Losers (6 page)

“You just dropped it? How?”

“Okay, let me try. Um. Did you hear how you said
dropped?
You swallow up the
o
, you roll the
r
, and you squish the
p
and
d
together at the end. Listen to the way I said it, just from what you remember.”

“Dropped.”

“Close.
Dropped
.”

“Dropped.”

“Now try it slower.” She said
dropped
again, in slow motion. I repeated her. She shook her head
no
. Then she reached over and took my hands in hers.

She lifted them to her face. I could feel my entire body heating up, the knuckles between my fingers stiffening. She placed them gently on her cheeks and throat.

“Feel the way I say it.”

“Say it.”

“Dropped.”

“
Draah-ppeht
,” I echoed her. I felt ludicrous saying it, being made to say that same word again and again. I felt like a domesticated parakeet. I cleared my head. I couldn't second-guess myself now. I felt like I was on the brink of learning some forbidden knowledge, standing on the precipice of this giant mountain that was going to be the rest of my life.

“Once more,” Devin said, smiling at me. “Say it.”

“Again?” I asked.

Devin nodded.

“When I move, you move,” she said. My hand tensed into her cheek. She squeezed my fingers, enthusiastically, supportively. Her mouth convulsed, danced through the word like a ballerina in slow motion, voguing and pirouetting each step in one one-hundredth of normal speed, slowed down beyond the range of any normal household DVD player, moving and reacting to every microsyllable in the word.

I said it again. The moment felt like hours in my head, every part of every sound. My mouth imitated hers. For the merest
fraction of a second, my mouth
became
hers, more vivid than a 3-D movie, more intimate than making out. And it sounded, it
felt
, absolutely perfect.

“Just like that?” I asked her.

She smiled. “Just like that.”

The moment felt perfect, the stars and planets and even passing meteors in total alignment. It was so intimate that I wondered whether we were supposed to make out. The whole idea of making out was still a foreign notion to me, and I was still unclear on the details of its choreography—was it a single moment when both involved parties felt a sudden, unavoidable rush of hormones at the same time? Was it something that both of you had to have in the back of your minds the whole time, darkly hinted at through the course of your conversation, and as soon as one person was too overt and crossed the line, you both erupted into passionate kisses and feeling-upness? Or did it just happen when we ran out of things to talk about?

I wondered if I was supposed to make the first move.

Devin reached out and grabbed hold of a guy's shoulder. A tall, well-built, muscular guy who, at rough approximation, was twice my size. He was one of the jocks who had been roughhousing around the keg, trying to out-stupid a bunch of other, identical jocks in front of the soccer girls. For a second, I thought Devin was going to tell him that I wasn't allowed to be here and ask him to take me out back and beat me up. Then I reconsidered, and decided that she was about to introduce him as her boyfriend, which might produce the same result.

“Hey, Reggie, this is Jupiter Glazer,” she said, hugging his arm in a way I found both off-putting and nervousness-inducing. “Reg, Jupiter came here with Crash Goldberg and that circus,
and, in his short residency at the party, he's already outgrown them. Feel like showing him around?”

“Sure, babe,” he said, kissing her on the cheek in that noncommittal, mixed-sex way that popular kids do when they're trying to be adultlike, as if to say,
We can get some any time we want to, so we don't need to prove it.

Reg wrapped one firm, worked-out muscular arm around me, leading me away. I glanced behind me toward Devin, flashing her a quizzical expression. Suspicion loomed in my head that she was just trying to get rid of me.

As if she could hear my thoughts, she shook her head, and the curls at the ends of her hair shook in agreement. She mouthed the words at me, “Work your accent,” and winked before turning away to address a crowd of short-skirted girls. I couldn't help but wonder why she couldn't have introduced me to them instead.

“So, Jupe,” said Reg, once we were clear, “what have you been up to, and how the hell did you wind up at one of Devin's social drink-a-ramas?”

Reg Callowhill! Oh, oh, whoa. In all the madness of the crowd that was Devin Murray, I hadn't even realized who she was talking to—Reg Callowhill, who used to be my Frisbee partner in the JCC community kindergarten. When we were five, we were unbelievably tight. We had each other's backs like old-school gangsta rappers. The next year, his parents sent him to private school, and I was left to flounder by myself in Wilson Goode Elementary School. Since then, Reg had moved on to bigger and better while I had somehow managed to stay true to my loser roots.

For some reason, there was no question in my head about
opening up to him. I hadn't drunk anything, but I was feeling giddy anyway.

“I don't,” I babbled to him. “I live right around here, and one of my friends got wind of the party, and my parents were screwing with me—for a change—and I was just, like, what the hell. I can jump right out my window, you know? I just needed to escape. I mean, this has been practically the worst week ever—I just started at North Shore—”

“Whoa, no way! You're at North Shore? I just transferred out of Blessed Sacrament. I'm at North Shore, too!”

I was about to say,
No duh, Reg—in case you haven't noticed, you're already in line to be King of the School, and the rest of the students only think I'm important when the person who's beating me up is important.
But then I realized that if he hadn't heard any news of my run-ins with Bates, it was actually a good sign. Maybe my reputation, as carcinogenic as it had been to start out, was not etched in stone for all eternity.

“Here,” he was saying, “let me show you around. That's Crash Goldberg. You know him, I guess—Crash, get your hands off her, she's gay!—and these are the guys. Guys, this is Jupiter. He's cool, so treat him good. Hey, somebody get him a beer?”

In a few minutes, I was playing it totally cool, beer in hand, telling wildly entertaining stories about my exploits over the first week of school and my adventures hanging out in the Yards. Because they were drunk, they all thought every word I said was the funniest, most diabolically clever thing in the universe. Because I wasn't, I kept on top of the game, keeping them laughing, making sure they were never laughing at me. I was only pretending to sip my beer—not because I was a prude or
anything, but because I didn't really trust myself to get drunk in a room full of potential hazards to my physical being. My parents had raised me on mother's milk and vodka, and if there was one thing I knew how to do right at this party, it was to carry my alcohol.

These jocks were seeming alright, but, you know, I didn't need to push it. Finally, one of them slapped me on the back, laughing so hard he was wheezing, and said, “Jupiter, you are the greatest. I don't even know
why
you're the greatest but you
are
, man. You tell that Bates punk, if he ever messes with you, he's gonna have to deal with us, you know?”

“Uh…yeah,” I said uncertainly. “I know.”

And then everybody laughed, and everyone raised their beer mugs high, and everyone but me swilled a giant, football-team-size gulp.

The truth was, I wouldn't depend on any of these guys to leap to my side in a fight. I barely trusted them to remember me by Monday morning. If Bates did lay into me, and any of Reg's friends came upon it, I doubted very much that anyone but me would sustain the worst of the damage. But I appreciated the sentiment, and I was enjoying being the center of the crowd and having people actually listen to me. At some point over the course of the evening, I remember catching Devin's eye—she was mostly engaged in flirting with the lead singer of a local punk band, which, in my newly social state, I didn't mind at all—and she just nodded approvingly at me, as if to say,
You finally got it, Jupiter.

I have to say, this whole not-having-an-accent thing was definitely agreeing with me.

Later that night, a gang of guys in North Yardley High jackets
showed up, prematurely ending the party when they tried to forcibly abduct the keg and roll it out to their pickup truck. Someone began screaming that someone had a gun. The screaming got everyone scattering, and the frenzied snatches of conversation—“A gun?” “A gang broke in!” “Where'd our ride go??”—spread the panic like an airborne disease. At first I tried to ignore it, since people were talking to me and I was actually having a good time. But the crowd got smaller and smaller as the non-Yards folks edged away from the newcomers and made excuses to leave. The fighting over the keg rose in tone and volume. One of Devin's guy friends was trying to make them stop; they pushed him around like a rag doll. Finally, one of the guys just decided to tip it over. The keg hit the floor with a bang, and someone yelled out “Guns!” and then I found myself suddenly using my amazing new accent to talk to no one but the air.

I decided that maybe it was time for me to make my exit.

I began to head casually to the door where everyone else was stampeding. I knew from the Yards that gangs never went after the people who weren't panicking; if you didn't think you were in trouble, they, more often than not, weren't about to give it to you. For a second, I felt like my old self, and the idea that my Yards-ness was something I could turn off and on, like a mute button or email encryption, both enthralled and terrified me.

About halfway to the door, something made me stop and turn around.

The Yardley gang was in full effect now, moving the keg out the door, getting down to the music that lingered on the turn-tables, a bizarrely hip-sounding remix of a They Might Be Giants song. It seemed not to match the actual scene unfolding: the
room almost empty, all movement either slowed down or completely stopped, the Yardley guys looking fiercely triumphant. Three of them were bent over the keg, wheeling it in some way. Two more followed around Devin, who was whispering to her friends, presumably trying to convince them not to leave. A few others were clustered around, draining the remains of the bar and having a good time. One Yardley guy was necking hard-core with a girl against the bar, clawing his dirty hands under her leather jacket and all over her white tank top. He backed off, fumbling for a half-full glass on the bar, and the girl pushed her peroxide-blond hair out of her face.

I grinned wryly, almost knowing who I'd see. Her eyes, almost at once upon pulling away from the guy, focused on me.

It wasn't such a surprise. I mean, I was almost alone, one of the last remaining North Shore kids at the party. I didn't have an hour's ride back home, I didn't have to hustle a ride to my neighborhood, and, of course, I didn't know any good after-parties. My shadow cast across the length of the warehouse floor by those rented house-party lights, the solitary figure left where I was standing, and the only target for the eyes of a girl coming out of a hot and heavy make-out session.

“What up, kid?” she said, almost a whisper, although I could hear it all the way across the warehouse.

I smiled back.

“What up, Margie?” I said, in my new downtown voice, exactly the same tone as hers. I knew her name wasn't Margie, but I said it anyway. I think she got it.

And that's how I lost my accent.

I
didn't lose it for good. Not immediately, at least.

If my decision to drop my accent was a science fair project, then Friday night would have been my hypothesis statement, and the weeks that followed were the rest of it, the experimentation and research and the cutting and pasting to make my diorama look like it deserved an A.

In other words: I had to start learning how to sell myself.

I took all my parents' old records. I went on a rampage on the turntable, discarding the antiquated ‘50s country and lounge-singer albums that they'd bought at thrift stores while they looked for their hair-core records, love ballad after love ballad, and selecting only the most passably retro records—James Brown, Johnny Hartman, Frank Sinatra, and the immortal Sammy Davis Jr.

Then I went out to the thrift store and ransacked their bargain bin for the best it had to offer. I listened to The B-52's, The Beach Boys, Dire Straits, The Cure. I listened to each of the singers, mouthed the words (first with the lyric sheet, then
without) and I gleaned from them the person I wanted to be. I plagiarized syllables, vocabulary words, and the breaths and spaces in between, integrating them all into my voice. Every hour of every day, I was either listening to someone or I was listening to my headset, to the little yellow Walkman that I'd picked up for a dollar thirty-five at the local Salvation Army, to the tapes from long ago and to the voices that I wanted to be. The batteries cost more than the Walkman did, but people paid thousands of dollars to get the education I was receiving. Really, I thought, what I was getting was priceless: an open ticket to not getting beat up ever, ever again.

That weekend, I prepared for the rest of my life. It was going to be Easy Street, but it was the hardest Easy Street I'd ever heard of. I was challenging my own biology, trying to will my lips to change shape, my tongue to dance differently.

Monday morning, when I emerged from my room, my parents were both sitting at the kitchen table, drinking individual cups of coffee. They both drank instant coffee, strong, but they drank it sparingly. When both of them were
sitting down
and drinking
full cups
, you knew it was bad.

They didn't say anything when I ran through, my customary mad dash to make it to the bus stop in time for the 7:35. I glanced over my shoulder for a second and saw their faces. Their looks tore through me like I was old newspaper.

The looks said,
What happened
? and
Why us
? and
We don't know you anymore
.

I hate to say it—I hated, actually, to even
think
it—but it actually felt pretty cool.

Vadim wasn't at his usual bus stop—he'd come in early for his meeting with Principal Mayhew—and the 18 bus chugged along slower than ever, but I had my headphones on, and the ride felt like the fastest in recent memory. I listened to the lead singer of The Cure, who the coffee-stained booklet referred to as Robert Smith, as he sang about loss and anguish and giant spiders eating his head, which I initially decided was a bit of slang so fresh that I didn't even understand it. I vowed to start working it into my conversations…until I realized that the tape was even older than I was, and for all the wonders this was doing for my pronunciation, maybe I had better just chill out and wait on the snappy dialogue until I started eavesdropping on my peers to make sure it was current.

But the truth was, I didn't have to say anything. From the moment I stepped through the metal detector that morning, everything felt different. Maybe the scowls of disapproval had faded along with the freshness of the first day of school, or maybe everyone had found something new to be angsty about. I no longer felt the constant urge to stuff myself into a locker and hide.

The first person I saw on my morning walk was Crash Goldberg, the kid with all the explosions. He was hanging out with a bunch of people who looked like the cast of a horror movie, the
after
cast—pale skin, hair like electric shocks, fake (?) blood dribbling from the corners of their mouths. They were lurking in a corner by the front doors, tossing safety pins and coins through the metal detector as kids they didn't like passed through. Crash spotted me at once and gave me a little salute. “Mornin', Jupiter,” he said, straight-faced.

The other guys waved.

Whoa.

I kept walking, speeding up just in case they were planning anything. But they weren't. I listened for someone coming after me, but there was nothing. Halfway down the hallway, I looked over my shoulder and they were getting ready to chuck an alarm clock through the metal detector as a really snobby-looking girl headed inside.

I smiled to myself. Not only did I not get punked by Crash, but I was actually starting to see the humor in high school pranks. Was I finally fitting in to school, or was I going insane? Maybe both, I figured.

At the end of the first-floor hallway, I passed the doors leading to the South Lawn. This was where all the Satanic people hung out—the goths and the punks and the death-metal kids and the kids who weren't part of any clique but just liked to hang out with people as bloodthirsty as they were. Even before I'd started at North Shore, people had warned me about the kids on the South Lawn. They'd allegedly slipped Rohyphol into the teachers' coffee the morning of finals and locked them inside the lockers of honor students. They'd killed baby goats on Friday afternoons, when classes were done. They'd rolled freshmen down the hill in garbage cans, then forced them to be Satan's slaves.

This morning, the doors were wide open.

A bunch of goths stood out there, smoking clove cigarettes. They stood in the perfect direction to let the smoke filter into the school. A bunch of guys in army fatigues were standing around a tree, doubtlessly planning something sinister, probably
involving goat blood. Then I caught a glimpse of Bates sitting calmly on the South Lawn stairs, cradling his staff in his arms. I guess everything had turned out okay for him.

I hurried off. My encounter with Crash had me feeling pretty okay about my social standing, but I didn't want to push it too far.

Then, in the stairwell, I ran into Reg Callowhill. He was walking with a bunch of upperclassmen from the lacrosse team. They were all dressed in matching jackets, all tossing balls at each other like one complicated juggler with many disembodied arms. Clearly, he'd be joining them soon.

“Hey, Jupiter,” he said, slapping me five on my way up and their way down the stairs.

“Hey,” I replied breathlessly.

Then the chorus came, a panoply of
hey
s and
yo
s and
what's up
s. I lingered on the last step, frozen in confusion. Had I met them all at Devin's party? Or were they just going along with Reg, being cool with whoever he thought was cool in a kind of A equals B postulate of acceptability?

Then again—what difference did it make?

All morning, it went like that. Kids I didn't know stopped me in the hallway. Kids I vaguely recognized from the party had conversations with me about subjects I didn't even pretend to understand, movies I'd never heard of and MTV bands I'd never heard of and girls I'd never heard of. Several of them asked me if I remembered what had happened to them at the end of the party—and when I said no, they were duly impressed. “Wow, you must have been even more wasted than I was,” cooed this one girl, as I imagined her fingers casually winding and unwinding
the curls on my head. Without bothering to wait for my answer, she replied, “Damn, dude—you are
on
it,” and then turned around in her seat just in time for the teacher to call on her. She got the question wrong, but man, was I glowing.

Meanwhile, Vadim was having his own case of the Mondays. Just as he'd been told to, he'd showed up to Dr. Mayhew's office at 7:45, exactly half an hour before the first bell of the day. He'd knocked three times on the frosted-glass door, just below the embossed letters of Dr. Mayhew's name. Then he'd stepped back and waited. He'd clutched his books tightly to his chest, ready to hand them back to Dr. Mayhew in a second—ready, as it were, to exchange them for the set of books applicable to the next grade up. The expression on his face (I'm imagining this part) must have been tentative, anticipatory, eager. Vadim had been moved up twice before, but never at a high school where simply being there was already a privilege. His hands must have trembled, anticipating Dr. Mayhew's inviting look. His eyes must have never left the glass door.

He stood there for five minutes.

Finally, the door opened. Dr. Mayhew was just taking off his hat and jacket, ready to jump into the day. He looked vaguely disoriented as he gazed upon the impossibly small boy who stood at his door, gazing back up at him with the expectation of salvation in his eyes.

“Uh,” he said. “Can I help you?”

“I'm Vadim Khazarimovsky,” Vadim reminded him. “We spoke on Friday about my classes being too easy?”

If Vadim expected that fact to jog the principal's memory, warm him up, and make them instant pals, it didn't work. It did,
however, jog his memory. Dr. Mayhew peered at him through half-lidded eyes, as if sizing him up.

“Sir?” said Vadim, still hopeful.

“Ah,” Dr. Mayhew said, itching his chin, faint with stubble. “The upstart. Yes, well, it's good you've got your books out——image, my boy, image. Let me take you somewhere.”

I was jonesing in the hallway, waiting for class to begin, when Devin Murray marched straight up to me, a stack of flyers in her hand. She didn't even make a pretense of pretending to be too busy to talk to me until I initiated the conversation. How cool was that? She was so popular, she didn't even have to make a thing out of being popular.

“Hey, Jupiter,” she said, smiling her ultra-lipsticked smile. “Good to see you. How'd you enjoy the party?”

“It was—man, I can't even tell you, Devin,” I said, gushing earnestness at her. “Thanks so much for having me. It was really cool of you.”

“Glad you came,” Devin replied airily. “Anyway, you don't know anyone who lives in the Yards, do you?”

I almost choked on the
yes
that was about to spring from my throat, forcing it back down to the depths of my esophagus with a discipline that bordered on superhuman. “I don't think so,” I said cagily, being careful to avoid that outright
no
, “but I can ask around.”

“Would you? That would be so cool, thanks!” She spun around a hundred and eighty degrees on one of those three-inch heels of hers, completed a quick about-face, and continued on her morning walk.

My hand jumped up of its own accord, and I felt myself
getting ready to reach after her. I didn't want her to leave. I wanted her to stay in the hall and talk to me for twenty more seconds, so maybe another forty people could pass us and realize my new status of acceptability. That would certainly erase the whole Bates thing from their consciousnesses.

“Why do you ask?” I choked out suddenly.

Of all the things I could have asked, that might not have been the worst. But it was definitely—
definitely
—the most potentially incriminating.

Devin stopped in midstride, turned around, and tilted her head to the side.

“That group of kids who trashed the party,” she said. “They stole the beer keg, remember? Well, Nessa Greyscole still owes her parents three hundred dollars from the deposit.”

“Three hundred dollars?!”

“It was the biggest keg they had. And we would've finished it, too, if it wasn't for that gang,” she said. “Anyway, if you see any white-trash kids floating around the school who look familiar, let me know. Here, take one of these.”

She handed me a flyer.

It was Photoshopped to look like a Wanted sign from the Old West, complete with old block letters and a reward. In the space where the mug shot was supposed to go, there was a picture of a toxic waste dump. “ ‘Wanted: Low-Down, Dirty Keg Thieves and Stool Pigeons,' ” I read aloud. “And she's offering a three hundred dollar reward? Why doesn't she just use the money to pay the deposit?”

“I'm offering the reward myself,” Devin informed me, already looking down the corridor to find more people to hit up. “I
figure it's my civic duty and all. I mean, I
did
convince her to lay out the cash in the first place.”

I thought about suggesting an alternate plan, but decided to keep silent. “Whoa,” I said. It was, I thought, what popular kids said when they didn't know what else to say.

“Nessa said that Reg said that Crash said that someone saw one of the Yards gang looking tight with one of the people at the party,” she informed me, the valley-girl tone in her voice suddenly gone. “One of
our
people. Reg reckons they told the Yards guys to come over and crash the party. I seriously can't imagine—I mean, why would anyone from the Yards even
be
at the party in the first place?—but, you know, they had to find out about it somehow. That's the stool pigeon part.”

“Maybe they were just cruising by?” I suggested.

“Maybe,” Devin echoed dryly—as though she wouldn't believe it for a second. “Anyway, thanks for listening. It's good to see you in action, you know? I mean, within the walls of North Shore and everything.”

“Yeah,” I started to say, “you, too,” but Devin was already cruising down the hall, removing the next flyer from the top of the pile.

Dr. Mayhew led Vadim down the first-floor hallway. They whizzed past students digging in their lockers, students sitting against classroom doors and studying, students talking and flirting and hurrying to wherever they had to go. Dr. Mayhew moved faster than them all. They say that a school is only as good as the principal that leads it, and in the case of North Shore, both school and principal were irrevocably intertwined—so much
so that it seemed to Vadim that the hallways flexed and curved with each of Mayhew's steps. When they banked sharply to the left to avoid the hip-hop kids who were freestyling in the center of the corridor, the walls themselves seemed to bend left to allow them free passage.