Losers (2 page)

“Come over later!” Vadim called down the steps at me.

“Can't!” I called back, already a set and a half of stairwells below him. I could only imagine what anyone overhearing would think of the loud Russian words cutting through their American air. “My parents want to take me out for dinner.”

“After your first day of school? Why would they do a thing like that—as a consolation prize?” Vadim's heavy voice was amplified and accentuated by its echo in the stairwell, but I didn't answer him.

I just kept running.

T
hat night, to celebrate my allegedly victorious first day of school, my parents took me to the same place we went to celebrate virtually every family birthday, anniversary, and good report card ever—the Country Club Diner. In honor of the occasion, I wore a dress shirt with a collar. I had to try on all three collared shirts in my closet before I found one to mask the bruises that Bates put on me in the afternoon, but finally I looked presentable enough.

The Country Club was the most revered and upscale of all the dirty, deep-fried, oil-hanging-in-the-air and waitresses-who-call-you-“hon” places you can imagine. They even had a dress code there. It ran along the lines of “No Shirt, No Service,” but it was still a dress code.

We waited in the lobby, which smelled of cheap, powdery mints and cigarettes, but not unpleasantly. I hated cigarettes with a passion—at my old school, my sixth-grade best friend Garfinkel told me I wasn't cool enough and stopped talking to me on the same day that he started smoking cigarettes—but
I really, really liked the smell of cigarette-inflicted lobbies. Maybe it just felt poetic. Maybe it was dirtiness and nostalgia all lumped together, although I wasn't entirely certain what it was nostalgia for.

Most of the waitresses at the Country Club Diner were totally creepy old ladies with hunchbacks and fake hair that stood straight up in messily asymmetrical beehives. Their skin smelled of Lysol and fish.

This time, though, we won the lottery. The waitress who met us at our table must have been the youngest there by about sixty-five years.

I tried not to stare.

She looked to be most of the way through high school, three or four years older than me. High cheekbones, longish blond hair bound up in a knot at the back, a small nose that turned up at the end. Her eyes were distant and vacant, like she'd been watching TV for hours, or maybe just working at a job that she longed to be rescued from. Right then and there, I felt a sudden injection of a fantasy whereupon I grabbed her hand, she ripped off the clip-on maroon bowtie and yanked the matching vest right over her head, and we ran out through the kitchen, took the first bus out of the Yards, and spent all night downtown, watching independent movies and drinking Italian espresso-based drinks that no one in the Yards had a hope of pronouncing correctly.

This fantasy tumbled apart the minute she opened her mouth.

“Ya want drinks now or just warter ta start wit?” she said.

Her voice was pure Yards, words running into each other like
caramel, totally unmodulated. She sounded like every Yards girl did, a cross between a ‘50s B-movie gangster and a robot. When she stopped talking, her mouth kept moving, and her rear teeth cracked a stick of gum so emphatically that my father winced in his seat.

My mother, otherwise known as the most neurotic person on either side of the Atlantic, was already scrubbing soup stains off the laminated menu pages with her napkin. “Can you tell me, which specials are for tonight?” she asked, her not-used-to—English voice making static bumps out of the language I'd worked so hard to get smooth. I sank a little lower in my chair.

“They're on tha firs page,” said our waitress, hovering rigidly in front of our table, pen and ordering pad poised in the air.

I wondered if she was just putting on the accent as a front—maybe she, too, had learned to blend in with the crowds. I wondered whether, if we found ourselves alone together, she would whisper in my ear like a late-night anchor on the TV news.

Totally on instinct, I looked over at her chest. She was wearing a bleached cardboard name tag, also laminated. Beside the Country Club Diner logo, it said, in all capital letters,
MARGIE
.

My mother folded the menu shut, as if to demonstrate a remarkable feat of instant memorization. “I will have the tuna salad grinder,” she announced to
MARGIE
, whose facial expression was growing more bored by the minute.

Without waiting for me or my father to order,
MARGIE
snapped her pad shut. “I'll be raight out wit your warters,” she told us. “Youse can order then if ya want.”

For some reason, I really wanted a Coke. Someone at the next table over had ordered one, and the way the ice cracked in the glass, the way the bubbles fought each other sizzling to the top, looked really appetizing. But there was this unspoken rule in our family: We only drank water at a restaurant. Partly this was because they always charged as much for a glass in restaurants as stores did for a two-liter bottle, and we were offended by that. The other half of it—at least, for my part—was that my parents had just invested all their money into the factory, the block-long warehouse inside which we now lived. Going out to a restaurant like this—sitting at a table that didn't used to be a conveyor belt, drinking out of glasses that weren't stained with factory dust—was a luxury to us.

I watched my father sip his water, taking great care to avoid brushing the ice cubes with his mustache. My mother was spending an inordinate amount of time adjusting the napkin (cloth!) to drape perfectly on her lap. I picked up my own glass of water, ran the tips of my fingers over the raised bumps of the meniscus, and realized that
MARGIE
was staring at me, waiting.

“Sir?”

Her voice was absolutely flat. I couldn't tell if she was making fun of me or not.

“Uh,” I fumbled. My menu was open to the page of steaks. The words swam over my eyes, each sounding more barbaric than the last: sirloin, pink, rib eye.

“Omelet,” I said, taking a sudden urge and running with it. “Spinach, tomatoes, and cheddar cheese, with hash browns, grilled hot and hard, extra paprika, and rye toast.”

Her pencil scribbled fast to keep up with my order. When at last she had finished, she glanced up from her pad and flashed me a single, lasting, cold stare, the kind that pretty girls with long blond hair are wont to direct at miscreant boys such as myself.

“An omelet?” said my mother. “With eggs? This is what you get for dinner at a restaurant? I could make you omelet at home, for nothing.”

“Is fine,” my father was already starting to defend me to her. He grabbed my wrist, shaking it like I'd just won an Olympic trophy. “Tonight is his honor dinner. Jupiter can make his own choice of anything he want.”

The waitress tapped her pen impatiently on the pad. She was smirking at me, as if to say,
You're fourteen years old and you still go out to dinner with your parents?

I looked around at the rest of the restaurant. Old people in khaki shorts and sandals. A family with several children gathered at a round table in the center of the room, the parents impossibly young. They were both huge—fat, yes, but also
huge,
squeezed into their skin. Their haircuts and clothes were hopelessly Yards, either out-of-date or stuck in a timeless Kmart vortex. The husband and wife looked almost the same, dressed in their sloppy T-shirts, with four or five kids that were identical, or almost identical, arranged neatly in their own seats around their mountainous parents. They didn't look more than a few years older than me, that couple—
that
was the scary part. I wondered if that was going to be my future, a potbelly and a family of indistinct-looking kids straight out of high school.

There was another family in the restaurant that was clearly
Russian. You could tell. The parents didn't look American at all, and the kids looked way
too
American. Cheap button-down shirts and single-sheet pattern dresses for the adults, backward caps, sports-team jackets, and skanky skirts for the girls. Lots of visible electronics. Cell phones clipped to their belts, pagers in abundance, and, for some reason, sunglasses that they'd borrowed straight from the Junior Mafia.

All these families were clustered in a restaurant named after an American institution that none of us would ever have a shot at getting into.

The soccer-team girls were probably all out on dates with their boyfriends tonight. Even Bates was probably out with Anarchia or some other heavy-metal girl, doing God knows what in a dark basement somewhere. And I was going out with my parents after the first day of school.

I needed to get out.

“I'll be right back.” Without really knowing where I was going, I stood up and shot off.

Going to the bathroom in a new place was one of my favorite things. I know it sounds gross, but bathrooms, when you're fourteen years old, are the only bona fide place where you can hide out from your parents. Everywhere I went with my parents, sooner or later, I needed to escape from them. And each place I hid out, each bathroom, was different. Some were sleazy, with cigarette butts all over the floor, leftover pee bubbling in the urinals. Others were clean, almost eerily hygienic. The best thing about bathrooms, really, was the graffiti. Everything from the trite-but-classic “Here I sit/brokenhearted/come to shit/but only farted” to ruminations on the universe, to those
almost-possibly-real girls' names and phone numbers written on the walls, either by vengeful ex-boyfriends or (please, God, please) by the girls themselves, curious to see what kind of teenage boys were reading them.

I followed a hunch, and slipped into the hallway next to the kitchen.
MARGIE
was standing there, right in the doorway, staring at her nails. She looked utterly fascinated and utterly bored.

“Hey,” I said.

She looked up from her nails. “Yeah?”

I took one hand out of my pocket, gave her a little wave.

“Whaddyawant?”

I counted the words in my head.
What. Do. You. Want.
Four words, and she'd managed to condense it into a single syllable. There had to be a Nobel Prize category for that.

“Uh, I was actually just looking for—” I said slowly, halfway into my sentence before I realized I was going to ask for the bathroom.
Bathroom.
There had to be a better word for it. Or, at the very least, a word you didn't have to use with girls.
Facilities? Lavatory?
In a flash, simplicity seemed like the coolest response, and before I could check myself I'd finished my sentence. “—the boys' room?”

Shit.

She didn't even blink. “Right over there,” she said, nodding behind me.

I looked over my shoulder. There, on bright red plastic signs, were two silhouettes, the international symbols for
I need to go NOW.

I blinked at her, briefly, coolly, as if to thank her without further sacrificing my dignity, and turned to follow her nod.

“Hey, wait.” She tugged on my sleeve. I wasn't out of this yet.

“Yeah?” I spun around carefully, making sure she didn't let go of my shoulder.

“You look sorta farmiliar,” she said. “Do ya go ta Yardley?”

Nathan Yardley High was just down the street. There were about three thousand kids there, bussed in from all over the Yards. Everyone from my old class went to Yardley—everyone, that is, except for the hydroponic nerds like me who placed into an accelerated high school on the other side of the city. I couldn't say yes, and I really, really didn't want to say no.

“No,” I said, throwing all my cards into one basket. “I'm at North Shore. It's this special-admissions high school near town—”

“Wow,” she said—still in that android monotone, but her eyes open in newfound appreciation. “Yeah, I heard of it. You must be pretty smart or somethin', huh?”

I shrugged. If I was now playing the part of a North Shore kid, I might as well do away with the false modesty. I was already feeling like roadkill, and I could use any brownie points I could get.

“Hey—I got to take my cigarette break now, or I don't get another one for another hour. You wanna come?” She nodded toward the door marked
EXIT
, which was right next to the door marked
GENTLEMEN
.

And then she threw me instead into the broom closet, shut the door behind her, inserted a single, long-nailed finger into the collar of her dress shirt, and yanked it down so that the shirt ripped in half, buttons flying everywhere, her lacy-bra'd breasts popping out like a cuckoo clock, like a pair of grenades, with me at ground zero. Her hair got in her face. Her hair got in my face.
Our tongues dived into each other like crazed monkeys battling, fingers grabbing each other, pulling into our flesh, trying to force our bodies even closer together. Her skin was white and smooth, like new, just-out-of-the-package soap. Her lips were thin and crisp. I tried to pull myself away, then relented, pressing my torso against hers, hoping against everything that she noticed, that she could smell how incredibly much I wanted her.

Oh my God. I am a teenage boy. I am loquaciously, disgustingly horny. I am horny for anything that moves. I have fantasies about the girls on the nine o'clock sitcoms, girls on the ten o'clock dramas, and the girls in the deodorant and car commercials in between. My head is in the gutter, and the rest of my body is squeezed right underneath it.

We stood right outside the exit door, a few steps away from the kitchen, and she pulled on the hoodie she'd brought out with her. It was tight. It pulled in her stomach and silhouetted her breasts a lot more clearly than the loose shirt and vest of her uniform. She drew a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket and lit one up, barely looking at me as she drew the flame into her cigarette with a deep breath. Her hair bristled. It looked nice.

“So,” she said. She looked at me expectantly, like my being here was a privilege, and now I had to earn it.

“So,” I echoed, not sure what to say. I folded my hands in front of my belt, realized I was standing with the posture of a fifty-year-old college professor, and quickly slid them into my back pockets. “You live around here?”

“Yeah,” she grunted. When she talked, the smoke curled out like a dragon's breath. “My parents got an apartment a few blocks away. I'm saving up so I can move out of that shithole and get
my own place, probably another shithole. But at least it'll be my own shithole. You?”