Brutal Youth (24 page)

When they were alone, Stein closed his arms in an embrace around Lorelei’s shoulders. “I missed you,” he said.

Lorelei scrunched up her face. “Just since this afternoon?”

He tightened the embrace gently, feeling her warm cheek against his frigid neck. “It’s been a lot longer than that, and you know it.”

When she pulled back, he admired the bulky brown sport coat tilting across her shoulders. “Interesting look,” he said.

“It’s Mr. Mankowski’s. He made me wear it,” she said, sticking out her tongue. She peeked over Stein’s shoulder to make sure the girls selling carnations nearby weren’t looking, then drew open the buttoned jacket to show off tight jeans clinging low on her hips, and a lacy white camisole embroidered with a spectrum of flowers stopping just above her belly button, which was like a little swirl in a smooth curve of cream.

“I wore a big sweater to get out of the house, but I couldn’t get past Mankowski. Not ‘Catholic school’ enough for him,” she said, gesturing toward the bald-headed chaperone standing in the center of the dance floor, policing the romance. “The worst part is, it smells like him.”

“You make a musty old jacket look very hot,” Stein told her. She didn’t say anything back, though she held his gaze a long time.

I do care about you, Noah Stein,
she thought,
no matter what happens now.

He draped his arm across the back of the jacket and they walked to the dance floor as the writhing students there slowed for a power ballad—Cinderella singing “Don’t Know What You You Got (Till It’s Gone).” Lorelei and Stein placed their arms in comfortable spots and began to sway. He leaned his face beside hers, smelling the sweet, candy scent of her hair spray and perfume and makeup.

They didn’t leave the dance floor the rest of the night.

Later, he noticed two familiar faces staring at them from the garden of wallflowers: Asshole Face and Sandmouth. Lorelei turned away as Stein taunted them: “Why don’t you two ladies have a dance. You look beautiful together.”

Lorelei whispered, “Please, don’t…”

Stein looked at her, then back to the two seniors, who flipped him off as they walked away.

*   *   *

Davidek spent most of the night beside Green, who spent most of the night schooling him on recent music history, triggered by the random songs on the DJ’s playlist. He heard all about the New Wave movement and the first song featured in a video on MTV (something about the radio killing someone). A Police song launched him into a lecture on reggae and rock fusion, which concluded with Green doing the robot as he sang along in staccato to “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.”

Good advice,
Davidek thought. Near the end of the dance, Hannah Kraut surprised everyone simply by showing up. “Have you seen Mr. Zimmer?” she asked Davidek. “I thought maybe he would be chaperoning tonight.”

“I think I heard some of the parents saying his car was snowed in,” Davidek said. Hannah seemed disappointed by that.

Later, he saw Hannah in the corner engaged in an intense conversation with Smitty, of all people. Smitty looked nervous, like he didn’t want to be seen with her.

Hey, if she pisses
him
off, she can’t be all bad,
Davidek thought.

*   *   *

Stein and Lorelei were face-to-face, lips almost touching, eyes locked. Sinead O’Connor was singing a sad song about eating her dinner in a fancy rest-AHRR-aunt, and Stein’s hand moved inside Mankowski’s monster-sized jacket until the tips of his fingers brushed the firm, bare skin of Lorelei’s hip, hidden in the shadow of the cloak.

“I wish I could kiss you again,” Stein said. “Like we did before, outside the church.”

Lorelei’s eyes wouldn’t meet his. Their bodies turned with the music. His touch had made her breathless.

“Let’s just take things slow…,” she said, and her hand slipped down to stop his caress. “Maybe if—” But before she could finish, he touched his lips to hers.

That’s when Ms. Bromine pulled them apart.

The guidance counselor had been wandering the dance floor for the past hour, placing balloons between girls and boys she deemed to be dancing too intimately. “Make room for the Holy Spirit,” she said flatly, wedging a pink balloon between him and Lorelei.

Stein smiled at Ms. Bromine, and responded by pulling Lorelei to him so quickly that the thin, pink-rubber bubble of air flattened, then burst. He turned to the guidance counselor. “Something tells me no boy ever popped anything on you.”

Lorelei covered her mouth and stepped back, but Ms. Bromine didn’t do anything for a long moment. “What did you just say to me?” she asked.

Stein leaned in, raising his voice over the music. “Nothing. You must be hearing th—” But Ms. Bromine grabbed his wrist before he could finish, bending his arm back. Her nails sank into his skin. Tears blurred her eyes, flickering in the spinning lights of the DJ’s disco ball. “What did you say to me?” she said softly. Stein tried to pull his arm away, but she kept twisting it, repeating, “What … did you … say?”

The music kept playing, but everyone around them had stopped dancing.

TWENTY-THREE

Davidek was standing in the exterior stairwell leading up to the parking lot. He’d come out here following Hannah and Smitty, but they disappeared into the snow—maybe together; he didn’t know. Stein’s dad was already waiting in the parking lot, standing around in front of his headlights with some other parents, singing old songs from their own high school dance days.

A lot of kids were already leaving. He watched Mullen and Simms bumble past him, looking giddy and reeking of Kmart cologne. He was watching them go when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Lorelei.

“Hey,” Davidek said.

She was pulling on the bulky sweater she’d hidden upstairs in her locker. “Hey, yourself,” she said.

Davidek patted his hands against his sides because he didn’t know what else to do with them. “So … that’s cool you and Stein are back together.”

“He just mouthed off to Bromine again,” she said. “Nice of him to drag me back into trouble right away. I didn’t stick around for it this time.”

“He really cares about you.”

“You dance with anybody?” Lorelei asked.

“I can’t dance.” Davidek shrugged. “I just came to hang out.”

Lorelei nodded, still standing there, though they were fresh out of things to say. “I bet you could have if you’d wanted to,” she said, and began walking up the stairs. At the top, she turned around. “I want you to know … how things are turning out … this isn’t what I wanted.”

Davidek looked up at her from the bottom. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m glad things are this way. I mean it.” And he did.

A pained look crossed Lorelei’s face, as if there was something he didn’t understand, or couldn’t. When she was gone, Davidek kept staring at the empty space she had left.

*   *   *

Mr. Mankowski wrapped his hands around Bromine’s wrist. “Gretchen,” he said. “Gretchen, it’s okay.” He loosened her grip on Stein, and she released the boy into the crowd of faces looking at her,
noticing
her.

Mankowski walked the guidance counselor to the corridor behind the bingo stage, and as soon as they were out of sight, the tears gathering in her eyes began to stream down her face. Her heart raced with terror at what she’d just done. What she had
almost
done. “These little shits can really push the limits,” Mankowski said. “Don’t let him get to you.” He tried to put an arm around her, but his shoulder didn’t work very well ever since he dislocated it during the incident with The Boy on the Roof.

Bromine closed her eyes, and imagined the clumsy embrace was from somebody else, one of those boys who used to want to kiss her—not the kind who would do it for a joke, and then laugh and lie about it.

*   *   *

Once he was free from Bromine, Stein didn’t wait around for one of the chaperones to grab him for more questioning. He shot toward the exit, where he found Davidek standing alone on the outside stairs. “You see Lorelei?”

Davidek pointed upward, lamely. “She took off.”

Stein kicked over a blue recycling bin full of empty soda cans, which jangled and scattered out across the bottom of the concrete stairwell. The side of the bin read:
PROM FUND.

Davidek stood it upright and began gathering the cans back into it. “You know, you’ve got three more years here with Lorelei,” he said. “You don’t have to Romeo-and-Juliet yourself because one night ended badly.”

Stein snorted. “You know a whole lot about romance for a guy who spent the night standing alone by the trash.”

They got into Larry Stein’s truck and rode home in silence. Halfway to the Tarentum Bridge, cars were backed up more than a mile and some police cruisers swept by, followed by an ambulance.

Larry looked at the boys. “You want to sleep over tonight, Pete? I can turn around here, and just take you home in the morning.”

When they got back to the little white house in the woods, the phone was ringing in the dark kitchen. Larry answered it, then handed it to his son.

“Hey…,” Lorelei’s voice said, sounding tired.

“It’s her,” Stein whispered to Davidek.

“Who?” Davidek asked.

“Her,”
Stein’s father intoned from the kitchen, making his hand flutter against his chest.

“I thought you couldn’t call from home?” Stein whispered into the phone as he stretched the cord out to his bedroom and closed the door. Lorelei explained she had gotten a ride home with some friends, and they were at Eat’n Park to grab some french fries. She was calling from a pay phone, and only had a few minutes.

“Who’d you go with?” Stein asked, knowing she wasn’t on the best terms with any of the girls in their class. “And why’d you ditch me?” He started ranting about Bromine, how he was sick of her picking fights with him, how she had looked like she really might lose it tonight—

“I love you,” Lorelei cut in. “That’s what I called to tell you. I was afraid to say it in person, I guess. I love you.”

Every thought in Stein’s head evaporated. Lorelei breathed on the line. “Just … I want to go slow. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.
Okay, yes, anything.

She was silent. Then, a small voice, almost a whisper. “I liked kissing you.” There was a muffled sound, the clatter of the phone on her end. Then she said, “And you’re handsome.”

“I agree,” he said. And when she didn’t laugh, he added, “And
arrogant.
”

There was a pause. “So we’ll go out again?” she asked.

“The two of us?”

“Maybe with Davidek or somebody else?” she said. There was commotion again on the line; she was covering the phone and saying something.

“Is somebody else there?” Stein asked, and Lorelei responded, “Yeah, just … I’m gonna go now.”

“But—” Stein heard the click of her line, but held the phone to his face for a long time afterwards.

Outside in the living room, Davidek sat beside Stein’s father, watching a late-night rerun of a sitcom about a family who lived with a smart-ass alien. Stein’s sister, Margie, bleary-eyed and stumbling around without her contact lenses in, had emerged from her bedroom to ask them to please turn that crap down because the laugh track was giving her a migraine. Now that the phone was free, Davidek got up to tell his parents he was staying the night. As Stein sat down on the couch, his dad noticed the huge smile on his face. “Well,
somebody’s
glad to be watching
Alf,
” he said.

*   *   *

Inside the Eat’n Park restaurant, groups of old couples dressed in colorful square dancing costumes were pestering the waitresses for more decaf, while teenagers from the public school were making a ruckus and ruining the salad bar. No one else from St. Mike’s was around.
Thank God,
Lorelei thought.

She was sitting in the glass corridor between the restaurant lobby and the exit, where the pay phone and cigarette machine were. She spun around as she hung up the phone. “You idiots!” she said. “You tell me, ‘Say he’s handsome’? He could’ve
heard
you!”

Mullen and Simms, old Asshole Face and Sandmouth, were leaning on opposite sides of the cigarette machine. Simms shrugged. “My voice was low enough.”

“Because I covered the phone!” she exclaimed.

“We did what we had to,” Mullen said. “Now, let’s get out of here before somebody sees us together.”

They led Lorelei outside and she slumped in the front seat of Mullen’s 1982 Plymouth Volare—a forest-colored piece of shit known to other students as the Pea Green Love Machine. Mullen got behind the wheel and Simms crawled into the backseat, gnawing on a Smiley Cookie from the restaurant’s bakery. “You want a bite?” he asked, extending the half with the eyes to her.

She had no one to blame but herself for this. Lorelei had sought them out as protectors that day in the cafeteria just before Christmas. She had been desperate, and they had promised to make the others leave her alone—all she had to do was help them in return. They wanted to hurt Stein. Badly. But that was okay. At the time, so did she.

At the time.

She wasn’t even sure what the plan was. Mullen and Simms wanted her to stay with Stein just long enough to humiliate him, maybe by simply dumping his sorry ass again. They wanted to really get to him, to hit him in a way that would hurt a lot worse than any kick or punch. By devastating the untouchable Stein, they would prove their worth to the other upperclassmen—and Lorelei would do the same.

Out there on the dance floor, feeling his fingertips brush her midriff, Lorelei began to doubt what she was doing. But then Stein had gone and pissed off Bromine for about the seven hundreth time, almost dragging Lorelei into that mess again, too.

Maybe the son of a bitch did deserve this.

As they drove her home, Simms said from the backseat, “You sure you don’t want to come back here with me? I like that little shirt of yours. You have a cute belly.”

Lorelei pressed her face against the cool glass of the passenger window, feeling her skin crawl. She said to Mullen, “If your creep friend comes on to me again, I’m going to barf in your car.”