering which freshmen to pick next week. If you say she’s cool…”

“Yeah, yeah. She’s nice.”

Audra nodded, as if that concluded things.

“Have a happy Thanksgiving,” Lorelei said as the 4Runner pulled away, but her guardian angel had already rolled up the window.

EIGHTEEN

“Okay, this is bad,” Green said. The boys were standing together in the library. It was Monday, just after Thanksgiving break, and the Brother–Sister sign-up sheet had been posted in history teacher Mrs. Arnarelli’s homeroom that morning.

Half the freshmen were already taken. Green had been chosen by Bilbo, Zari had been selected by Mary Grough, and half a dozen others were also chosen by seniors they’d befriended. The upperclassmen looking for someone to hate on were taking more time.

Stein and Davidek had been deemed off-limits to everyone—the seniors of St. Michael’s were leaving them as bait for Hannah Kraut. That was Green’s bad news. “I’m sorry,” Green said to Davidek. “I tried to talk one of Bilbo’s guys into choosing you, but they all remember you being a pain in the ass during that Dog Collar Day thing … and you running and hiding in that bus didn’t exactly earn anyone’s respect.”

Shit.

Davidek asked Green if he had any idea what was in this book of secrets.

“It’s just vague rumors right now,” Green said. “Bilbo and the guys think she knows about a senior girl—no one’s sure who—who’s had abortions. That’s abortions with an
S
—plural. And apparently some sophomores are worried she knows about them breaking into cars last summer to steal stereos. I overheard some girls say Hannah knows about a junior—a junior
guy
—who’s been secretly snapping naked photos of dudes on the basketball team in the locker room.”

“How could she
know
that?” Davidek said.

Stein was looking at a book about medieval torture, and acting like he didn’t care what they were talking about. “She wants to make someone read that at the Hazing Picnic?” he said absently. “Damn, I may just volunteer. I’d love to stick it to those seniors.”

“It’s about more than just the seniors,” Green said. “Good luck next year—and the year after that—facing all the sophomores and juniors you humiliate.”

“Bullshit. The teachers’ll never let anyone read that stuff anyway,” Stein said. “They’ll cut the mic the minute anyone tries.”

Green shook his jowly cheeks. “They can’t, remember? It’s not an official school event. They’ve had people get up there at the Hazing Picnic and do all kinds of deranged stuff that makes the school mad. The teachers aren’t able to stop anything.”

Stein scoffed. “If you’re so worried, just refuse to read it if she picks you. Tell her to roll that notebook up and shove it up her ass.”

“And what if she knows something about
you
?” Green asked.

Davidek smiled. For the first time, the threat seemed to lift. “Shit,
we
never had any abortions! What’s to know about us?”

Green shrugged. Stein riffled the pages of his torture book. “I’ve had a few,” he said.

*   *   *

Davidek figured if he found Hannah Kraut first, she wouldn’t find him.

If he could ID her, he could avoid her. If he knew where she went for lunch, which hallway her locker was in, and when her classes were, he could theoretically stay out of her way. And if she didn’t know
him
, she wouldn’t pick him. But after three days scanning the halls, he never spotted anyone with two different-colored eyes.

On the bookshelves in the library, Davidek, Green, and Stein found a yearbook from the previous year with a grainy, black-and-white photo of Hannah Kraut, and he instantly recognized her frizzy blond hair. When The Boy on the Roof had been bombarding everyone in the parking lot, she was the one Ms. Bromine snagged by her pigtail as kids were fleeing across the street. There was nothing the three freshmen could gather from her face, however. It had been scratched away to the rough, white paper beneath.

Davidek found three other copies of the yearbook on the shelf. Each one had her face scraped away, and they found other listings of her name throughout the books. Not one image remained intact. They found the yearbooks from her freshmen and sophomore years, too, but already knew what they’d find. Every photo of her had its face scratched away.

“I know everybody hates her, but who would do this?” Davidek asked.

Green got the answer a few days later, after asking his senior friends from the stairwell gang. “
She
did it,” Green said, showing them a copy of Bilbo’s junior yearbook. “When they came in, they all passed each other’s books around, getting everyone to sign them. This is what Hannah did to each one.” Just like in the others, Hannah Kraut’s face was scratched off in every photo. Underneath her defaced portrait, she had written in bold, black marker:
YOU COULDN’T REMEMBER ME IF YOU TRIED.

*   *   *

Lorelei was panicking. “Audra, Audra—!” Lorelei said, running up behind the student council president in the crowded hallway. Audra adjusted her black-rimmed glasses as if the girl before her were out of focus. “Yesss…?” she said, like air hissing from a tire.

Lorelei could hardly speak. Her lips worked, and her eyes pooled as she struggled to get the words out. “It’s been a week, and I’ve been very patient, but I just saw the Brother–Sister sign-up sheet, and…”

“And…,” Audra said, crossing her arms over her books.

“It says you signed up for Justin Teemo. Justin Teemo?”

Audra shrugged. “Michael—my
boyfriend
—told me he was a nice kid. We’re going to have the other girls dress up in poodle skirts and sing ‘My Guy’ to him onstage.”

“You said you’d pick me,” Lorelei whispered, unable to hold back the tears dripping down her cheeks. “Please.
Please
change it back.… Or could you make someone else pick me?”

Audra rolled her eyes as she walked away. “I know who I
hope
picks you.”

*   *   *

Davidek found Lorelei hugging Stein in an empty stairwell. They stood below the stained glass window of St. Francis of Assisi holding a bird on his extended finger and keeping the peace between the sheep and rabbits and ducks and wolves. Davidek couldn’t see Lorelei’s face. It was pressed into Stein’s shoulder.

Lorelei’s body squirmed against Stein’s arms. She was murmuring, “Your fault … your fault…,” and gripping him in something that looked less like an embrace and more like an effort to inflict pain. When she finally pulled away, the skin beneath her eyes was swollen and purple and wet. “They hate me because of
you,
” she said. “I
knew
it! I
warned
you!”

Stein was trying to find out who? What? How did this happen? But Lorelei wasn’t interested in him understanding. As he tried to pull her close again, she snapped. “Keep the hell away from me.”

Stein’s face was a mask of shock and sorrow. Davidek couldn’t look at it, and he backed up the steps without either of them noticing him.

*   *   *

The next morning, Stein found Davidek beside his locker. Word had spread all through the school that Lorelei’s connection with Stein had poisoned her relationship with Audra, and Audra allowed that rumor to continue rather than admit she was afraid a freshman was trying to steal her boyfriend.

“You’ve been a good friend to me, all this time. Never ditched me even when it would have made you a local hero,” Stein told Davidek, his voice drained of that usual dangerous enthusiasm.

Davidek tried to make a joke. “I keep you around because you make me look like the nice one.”

Stein didn’t laugh. “You
are
the nice one. You’ve got friends. You’ve got Green telling you stuff, and LeRose coaching you. You even have friends among the seniors … that redhead girl, what’s-her-name—Claudia—who helped you with the cigarettes? Why don’t you go talk to her? Ask her to pick you.”

“The truth is, I don’t know her that well,” Davidek said.

“Well,
get
to know her. I don’t want you to worry about who I end up with, because I honestly don’t care,” Stein said. “We’re brothers no matter what.”

Brothers.

“Thanks, Stein,” Davidek said. He wanted to say more, but he just said, “Thanks, Stein,” again.

*   *   *

Davidek found Claudia the next morning in the third-floor hallway, kneeling beside her locker as she separated a pile of loose papers. “Hey, how’s it going, Marlboro Man?” she said, zipping shut her denim bag and slinging it over her shoulder as she stood. “Haven’t seen you lately. How’d that cigarette thing turn out, anyway?”

“Good,” Davidek said lamely, trying to figure out how to ask what he needed. He found himself distracted by the light freckles on her chest, curving down her breasts to the edge of her green bra, which he could just see the outline of through her white uniform shirt.

“—the second floor?”

Davidek snapped back to reality. “What?”

“I said, ‘How’s life on the second floor?’ That’s where your locker is, right?”

Davidek blurted “—so, can I be your freshman?”

The girl laughed, errant flame-colored hairs falling forward in her face. “You’re a bold one, aren’t you! I thought seniors were supposed to choose, not have freshmen volunteer.”

Davidek tried to explain but couldn’t. He tried to breathe, but that wasn’t working either. “I’m sorry, actually.… I’m just a bit desperate, so … I’m … sorry, I’m gonna go.”

“Relax,” the girl said, putting a steadying hand on his shoulder. “So, all you want is for
me
to sign up as your big sister?”

Davidek nodded, blood pulsing in his cheeks.

“My own little freshman,” the girl said. “To be honest, I was thinking about choosing you anyway. You’re sweet. What you did for your friend with the smokes. It was … sweet.”

Davidek beamed, delirious with relief: “Man,
thanks,
Claudia. I was afraid the other seniors would hav—”

“Claudia?” the girl asked. Davidek blinked at her. A nervous and embarrassed smile bloomed on her face, and she drew back her fallen bangs and rubbed at her neck. “Right … I told you that, didn’t I.…”

Davidek bobbed his head, perplexed. “Yeah, back when you—” His eyes fixed on hers, shimmering and smiling at the corners. One was blue. The other was green.

“I was in kind of a weird state that day,” she said. “I’m a little bit unpopular around here with some people, and—well, I was testing you when you asked me for help. To see if you knew I was bullshiting you, or if … well … sorry about that.”

She reached out to shake his hand, which he accepted absently. “My name is Hannah Kraut,” she said. “You’re Peter, right? Peter…?”

“Davidek,” he said, his voice a whisper from another dimension.

The redhead nodded and repeated it to herself: “Peter Davidek,” she said, smiling. If he had been capable of rational thought at that instant he would have loved how the words looked on her lips.

“You look so serious,” she said. “Is there something else you wanted to say?”

Davidek’s hand slid away from hers. He let it fall, and for all he knew, it hit the floor. “You changed your hair,” he said.

PART IV

Winter

NINETEEN

Seven-Eighths knew everyone called her Seven-Eighths. No one made a secret of it anymore. They said it right to her face, like it wasn’t even an insult anymore, like it was just her name. Some of them probably didn’t even
know
her real name.

Sarah Matusch struggled not to let it bother her. At her old school, they called her “Hatchet Face,” which she was sickened to find listed in the dictionary. Sarah could live with the name as long as it was something created by morons, but not when the
Oxford English Dictionary
seemed to taunt her, too.

Her parents were fundamentalist Catholics, lifelong parishoners at St. Mike’s who had met at the high school when they were both freshmen, and Sarah and her little brother, Clarence, were raised to worship not just the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but also Father Hal Mercedes and Pope John Paul II—in that order. (The pope lost points for not reversing the liberal changes of Vatican II.) Father Mercedes knew the Matusch family all too well. He considered them zealots, and found them tiresome.

They were strict and humorless—blindly, pathologically devoted to what they considered the “traditional” teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. They hated, for instance, that the Mass was now in English instead of Latin, though that change had been made almost thirty years ago. The Matusch family was also aghast when they complained to him about the textbooks in Sarah’s biology class and discovered that the Vatican had long ago accepted evolution as a true scientific phenomenon.

During the family’s weekly confessions each Saturday, the mother would drone on about her frustrations with the leadership in Rome, the leadership in Washington, and the failures of the other mothers and wives she knew. When it was her husband’s turn, he would just grunt terse apologies for swearing, or slapping his kids—end of confession. The boy, Clarence, was only eleven, but was the family member with the most disturbing misdeeds to confess. He complained about feeling rejected and isolated in his parents’ house and considered setting fire to the home several times, though the daydreams made him feel angry at himself and ashamed. Father Mercedes tried to tell his parents about this, but they were more upset that the priest would consider breaking the Seal of the Confessional, the vow of secrecy priests took never to reveal what they hear during the sacrament of forgiveness. Father Mercedes merely suggested they take him to see a child psychiatrist to discuss his aggression issues. “If I ever catch him playing with matches, he’ll be going to see a doctor, all right—but not a head-shrinker,” Mr. Matusch said.

Although they treated Father Mercedes like a demigod in most other instances, the priest felt only tired contempt for the Matusch family. Father Mercedes, who took such pleasure out of the richness and risk of life, was annoyed by their intolerance of it. They were the fringe of his parish, and Sarah was their dim-witted, hopeless spawn. He would have pitied her if she hadn’t made his weekly confession schedule so monotonous.