Brutal Youth: A Novel Read online

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  To Jillo

  for my wildflower,

  these cruel shadows

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  1991

  Prologue: The Boy on the Roof

  Part I. The Bad Hand

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II. Our Turn

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part III. Hannah

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part IV. Winter

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part V. La Verdad y Nada

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part VI. Prom and Promises

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Part VII. The Other Way Down

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1991

  PROLOGUE: THE BOY ON THE ROOF

  The kid had taken a lot of punishment over the years, so he had much to give back.

  A steel hatch on the roof of St. Michael the Archangel High School shuddered, then burst open, and the boy crawled out and collapsed against the gritty tarpaper surface, kicking the lid shut again with one sock-covered foot. He wore only his uniform gray slacks and a wide-open button-down shirt, streaked with blood that wasn’t his. A black canvas book bag hung over one shoulder, swinging back and forth as he scrambled to his knees. He pressed his weight against the closed metal door to stifle the hollering and pandemonium rising from beneath it.

  Next to the steel hatch was a bucket, steaming with hot tar. The janitor had been using it to seal sections of loose shingle that had been leaking water into the school during every springtime rainstorm. A grubby tar mop leaned against the bucket. The boy shifted his heavy bag and scooped up the mop, wedging it between the handles of the hatch, locking it shut. Then he fled back across the flat roof toward the ghostly concrete statues lining the edge.

  The row of saints had stood watch over St. Michael’s for as long as anyone alive could remember. Thomas, the doubter; Joseph, the foster father; Anthony, finder of lost things; Jude, devotee to the hopelesss; Francis of Assisi, the lover of nature, who had a small concrete bird in his outstretched hand, and a real drip of birdshit on his concrete head. At the center archway of the ledge high above the school’s main entrance stood an even larger statue of a warrior angel, St. Michael himself, wings spread and sword raised against the satanic serpent being squashed beneath his foot.

  The boy on the roof was named Colin Vickler. Not that it mattered. This was the end. This was good-bye. There was nowhere else to hide. He climbed up onto the short ledge, first steadying himself on St. Michael’s wing, and then hugging its torso as he tried not to stare into the bone-shattering drop below. Behind him, the steel hatch shook again—a rumble of thunder on a sunny, spring afternoon. He heard screams rise from the open classroom windows on the face of the school below. Even out here, on the edge, he was surrounded.

  He slumped against St. Michael, pressing his open mouth against the concrete figure’s arm to make himself stop crying, tasting the stone that had weathered away to dust. The statue lurched, as if withdrawing from him, and he fell back as pieces of the crumbling base tumbled over the ledge.

  Peering over the side, he saw a small group of classmates in gym clothes lingering on the school steps. The bits of stone lay scattered around their feet, and they stared up at him, shielding their eyes against the sun.

  One of them pointed and said, “Hey, I think that’s Clink.” Another shouted: “Jump, Clink!” and the rest of them laughed. A girl’s voice rose up in a singsong: “Cliiii-iiiink!”

  Vickler stood up straight, staring back at them.

  He rammed his shoulder against St. Michael. He beat the saint’s back. He grabbed the figure’s sword-wielding arm and rocked him back and forth, cracking the mortar. The statue lurched, and the rusted shaft of pipe protruding through the base cracked loose, splitting the serpent free from the avenging angel’s foot.

  St. Michael tipped off the ledge and spiraled to the sidewalk, diving toward its own shrinking shadow. It detonated against the concrete steps in a crackling explosion of dust and rocks as the gym students leaped for their lives, shrieking and scrambling over each other.

  For the first time that day—for the first time in a long while—Colin Vickler smiled.

  As those fresh screams rose up, he stared over the streets ahead, to the shopping center across the road, the receding clusters of homes, the green springtime slopes of the valley rising in the distance, the wide curve of the Allegheny River, an industrial artery slouching along the steel mills and gravelworks as it bent toward Pittsburgh. In the busy street beside the school, traffic crawled past the gas stations, fast-food joints, doctor’s offices, and other storefronts that lined Tobinsville’s main strip. Up here, it all looked like some toy village in a model train layout. Tiny. Unreal. It seemed harmless to him now. And he felt so much bigger than it.

  The hatch shook again, but the mop handle held. Vickler watched it. Waited. Then nothing.

  He stumbled toward the next saint, dragging his heavy behind him.

  The bag. That’s what got him here. Thick, full glass jars clattered inside the canvas. The strap cut into his hand, but he wouldn’t let it leave his side again, not that it mattered now. The other kids had discovered what he kept inside, though they wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t. Not even he did, really. A kid had the right to some secrets, if only the ones he could carry. But these had just been taken from him.

  He heard voices in the parking lot. More of the gym students were gathered below. His classmates. Former classmates now, he guessed.

  One kick. One kick was all it took, and that surprised Vickler. One kick sent St. Francis toppling end-over-end to the ground. But the statue didn’t deliver the satisfying explosion the angel had. Instead of the sidewalk, it landed with its touchdown-raised arms now stuck in a soft flower bed, its head buried: patron saint of ostriches. The kids standing around the garden looked at it with confusion.

  Vickler dragged his bag to St. Thomas. He rattled the saint’s head. Jars clinked madly in Vickler’s bag. Clink. That’s what they called him. Clink.

  Three kicks later, and St. Thomas became an arrow to the earth. He hit the bri
ck wall along the grand front steps and fractured in two at the waist. This time the kids ran.

  St. Barnabas. Decades of hard weather had already crumbled the base of this statue. Vickler heaved him over.

  St. Anthony—three shakes, two kicks—pray for us.

  Vickler had black dust on his hands now. The filth smeared his face as he wiped away tears.

  A man’s voice bellowed below the roof hatch. Vickler whirled. The contents of his knapsack clattered: clinkclink. The steel sheet rocked once, then twice, as someone rammed it from the other side. The mop handle bent like rubber, flexing, beginning to crack. The next hit splintered it. The tar-bristled mop end flopped away from the jagged stick.

  Vickler’s hands crawled into his book bag and came out with a sealed glass jar. Trapped inside the clear fluid was a small swollen creature: a baby shark, curled in death, its little black eyes staring at him. He inched closer to the hatch, his shadow touching its edge.

  The heavy steel door lifted. Below rose panicky shouts. A woman’s voice barked, “Open it already!”

  A little head, as white as a clover flower, rose up from the hole. Vickler arched his arm and hurled the jar into the face of Mr. Saducci, the school’s mumble-mouthed elderly janitor.

  Saducci squealed. One hand rose to shield his face too late. The other squeezed at the edge of the hatch for balance. The jar caromed off his brow and burst against the steel door, spraying the tumbling janitor’s face in formaldehyde.

  The old man’s right hand grasped blindly as his eyes sizzled, and the steel lid slammed down, trapping his fingers. The janitor’s wail echoed, seeming to plunge away in the distance as rounds of fresh screams erupted below.

  Vickler dropped to the roof and scrambled forward on his hands and knees, pulling his bag after him. He picked up the sharpened end of the splintered mop handle and held it like a spear.

  But the hatch didn’t move. The janitor’s trapped fingers didn’t either.

  Vickler’s guts roared. His greasy black hair dangled around his eyes. He shifted his pack. Clink. Clink. His eyes darted. “Go ahead!” he yelled, his voice breaking. “Open it up. Pull in your hand. I won’t hurt you!”

  A thread of blood began to run along the hatch’s crease.

  Vickler waited. He lifted the mop handle and timidly poked at the fingertips.

  They rolled off the ledge and bounced against the roof.

  * * *

  About twenty minutes before the saints began to fall, another boy, named Peter Davidek, was walking the crowded halls of St. Mike’s and trying not to feel microscopic. His last name was pronounced Davv-ah-deck, which rhymed with “have a check”—and he had been repeating that all day. Still, most of the teachers got it wrong, even after he meekly corrected them. At first he thought it was on purpose, that they were messing with him. Then he realized they just didn’t care enough to make the miniscule effort to remember. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

  Freshly fourteen years old and a foot shorter than most of the kids around him, the lost eighth-grader searched for the right place to be. It was St. Michael’s annual open house for potential incoming students, and the stone halls of the Catholic high school were filled with miniature middle-schoolers like him, trying to make their way between the oafish St. Mike’s guys, who seemed to be all shoulders wrapped in polyester blazers, and the equally intimidating sweet-smelling schoolgirls in their tantalizing navy blue sweaters and plaid skirts.

  Davidek’s heart pounded as he scanned the room numbers. He was supposed to be in Mrs. Apps’s chemistry class, room 11-A, but had become separated from his group. There were no familiar faces here. All of Davidek’s friends planned to attend Valley High next year, New Kensington’s public high school. Only 316 kids in total attended St. Mike’s, almost nothing compared to the thousands at Valley, where it was easier to lie low, and the students didn’t have to wear stupid uniforms or go to church all the time or have weird priests and nuns watching every move.

  Attending Valley was one of the few things Davidek and his parents agreed on. His father had attended St. Mike’s for a year, though he hadn’t graduated. The old man wanted to know why his son was even bothering to visit that school full of spoiled brats and know-nothings. For Davidek, it had seemed like a good excuse to escape regular class.

  Three upperclassmen blundered by in the hallway, punching each other and swinging their book bags like maces. Davidek caught one behind the knee and hit the ground. His wrinkled paper schedule fluttered out of his hand. A girl stepped on his ankle, but she glanced over her shoulder at the guy behind her and apologized to him instead. “No problem,” the guy said, stepping on Davidek’s ankle, too. Only he did it on purpose.

  Legs pistoned at the floor all around Davidek. A hand hooked under his arm to help him up, and that person handed him his schedule before stepping back into the crowd. “I owe you one,” Davidek said, but the kid kept moving, giving Davidek a nod. The boy was a visitor, too, since he was wearing regular street clothes and not a St. Mike’s uniform. Davidek didn’t recognize him from his group, and he would have remembered—this boy had a band of scars on the left side of his face, with rosy tendrils linking the edge of his left eye to his neck.

  Lockers slammed like gunfire. Every student seemed to be hauling both book bags and duffel bags as class changed. Some of them toted dirty sneakers. Gym class had just ended for seniors and was about to begin for juniors.

  A chunky kid with greasy black hair staggered by Davidek and whacked him on the side with his black canvas bag. Glass jars clattered together inside. A smaller sack, a Pittsburgh Steelers gym bag, dangled at the greasy kid’s side.

  “Cliiiiiink!!” someone in the crowd shouted. A couple of girls giggled. Soon the hallway was a cacophony of voices muttering, whispering, and shouting the same word: ClinkClinkClink. All of a sudden, no one was moving. They were blockading him.

  The greasy kid whirled around. “I got to get to my locker,” he barked.

  “Umm, can you help me?” Davidek pleaded to the faces around him, but they were all too amused blocking in the increasingly frustrated Clink. It was Davidek’s first lesson at the school: When people didn’t like you, they got in your way. When they didn’t care about you, they let you get in your own way.

  Clink clutched his clattering black bag like a battering ram, shoving through and disappearing as the change-of-class bell shrieked. Everyone still standing in the hall, including Davidek, was now officially late.

  The students around him scattered, but Davidek had no one to follow. He had lost track of the scarred boy, but followed in that direction. He found a room 11 on the second floor, but it was an elderly nun teaching French—not Mrs. Apps’s chemistry class.

  In an empty stairwell, Davidek found a white-haired janitor hauling a hot tar bucket up to the roof on a retractable steel ladder. Davidek held out his paper schedule and asked, “Could you help me find where I’m supposed to be?”

  The janitor glared at him, like he’d been tortured mightily by the children at this school, and was not now about to supply aid and comfort to the enemy. When he spoke, the Pittsburgh accent was so thick, it was almost another language: “Howen da’heckamye sposta know where yinz kids shubbee?” Davidek blinked. How in the heck am I supposed to know where yinz kids should be. Yinz. In the South, it was y’all, in New York it was you’s. Around Pittsburgh, yinz was the plural of you, the telltale sign of someone born and raised in Pennsylvania’s bottom left corner. The word was invisible most of the time, since everybody used it now and again.

  “I’m looking for room 11-A,” Davidek said. “But I can’t—”

  The janitor waved his free hand impatiently, counting out on fingers that would soon be separated from his hand. “A, B, C,” he said. “Three letters, three floors. Unnerstann?”

  Davidek thanked him and descended the steps. The janitor muttered as he carried his acrid-smelling tar bucket up the ladder.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, the eighth-gr
ader pushed open the doors to the first-floor hallway. “Lost?” a woman’s voice said.

  He turned to see a tall, plump woman in a long, royal blue dress, which swept the floor at her heels. She was pacing outside the closed door of the principal’s office, apparently waiting for entry. He smiled at her, and she smiled back—thinly. He couldn’t guess her age—anywhere from thirty to fifty. She was pretty in a sad way, a faded way. Once-delicate features had gone soft and round, slightly wrinkled, as if they had swollen and then deflated. “Are you a teacher?” Davidek asked. “I could use some help finding—”

  “I’m the guidance counselor,” she said, as if teacher were a slur. “Why are you wandering the halls?”

  “Uh, I’m Peter Davidek, I’m—”

  “Daffy-what?” she said.

  “Daff-a-deck,” he corrected, with a break in his voice. “I’m an eighth-grade visitor for the open house.”

  “I didn’t ask your name. Why aren’t you with your group?” Her voice was sharp, annoyed by default. Her eyes narrowed, which with her chubby cheeks, made her look like a grown-up baby.

  “I’m supposed to be in 11-A, chemis—”

  “Right there,” she said, jabbing a finger down the hall. The nail was also painted royal blue. “You’re supposed to be there.”

  Davidek was about to thank her and slink away when two boys emerged from the men’s bathroom, both wearing shorts, T-shirts, and tennis shoes. A stout man—completely bald, lacking even eyebrows—emerged from the stairwell, also wearing shorts and a T-shirt (though his was tucked in.) He had a whistle around his neck, and blew it as he tossed the first boy a football and shoved open the bathroom door: “Ten more minutes, guys, out on the field!” The boys with the football ran off, and the bald gym teacher looked Davidek up and down, then turned to the blue woman. “So what’s going on here, Ms. Bromine?” he asked, stroking his naked chin. Bromine. It was a name like chemicals in the mouth.

  “I’m trying to get to the bottom of that myself, Mr. Mankowski,” the guidance counselor sighed.

  “Ahhhh…,” the bald man said, acting like this was serious business. “Should I get Sister Maria?” Sister Maria was the principal, and had welcomed all the visiting students in the assembly hall that morning. She had seemed nice. Davidek actually hoped they would get her.