Brutal Youth (29 page)

Hannah Kraut was one of the French students, and before the “Aux Champs-Élysées” number, she sat on one end of the stage with her feet dangling over the side, her downy blue cancan skirt drooping like a giant predatory flower choking on a pair of legs. She saw Davidek and winked at him. “Hey, Playgirl,” she said, making him look away.

“Come on, Stein, let’s go sit in the back,” Davidek said, weaving through the crowd.

“I need to find Lorelei first…,” Stein told him.

He spotted her in the corridor leading backstage, where the Spanish seniors were gathering for their performance. She seemed to be arguing with Mullen, who was holding a giant piñata shaped like an airplane.

“If that guy is giving her shit, I’ll bust that piñata right over his fucking face,” Stein said, and Davidek held him back as Lorelei pushed through the crowd toward them. “I’m not feeling well. Can you take me upstairs?”

“What’s wrong?” Stein asked.

She shook her head, frustrated, as if he wasn’t listening. “I don’t
feel
well. Will you please take me upstairs?”

“Sure, sure thing…”

But Ms. Bromine had been watching them and stepped forward as Lorelei’s hand slipped into Stein’s. “No touching on school grounds!” Bromine barked.

“She’s sick,” Stein said. “I’m taking her up—”

“Are you the school nurse now?” Bromine said. “I’ll take care of it.”

Davidek put a hand on Stein’s shoulder. “Come on, man.”

Bromine smacked his fingers, a little hard. “No touching, Mr. Davidek,” she said as she led Lorelei away.

*   *   *

The Spanish teacher, Mrs. Tunns, was bitter over having to once again follow Sister Antonia’s terrible dance number, and hurried the French students offstage as she scowled at the slow-moving Spanish students hauling their props. This year’s Spanish show was whipped together at the last minute, and she was worried it would be a mess. She had wanted a translation of Hamlet’s “Murder of Gonzago” scene, but some of her lowest-watt students, Mullen and his pal Simms, had persuaded the other kids to do a stupid, slapsticky public service skit instead.

The stage was set to look like a room with a table and chairs and a bed. On one chair, they placed a bulging white sack with an oversized plastic nozzle affixed to the end.
PEGAMENTO LOCO
, its label read in fat, hand-drawn letters.

“What’s that mean?” Davidek asked, peering around heads from where they sat in the middle of the audience.

“Uh …
loco
means ‘crazy.’ I don’t know what the other word means,” Stein said.

“I think it means ‘glue.’ It’s Krazy Glue,” LeRose spoke up from the row behind them.

“Ha, ha,” Davidek said flatly. “Hi-larious.”

The Spanish teacher took the microphone at center stage and ran a hand across her goatish head to smooth any loose hairs. “St. Michael’s senior Spanish students would like to present: a public service announcement.
Parada, Gota y Rodillo
or, in English: ‘Stop, Drop, and Roll.’ The skit will be performed with an English translation.”

As Mrs. Tunns walked off, the actors marched into formation onstage, led by a girl in a shawl who wore an enormous brown wig that looked like a lot of small animals sewn together. Behind her came the infamous and revolting Mark Carney, one of those scumbag types who rarely bathed and thought pulling down his pants to light farts at parties was a good way to impress girls. Now he stood before the whole school, sucking his thumb and stretching the life out of a pair of Winnie-the-Pooh footie pajamas. He waggled his tongue at the audience as he bent over, pointing at his ass, and asked, “Where’s the hatch on this thing? I gotta poop!” which drew furious laughter from the crowd, but made Mrs. Tunns jab a finger at him from the wings of the stage and snap “Non
español
!”

“It’s weird,” Davidek said. “The seniors are up onstage doing the kind of dumb stuff we’re all terrified of at the Hazing Picnic. And they love it.”

Stein shrugged. “It’s different when you choose to be the idiot.”

The show’s translators walked out to the podium: Asshole Face Mullen and a stout, disgruntled-looking girl named Beth Bartolski, each wearing a birthday sombrero from Chi-Chi’s restaurant. Beside them, Carney’s little-boy character plopped down on a pillow and pulled a blanket over himself.
“¡Mamasita! ¡Mamasita!”
he called out to the actress with the critter wig and shawl, who sat beside him, knitting.

“Mommy. Mommy,” Mullen translated from the podium, a satisfied smile on his lips as he faced the audience.

“¿Sí, mi hijo?”
the girl playing the mother responded.

“Yes, my son,” Beth Bartolski translated in monotone.

Carney wobbled forward on his knees—his way of playing a little kid.
“No soy sonoliento,”
he said.

“It is bedtime, but I’m not sleepy,” Mullen echoed in English.

You have too much energy. You must be in bed before your father returns home,
the mama said, and the little boy began to wail and throw himself around the stage in a comical fit. “
¡Déjeme acabar mi piñata!
” the boy shouted.
I want to finish building my piñata!

The girl playing the mother pretended to look to the audience for parenting advice. “Let him play!” a girl shouted, followed by a round of applause. “Spank him!” another voice yelled, this time to bigger applause.

“This is kind of hilarious,” Davidek whispered over his shoulder to LeRose, who nodded enthusiastically. Davidek elbowed a smile out of Stein, who was sitting quietly. “Yeah, it’s funny,” Stein agreed.

Onstage, the mother agreed to let the boy finish his airplane piñata, and Carney’s bizarre man-child grabbed the gigantic, fake tube of glue and held it over his head triumphantly as the crowd cheered. The mother warned him in Spanish:
Be careful! That glue is very flammable and very dangerous.

Then, as Carney continued to cavort with the glue and piñata, the girl playing the mother laid herself down on the make-believe bed and closed her eyes.
Oh, I am so tired from caring for this little monster!
she said

Carney stage-whispered to the crowd:
This piñata needs more glue!

Then he huffed, and puffed, and squeezed the cardboard bottle until his face turned crimson, the whole time barking:
“¡Más pegamento!”
The audience began to chant it along with him.
More glue! More glue!

But the little boy was out of glue.
“¡No más! No más!”
he cried, and began hunting around the stage for more, opening the drawer of a dresser and finding a cartoonishly large book of matches made out of cardboard and red construction paper.

Carney made his mouth into a devilish little
o
and flashed his eyebrows at the hooting audience, who cheered as he raised one of the big matches into the air and swiped it across the floor, touching it to the imaginary trail of flammable glue.

A rush of wind threw a flurry of orange and red plastic shreds into the air. It was a neat special effect for fire—designed by Simms—made from a window fan filled with red confetti and hidden behind the bed.

Carney backed away on his knees as two students dressed in orange jumpsuits draped in red, yellow, and orange ribbons leaped onstage toward him. “Raarrh!” one of them said, throwing a fistful of red confetti at Carney, who slapped both hands to his face and vented a howl of distress. “Oh, no!” Mullen translated, his glimmering eyes scanning the audience. “The glue is on my face! I am burning!”

“¡Fuego! ¡Fuego!”
the flame-people cackled as they shoved the boy back and forth. Just then, a siren wailed, and boys and girls dressed as firefighters rushed onstage, throwing buckets of blue confetti to simulate water. They scooped up the boy to rescue him, but he reached back, crying:
“¡Mamasita! ¡Mamasita!”

The mother awoke from her slumber just in time for the students playing the fire-folk to attack her.
“¡Estoy muriendo! ¡Donde está usted, mi hijo!”
she cried.

“I am dying,” Beth Bartolski translated tonelessly. “Where are you, my son! Why? Why!”

The firefighters began a clumsily choreographed kung fu fight with the flame-people, and it all ended with the spray of an actual fire extinguisher, burying the stage in a low-floating white cloud. When the air cleared, the flame characters were heaped atop one another, groaning like comic-strip thugs who’d had their lights knocked out.

Carney’s little-boy character sat on the edge of the stage, rubbing his eyes and sobbing melodramatically. Half his face was now painted with red marker to indicate burns. A firefighter girl walked up to him carrying a plastic, glow-in-the-dark Halloween skeleton. “Your
mamasita es muerta
!” she declared, waving the skeleton mournfully at the son, who hugged it and cried out “BOO HOO! BOO HOO!” as the firefighters shook their heads. (Inexplicably, the skeleton had a rubber snake slithering out of one eye socket.)

Let this be a reminder to everyone…,
Mullen translated as all the actors onstage said in unison:
“¡No juegan con el fuego, o usted será quemado!”

“Do not play with fire, or you will be burned!”

*   *   *

The Spanish stars took turns bowing before the whooping crowd. Carney even brought out the skeleton with him for a curtsy. Davidek looked at Stein—who wasn’t applauding, who wasn’t doing anything except sitting still and staring at the stage with blank eyes. At the foot of the stage, a relieved Mrs. Tunns was congratulating Mullen and Simms for authoring the show, proud for once that her two worst slackers had accomplished something worthwhile.

Stein stood from his seat, not hearing anything around him—certainly not Davidek saying his name again and again.

He brushed through the crowd, moving up the aisle. Davidek tried to follow, but Stein went too fast, shoving people as he began to walk faster and faster.

Mullen and Simms whispered at each other, grinning as they peered through the audience. By the time they saw Stein he was already upon them. “Bring back some memories, you fucking firebug?” Mullen asked. Simms was even less delicate: “So when they found your mama, was she Extra Crispy or Original Recipe?”

Stein smashed his fist into Simm’s tombstone buck teeth, staggering the senior back against Mrs. Tunns, toppling both of them over. Mullen flailed his hands in front of his face, so Stein launched a foot into his balls instead, dropping him to his knees, where he kicked him in the center of his chest. Mrs. Tunns was crawling out from under a howling Simms, whose green teeth were dripping red, when Mullen fell on her, too. “For chrissakes, stop him!” Mrs. Tunns shrieked as the closest students, teachers, and even a few parents who had come to help out for the day snapped out of their paralysis in unison.

Stein loomed over the fallen seniors, his shoulders squared against the panels of the hall’s cheap dropped ceiling, heaving breath, hungry for more. Blurred figures rose behind him, pressing forward as if through heavy water. The freshman did not turn toward them and did not resist as they struck, their arms blossoming around his body, swallowing him, dragging him down.

TWENTY-NINE

Lorelei heard the International Day performances unspool from the secretary’s office—the raucous French music, the tepid applause, the muffled foreign babble and laughter rising up through the hardened arteries of St. Mike’s basement corridors to its sunny front office.

After she had feigned illness downstairs, Ms. Bromine dragged her up to sit on the couch beside the school secretary, Mrs. Corde, a tall, boxy woman with carrot-colored hair, who typed with only her index fingers, jabbing them down against each key like someone playing a miniature game of Whac-A-Mole.

Bromine left the door open when she departed, and the sounds of International Day continued wafting up from the basement. Lorelei picked up on Mrs. Tunns’s muffled introduction to the Spanish performance and strained to hear, then strained not to. She heard applause when the Spanish program ended, and there was a brief moment of silence.

Then—an eruption.

Mrs. Corde perked up from her typewriter like a woodland creature detecting distant danger. She turned to Lorelei, as if to verify the commotion, and the sound grew louder, drawing closer, a thunder of movement. “Is that part of the show?” the secretary asked.

Lorelei’s lifelessness evaporated. She sprang from her seat as twin doors banged open in the hallway and what sounded like a beast made of many bodies thundered against a row of lockers. Feet scuffled and squeaked on the tile, and voices shouted desperate, contradictory instructions as the rumble dragged nearer.

Lorelei closed the door of the office and pressed her finger against the brass button in the center of the knob, but the click of the lock felt useless as backs and arms and faces slammed up against the narrow window of the door, like bodies swirling in floodwaters. Mr. Mankowski was orbiting the melee in his ridiculous lederhosen and bright green cap, barking orders at the uniformed boys, all grappling with one struggling figure: Noah Stein, with at least three boys on each arm, pulling them out straight as his flushed neck strained like a clutch of cherry licorice whips, ready to snap.

Stein finally saw Lorelei when his attackers shoved him against the office door. His eyes held her, deep pools of questioning grief, crisscrossed by the wires embedded in the glass. Then they slipped shut and stayed that way, as if to preserve an image of her that would escape if he opened them again.

The Lorelei he knew was a ghost, fading in and out of view. Just on the other side of a door, but gone from him forever. His racing mind made a bargain with the universe: Return the girl he knew he loved and he would forfeit every kiss, every touch, every word, every sight of her. Take her from him, but just let her exist somewhere, and not only have been a dirty trick.

Lorelei’s fingertips brushed the doorknob, but Mrs. Corde grabbed her arm. “Are you crazy? Don’t let him in! We’re
safe
in here.”