Brutal Youth Read Free Page B

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 whistle 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