Brutal Youth (22 page)

Davidek guessed Stein just needed
someone,
and agitated his friend by saying things like, “This is not some cosmic romance. It’s ninth grade.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to lose something you love,” Stein said, and Davidek resisted the urge to tell him how wrong he was. They both spent their days missing the same girl.

*   *   *

As Christmas neared, the early winter evenings fell like ax blades, cutting every day short. Every tree was a cold, brown skeleton, electrified each morning with a blue frost. No one at St. Mike’s went outside during the lunch break anymore. The upperclassmen either left school grounds entirely, or they remained packed in the cafeteria, gossiping and threatening one another. The freshmen had no choice. They were stuck.

Lorelei could never find a place to sit. After Audra abandoned her, Lorelei had tried going back to her old table, taking a seat beside Zari and the other girls, asking if anyone could figure out the Spanish extra-credit assignment. It wasn’t long before a handful of seniors walked by, mentors to some of the girls at the table. They whispered briefly to their freshmen, eyes on Lorelei. One by one, the freshman girls would dab their mouths, pick up their trays, and follow their orders to move elsewhere.

With Audra’s protection gone, the Grough sisters returned to harrasing Lorelei. Anne-Marie Thomas snatched her midterm Spanish paper—a partial translation of
Don Quixote—
and passed it off to little Theresa Grough, who rushed into the bathroom and dunked it in a toilet. Lorelei fished it out, but the handwritten ten-page paper was worthless, the blue ink running and illegible. She tried to turn it in, but Mrs. Tunns wouldn’t accept it. “I know the trick of turning in ruined chickenscratch and claiming the dog ate your homework,” the teacher said.

Twice the Groughs snuck by with scissors and snipped away a lock of her hair. “Didn’t ya hear? Symmetry is so yesterday.…” They giggled. To protect herself, she would walk the halls with her free arm looped up over her head. People started imitating the walk.

At lunch on the final day before Christmas break, she slid her tray of food down at a table full of boys. Not one with Stein, but other boys from her class. She assumed they would be less likely to care about who was shunning her, but no seniors even needed to visit the table. After a while, the boys cleared away and squeezed in with friends at other tables, leaving her alone.

Only one person stayed behind.

Blue-eyed Smitty was so much taller and sturdier-looking than the other freshman boys. His face had a chiseled look, with caved cheeks and those pale eyes. There was something about his calm face, his slow way of talking, that she found hypnotic.

“I heard you like older guys. That true?” he said. The rumor that she’d been after Audra’s boyfriend was making the rounds, but Lorelei still didn’t know that.

Lorelei looked at her plate of uneaten pizza. “I don’t like anybody,” she said.

Smitty slid down the row to sit across from her, and his heavy weight made that end of the table bend a little. “Suppose I told you that
I
was older…,” he said, those blue eyes burning white-hot across her body, making her squirm.

Lorelei stood from the table. “Suppose I said you had a lot of growing up to do!”

Smitty laughed, and banged the table raucously, making her tray and silverware jump. “You know what else they call you?” he said as she walked away. “Hannah Two!”

She’d heard that before. Variations on the nickname had already passed around her in barely concealed whispers:
Hannah 2. Little Kraut. The Second Coming of Fuckslut.

Lorelei had faced this kind of isolation before. She had felt her carefully assembled life fall apart. But it couldn’t be allowed to happen again.

There must be another senior who would still protect her, who knew what it was like to be the outcast, the one treated cruelly. Lorelei’s eyes got wet. She smeared them with the sleeve of her sweater.
Stop it,
she thought, and did.

Audra had been an accidental discovery, but as Lorelei walked through the aisles this time, she knew exactly who she was looking for. The voices rose around her, upperclassmen on all sides.

It didn’t take long to find what she needed.

TWENTY-ONE

First-semester report cards came out just before the holiday break, and Davidek’s dismal grades made Christmas an un-jolly time in his house. “How do you get an F in Religion?” his mother said. “Seriously. Explain this.… Do I need to repeat the question again?” Davidek told her the teacher hated him, and his father asked if all the other ones did, too. D’s in Algebra and Biology, a C-plus in English, C’s in French and Phys Ed, and B’s—the high points—in History and computer class. “You spend so much time at that school with all your detentions, I assumed you’d learn something just by accident,” his father said.

Davidek’s trouble with his schoolwork came from fretting so much over Hannah Kraut, who was the only subject that consumed Davidek. And he wasn’t alone.

Father Mercedes had been dwelling on the rumor of Hannah Kraut’s notebook all through Advent, but hadn’t discussed the diary in any of his weekly evaluations of Sister Maria’s disciplinary shortcomings. He didn’t have enough information from Seven-Eighths, and for that he had ordered her some fresh penance—four rosaries each morning, four each night—but no prayers during schooltime. That’s when she was supposed to be
listening.

If this diary did exist, documenting true crimes and debauchery from the halls of St. Mike’s, it would serve his cause to have those embarrassments revealed publicly. But he was haunted by one question: What if it contained suspicions about
him
? He had no idea if a teenage girl would bother herself with gossip about the parish priest, but couldn’t risk silly rumors turning into serious questions.

In the snowy first weeks of January, he decided to seek help from someone in authority at St. Mike’s who was
not
loyal to Sister Maria. Someone close to the children, but mistrustful of them. Someone who could be clever enough to gather information, but not clever enough to figure out his motives.

“Ms. Bromine!” he said, greeting the guidance counselor at his door. “I get too few visits from you! Is your New Year going well so far?”

“Two weeks down,” she said. “Fifty more to go.”

“God willing.” He smiled, opening the storm door as she walked inside from the crackling ice on his front porch.

They ate chipped ham sandwiches in his kitchen, though Ms. Bromine would much rather have sat at the priest’s antique walnut table in the rectory’s ornate dining room, surrounded by those gorgeous cabinets full of carnival glassware and holy relics. Compared to that finery, the Formica table and fluorescent bulbs of the kitchen were a letdown.

“We’re of a like mind, Ms. Bromine,” Father Mercedes said. “I can tell.…”

She chewed her ham sandwich. “How’s that, Father?”

“You’ve come to me with concerns in the past,” he explained. “About the school’s, uh … leadership deficit. Now I come to you, as a fellow believer that increased vigilance is necessary. St. Mike’s seems to be plagued with students we know to be troubled, prone to disobedience—”

“In the faculty, we call them jerk-offs,” Ms. Bromine said. “I do keep watch on them, Father. I do. I even have a list of the no-good ones.… I could show you.”

The priest said, “Is a girl named Hannah Kraut on that list?”

Ms. Bromine nodded, chewing a mouthful quickly so she could tell him all about it. The priest settled back into his chair. “I want you to be mindful of her. These self-destructive types … Sometimes they can hurt others on their way down.”

The guidance counselor nodded, still chewing, and the priest smiled again.

“Tell me, whatever became of those two boys who were bedeviling you?” he said. “The quiet one, and the preacher boy I met.”

“Preacher boy?” she asked, dabbing her mouth.

The priest groaned. “The one with the scarred face. He was mouthing off about how many religions his family has devoted themselves to over the years. Most likely fiction. Must be interesting for you to teach religion to the only born-again Buddhist Jew in Catholic school.”

He laughed, but Bromine didn’t. “He’s a godless little liar,” she said. “I’ll prove it someday.”

Bromine only wished that Father Mercedes had told her about this sooner. She would happily shred the braggadocious little shit on the pastor’s behalf.

*   *   *

She got her chance the next time Stein spoke up insolently in the middle of her lecture—this time on the subject of comparative religions: “Sorry, but Jehovah’s Witnesses are different from Mormons,” he said. “They’re different religions.”

Bromine stopped writing on her chalkboard in the middle of
MORM
. “I didn’t say they were the same. I said they were
related,
” she said. “They both go door to door.” She extended her chalk. “Would you like to teach the class?”

Stein shifted in his seat. “It’s just that … my parents were both Witnesses, but only for a little while.” Some of the kids laughed. Only Davidek knew Stein wasn’t joking.

“It was before I was born,” he said. “In our basement, we still have some of the old
Watchtower
magazines those guys give out. My parents met some missionaries in Seattle when they lived there. Dad says my mom would’ve kept studying, but when she found out they were serious about no Halloween or birthday parties, it was over for her.”

“Are you telling me your parents are polytheists?” Bromine said, though the other kids had no idea what that meant.
“Pagans?”
she asked, playing to the room.

Stein shook his head. “My dad’s an atheist. My sister is an Evangelical. She wants us both to be born-again, but … like I said, Dad’s an atheist now.”

Bromine snorted. “What’s your mother? A leprechaun?” This lame sarcasm actually got a laugh from the class, Bromine’s first in a long time. She basked in it.

Davidek slouched in his chair, smiling. Bromine was done for. She had no idea Stein’s mother had died. Let her make a few more snide cracks. When he dropped that bombshell, she would melt into the floor like the witch in
The Wizard of Oz.

“My mom was always looking for something to believe in,” Stein said. “She studied Hinduism, Buddhism … When we lived in Los Angeles, she got in with Scientology a little. We moved to Florida and she got me to study Judaism, ’cause my dad’s parents are Jewish. She wanted me to be bar mitzvah-ized.”

“I think you’re lying,” Bromine said, coming on a little too strong. “I won’t be lied to in my classroom.”

Stein blinked at her. “I’m not lying,” he said.

The teacher stalked to a bookshelf in the back of the room that was stacked with religious texts, including a dozen variations on the Bible, a Book of Mormon, three Korans, and a paperback of
When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

“I’m holding the book of Jewish scripture, can you tell me what it is?” she asked, hiding the volume behind her back.

Stein shrugged. “Sorry, Jews lose their mind-reading powers after we’re circumcised.”

Bromine’s face flushed. “A real Jew would know the answer.”

“There are lots of Jewish texts,” Stein said, then made a guess: “The Talmud.”

Bromine put the Talmud back on the shelf, seething. “So what exactly is your religion now?”

“My sister’s the only religious one,” Stein said. “She’s born-again. Like my mom.”

Who’s dead!
Davidek’s mind screamed.
Just say it.
Destroy
her.
But Stein didn’t.

“Born
again
…” Bromine sniffed. “Is that for people who mess it up the first time? I’d like to talk to your mother, and see if this is all true.”

“You could,” Stein said. “Except for one thing.”

Davidek’s smile bit into his pencil.
Here it comes.…

“What’s that, Mr. Stein?” Bromine asked.

“She would just quote Proverbs 12:23 to you.”

The other students began riffling the pages of their Bibles, stopping on the correct verse. The kids knew they shouldn’t laugh, which made it unstoppable. The snickers and sputters from faces hidden behind upright textbooks gave way to an avalanche. “What does it say, Lorelei?” Ms. Bromine asked.

Lorelei sighed as she read: “‘Smart people keep quiet about what they know, but stupid people advertise their ignorance.’”

That was the end of the discussion. Bromine went to her desk and began writing out detention slips—two for Stein’s “backtalk” and “lying,” and one for everyone in the classroom who had laughed with him.

Davidek, for once, wasn’t one of them.

*   *   *

Stein’s father picked him up from school that day. Usually it was Stein’s older sister, Margie, who worked at Sears in the mornings and attended nursing school at night, but some pipes had burst at the condo complex where Larry Stein was working, giving him and the other electricians the afternoon off. He volunteered to get Noah this time, looking forward to a little father–son time, though the boy wasn’t very talkative at first.

Oh well. Larry couldn’t make the kid be chatty, so he turned up the radio and sang along with the Eagles about the importance of taking it easy.

The work truck looped along the frozen country road, which twisted toward their little house in Sarver Township. Snow blasted the windshield as the wipers worked in time to the music. Stein’s dad kept singing until his son said to the window, “A teacher asked me about Mom today.”

Neither of them spoke for a while. Then his father turned off the radio and reached over to jostle the boy’s knee. “We were in Religion class and the teacher was arguing with me about, you know, all the faiths and stuff Mom got us into,” Stein said.

“Your mom liked to believe in things,” his father said. “Everything she could … Heck, she believed in a loser like
me
enough to say ‘I do.’”

Larry Stein’s fingers fidgeted around the wedding band he still wore. He wanted to stop this conversation, though he couldn’t. Shouldn’t. “If you think this is one of those stages you go through, maybe we could go see a doctor again,” he said. “I can talk to Margie about it and—”