Brutal Youth by Anthony Breznican

over to Stein’s computer and nudged his shoulder. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “Help me figure out what to do about the Groughs.”
    Stein didn’t look away from his screen. “Why don’t you ask your mom, ” he said softly. “Since she’s so worried about who you hang out with.”
    Lorelei slumped in her seat, fingers resting on the keyboard but not moving. Davidek remained puzzled behind her. “Would your mom really help?” he asked.
    *   *   *
    Lorelei had learned about the dangers of cigarettes from the time of her first health class in grade school, and she had always worried about her mom, seeing the specters of cancer, emphysema, and heart disease floating in the white smoke that seeped out of her mother’s nose and mouth. Now her mom’s stash in the upper kitchen cabinet was her salvation.
    Even before her accident, Miranda Paskal despised being preached to about her bad habits, but afterwards, when she shifted from one to two and a half packs a day and began subsisting more on rums-and-Cokes than any other fluid, her guilt was the one thing certain to provoke her temper. The haggard woman’s once-thin face, sagging with extra weight from her now sedentary lifestyle, would tense whenever she sensed even unspoken judgment. Her eyes, usually bleary and lifeless, would flame to life. Once, after what had been an intensely unpleasant seventh-grade lesson on cancerous thyroids and blackened lungs, Lorelei made the mistake of saying simply: “I’m worried about how much you smoke, Mom.”
    Her mother had glowered at her. Her father, watching from the kitchen, had said, “Lorelei, don’t criticize your mother.”
    Miranda Paskal had moved carefully to place her lit cigarette in the stainless steel clasp attached to her prosthetic forearm. She knew her daughter hated to see it without the fitted latex hand. Sometimes she left it bare on purpose.
    Without Lorelei saying another word, her mother’s outrage snowballed into irrational fury. “Everything in this house, every thread of clothing you’re wearing, all the food you and your father eat—it’s all paid for by this. My accident. My hand! ” Her mother had lunged forward, moving with one quick swipe that made the sound of hard plastic connecting with flesh. Lorelei reeled backwards, holding her cheek. She never cried. It made her mother feel guilty when she cried, but that only made her angrier.
    “A lifetime of paths poorly chosen…” That’s something Miranda Paskal sometimes said aloud. She had lamented being a failure, long before she became one. She always said her parents should have been stricter with her, were right to be as harsh as they were, but did not go far enough. She had married poorly, settled too soon with a man who got her pregnant. She planned not to make the same mistake with her daughter. That was the source of her many random and unprovoked rules: no dating, and no driving until Lorelei was eighteen, either. No telephone calls after 8 P.M. (though no one ever called her daughter anyway).
    After her handicapping, Miranda Paskal had real misery to fuel her self-pity, which made her explosive. When her husband and daughter failed to tiptoe around her moods, a simple dropped dinner plate or a coy answer to a question could elicit a smack across the face, for either of them. Lorelei tried to interfere when her mother’s arguments with her father degenerated into thrown glassware or poundings on his back. He rarely did the same for his daughter.
    The worse part was that her mother often hit with the arm she lost, using the hard prosthetic as a weapon. It’s easier to hurt someone when you don’t have to feel it back.
    Lorelei never asked her to stop smoking again. Never mentioned the drinking, the overeating, the isolation of sitting in a dark house day after day, year after year.
    On the afternoon after she was threatened by the Groughs, Lorelei stood on a kitchen chair and opened the small cabinet over the