Losers (14 page)

I reached between his fingers and pulled the document toward me. It was a cc: of a letter sent from the landlords to the company that ran our factory, whose trucks showed up like clockwork to pick up the fruits of our daily labor. I ran my finger
from the body of the letter to the top and checked out the company letterhead myself. “ ‘Golden Property Investments,' ” I read. “Dad, isn't this the same logo that's on every building in the area? How can they say they have no property?”

My father let go of the paper, deflated. “Is America,” he said, his stock answer for why anything didn't work out, “is complicated legal answer. We cannot know what.”

I still held on to the fatal letter, scanning it over, looking for clues, for tricks, for anything that would help us.

“Dude,” said Bates, “why don't you just go out with Devin Murray?”

We were lying on the grass in the South Lawn, early the next morning. Like my mother said, it wasn't enough that I had to stay at school late every day—now I was getting there an hour earlier than everyone else, trying to squeeze as much out of my out-of-the-house life as I conceivably could. Large patches of the lawn were flattened, one-directional crop circles left over from Freshman Day, where the eponymous freshmen had been rolled down the hill. But off toward the sides and around the bottom, the grass was thick and tall, perfect for camouflage. Standing up, it came up to our waists. Lying down, the thick, savage blades towered over our heads, rendering us a Huckleberry Finn shade of inconspicuous.

“What?” I said, suddenly struck with the belief that Bates was on crack.

“You like her. That information is uncontestable—you fricking bring up her name every time you're talking about anything to do with school.
I'm so goddamn popular, Devin Murray
likes me
and
What would Devin Murray think
? and
Does this make me look like Devin Murray?
You're practically her slave already. The only thing that you're missing is the chance to bump uglies. And she'd probably say yes.”

“Even if she would—which she wouldn't—what makes you say that?” I asked.

Bates shook his head in despair. “Listen to you, Jupiter. That's the thing about you popular kids. Heads permanently twisted around so you can't see nothing but yourselves. What none of you realizes is, you're all so popular that none of you has time to be normal kids.
Chess nerds
get more play than people like you and Devin Murray. You're all losers.”

My natural instinct, to protest being called a loser, was stifled by two very important other impulses: First, that he had said
you popular kids,
implying that, finally, I had reached the level of being recognized as
one
of those people identified as popular. And, second, the realization that Bates, though now we were almost officially at the level of being friends, could still punch my lights out.

And so I restrained myself, holding back the attack dog of my ego. Instead, I asked, “What do you mean?”

“See, the way I figure it is, everyone's like a band. That's your popularity, that's the way you go through life. And you can be a goddamn Spice Girl or something, where everyone in the fucking universe knows who you are, but only for a minute, and you think you're fucking immortal. Then five days later you're old news, and no one's listening to your shit anymore. Or you can be like Slayer. They're not the most talented musicians ever, they ain't composing symphonies or any of that shit, and they
don't care about
Total
fucking
Recall Live
or whatever you wanna call that TV shit. They just play good fucking music. And there ain't a lot of us who love them, but damn, the minute Kerry King plays a guitar solo, I fucking know what it means to be in love. And, me being in love, that's all they need.”

“Well, yeah. But these Slayer folks—how many people even know who they
are
? They make music, and maybe it's great, but does it pay the bills? Do they have a place to sleep at night?”

Bates sat up, causing a huge bushel of grass to shoot up behind him. He crossed his legs, gave me an evil, wise look, and leered down at me.

“And you think you're doing any better?”

I sank back. He was right. If I didn't figure something out soon, my family was going to be homeless, jobless, and without much more résumé potential than the lead guitarist of Slayer.

Bates returned to his spread-eagle position on the grass.

“I'm sorry, Jupe,” he said. “I'm just givin' you shit. Fact of the matter is, you aren't one of them kids. You don't want to go out with Devin Murray any more than I want to get with one of those pasty rave boys. It's just, that's what life gives us. They're the easiest thing to do.”

It was then that I remembered to keep track of time. Without thinking, I seized Bates's wrist and pulled it toward me. I checked his watch.

“You do that again, they're gonna be servin' you for lunch on top of iceberg lettuce,” Bates grumbled.

But I was already standing up, brushing the grass flakes off my jeans, and wrapping my bag on my shoulder.

“Thanks for the advice,” I said quickly. “Seriously. I'll see you soon?”

“Where the hell are you going?” Bates said, curiosity overcoming his natural inclination to threaten and destroy.

“To save my family,” I called over my shoulder, already climbing the hill to school.

I showed up in the exact same hallway as before, at the exact same time. Time to put my plan in action. The girls' soccer team was there, clustered around the same locker, their hands poised over their mouths in the same confidential position. The minute I got there, the first late-bell of the day rang. The crowd had just started breaking up.

I pushed my way to the center, and, finding nobody there, I peered down the halls in every direction. Of course, she'd be the first one gone.

There.
Almost out of sight, she was almost nothing but a bump of blond hair disappearing down the staircase to the first floor. I took the stairs two at a time. I took the last half dozen in a single leap, lunged forward, and seized her forearm.

Devin turned around, startled. “Jupiter?”

“Hey,” I panted, attempting to recover lost gulps of breath. “How did you decide to have your party in the Yards?”

She crinkled her nose. “ 'Cause it's the
Yards
, gummo. It just made sense. You don't have to worry about your kid sister and her friends crashing, and who's gonna make a noise complaint to the cops?”

“How did you find the warehouse, anyway?”

“Hel
lo
, Jupiter. From your number-one partner in total wackness, Crash Goldberg. His dad owns a bunch of buildings all over the Yards, all the warehouses around there.”

“Oh, man,” I said. I took a step backward, straight into a row
of lockers. Then I sank, cradling my head. My brain was in overdrive, burning up faster than I could think. “Oh,
man
, Devin. This is perfect.”

“Why?” said Devin, looking at me with renewed interest. “You think he can help us track down the keg?”

“W
ell, you were right.”

Vadim stood in front of me, atop the tallest hill on the South Lawn, at the end of the day. School had been out for hours, and even the drifters had gone home. His head hung perilously low, as though it was going to roll right off his shoulders, and the acoustics of the ground made his voice bounce off dirt and sound even quieter than it normally did.

I didn't move. I braced for a reaction. Was he going to yell at me again? Was he going to threaten to spill one of the secrets of our nerd past to the entire rest of the school?

“What do you mean?” I said—slowly. Carefully.

“I asked out Cynthia Yu. After school last Friday. We were sitting on the steps, with everyone around, and half of them watching us out of the corners of their glasses. I didn't even do it right, probably. I got down on one knee and took her hand and asked her if she wanted to go downtown and hack the wireless servers of all the office buildings together.”

“She wasn't into it?” I ventured.

“She didn't even say no,” Vadim said. “She laughed at me in front of everyone. In front of all of them.”

“Damn.”

“Exactly.”

I floundered. “But she didn't actually
say
no? Maybe she just thought it was, like, a really cool idea or something, and she was laughing because she thought—”

“She said she didn't
need
me to hack into those corporations—she could do it in her sleep, with her eyes closed. And then she said that she'd turned down people who were more famous than I'd ever be, and that I probably couldn't even
plot
my chances of getting with her as a Heisenberg principle.”

“Oh.”

“Heisenberg wrote the
uncertainty
principle, Jupiter.”

“So that's good, then. Right?”

“Oh, man, Jupiter,” said Vadim, clucking his tongue. He sounded somewhere between disapproving and pitying. “You'll never understand.”

I hoped he was talking about physics. I was actually wanting pretty desperately to have my heart broken—or at least to meet the kind of girl who would break it for me.

“This is the beginning of our school careers, you know?” I told Vadim, trying to inject an epic quality into the timbre of my voice. “There are six hundred and ninety-two kids in our class. That means there are over
three hundred
girls for you to ask out. And, I mean—hell, they can't
all
say no. You're one girl ahead of me, and that's gotta count for something, right?”

He turned around and looked straight at me for the first time since we'd gotten into this ridiculous non-fight of a fight that
neither of us had started; more like we'd just fallen into it. Anyway, he looked me in the eyes, which he almost never did to anyone, and grinned like the day we'd stepped off the plane to America.

“You're right, Jupe,” he said. “I really
am
ahead of you, right?”

“Well—I didn't mean—”

“It's okay, dude. It will happen. It'll happen before you know it. You'll see a girl that you'll want to spend more and more time with, and the stories will construct themselves in your head, building it up into a giant crystal palace of what you want to be—and then, sooner or later, it will all come crashing. You shouldn't try to make it happen before you're ready, Jupiter. It's okay, really.” He reached up, way up, and rested one hand on my shoulder. It looked slightly awkward, since my shoulder was higher up than his head, but I didn't want to break the moment. “In fact, I should apologize for getting you involved in the first place, Jupiter—for asking you to check her out. I don't know why I didn't realize you're even more clueless than I am.”

I stuttered a faulty, broken protest, trying to explain to Vadim that he wasn't wrong, that it
had
made sense for him to ask me. I was his best friend, and I was an incredibly accurate judge of character, and I was still more popular than him—of
course
he should run his crushes by me for verification.

“Don't worry, Jupiter,” he said, digging his fingers into my shoulder in what I eventually managed to realize was supposed to be a supportive squeeze. “One day, you'll find a girl of your own to have a crush on. And, that day, I'll be right there to help you through it.”

At that moment, I spotted a bunch of guys approaching us from behind Vadim. Thinking they might be a neighborhood gang looking for a couple of nerds with some extra cash in our pockets, I made an executive decision that it was time for us to hustle. “Listen, Vadim—” I said.

“Uh, hey, are you Vadim from the Nerd Stairs?” one of them said. “We've been looking for you.”

Vadim, in an instant, had let go of my shoulder, spun around, and jammed his hand into his pocket—probably fishing for his house keys, the way that the latch-key student Protect Yourself program last year in Malcolm X had taught us to do. “Yes, that's me,” he answered. “What are you looking for?”

As they stood there and I got a chance to study them, I started spotting telltale signs—analog watches, neatly groomed backpacks, neckties—that made them look decidedly un-ganglike. The tallest of them, a Korean kid with floppy hair and a T-shirt that said
E=mc
²
in a neon graffiti font, extended his hand in the same way you'd expect the dean of the Mafia to extend his.

“We heard you got rejected by Cynthia Yu,” he said. “We have, too. We just wanted to introduce ourselves and extend our congratulations. Way to go. You're official.”

“Official?” Vadim said, flashing a big, mystified look in his eyes that was obscured by his thick glasses.

“You bet,” said E=mc
²
. He took Vadim's hand in a squeezing gesture that was half-handshake, half-high five. “Welcome to the club, man. You want to grab a pizza with us at Mario's and translate comic books into American Indian secret codes?”

My cheeks were heating up, my pulse beating faster and faster—half embarrassed at my own exclusion, half feeling the
pressure from the rest of my life. I didn't have any time to stand there and be a proud parent.

I had to set my plan in action.

“You sure you know where this place is, Bates?” I said.

I gazed uncertainly out the bus window, taking in the unfamiliar neighborhood outside. I'd driven past it with my parents on our way downtown, just another neighborhood that whizzed by in the car. In a bus, with stops and starts and people from the neighborhood actually climbing on, it took immeasurably longer.

And now we were downtown. Rows and rows of reflective glass buildings passed us by, each one more anonymous than the last. I felt like a customer at a sushi bistro, just waiting for the right avocado-and-cucumber California roll to pop up.

Bates tapped the bus window with his knuckles, which were loaded up with spikes and faux-iron knuckles. The glass clinked. “Dude, relax. Crash's father's building is at 499 Fitzpatrick Street. Right on the corner. It's bigger than the whole goddamn school, so it's gonna be right in front of us. There's no way we can miss it.”

“Are you sure?” My head shot around. 500 Fitzpatrick had just passed by with the suddenness and blandness of every other building, swallowed into the anonymous mess of the past. The next block was taken up entirely by one building, and the fact that its numbers were emblazoned across every window on the first floor—
451
—was far from promising.

“Oh, uh, maybe not.” Bates thudded the bottom of his fist against the window, this time in frustration. “Shit. You think his
dad's secretly poor and runs his business outta the Coffee World on the first floor?”

I took the letterhead out of my pocket. It was crinkled and balled up, but it was still legible. I double-checked the logo—fancy superimposed spirals and thin, elegant capital letters. It said, written out in too-big fancy letters that swirled around each other like multiple coffee spills,
Four Ninety-Nine Fitzpatrick.

“I don't think so, Bates,” I said. “Maybe we should get off the bus and check. I really doubt we could've—”

I looked up just as the bus whizzed past Two Fitzpatrick West, kept going without stopping to let on the passengers who were waiting on the sidewalk, and picked up speed. The next building on our left was 152 Fitzpatrick Street East, and I hit my head on my sleeve, remembering that every street downtown worked like that. That the numbers went down all the way to zero, then started going up again. We hadn't missed it at all.

Bates, amused, shook his head at me. “I thought I was comin' along so I could be yer muscle,” he said. “I realize the irony in my saying this, but, dude—all you really need is a girl. Or
someone
to keep yer panties from gettin' all bunched up, anyway.”

Without any clear rhyme or reason, the bus stopped at the corner of Fitzpatrick and Fifth, right in front of a huge, decked-out, marble and glass diamond sculpture of an office building: 499 Fitzpatrick, an exact replica of the Emerald City, and home (as the decorative fountain out front advertised) to the Goldberg Property Management Corp.

“You comin', Jupe?” Bates called from the bottom of the bus
steps. He leaned into the double doors, holding them wide open, as the bus driver glared through the rear window angrily and I sat there, staring out the window at the building, gaping.

We took the elevator all the way up to the top floor of the building. All the elevators were made of glass and looked down on a central atrium. My palms started to ache as though there was nothing beneath us. From this high up, it felt like we were surrounded by air.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the secretary, hitting a big green button on her telephone. “You have a Mr.—uh, a Jupiter Glazer, and a…” She looked up at Bates and blinked at him questioningly.

“Bates,” said Bates. He smiled wide, enjoying the sudden fear that being a two-hundred-pound, metal-enhanced high school student hovering over her desk was instilling in her.

“…and a Mr. Bates here to see you,” she finished.

“It's just Bates,” said Bates.

She ignored him and tilted her head downward, listening to the voice talking in her ear.

I couldn't believe she was actually calling Mr. Goldberg from like ten feet away. It seemed way too Star Trek to be real—well, it was either that or it was just straight-up pretentious.

Her head shot back up.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Glazer,” she said, “but, as I said, Mr. Goldberg has no appointment scheduled with you, and he really can't just—”

She broke off, realizing only one of us was still standing in front of her. A voice called out from the door behind her, which
was suddenly open. “Yo, Glazer,” Bates yelled over in an outdoors voice. “Am I supposed to do this alone? Get in here and
talk
to this dude.”

Without another thought, I stepped into Mr. Goldberg's office.

If the penthouse office suite of 499 Fitzpatrick hadn't been designed with the specific purpose of intimidation in mind, then it was a really fortunate accident. The office was long and narrow, but almost totally unfurnished, except for a small mahogany desk at the far end which sat with a tiny but expensive-looking computer and a single, mammoth, imposing, leather-upholstered chair with claw-edged armrests. The walls were made of glass. Behind the chair was an awe-inspiring view of the city, skyscrapers jutting out of it like moles ready to be whacked. On the other side of the desk sat two tiny, uncomfortable-looking utilitarian plastic chairs, not nearly as big and not nearly as posh and plush and executive-suite as the other one.

We decided to stand.

Mr. Goldberg sat in the chair, clicking away on his computer, half paying attention to us. He was big, with wide shoulders and beefy arms, a neat black mop of curly hair with a cowlick hairline, and a poker face that looked like it never switched off.

“Well, boys,” he said. His face stayed fixed to the computer screen. “What can I do for you?”

I swallowed. Bates looked at me expectantly.

“Well, sir,” I began nervously. I cleared my throat and started again. “I'm a friend of your son. Kind of. My family lives in a factory in a building you own, a warehouse on East Diamond Street in the Yards. The company that runs our factory,
TransGlobal, needs to expand. They want to rent another factory from you, but you won't let them. And they still need extra space, which means they have to kick my family out. And I thought, with all those factories in the area that never get any play—that no one ever uses and they just sit there, empty, until the windows get shot out by gangs and stuff—wouldn't it just be a lot easier to lease another factory to TransGlobal, and you'd make more money, and my family wouldn't have to be on the street?”

Mr. Goldberg stopped clicking. He looked up at me thoughtfully. He lowered his wire-rim glasses and tilted his head.

“Nah,” he said. “Good pitch, though. Now get out.”

I was speechless.

No, actually, I was riled. I was annoyed. I was irate. I was anything
but
speechless. I'd used all my charisma on him, all the tricks I'd learned in finding out how to be social at North Shore, and none of it had worked.

“But, sir,” I protested, remembering to call him
sir
and flatter him. “It's a win-win situation. My family really needs a place to live. We're going to be
home
less—doesn't that bother you?”

“Not particularly,” he said. “I still got a ton of people in this city who have homes.” His hand shot to his computer, and the sound of rapid-fire mouse clicks seemed to be his way of dismissing us.

Bates, from the corner where he was standing, stepped up to Mr. Goldberg's desk. He spread his fingers out. His hand hovered, like an invading UFO, a foot above the blotter. Then he brought it down onto the desk, straight into Mr. Goldberg's laptop, and, in one swift, deft move, swept everything off it.