Brutal Youth (6 page)

Besides that last one counting as a good deed, a crippled person would also be a greater target for teasing, drawing any ridcule away from Lorelei—though she didn’t want to write that down. It seemed mean. She memorized it instead.

In the mirror, on the morning of her first day, Lorelei tried to pinpoint her own flaws, anything at all someone meeting her for the first time might make fun of. She fixated on the shape of her eyebrows, each of which had a hard little arch in the centers. If a mean girl noticed that, it could undermine months of preparation.

She found a set of silver tweezers in the mess of makeup, brushes, and lotions atop her dresser, and braced herself beside the mirror. There wasn’t much time; the bus was supposed to arrive soon. She worked fast. Fresh tears appeared with each pluck.

Her distorted vision and hurried work prevented her from noticing right away that one brow was noticeably narrower than the other.
Damn it.

She plucked again at the thicker one, but once again miscalculated—attacking the bottom half of the eyebrow instead of the top. They were the same thickness now, but one was higher than the other—making her look permanently skeptical.

She walked downstairs and then back up, paced the corners of her room, then settled in front of the mirror again. An eyebrow pencil wasn’t solving the problem, so she washed her face and tried something risky.

Lorelei yanked her ponytail loose. Her hair was all one length, but a small pair of cuticle scissors were all she needed to trim a line of bangs across her forehead. Then, while attempting to curl them, she once again realized the perils of hasty grooming. She had cut too short, exposing the eyebrows anyway—and the line of bangs was painfully crooked.

For the next ten minutes, she made pass after pass with the scissors, shaving off dust-sized fragments. Her hands trembled.

Soon she was sprinting through the misty rain down her empty street, the rows of factory houses silent and dark. She rounded the corner past the warmly glowing windows of Mazziotti’s Bakery, where she had intended to treat herself to a doughnut and hot chocolate for breakfast, if only she’d had enough time. Lorelei raced toward the corner of Constitution Boulevard, waving her arms and calling out as her bright yellow bus started to pull away. The brakes squealed, and the doors gasped open, inhaling the out-of-breath girl. Lorelei thanked the lumberjack-looking man behind the wheel and sulked into a seat—the first row, of course, right behind the driver. (Only troublemakers gravitated toward the back rows.) In the big rearview mirror, her wet bangs fell in something that looked like a chart illustrating economic decline. And they did nothing to hide her weirdly askew eyebrows.

The rusty little town of Arnold slid by outside her rainy window. Lorelei tried to look happy as the dim morning light cast shadows of trickling water down her face.

THREE

First class of the day: Religion.

Lorelei entered the classroom and found a seat in the center of the front row, placed a notebook and pen on the desktop, and crossed her ankles under her chair.

Her new classmates shuffled in behind her, and the boy who took the seat next to hers had a web of thin pink scars running from the corner of his eye, right down to his jawline. But he was still kind of cute. It made him look strong somehow, to be damaged.

Lorelei immediately remembered Rule No. 5 (befriend a cripple), and thought this might be a perfect opportunity. “Can I ask you…,” she said, tracing a finger near her own eye. The boy instinctively touched his scar. “Are you blind in that eye?” she asked.

The boy leaned in conspiratorially, smiling. “If I was, I’d have sat on the other side, so I could still see you.”

Lorelei groaned. “I get it. So you’re the guy who flirts with every girl in class?”

The boy with the scar shook his head. “No,” he said. “Just the prettiest ones.”

The chatter in the room was cut off by the slam of a door. Ms. Bromine stood with her hand clenched on the knob, in case she needed to slam it again. “Good morning,” she said sweetly. She walked to the podium beside the teacher’s desk. After more silence, she said: “Aren’t you going to wish
me
a good morning?” which was followed by a disjointed response of “Good morn-ing, Miss-us Bromummum…”

“Bro-
myne,
” the teacher corrected them, dashing her name on the chalkboard. “I am the school guidance counselor, and I also teach this class on Catholic catechism. This is not church, but it’s
about
church, so I expect you to behave ac—” That’s when she noticed the scarred boy. Their eyes locked. The lips he had once planted a mocking kiss on pursed. “Do you have a problem, young man?”

Stein looked behind him. Bromine said, “I’m talking to
you.
What is it you have there on the side of your face? Some kind of … rash?” As every eye in the classroom penetrated him, the teacher adjusted her little Ben Franklin glasses and said, “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that was just … well, how God made you.” She put a hand to her mouth to cover a small smile, and coughed to clear her throat.

“You should see the other guy,” Stein said. “And it wasn’t
God.
” The kids in the class chuckled, but Ms. Bromine no longer had a smile to hide. “Let’s not talk out of turn,” she said, unable to think of a better comeback.

A hulking, blue-eyed boy in the back row snorted one out for her. “Is that from when your mom tried to abort you?” Bromine pretended not to hear this. Stein turned to glare at the big kid, and mouthed:
Shut up
,
shit head.
The boy, who appeared too large for his desk, sat up straighter and hardened his gaze:
Make me, asshole.

“In any case, where was I?” Bromine said. “Oh, yes. This class is where you learn right from wrong. This is
not
a place for you to sit around and discuss what you
believe
is right, or what you don’t
feel
is wrong. ‘Believing’ and ‘feeling’ aren’t welcome in a mathematics course, and they’re not welcome here either.”

Bromine had them go to a table in the back and pick up a textbook,
Exploring Modern Faith
—or, as some of them had been vandalized by past students,
Exploding Modern Farts
. As the kids returned to their desks, the classroom door opened. Bromine looked over at the new arrival.
Good Lord Jesus. The other one, too?

Davidek, his hair and blazer still dripping with rain, wandered in nervously, raising a freshly printed class schedule like a talisman to ward away evil. “The secretary gave me a sophomore list by mistake…,” he said.

“It’s always somebody else’s fault with you, isn’t it?” Bromine said. She folded her arms. “Take a seat,” she said. “And congratulations.”

“For what?” Davidek asked, hunching toward the empty desk on the other side of Lorelei.

“For collecting the first detention of the year,” Bromine said. “And in the first class of your first year, in the first minute you enter. You should be in the record books.”

Davidek sank into his seat. Stein leaned forward to tip him a friendly salute that Davidek didn’t feel energized enough to return.

“You’ll need to get a textbook,” Bromine said. When Davidek stood up, she snapped: “Play catch-up on your own time. You’ve already distracted me enough. Let’s go around the room, and each of you say your name. And don’t go changing seats after today. I can’t remember who’s who if you keep shifting around.”

Bromine barely heard any of the kids saying their names. She was focused on the two hooligans, evidence of how things had changed for the worse around here since the days when she had worn the St. Mike’s uniform.

When the scarred kid introduced himself as “Noah Stein,” Bromine raised her pencil-thin eyebrows. “Noah, eh?” she said. “So, where’s your ark?”

She basked as the class chuckled at her zinger (which had been her whole reason for the introductions), but Stein shot back: “Where’s the second animal who matches you?” It was a reflex from a lifetime of dumb “Hey, Noah, where’s your ark?” jokes.

Bromine’s eyes went wide. “You,” she said, “have earned yourself the second detention.”

Stein shrugged. Bromine started scribbling the punishment slips at her desk. She didn’t bother with the rest of the students’ names.

When the bell rang, Lorelei turned to Davidek and reminded him to pick up his textbook from the back desk. He thanked her, and she noticed his gaze linger slightly above her face.

She raised a palm to her forehead, like she was taking her own temperature. “What?” she demanded, though she knew exactly what. The misshapen eyebrows, the crooked hair.

“
Nothing.
Just your hairdo is a little different.… But different is cool,” Davidek added.

Lorelei, hand still on her forehead, told him acidly: “You know what else is cool? Your clip-on tie.”

*   *   *

In Biology class, the students sat at long, high tables with gas pipes jutting out of the center for Bunsen burners. The scorched-egg smell of sulfur hung in the room—the ghost of experiments past. The Biology teacher, Mrs. Horgen, handed out textbooks and a set of copied notes, telling the students to pick a partner for the semester’s lab work.

Davidek scanned the tables for a seat and saw Stein talking with Lorelei, and since he had so recently offended her, he settled at a different table beside another person he recognized: the chubby black kid, last seen dodging projectiles in his tangerine sweater. Davidek told him, “I remember you from that day in the parking lot. I wouldn’t have guessed you’d come back after getting stuff thrown at you the first time.”

The black kid looked amazed and flattered. “That was me, yeah. Hector Greenwill—but everybody calls me Green.… You and that Noah guy were the ones trying to help that hurt kid, right?”

Davidek nodded. Green said, “That was a weird day, all right.… My parents said this would be a good school for me, though. I’m really into music and stuff—I play guitar—and I want to learn about choirs and arrangements and all. The sucky part is the school’s music teacher quit over the summer. Anyway, they say at a smaller school like this, you get more attention.”

“When you’re not dodging bricks,” Davidek said, but Green waved it off.

“Honestly, that kid on the roof made me want to come here even more. It felt good helping that teacher, like I was a part of something, you know?”

Davidek shrugged. “What do you think happened to that kid anyway? The newspaper made it seem like nothing happened.”

“He’s probably down in a psych ward somewhere, banging his head in one of the padded rooms,” Green said. “But I’ll tell you this—that guy could
throw.
If the loony farm has an all-crazy softball team, he’d be an all-star.”

Davidek said, “It’s hard to pitch in a straitjacket.”

Green contemplated this. “If a guy with four multiple personalities gets to home base, does that count as a grand slam?”

They started to laugh, and then they couldn’t stop. It went on for so long, Mrs. Horgen told them they couldn’t be lab partners, and separated them.

*   *   *

Computer Science class was taught by Mr. Zimmer, the human praying mantis who had scaled the side of the school and saved the boy on the roof. He was telling them they’d learn how to format term papers, and create spreadsheets and other programs.

The faces of the students blinked at him from behind their computer monitors.

“Okay,” Zimmer said. “So you have an empty screen in front of you. Put your hands on the keyboard and start writing—it doesn’t matter what. Swearwords, the Gettysburg Address … I just want to get a sense of your typing skills. But, seriously … don’t type any swearwords. I was just kidding about that.”

Zimmer prowled through the room, and when he got to Green, he asked softly: “Do you mind talking to me in the hall for a second?”

Green nodded mutely, and they walked out of the classroom and down the corridor near the main entrance, where there were two wooden trophy cases full of aging honors, and between them a large crucifix hanging on the wall. A long-departed priest, who had been pastor back when Sister Maria was only a student at St. Mike’s, had commissioned the art class to paint wide white eyes on Jesus—an unsubtle reminder to students that they were always being watched. The Christ figure with the stark, crazy eyes loomed over Mr. Zimmer’s shoulder, chest out, arms spread, like it was trying to taunt Green into a fight.

“I wanted to tell you, I’m glad you decided to come to school here,” Zimmer said. “I never got a chance to thank you for running interference for me that day. You’d make an excellent running back—if we had a football team.”

“I was glad to help,” Green said.

Zimmer nodded. “I wanted to talk with you privately because … well, you’re clearly a good kid and I’m a little worried. Maybe unnecessarily, but there are some things you should know.… Have you heard much about initiation and hazing at St. Mike’s?”

Green said, “Sorta. Like in the movies where the frat brothers are all getting spanked and saying ‘Thank you, sir, may I have another’?”

“Well, St. Mike’s isn’t quite
Animal House.
” Zimmer laughed. “But it can get a little mean. Not all of us like it, but it’s a part of the school’s tradition. So, it’s difficult to stop.”

“It’s just fun and games, right?” Green shrugged. “A little teasing?”

Zimmer proceeded cautiously. “St. Mike’s is a good place, but … the seniors have a lot of pressures facing them. College applications to start, scholarships to fight for … It makes them a little—
severe.
Tempers are high, emotions can be, too. What troubles me is, well, you’re
different
from the other freshmen—and that’s a good thing. But when this hazing thing gets under way, I don’t want anyone to take advantage of that difference. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

Green did, and he made it easy on the struggling teacher. “You think they’ll come after me since I’m the only black kid.”

Zimmer ran a hand on the back of his neck. “We’ve had other people of color at St. Mike’s—not many, I’m afraid, but a few. None right now, though. Just you. Kids can say stupid things sometimes. If it ever happens, just know you can come to me for help, okay?”