Brutal Youth (47 page)

As they walked back to the crowd, Hannah held the package under her arm like a seminarian with a Bible, and Smitty stayed close beside her as a security guard—a necessary one. Right away, Amy Hispioli ran at Hannah and tried to grab the package, but Smitty tripped her flat on her face and they kept walking.

LeRose broke through the crowd and began cursing at Hannah, a demonstration of courage for his upperclassman friends, but when he got too close, Smitty grabbed his shirt and knocked him out of the way.

He didn’t like helping Hannah, but had no choice. John “Smitty” Smith used to live in Hannah’s neighborhood. In fact, she had once grabbed him by the face and shoved him to the ground for burning insects with a magnifying glass. The secret she knew about him was that Smitty looked so much older than the other freshmen because he
was.
He was her age, eighteen now—but had been held back several years in grade school. He had been doing whatever Hannah asked to ensure she would never tell. Now, as far as he was concerned, the debt was paid.

Hannah beckoned Davidek to the side of the stage as Smitty left her.

Audra approached the microphone like it was wired to explode. “Next up…,” she said, her voice pinched. “Uh, musical presentation, by Danny ‘Bilbo’ Tomch’s freshman.…” She was going straight to Green’s guitar playing. But Hannah extricated a blue binder from the black plastic wrapping and called out, “I think you’re moving out of order.… We’ve got to follow
the rules,
right?”

Audra didn’t answer. She looked at the crowd, which stared back at her, baffled. No one wanted to challenge Hannah. Not with that book in her hands.

“No, Hannah,” Audra said into the microphone. “No! I’m
not
going to allow this!” She stepped away from the mic and blocked Hannah at the back of the stage along the curtain. She looked ready for war—but then whispered, “I’ll let you go—but only if you
swear
not to make him say that thing you wrote about me.”

This caught Hannah by surprise. “And … what about your boyfriend? And your other friends?”

Audra swallowed, then repeated: “Nothing about …
me.
”

Hannah poked her tongue into her cheek and cocked her hip.
“Yeah?”
she said, as much a question as an agreement.

Audra stalked back to the microphone looking super-fucking-pissed-off, like she had done everything in her power and the sheer injustice of it all simply galled her. “Ladies and gentlemen, Hannah Kraut’s freshman … Peter Davidek.” Then she marched down the front steps of the stage, and all the onlookers stared around helplessly.

*   *   *

Behind the stage, out of sight of the others, Hannah and Davidek stood alone amid the tables and props discarded from the earlier acts.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had a double?” he asked. “I thought they burned—”

“That was a fake,” Hannah explained. “Those pages were all just the same page—printed over and over again. Since it was all about Audra and her boyfriend, I knew they wouldn’t look long, or let anybody
else
check.”

Davidek wondered, “Why didn’t you just print out a whole other copy?” But Hannah didn’t answer. He’d find out soon enough.

“Are you going to do this thing, or ask a million questions?”

Davidek raised a finger. “Only one more—how’d you get that asshole Smitty to do your bidding?”

“I can’t tell his secret any more than I could tell yours,” Hannah said, fluttering her eyes.

She placed the binder in Davidek’s hands. “Whatever happens, just come talk to me.
Don’t worry.
I’ll be right back here.”

Davidek tapped the binder with two fingers. “I’m not the one who needs to be worried anymore,” he said, and walked up the steps through the curtain.

What seemed to be a thousand faces greeted him. Davidek imagined all of them with painted red scars on their cheeks. Time to wipe those away.

Bromine was inching close to the sound board, ready to make the kids there cut his mic the second he said too much, but Davidek would keep reading, no matter what. He would shout until his throat tore apart.

There wasn’t a whisper from the crowd. Over in the corner, down by the base of the stage, he could see the Parish Monitors, their notebooks poised. Mullen and Simms were alone together far in the distance, not a part of the crowd, not a part of anything. Green stood alongside Bilbo and his senior friends, shielding his guitar in the jostling audience. Davidek’s father was out there somewhere, too … and Lorelei.

Davidek opened the binder, prepared to make it hurt. His mouth moved closer to the microphone as he looked down to begin reading. But the first sheet was pure white.

Empty.

He turned the next page, but that was blank, too.

So was the next one. And the next one.

So were all of them.

FORTY-SEVEN

The next few moments existed in Davidek’s mind only as snapshots and scattered sounds. At first it was just white, a total void on all sides. Then the whiteness receded; it was only the blank pages he held, and those were meaningless. Even the breeze flipped them dismissively.

The faces in the crowd below weren’t people, just a smattering of color against the lime background of the Harrison Hills fields.

Here was another snapshot: Hannah, her eyebrows forming an angry V, teeth bared. Davidek opened his mouth, and that’s when she swung her fist at him. The world went black, but not because she struck him. He had simply closed his eyes, expecting to be hit, but Hannah had merely swatted the microphone, skittering it across the stage. It made a sound over the speakers like a lawn mower digesting silverware.

Davidek’s eyes opened again and Hannah was leading him by the arm through the backstage door, like an impatient lover. “It’s the wrong notebook,” he told her. And she hushed him, taking the useless binder from his hands.

“It’s not the wrong notebook, Peter. It’s the right notebook. It’s the only notebook. There never was a notebook.”

These notions all seemed to be at war with each other. He couldn’t understand and began peppering her with questions she didn’t have time to answer. Hannah insisted: “I’ll explain more to you later, but for now—you did great. This all happened the way I hoped it would. There’s only one more thing I need you to do.”

Davidek listened. She said, “Stand behind me onstage and don’t say anything. Okay?”

Then she was moving again, and he followed her through the curtain and back onto the stage, where she picked up the microphone and, like all great public speakers, warmed up the crowd. “Just so you all know … St. Mike’s is a wretched place on this Earth, and you all plague its halls, wallowing in your sick, cruel little lives.” She held the binder aloft. “That doesn’t change whether my freshman reads this today or not.”

Nearly every breath in front of them halted. Hannah’s mouth became a thin smile. “My freshman here has been disobedient,” she said. “He tells me now he is
refusing
to read what I have
told
him to read.” Hannah looked back at Davidek, and was pleased by the angry and confused expression on his face. It fit quite perfectly with the story she was presenting. She had been right to keep him clueless all this time.

“Maybe Davidek is a little soft on you, a little misguided,” she said.

The audience began to jeer and holler at her. Someone threw a chunk of grass that flop-rolled across the stage. Carl LeRose, standing in the front row, raised a middle finger in the air. “Get off the stage, Fuckslut!” he shouted.

Someone else yelled, “Freshmen only!” Another voice: “Cut the mic!”

That sentiment was spreading quickly and the noise was rising. “The thing is … I like my freshman. Even if he is a little soft on the rest of you.” Hannah tossed the fluttering pages to Davidek. “Their secrets are yours now, tough guy—in case you change your mind.”

Hannah lowered her mouth closer to the microphone, peering through the autumn hair hanging over her one blue eye and one green eye, and addressed her classmates one last time: “I suggest you treat him better than you treated me.”

The heckling became a wave that pushed Hannah off the stage. The crowd screamed names at her, hurled a few more chunks of grass and half-eaten cookies, and booed and hissed and cursed and laughed as she walked away.

*   *   *

Hannah hurried back to her Jeep. She wanted to talk with Davidek, but not around the others, and she guessed it would take him a while to catch up. Hopefully, not long. She couldn’t afford to linger—not with her protection gone.

At the edge of the crowd stood Mr. Zimmer, his thin head rising high above the others, looking like some separate species. They hadn’t spoken since he had fled the prom weeks earlier. He never bothered to explain himself to her, but Hannah had chosen to forgive him anyway. She wasn’t angry anymore. Not about anything at all.

As she walked by, Mr. Zimmer said, “You did the right thing.”

Hannah looked back at Davidek, who was holding the empty pages and being mobbed with congratulations. “Yeah,” she said. “Even if that kid never
did
show up at the prom, like he
promised.
” She shrugged. “Nothing to take pictures of anyway.”

Zimmer said, “I’m sorry, Hannah.… But you and I…” She let him struggle with his words. All the teacher came up with was: “Maybe your freshman can take our picture at graduation next week. I’d like one of you in those commencement robes, to remember you by.”

“Okay. Graduation, then, Mr. Zimmer,” she said. “I’ll see you when it’s time to say good-bye to this place.” Then Hannah hugged him, not knowing that moment would be their actual good-bye.

*   *   *

Davidek caught up to her as she was opening the door to her Jeep. She saw him running across the field—alone, thankfully. Before he could ask it, she tried to answer the obvious question: “I made up the story of the notebook with all the secrets. I made it up a long time ago.”

Davidek was still catching his breath. His face was furious. She said, “You want to know why, don’t you?”

Davidek said, “Fuck you…”

Hannah frowned. “Why don’t you try ‘Thanks’? The notebook story protected me for two years. It made people afraid. And that made me safe. I brought you in because I wanted to pass that protection to you. You’re the hero, Peter. To all those people, you killed the monster. All by yourself.”

Davidek wasn’t impressed. “I didn’t want this.…” He shook the empty stack of pages at her, and Hannah said, “Then tell ’em it was all a trick. Tell ’em you
didn’t
stand up to me and really wanted to read out all the worst, dirty little things about them. That’ll cure all the backslapping you were just getting.”

“Why’d you lie about it to me?”
he demanded. “Why couldn’t you trust me?”

Hannah put a hand on her hip. “Are you really going to stand there and say you wouldn’t have warned them? That you wouldn’t have told them
months ago
it was all a trick? Back when you were getting Zimmer and Bromine to threaten me? Where would I have been then, Playgirl, if I told you the truth? Helpless.
Defenseless.
”

Davidek got right up in her face. “Goddamnit, Hannah, this was supposed to … to make it
right
! What about all the stories you said you knew?”

“Do you think I’m the invisible-
fucking
-man?” Hannah said. “I told you—I’ve heard rumors, sure. And some might have been true—but nobody tells me anything. What everyone
imagined
I knew was the trick that protected me. The best revenge you can get is making people see the worst parts of themselves.”

Hannah reached into the pocket of her shorts and withdrew the disposable camera. She stuck it in his free hand. “Here, you can have this back, too.”

Davidek squeezed it until his knuckles were white; then he thrust it out at her. “And should I thank you for that, too, the day under the bridge? Did you have to humiliate me like that?”

Hannah was quiet. She didn’t want to keep fighting with him. She wanted to leave. “I needed you to stop
resisting.
I needed you to stop taking their side, telling teachers, helping undermine me. Let’s face it—the main reason you warned me about the plan to ambush me at my house today was that camera. You were afraid they’d get it. Or that I’d print up the pictures—”

Davidek’s jaw clenched. “I warned you because
I
wanted what
you
wanted.”

Hannah said, “I just wanted to be left alone.”

Davidek’s raging eyes almost pitied her. “You wanted to hurt them.”

“I used to,” Hannah said, and brushed her small, soft hand on his cheek. He closed his eyes and let it cradle his jaw, savoring the warmth, trying to remember the feel of it because he knew it wouldn’t last. “What I really wanted was to save the kid who asked me to be his senior—the one who thought I was too nice to be the Hannah Kraut everybody talked about. Can’t you see the good in this? Please?” she asked. “I did this to protect you. To make you the good guy. From now on, everybody owes you.”

She forced a wry smile that she didn’t really feel. “As for our incident under the bridge … Don’t tell me that wasn’t a little bit fun.”

Davidek put his arms around her and squeezed her close. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

Then she watched him growing small against the plain of green grass as he walked away. “I’m sorry for you, Playgirl,” she said, too soft for him to hear. “You always hold on to the worst of things—and you lose everything else.”

*   *   *

Davidek was mobbed by people shoving and hanging on him good-naturedly. “That was brave, man,” said John Hannidy. “United we stand!” They were all around him now, his enemies—presenting him with the gift of friendship.

There was a cheer as Hannah’s Jeep disappeared down the road. Someone asked Davidek what he planned to do with the notebook—the question came from Mary Grough, and it had the vague tenor of a threat. All eyes were on the binder he clutched to his chest.

He walked to the fire pit, and with a gasp of ash, the binder dropped in and Davidek watched the blaze consume a second helping of useless pages. He reached into his pocket and dropped the disposable camera into the flames after it. The heat turned the plastic into smoldering bubbles, releasing tiny purple ghosts of smoke into the air. Then it was gone, too.