Brutal Youth (40 page)

Bellamy raised a pen and notebook and began to write. “Sister, frankly I’m saddened.
Saddened.
I’ve been one of your defenders on the parish council, and to be honest—there aren’t many of them.” He continued to write, then looked up at her.

His silver eyes reflected the light again. “There is real consideration toward closing this school, Sister, a
real
possibility.… And seeing you, the highest-ranking figure at St. Michael’s,
leave
an event that could turn volatile—”

“Volatile?”

“
Volatile,
Sister,” Ms. Bromine echoed. “The high school prom is supposed to be fun, but we know what it has turned into in this age.”

Mr. Bellamy painted a more direct portrait. “It’s a night of drinking, drugs, premarital sex, car accidents, fights. Girls giving birth to babies in the bathroom and leaving them in Dumpsters and urinals.…”

The nun rolled her eyes and tried to move around them. “I’ll check the Dumpsters on my way out,” she said. “You check the urinals.”

Bellamy put a hand on her arm. “I thought you took your job as a supervisor of children seriously,” he said. Over his shoulder, Sister Maria saw Bromine trying not to smile.

Someone needed to get over to the Stein house immediately, but Sister Maria knew it couldn’t be her. Not now. Not with this scrutiny.

Sister Maria took a step back. “You know … I … I suppose I lost my head. This loud music and all … I’m eager for bed.…”

Bellamy smiled uneasily. “So are we all, Sister—”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Yes, I suppose I was a bit overeager. Best to stay awhile, though. You’re right.”

“Until it’s finished,” Bellamy said.

“Yes, yes,” the nun agreed, backing away toward the dance floor. “Yes, absolutely. Thank you, Mr. Bellamy.”

As they receded from view, Sister Maria gasped like a person who’d just escaped suffocation, and began searching for the one person who could help her.

*   *   *

Across the dance floor, Mr. Zimmer could see Hannah watching him, a small head poking out of a great plume of pink, sipping from a glass of Coke. The reflected images in the great bank of windows overlooking the river were dim ghosts of the slow-moving couples on the parquet dance floor. The song was “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton, one of Green’s favorites. The freshman had finished with his kitchen duty and was over by the DJ, looking through his record collection with Bilbo and Strebovitch.

Zimmer had stood up and was walking over to accept Hannah’s repeated requests for a dance when a thin, cold hand pulled at his shoulder.

Sister Maria hovered behind him. She whispered, even though the music was loud enough to mask her words. She couldn’t risk anything with the Monitors watching so closely. Zimmer stooped to hear her. “I have something I need to tell you…,” the nun said. “And a favor to ask.”

It took longer than she would have liked to explain the situation: Noah Stein’s gashed wrists, his friend Davidek, the hospital, and what she’d done to the bathroom to hide it all. Zimmer overflowed with questions, but Sister Maria couldn’t allow many. “The Davidek boy is there now … At their house … I can explain all of this more, but
later
.…”

Mr. Zimmer closed his eyes and covered one side of his face with his hand. “I know both those boys…,” he said. “But if this kid is at their house causing a disturbance, maybe we should just call the police. Or contact Davidek’s parents—”

“Andrew…,”
Sister Maria said wearily. “I’ve tried to keep as much secret as I can—even from the Davidek boy. And all this may be a mistake … a huge one. But I’ve already done it. And I think it can still turn out right. I’d go myself, but it would raise questions with the Monitors.” She tucked a note into Zimmer’s hand. “I wrote down the address. The house isn’t hard to find. I think you’ll know the way.…” She began describing the route to him, but Mr. Zimmer took her hand.

Standing before her was no longer Mr. Zimmer, the longtime St. Mike’s faculty member. It was Andy Zimmer, her heartbreakingly lanky sixteen-year-old Geometry student from decades ago. His face was solemn. She knew this ended it, the whole big lie. Zimmer would tell her enough was enough, that this had to stop, that she had gone too far. He would tell her to admit the truth, however painful, however destructive. It would be a cleansing—and she needed that.

If Zimmer had said those things to her, she would have been proud of him, for his honesty, for his integrity, for his responsibility. But he didn’t.

She was proud of him, still.

“I know the way, Sister. I’ll take care of it.…” His narrow fingers refolded the note and placed the paper in his jacket. “But can I just have a minute? You see, I promised I’d dance—”

The nun raised her head, her brow creasing.
Dance?
“I need you to go
now.
”

She had her back to Zimmer, and deliberately avoided watching him as he left.

Zimmer put a hand on the exit and looked back at the room, bathed in the swirl of lights. He spotted Hannah across the room. She had been staring at him the entire time.

Good-bye, Hannah,
he thought.
Not tonight. But someday. On your wedding day maybe, I’ll be one of the faces in the background, one of the lucky men who will dance with you on that night, and we will celebrate happier times than these.

As he pushed through the door, he raised a hand to wave. But she looked away.

FORTY

Davidek piloted the minivan down the darkened country road, his mind scrambling to remember directions and landmarks from the few times he’d traveled this way as a passenger. The sulfur-glowing grid of the Allegheny Valley floated away in the blackness as he motored farther into the hills, like some distant galaxy drifting against the void. The road bent along the path of a stream, which kept switching sides beneath small, rusting bridges, and the new green buds of the springtime branches dangling nakedly above the spread of his headlights.

The last time he saw the Stein house, it had been buried in snow. Now the little white structure looked exposed on the hill sloping down from the woods. Two cars were parked in the gravel driveway—Stein’s father’s truck, and his sister’s beat-up Honda. Far away down the empty road, distant neighbors’ homes were just specks of light between the forest branches.

Davidek just watched from across the road for the longest time. His mother’s minivan sat crooked on the shoulder of the road, pressed in close to the low-hanging pine trees, which swayed their limbs in the wind as if stroking the vehicle like a sleeping pet. The engine of the van ticked as it cooled, but the boy’s hands remained clasped to the wheel, as if afraid the vehicle might roar back to life on its own.

Davidek crossed the empty strip of road and slipped toward the back of the house. All he wanted was to catch a view of Stein from afar. Let Mr. Mankowski call out his name every day in homeroom for the next three years. All he wanted to know was that his friend was
somewhere.

Davidek stayed close to the tree line as he peeked into the back kitchen through the sliding glass door on the rear porch. The dining table beneath a brownish light fixture was piled with mail and unread newspapers. Dirty dishes were heaped in the sink, threatening avalanche with every drip from the faucet. A telephone on the wall had its receiver dangling off the hook—the reason no calls were coming in.

From inside, he heard the muffled voices of a man and woman arguing with each other, then the roar of some machine—a vacuum cleaner. Davidek couldn’t see into the living room or the back bedrooms, so he walked around to the other side toward Stein’s room—and was heartened to see that light glowed brightly, though the window was too high above the sloping yard for Davidek to see inside. The howl of the vacuum was loudest here, and Davidek leaped and hopped and tried to prop himself in the crook of a too-slim dogwood tree to peer inside—desperate only for that glimpse, a flash of proof, that his friend was okay.

From his low angle, all he could see clearly was the glare of the ceiling light and the tops of the walls. Stein’s white bookshelf had been cleared of his comics,
Sports Illustrated
back issues, and old toys. The wall beside it was bare where there once hung a sepia-print poster of a squinting Clint Eastwood, crossing monstrous guns against his chest as in
The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Davidek dropped back to the ground. For some reason, that made him think of his fallen paper schedule in the school hallway on that afternoon of St. Mike’s eighth-grader open house, and the strange, scarred kid who grabbed it for him and helped him to his feet as the rest of the crowd pushed and shoved on all sides. Davidek’s mind reeled through whatever memory he could find to keep Stein real, to make him seem
here.

All this sneaking around would be easier if Stein were with him.

He knew what his friend would suggest: outright provocation. Stein wouldn’t have pussyfooted around the house, propping himself into little trees. He would have pounded on the front door and demanded answers.

Davidek’s feet scuffed against the front porch steps, breaking loose some of the gray paint still clinging to the boot-softened wood. He could see through the thin curtains of the front window, and the sound of the vacuum from the bedroom cut off. A television blared in the living room—a war movie Davidek had seen years ago, where the Communists invade America and it’s up to a bunch of high school kids to give them the heave-ho.

Stein’s sister appeared in the living room, holding a sagging plastic garbage bag in one hand. “Dad?… Daaa-aad!… What happened to my show?” she asked, fists punched against her sizable hips. She glared at Stein’s father as he lay on the couch, out of Davidek’s sight, just below the window.

Stein’s father grumbled her name—“Margie…”—in response, and reached forward to the coffee table, his clumsy hand toppling two empty beer bottles into the cushion of an overfilled ashtray as he grabbed at the remote control an instant too late. Margie Stein had already snapped it up, clicking the channel over her shoulder to a Christian basic cable station, where a snowy-haired minister with his pious face turned up to God replaced a Russian soldier who had just collected several arrows in his spine.

“… was watching that,” Stein’s father muttered.

“No,” Margie replied, stuffing the remote in her back pocket. “No, Dad, I was watching
this,
and you changed it.”

“Y’were in the other room!” he said, the words slurring lamely, undercutting his outrage.
“Cleaning up…”

“Right,” she said coldly. “Until you feel capable of
helping,
for once, I get to watch what I want! And you’ll watch it, too. It’s good for you.”

“You’re
not
watching,” her father said.

Margie squeezed her eyes shut in frustration. “I was
listening
!”

Stein’s father lurched to his feet. “Well, I can’t take preaching from both of you.” He didn’t sound like the man Davidek remembered, the smart, mellow, cheerful one who had picked them up from the Valentine’s Dance, politely accepting the duty Davidek’s mother had shirked. Now Stein’s father seemed like a bratty little boy, trapped in the slow skin of a withering man. And he was fully, utterly shit-faced.

Margie didn’t respond to her father. She had frozen. The loose mouth of her garbage bag drifted sideways to the floor as she stared straight ahead to the curtained window.

“Who’s out there?” she called, jerking aside the drapes. Her face was round and red, thick in a matronly way that made her seem much older than her early twenties. “Who the hell are
you
?” Margie barked through the glass.

Davidek had met her before, here at this very house. “It’s me. I’m Noah’s friend, remember?” he stammered. “I’m here to see him.”

Margie’s face knotted. She pulled the curtain shut again. “I’m giving you five minutes,” her silhouette said. “Then I’m calling the police.”

Davidek flattened his hand against the glass and tried to peer inside. “I’m his friend. I just want to know what happened to him! I just want to know if he’s all right!”

“Right…,”
Margie scoffed from the hallway. “I’m sure it’s a big joke. You got friends waiting down in the car or something? Did you win the bet? Or the dare, or whatever?… Just get
out
of here.
Now.
”

“Please … the hospital said he wasn’t there anymore,” Davidek persisted. “I’ve been calling. No one will tell me anything.… I just want to know if he’s okay. And when he’s coming back?”

Margie marched out and stuck her face back in the window. “He wasn’t in any hospital. He just vandalized the place, so they kicked him out. You St. Mike’s kids are just bound and determined to start rumors about him. Can’t you just let him be?”

“I
know
he was hurt!” Davidek screamed. “I saw him all cut up. I
saw
it. He was talking to me. I carried him out to Sister Maria and the car!”

“What crap…,” Margie said, narrowing her eyes. “Sister Maria never said a word about you.” Davidek held her gaze; then Margie put a hand over her face. She had given away the lie.

“That’s it,” she said, storming into the kitchen. “I’m calling the police.” She placed the phone back in its cradle to reconnect the line, then took it off again and began dialing.

“No, Margie … no attention on this,” her father said, still standing in the middle of the living room.

“I’m not going to be harassed at our own house!” she said.

“No
police,
Margie,” her father called, following her into the kitchen. He loomed beside her. Margie hesitated, then hung up the phone.

Davidek watched through the curtain as the disheveled older man put his arms around his daughter. They held each other for a long time, the boy outside momentarily forgotten. Finally, Margie broke away and yelled toward the front of the house: “I don’t know
what
you think you know, but whatever happened to my brother, whatever put him where he is—it was an
accident,
and that’s all.”