Brutal Youth (16 page)

“Oh,
I
know who you mean,” Stein said, snapping his fingers. “She was in that movie
Predator
with Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? Turns invisible, hangs out in trees. Laughs like this—
mwaah, ahh, ahh, ahh.
…”

LeRose squinted. “Let’s see if you’re laughing when she walks up to a group of your friends and just blurts out some horrible secret thing about you. She’s done it before. That’s why you don’t mess with Hannah—you avoid her. And you definitely don’t talk about anything important if she’s around. Shit, there are people in her class who won’t tell you what
time
it is if Hannah Kraut’s in the room.”

Stein’s smart-ass smile faded a little, which made Davidek nervous.

“This is her final year,” LeRose said. “Everyone’s scared about what she’ll do now that she’s saying ‘fuck off’ to this place forever. You worry about some big guy shoving you around? Try having Hannah spread sick, stupid stories about you for the rest of the year. Doesn’t even matter if they’re true. By the time you’re a senior, even the visiting grade-school kids will be making fun of you.”

“So what does she look like?” Davidek asked. “How do we avoid her?”

“I dunno.… She’s a goddamned
shape-shifter.
Always switching her hair and shit. She doesn’t have a single friend in this school, so I can’t even tell you who she’d be hanging around with. But one thing about her—?” LeRose shook his head like even
he
didn’t believe this part. “She has one blue eye, and one green eye,” he said, laughing nervously. “I shit you not. She’s fucking
hell spawn,
man.”

*   *   *

LeRose was right about most of it, but wrong about one thing: Hannah Kraut wasn’t
completely
friendless at St. Mike’s. The mysterious and loathed girl did have
one
confidant, though LeRose didn’t know this. No one did.

Mr. Zimmer had noticed her right away when she was just a knobby-kneed freshman with electrostatic waves of curly black hair hanging around her head. The other freshmen said she looked like a Halloween decoration, the first of many insults. As they absorbed their share of torment from the seniors, they dumped it back on Hannah, who accepted it meekly, as if it confirmed something ugly about herself she’d always suspected. As if she deserved it.

Zimmer admired her grace, while secretly longing to see her haul off and sucker-punch one of those little jerks. He knew from a decade of teaching that you can’t protect a vulnerable student all the time, but you could extend your own friendship. Zimmer tried to talk to her about her hobbies, which she didn’t have, and movies or books or music she liked, but she wasn’t really into any of that either. “Living doesn’t seem to be your thing,” he joked to her once, immediately regretting the words. But that had actually brought out a little half smile, and her dour eyes brightened a little. It was only then that Mr. Zimmer noticed that odd little defect, if you could call it that—her one blue eye, and one green eye.

“It’s genetic,” she told him. “Not even that rare. You’d be surprised.”

Just when things were supposed to get a lot better for Hannah Kraut, they got a lot worse. At the end of her freshman year, during the Hazing Picnic, she had been spared any of the ritual humiliation that befell the other freshmen. A senior named Cliff Onasik, a genial burnout, had ended up with Hannah by default when the seniors divvied up freshmen for the picnic’s “talent show,” the event freshmen feared all year long. While her other classmates were paraded up to the park’s band stage as targets for ridicule—in one case literally, as five freshmen were pelted with eggs and tomatoes from the audience—neither Hannah nor Onasik could be found when it was her turn up on the stage.

No one could figure out how that was possible until a rumor began circulating, one far more vile than lame old jokes about her Wooly Willy hairdo. It wasn’t until Hannah came back as a sophomore that the ridicule reached an intensity even a teacher could detect. Zimmer pieced together the story from fragments of overheard conversations, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. That didn’t matter. The kids did.

“Hey, Hannah, how was the hot dog–eating contest?” they’d ask her in the hall.

Hannah didn’t seem to know what they were talking about, though the teasing got much more direct as time went on. “How long did Cliffy Onasik make you blow him before letting you off the hook, anyway?” Bilbo Tomch said one day in the lunch line. (He had asked her out on a date some weeks before, but she had said no. Bilbo didn’t take the rejection like a gentleman.)

“She wasn’t ‘off the hook,’ man! She was sucking on his worm!” laughed one of Bilbo’s pals, maybe Prager, as the boys high-fived. Hannah slouched away when Mr. Zimmer came over to ask what the problem was.

It didn’t make any sense, Zimmer thought. Why would she do
that
rather than just appear onstage for the lame song-and-dance teasing all the other kids got at the Hazing Picnic? Cliffy Onasik wasn’t around anymore to confirm or deny. The rumor became that Hannah hadn’t been coerced—she had offered.

Zimmer couldn’t bear to think about the name they called her in the hall, right to her face, whispering it as they shoved past her. He’d handed out at least two dozen detentions, though that hadn’t killed it. The upperclassmen told the new freshmen, too green and scared to know better, to walk up to Hannah and bark it at her before running away. Zimmer couldn’t even think the word without feeling his jaw tighten:

That poor girl with the wild black hair. The one who couldn’t bring herself to look people in the eye or answer their questions with more than a mumble. That was the name she carried with her down the hallways, shorthand for a scummy little sex rumor that would never let her go.

Fuckslut.

Zimmer never asked her if it was true. He didn’t care, and didn’t want to know, really. Like any high school, St. Mike’s had seen its share of girls with slutty reputations, and most were sad, lonesome cases, filling a self-esteem void with attention from sleazeball boys like Cliffy. All Zimmer could do was try to be kind to Hannah, and protect her when he could, which wasn’t often enough. Hannah appreciated his help, and a friendship blossomed between them. She began asking for after-school tutoring, even on subjects Zimmer didn’t teach. That was okay by him. He liked Hannah, and he knew what it felt like to be her.

Sister Maria had been one of his only friends when he was student, and in many ways she still was. After school sometimes, they’d hit the Capri restaurant down the street, sharing a pizza and a pitcher of beer, and in the summer they’d catch a movie or Pirates game down in Pittsburgh. Not long ago, Sister Maria asked why he didn’t find a nice girl to share such times. Zimmer hated that question. If the answer wasn’t obvious, he didn’t want to say it out loud. “I guess they’re not interested,” he told her, but Sister Maria said she doubted that. “Come on, Sister, I can’t even date blind girls,” Zimmer said, running a hand across his pockmarked cheeks. “In braille, this face says: ‘Danger—Keep Away.’”

Zimmer had gotten used to solitude, what Stein might have called being happy with his unhappiness. He had been an ill child, prone to lung and vision problems, thanks to a genetic disorder called Marfan syndrome. It also accounted for his stretched appearance and long limbs. Though Andy Zimmer grew tall, his father still thought of him as a weakling.

Both his parents—heavy smokers, bad eaters, high-stress personalities—had died while he was in college, just two years apart. Their family home was now his alone. He used their old silverware, their dishes, their towels and bedsheets. The TV was new; the couch was not. The little white Subaru was his mother’s last car, and his first.

He lived daily with their ghosts, but it was a lot easier to miss them than it was to live with them. They had been hard on their quiet, bookish boy—and unlike Sister Maria, their questions about girls weren’t so easily sidetracked by jokes. His father, a failed cop who found sporadic work as a security guard after alcoholism cost him that job, just assumed his son was queer, and after he died, Zimmer’s mother decided to finally ask him directly, which he knew was very painful for her. It was painful for him, too, so he hoped a blunt answer would make her never ask again: “No, Mama,” he said. “I’m just ugly.”

In the spring and summer, students often saw Mr. Zimmer out at the old St. Joseph cemetery, on the edge of town where the shops and parking lots of Natrona Heights gave way to farmland. He would go there to cut the grass around his mother and father’s plots because St. Joe’s had recently been closed by the diocese, and no one maintained the grounds anymore except the families of the buried. It wasn’t a sad chore for him. He enjoyed being out there—the birds heckling him from the tall weeds around the unkept graves, the smell of the cut grass and the way it stained his tennis shoes green. It was peaceful there, and most of all, he enjoyed talking to his mom and dad, freely, about anything at all. And now they listened without hounding or judging him.

“Do you know they call you The Grave Robber?” Hannah had told him once.

“That’s a new one,” he said. He knew Hannah was good at making herself small and going unnoticed, which made her an excellent spy. “Back in high school, they used to call me The Skeleton,” he told her. “They would’ve considered a cemetery to be my natural habitat.”

“I thought they called you Señor Gargoyle,” she said.

Zimmer sighed. “That was mainly Spanish class.” Hannah laughed at that, and it coaxed a smile out of him, too. Let the kids call him names. What teacher could escape
that
fate? Hannah reminded him how nice it was to talk to the living. He hoped he did the same for her.

*   *   *

The next few years were vicious ones for Hannah. And after any particularly rough time, she would appear at school with a different hair color—blond, black, brunette—as if she hoped to go unrecognized. Her small, pudgy face was always the same, pinched, suffering, dogged by that word, that horrible nickname. The one Zimmer couldn’t bear to hear or repeat.

Then a strange thing happened near the end of Hannah’s junior year: It all just stopped. The teasing, the name-calling, the torment—it simply ceased. When Hannah moved through the halls, the other kids shifted away from her, like a negative pulse pushing them aside. Zimmer had no idea what happened, but he doubted they had all grown souls overnight. Hannah had done something. She had frightened them somehow. Hannah had
forced
them to stop.

He asked her once what had changed. “I have no idea,” she answered, but the lie was heavy in those mismatched eyes.

On the last day of that year, with the floors polished, the chalkboards wiped clean, and the textbooks packed away for the summer, Hannah had found him shutting down the computers in his otherwise empty classroom. “I came to say good-bye,” she told him, and in her hand was a sheet of paper folded in thirds. “And to give you this.”

Zimmer opened the page, smiling at her. He’d gotten these kinds of letters before: “Thank you, Mr. Zimmer. You really inspired me.” Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. They were all the same, and priceless, too. He saved every one.

But on this creased sheet of paper there were just three words:
Don’t be mad.

When Mr. Zimmer looked up, Hannah Kraut stepped forward, placing her left hand against the teacher’s cratered cheek. She tipped up on her toes and placed her open lips against his.

*   *   *

When he saw her again, another summer had passed, and it was the start of her senior year. He hadn’t told anyone about the kiss, not Sister Maria, and not even his parents, who were now good at keeping secrets.

He knew he had done nothing wrong, but still felt guilty. When Hannah had kissed him, he pulled away, staring everywhere but directly at her. But what could he do then—report her? Send her for counseling? Disrupt her already difficult life even more, just as it was turning around? “Hannah … I … You
really
shouldn’t have done that.…”

“I know,” she said. And as she left the room, she looked back one more time. “And I know you have to say that.”

There had been another metamorphosis in Hannah over the summer—a deep, dramatic, and lovely one. She had dyed her hair again, but it now hung smoothly around her shoulders, and a season of heavy exercise had transformed her previous squat awkwardness into a lean, girlish litheness. Her face was more serene, no longer furrowed and angry. She truly did look like a different person, and Zimmer almost didn’t recognize her.

She assumed they would return to their regular after-school study sessions again, but Zimmer said he couldn’t. “Is it because of The Note?” she asked.

He countered the intimacy of her code language by feigning ignorance. “Note? No. No, I just have nightly commitments now that I can’t break. I’m working almost every evening on a special project for the school.” He hated to sound mysterious; that made it seem like a lie. “I wish I could tell you, but … it’s kind of a private matter.”

“Secret agent man,” Hannah smirked. She didn’t believe him. But whatever.