Brutal Youth Read Free Page A

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