Brutal Youth: A Novel Read online

  Ms. Bromine nodded toward the principal’s closed office door. “I’m waiting for Sister Maria myself—not that it ever matters for much. As you know,” she said, her lips tightening. With a marble-sized mole near the right corner of her mouth, the expression was like a sideways exclamation point. She turned back to Davidek: “We don’t appreciate visitors abusing the rules at St. Michael’s, young man. Tell me your name again?”

  “Peter Daff-ah-deck,” the boy repeated, for the third time. “And I wasn’t—”

  A swell of laughter and a loud, horrified “Oh, God!” echoed from the men’s bathroom, drawing a concerned look from Mr. Mankowski.

  “All right,” said Ms. Bromine. “You can go—this time. But if you find yourself hopelessly confused again in this simple three-story structure—”

  “Stop!” a boy yelled from inside the restroom.

  Laughter erupted again and there was more shouting. Feet scuffled; voices rose. A boy cried out in agony. Mr. Mankowski ran forward and shoved open the bathroom door just as something massive collided against the other side, smashing the door into his face. A clear fluid popped from his nose as he collapsed.

  The bathroom door whooshed open and Davidek saw the greasy boy named Clink shamble out, his eyes bulging beneath tangles of hair. His black duffel bag, clattering with off-key chimes, swung around his belly like a disembowled organ. His uniform gray slacks were unbuttoned, and there was a splash of blood on his open white shirt.

  A boy with a gaping mouth of crooked horse teeth darted from the bathroom, holding a small glass jar over his head. “Have this back, you fucking freak!” Horse-Teeth hollered, heaving the jar against the wall just over Clink’s shoulder, spraying the brick with putrid yellow fluid.

  A new figure emerged from the boys’ room, a kid gushing blood and yelping panicked screams as he pawed delicately at the blunt end of a click-button pen jutting from his right cheek. The tip of the pen, dripping ribbons of scarlet saliva, poked out between his lips like a strange lizard tongue, clicking against his teeth as he moaned for help.

  * * *

  The contents of Colin Vickler’s black bag had been a curiosity at St. Mike’s for months. People began noticing the unusual glass clanking sound around the start of the school year, but whenever teachers had taken him aside and forcibly searched him, they never found anything. The rumors got more and more elaborate: It was a portable methamphetamine lab. Or, maybe was he smuggling bomb chemicals. Sickening theories arose: He carried his own urine in jars, filling them at school and keeping them on a shelf in his bedroom. But for what dark purpose could any of this be happening: perversion, paranoia, witchcraft?

  Colin “Clink” Vickler didn’t have a single friend at St. Mike’s, though he had been a student there for three years. As a freshman, he was a lightning rod for the ninety-two-year-old school’s hazing tradition, a yearlong, allegedly good-natured teasing of new students, which the school tacitly approved of as a “fun” bonding exercise for the newcomers. Vickler had carried a disproportionate amount of the torment, with even his fellow freshmen bullying him, usually to impress or distract their own oppressors.

  When he was as a sophomore, the teasing hadn’t stopped. In one of the worst instances, a group of seniors ambushed him in the bathroom one day, held his arms, and snagged the rim of his underwear, ripping them off from underneath his pants and tearing into his groin. While he rolled in agony, someone went outside and ran the tattered threads up the school flagpole. For weeks, Vickler’s classmates saluted him and hummed “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  It wasn’t the beautiful and so-called popular kids who did it to him, though they may have been laughing on the periphery. Everyone was, basically. The boys who had attacked him in the bathroom were the most worthless, aimless, and friendless in the school. The cheerleaders, basketball players, theater kids, and science geeks (among countless other cliques at St. Mike’s) all picked on kids within their own circles, venting their frustrations on weaker versions of themselves. Sometimes the cliques turned on each other, but that was rare. When one group did need another to beat up on, they all tended to turn on the same niche—the losers. Clink just happened to be the one the losers picked on.

  He became a junior, but even with upperclassman status, the teasing never stopped. The worst were the girls laughing at him, girls he thought were cute. And he was no help for himself—dropping his eyes, muttering, not clever enough to return the insults, not strong enough to fight back. It never stopped. It never would.

  Vickler’s only protection was to hide.

  St. Mike’s was a strange old building, full of narrow corridors and stairwells curling deep underground in a quiet labyrinth. To escape his jeering classmates when class wasn’t in session, Vickler would sneak into the subbasement and take sanctuary in the science storage room, where he would read comic books or video game magazines. There among the Bunsen burners and assorted carafes of chemicals, he found shelf after shelf of glass containers, each containing a preserved biological specimen: insects, birds, snakes, worms, lizards, fetal pigs, fish, frogs, mice. They stared forlornly at the greasy-haired boy hiding in their midst. Vickler studied them in the darkness. Even the prickly-legged giant centipedes had a mournful appearance, floating lifeless and tangled together in their preservative stew.

  These beings could not escape, had no future, and existed only as peculiarities.

  Vickler began smuggling away the jars, one by one, taking them to a place in the woods near his home to release the poor deceased creatures for burial. His parents became suspicious about him going to the woods each night, so he had to slow down. He knew he couldn’t explain. He also couldn’t stop. There were hundreds of jars in the storage basement, and he committed himself to removing them all.

  The earth around his shallow burials became blighted. Weeds shriveled to brown husks as they absorbed the toxic preserving chemicals. To avoid detection, Vickler began to spread the bodies around more broadly through the woods, which only slowed his progress. Then the science faculty noticed that half their biology specimens had disappeared. Suspicion fell on the janitor for carelessly disposing them, and new ones were ordered from the Nebraska Scientific company. Colin Vickler’s smuggling campaign started all over again.

  Throughout this time, not a soul knew what “Clink” really carried in his bag. Not until the day of the open house.

  * * *

  Gym class at St. Mike’s happened only on sunny days. This was because the school no longer had a gymnasium, and phys-ed classes had nowhere to take place when the weather was unkind. The old gymnasium had been converted into the parish’s church when the original chapel burned down four years earlier. There had been no money to rebuild the church, so the gym was made into a substitute house of worship—at first temporarily, though it had since become dismayingly permanent. The old locker rooms had become dressing rooms for the priest and altar boys, so for gym class, the students changed out of their uniforms in the school bathrooms. Their calesthentics and games of dodgeball took place in the grassy field where the burned chapel once stood. (In the winter, or if it rained, they earned gym-class credit at a nearby bowling alley.)

  On the day of the open house, while Davidek stood outside in the hallway in the glare of Ms. Bromine, a junior in that boys’ bathroom named Richard Mullen picked a fight with the only kid who was a bigger loser than he was. The bathroom was crowded, and Mullen was standing on one leg, leaning over at an odd angle, pulling at the tip of one socked foot as his open pants slipped down around his ankles. He stumbled backwards and landed hard on his ass, which drew loud laughs from the other boys—including creepy Clink Vickler.

  Mullen had only one friend in the school, his dull, horse-toothed companion, Frank Simms—the only boy besides Clink whose existence was more pathetic than Mullen’s. Since he was already so low in the pecking order, Mullen couldn’t abide being laughed at by the shy, fat, fellow outcast.

  In the hallway, Mr. Mankowski’s wh
istle blew and his voice called out: “Ten more minutes, guys, out on the field!”

  Everyone was still laughing as Mullen stood up, and he said to Clink, because he couldn’t say it to anyone else: “Is that how your dad laughs when he’s buttfucking you?” Mullen punctuated this with a swift kick to Clink’s duffel bag, causing two glass jars, pregnant with fluid, to tumble out and roll slowly across the tile floor.

  A handsome and popular boy named Michael Crawford lifted one of the jars toward the light, and a preserved fruit bat inside slid around to face him and his friends—its mouth open, wings undulating in the shaking water.

  Horse-toothed Simms picked up the other jar. “Holy shit, this guy’s pickling dead critters!” he cried, and Mullen shoved aside the layer of papers, books, pens, and pencils in Clink’s bag to reveal a dozen more jars. He extracted one—an embryonic pig—and held it out. “Whatever this is, you’re going to hell for it, sicko.…”

  Vickler’s mind went numb. An eternity passed. He had been trying to do something good, something merciful, but now he saw his collection with the same horror as the boys around him. There was nothing he could do, no explanation that would make sense. He heard the words psycho, freak, disgusting, and began to cry, squatting over his scattered papers, gathering them blindly.

  Mullen stuck the specimen jar against Vickler’s face. “Wait’ll the girls find out what you did to P-p-p-porky Pig!”

  That’s when Vickler’s groping hand found the ballpoint pen.

  Before he even realized what was happening, Vickler was slicing it through the air, puncturing Mullen’s cheek like a marshmallow.

  Mullen screeched, and Clink seized him by the throat, shoving him backwards with blind fury and slamming him against the boys’ room door as Mr. Mankowski pushed it open on the other side, crushing the teacher’s sinus cavity and toppling him to the ground.

  Clink tossed the bleeding, braying Mullen aside and grabbed his bag, yanking the strap over his shoulder as he fled out the door.

  The first-floor hallway of St. Mike’s yawned before Vickler like a giant stone throat. He was dimly aware of figures around him, two blurs—one giant and blue, the other small and insignificant—standing a few feet away, and a man—Mr. Mankowski—rolling in agony on the floor beside the lockers.

  Horse-toothed Simms rushed out of the bathroom, hefting a jar with a floating tapeworm inside, and hurled it at Vickler, who shoved past Davidek and sprinted into the stairwell, up one floor, then another, until there was no one around him except the stunned-looking janitor standing beside a ladder leading to a square of blue sky.

  He began to climb, terrified, thinking maybe he could hide, and realizing too late he was trapping himself.

  With unwitting help from Ms. Bromine, Vickler soon learned he had trapped everyone else, too.

  * * *

  When the janitor became separated from his fingers, he plunged down like a pile of old clothes and smashed against the stairwell floor, squealing as he clutched the red nubs of his knuckles. He might have shattered his spine if Mr. Mankowski, staggering beneath the ladder with his bruised face, hadn’t softened the fall.

  Ms. Bromine tried to remain calm. She took a step back as the janitor’s crimson-spritzing fingertips spray-painted the floor. The gym teacher was hysterical, whimpering beneath the crumpled janitor, his collarbone fractured. Davidek stood with the crowd of other gawking students and faculty as the two wounded men gibbered madly at the foot of the ladder. “This is going to be bad for enrollment,” Davidek heard one of the teachers say.

  Ms. Bromine, suddenly aware of the audience, tried to clear people away, but the crowd was too large for anyone to go anywhere. People in the back were yelling, “Sister Maria is trying to come through! Clear a path!” and Davidek looked over the railing to see the old woman on the stairs below, poking through the mob.

  Bromine drew back against the wall. She couldn’t be seen presiding over this chaos.

  The red handle of a fire alarm was beside her. “We need to get everyone out of here,” she said as her fingers reached for the switch.

  * * *

  On the roof, Colin Vickler, also known as Clink Vickler, also known in grade school as Creepy Colin, seventeen years old, still without a driver’s license, pale-skinned, a prospect-less virgin, and utterly friendless, felt power for the first time in his life as he listened to the electric howl of the alarm and watched waves of his schoolmates gush out of St. Michael’s arched entryway.

  They were afraid. Of him.

  Some turned their faces up, squinting against the sunlight, their expressions bent into question marks as they tried to see him. A few who’d witnessed what had happened were crying, not looking back—others were spreading the news, passing along a contamination of lies: Clink had been murdering animals, dismembering them, and hiding the remains in glass containers. One of the boys from the changing room said he’d looked into the bag and saw a human hand in one of the jars. A few visiting eighth-graders overheard a teacher say the boy on the roof had cut the school janitor’s throat.

  The actual truth was bad enough. Vickler knew he wasn’t coming down again. There was no crawling back through the hatch. There was no apologizing. There was no explaining. He was over. Colin Vickler was gone. Now, he was just Clink. Weird. Psychotic. Dangerous.

  But he kind of liked that last part.

  The boy lifted his bag onto the ledge and ran his grubby fingers over the tops of the remaining jars, counting ten. He hefted one in his hand, looked down into the parking lot, and surveyed his targets.

  * * *

  From the outside, St. Michael the Archangel High School looked like a building that might devour other buildings. The style of traditional collegiate Gothic architecture seemed to have been fused with primitive battle fortifications to create an imposing, redbrick edifice that bulged up from the earth like some thorny, stone-shelled titan. Davidek looked back at the building as he fled with the other students. “Rubberneck later, man. Now you better run!” someone said, pulling him forward. It was the boy with the scar on his cheek, the one who had helped him in the hallway earlier.

  The boy on the roof heaved a jar toward the crowd, smashing a spiderweb into the windshield of a red Buick in the parking lot. Davidek and the scarred kid bolted together through the scattering mob as the second and third jar of scientific specimens exploded against the ground behind them.

  Ms. Bromine stood in the center of the evacuation, conducting the mayhem to the street. A shuffling, heavyset kid, gushing sweat in his St. Mike’s uniform, nudged in front of Davidek, huffing as he lurched forward, like a bull trying to run on its hind legs. A thin red tie drifted over his shoulder as a flash of light streaked out of the sky and exploded against the back of the chubby kid’s skull. The glass jar had made a hissing sound as it cut the air, and the fat boy made the same noise as he faceplanted against the pavement.

  Davidek tried to stop, tried to reach down and snag the fallen kid’s shoulders, but the other students pushed him forward, with no time for anyone’s rescue but their own. Davidek and the scarred boy reached the edge of school property, where cars cut back and forth along the street, honking furiously at the herd of students fleeing across the blacktop.

  That’s when Ms. Bromine began to yell, “Stop! Stop!”

  For a moment, everyone did.

  “No one … can leave … school grounds,” she said, the crowd swirling around her as she turned. Her blond puff of hair was wilting with sweat. “No leaving without a … a … permission slip.”

  The students of St. Mike’s gawped at her. They began to argue in discordant unison. Then another jar streaked from the rooftop and sent them scattering for cover behind parked cars.

  The school principal, Sister Maria Hest, was among the confused and cowering. She crawled through the hiding crowd, demanding information. “What’s happening?… Why is the school being evacuated?… Who is throwing things from the roof?” Everyone tried to tell her at once, so she und
erstood none of it.

  Ms. Bromine did not speak up right away. She was formulating justifications. She wondered who, if anyone, had stayed behind with Mr. Mankowski and Mr. Saducci.

  A UPS truck squealed smoke from its tires and jerked to a stop inches from some scampering freshmen who’d decided to ignore the rules and run off the property. As the driver drowned out his own obscenities with the blast of his horn, Bromine and Sister Maria saw more refugee trails of students flowing across the street, out of range from the boy on the roof.

  The guidance counselor snapped her fingers at two of the other teachers. “Grab those kids. Keep them on school property! We can be sued if they get hurt in this traffic!”

  A blond girl in gym clothes broke away from the group and stood her ground in the middle of the street, right in front of Bromine. Her kinky hair was tied up in two madwoman pigtails. “Are you a total fucking idiot?” the girl snapped. “What if we get hurt on school property?”

  Bromine became aware of many eyes turning toward her. Her throat tightened. “Don’t curse at me,” she said.

  The blonde raised two middle fingers at the guidance counselor. “How about some sign language, then?” she said, turning her back to leave. Bromine darted into the street, seizing the girl by one frazzled pigtail and dragging her back to the sidewalk.

  A smattering of rocks fell against the cars at the far end of the parking lot. The boy on the roof was throwing chunks of broken brick at them now. Bromine ducked behind the trunk of a beat-up green Plymouth, still gripping the blond girl’s hair. At the other corner of the lot, a cluster of boisterious seniors stood on the hood of a silver Honda, chortling piggishly as they pretended to shoot the projectiles out of the sky with invisible shotguns.

  In the center of the parking lot, lying motionless in a widening pool of blood, was the unconscious boy who had charged in front of Davidek before getting beaned on the skull. With everyone else hiding, this still figure was now the easiest target for the boy on the roof.