Losers (5 page)

I checked out the day's damage.

To the left was the kitchen area, a big open space with a stove and dining table and the countertops that had been there as far back as I could remember. My mother was in there, slicing up beets for the night's dinner.

“Hey, Mom,” I said. “I'm home from school.”

As if she couldn't tell.

True to form, she didn't look up. My parents either had a psychic connection, or a really good sense of smell—whenever one of them was mad at me, the other could detect it in the air.

In my partitioned-off room, I checked my phone and found a new text message from Vadim waiting for me.
How was the damage?

I typed back:
Nothing unexpected.
We were used to doing damage control for each other after one set of our parents went on a rampage.

After a second, my phone buzzed again.
Just saw 2 Lexuses heading yr way. U really going?

I hadn't forgotten about my promises. My bragging.

Of course I was going.

As I scrambled to get dressed—which basically translated into throwing off one T-shirt and jumping into a new one—I made an instant checklist in my head.

Things that sucked about living in a warehouse:

Never being able to get away from work. How cold it got in wintertime. The fact that, every second I was there, it was an active, painful reminder that my family was dirt poor.

Things that made the warehouse dealable, if only barely:

How big it was. And how soundlessly I could sneak out.

R
ight across from my bedroom window was the rooftop of the next factory over. I could never get the window to close all the way, and even in the summer there were drafts that kept me up late at night. Where else in the universe got drafts in the summer? Only the Yards, I guess—only inside this little piece of heaven in the shape of an industrial warehouse. So I was meticulous about oiling my window twice a month (I borrowed some castor oil from the assembly line downstairs), and that night when I pushed the window, the hinges flipped open without a sound.

It was a four-foot drop to the roof next door. Fortunately, the walls hugged each other tight. Not more than six inches separated the two buildings. My feet touched down. From there, I used a ladder that went from the roof to the ground.

Once my feet touched pavement, I was running free.

The address from Devin Murray's Web site was a few blocks away. Mostly I used the back alleys. In a few, people were out, sitting on bridge chairs around a streetlight or a backyard light,
playing cards or listening to beat-up boom boxes or just chilling out in wifebeater shirts and sandals. I almost stumbled over Mr. Diggory, the wino who sometimes slept out here, but realized I was about to step on a breathing stomach and jumped a foot to the left, knocking over his wine bottle. I stopped and reached into my pocket for change to replace it, but he started to chuckle. “Don't worry about it, kid,” he told me, not unkindly, as he brushed off his pants. “You probably done me a favor, anyway.”

That was one of the things I liked about the Yards: No matter how screwed up everyone was, we all still met each other's eye.

You could see the party from blocks away. My first indication of its existence was a bunch of lost-looking kids in club clothes glancing at a printed-out set of directions on a corner. On an opposing corner, some drug dealers that I went to middle school with last year were laughing at them. The air was cool, stiff like winter, as if signaling the approach of an oncoming cold. Tonight seemed especially foreboding—the beginning of school, the first weekend of a new social scene, all of this curious information about my new high school's online underground social calendar.

You know the difference between bad parties and good parties? At bad parties, the only people there are your friends; at good parties, everyone in the universe is there. And this party definitely, definitely had everyone. Devin Murray certainly knew how to network. The trance kids were spinning music, the AV nerds were projecting a light show on the wall, and the jocks were busy trying to lift a massive, sumo wrestler-size beer keg out of the back of one of their minivans. So far, the effort was
being met with little luck. Not that it mattered. Sajit, the class's token gay stay-up-and-party prima donna, was tending bar, mixing lavishly colored drinks into elaborate martini glasses, serving them up and trying to lecture people on each drink's name and social relevancy. Right now, a bunch of the soccer-team girls were staring him down, looking disgusted while he tried to convince one of them to try a Flaming Orgasm. “Forget it,” said one girl, finally. “I can't deal with that name—it sounds absolutely gross. Just make me a Sex on the Beach.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. Sajit was the closest thing to a friend I had here. We grew up in the Yards together and, in elementary school, we used to get beat up together. We rarely actually hung out together, but common black eyes was the sort of bond you don't just take for granted.

“Jupiter, my dear friend,” he said once he saw me, following up his words by wrapping an arm around me and taking me behind the bar. “How in the hell did you end up at a dump like this?”

“I
live
in a dump like this, Sajit,” I said, looking around to see if anybody heard. “You've been over to my house, remember?”

“
Hon
ey, do you think that tonight just
happened
?” Sajit asked. I knew he was exaggerating his Pollyanna ‘tude for the night, but I think he was only doing it for the effect. “Tonight is a gift from heaven. You might live around the corner from here, but tonight, you get to pretend you have no idea where the hell you are.” He pointed at my chest, then turned over his hand, cupped it, and blew into it like he was blowing pixie dust all over me.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing full well what Sajit
meant, but feeling the need to keep him talking, to hold on to my conversation partner and to keep pretending that I knew what was going on here.

“You could be from downtown, South Philly, East Falls, even. You could have borrowed your parents' car, or rented one of those limos outside. It's the first weekend of school. Nobody here even knows who you
are
—oh, Jupiter, don't look like that; nobody in this place is going to recognize you from that scene with Bates. It's too dark and mood-lit. And, even if they do, whose side do you think they'll be on? Forget about the
first
first impression you made. Right now is when you make your
real
first impression. You're already wearing the coolest clothes of anyone here.”

“What, jeans and a black T-shirt?”

“What, do you not read
Vogue
?” Without waiting for an answer, Sajit took me by the shoulders, spun me around, and gave me a soft kick on the butt with his foot. “Now, stop talking to me and get out there and
mingle
.”

I was about to reply with a “yes, sir,” or some other typically dorky comment, but Sajit, social butterfly that he was, had already sprinted over to the far side of the bar, and started lecturing some jocks on the seductive qualities of certain Belgian beers.

I left my leash of Sajit, entering the vague and scary no-man's-land of the party. Navigating a party alone could be the most amazing experience ever, or it could be the worst. There were so many people to see, and so many conversations going on, and the only way to really be a part of them all was to be a part of none of them. I stood back, letting all the conversation trails flow through my ears. I watched jocks flirting with jocks,
goths discussing deep and impressionable matters in dark corners, the punk-rock kids dancing to lame pop-rock ballads in front of the speakers, and the normal kids, the ones who either transcended labels or feared dropping into a category, walking around the cliques and amongst themselves, dropping in and out of conversations with a casual, nonthreatening, no-stick attitude.

Kids passed me by. Kids said “hi”—not a first-day-of-school “hi” where the teachers force you to smile at each other and play nice, but the noncommittal, how-ya-doin' “hi” that signifies that the two of you are on the same level.

In reply, I nodded. A cool, detached nod. A nod in time with the music, which I still did not like, but which was pleasantly bland, agreeable to my sensibilities, coating my nerves with a light, white-chocolate-flavored layer. I might not come out from this party with any friends, and I might not learn any deep life lessons, but, dammit, I was having a good time. Hell, I was discovering what it meant to have a good time, independent of my dorky friends, independent of my parents. And that might have been enough of a life lesson for me.

I felt a finger on my shoulder.

“Hey, you're kind of cute. Do I know you?”

I caught hold of the finger with all five of my own and I spun around, still clamped tight, tracing the visiting finger to its owner.

It wasn't that hard. Even if I hadn't been holding on to her finger at that moment, she would have been impossible to miss. Three layers of smart-looking pink—tank top, the fluorescent trace of a bra strap beneath it, and a studded pink leather jacket that looked like it was straight out of a movie, high shoulder
flaps and wide ‘70s lapels—hugged her conventionally hourglass form, both concealing and teasing in a way that made it impossible not to look at her. Bright blue eyes peered out from under impeccably tossed blond hair, alternately dirty and bright yellow streaks. A pink headband held it all together.

“I'm sorry?” I said quickly—one of the only English phrases I could always say perfectly quickly, guaranteed to be without a trace of an accent.

“I'm Devin Murray. This is my party. Who are you here with?”

I fought the natural impulse to say,
No one brought me—I live down the street and your American hip-hop music is drowning out my ability to sleep.
Instead I just smiled and nodded—the cool kid response.

“What? Can you not speak English?”

“What?” I said, caught off guard. “Oh, yeah, of course I can. I'm Jupiter.”

Her momentary falter of a smile leaped back into full bloom. “Oh. Sorry. It must be the music—I mean, it needs to be loud, but only so we can complain about it, you know?”

“Of course,” I agreed. “Wow, Devin. That actually sounds sort of profound.”

“Yeah. I like to think I can manage profound, once in a while. So—uh—how did you get here?”

That question again. I'd managed to dodge it once, and I wasn't sure if my luck could hold out a second time. The possibilities leapt up in my mind like a Choose Your Own Adventure book—one of the sadistic ones where, at the end of every choice, you died.

I decided to go with the truth.

“My friend Vadim hacked onto your secret online diary,” I said.

She looked at me like she was trying to decide whether or not I was lying. I think eventually she settled on lying, because in one hot moment, she burst out in a huge, quick balloon pop of a laugh. “No, seriously,” she said. “Are you with Crash Goldberg and his posse? Because I think they're about to—”

At that moment, there was a massive, resounding explosion that flared in the far corner of the warehouse. An explosion that probably nobody else in this entire party would realize came from approximately five full-size barrels of raw castor oil, the kind used in powering T-3400 power generators and in greasing assembly-line conveyor belts to run smoother. Screams came out. It took me a second to recognize those screams as the girls' soccer team, that slightly annoyed but mostly flirty screaming that they did just to get attention.

The fire clouds were dying. People stood around, lightly applauding.

What was I doing here? Among the popular kids, among these fifteen-year-olds who dress up like thirty-year-olds trying to look barely legal? These were the popular kids. These were the kind of kids I'd gotten teased by in elementary school, then ignored by in middle school. I remembered being relieved when the ignoring started. Why was I now trying my hand at climbing that stupid social ladder? Why was I having to smile and endure those girls who made
girlish
synonymous with
helpless?
I tried to think about what
MARGIE
would say if she was here, and failed.

God, my realizations were really hitting tonight, weren't they? Bullseye after bullseye. Devin saw my look of exasperation, and
she rolled her eyes. “I mean, it's
cool
that Crash and his posse are so into spectacle, but do those girls have to act so five-years-old every time they blow something up?”

At that moment, a guy in a bright orange federal prisoner's uniform and a Che Guevara cap, eyes as big and hungry as a wolf's, with a face that could only be described as crazy-looking, zoomed past. He threw his hands on my shoulders and pogo-jumped way over my head, his face a few inches from Devin's. He swung on my shoulders. “Hey, Devin, man,” he said in a wild voice that befitted the rest of him. “Did you like the show?”

“Yeah, gorgeous, Crash. It was beautiful.”

“Now
that
was real American-made pyrotechnics. Rita designed the detonators out of Radio Shack toaster ovens, and McNeff the crime dog hooked us up with some juicy transistors.” He mopped a trickle of sweat—oil?—off his brow. He suddenly glanced down, right into my eyes, and gave an approving pat on my back. “Hey, dude. Are you enjoying the festivities?”

It had been so long since it was my turn to speak that I almost forgot to do it. “Oh, yeah, absolutely,” I piped up at last. “It was awes—”

“By the way, thanks for inviting your friend,” said Devin. “We're all
totally
into Jupiter. He's a few notches up from the usual hackers.”

“Oh, um, definitely.” Crash, still perched atop me, nodded approvingly.

“Are you gonna get some of your peons to clean that up? I have a three thousand dollar deposit on this place…”

“Already done, my good lady.” He climbed off my shoulders, gave a salute, and scampered off.

Now that this Crash kid was gone, Devin turned her attention back to me.

“Heh heh.” I gave a little nervous laugh. I was sure the game was up now.

“Yeah, I know. He's kind of a dork, isn't he? But it takes all types to make the world go round.” She looked around the place like a monarch surveying her kingdom. Some of the soccer team girls were just now coming down from their spaz-outs, and a bunch of guys in sports-team jackets were calming them down, giving them neck rubs. “After all,” she noted, “nothing sets off jock love like a nerd attack. And, by the way, you
utterly
aren't from around here. I've been listening for it in your voice.”

Panic. Sheer, total panic.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said.

“You think I'm crazy? Look, I'm from East Falls. Which is practically
the
capital for stuck-up, prissy princesses who are stereotypes of stereotypes of themselves. I grew up speaking half like a movie character and half like I was born in England. Then, in fifth grade, I started taking swimming lessons downtown. Olympic-size pool, taught by a former underwater stunt double from L.A.—all that impressive stuff. But the other kids there had all grown up downtown. They could spot my phoniness three lanes away. So I listened to the way I was speaking, and then I listened to the way
they
were speaking, and I just dropped it.”