Losers (9 page)

“And the owner he say, if too much business, they may need more space.”

“Big deal,” I said. “So, they buy another warehouse down here or something. Maybe they'll have another family move in and be the foremen of that place. Maybe they'll have a hot daughter or something, and there'll finally be someone for me to hang out with.”

Wow. I couldn't believe I'd said that. The words
hot daughter
—even if my parents, with their limited English proficiency, interpreted it literally—were dangerous words, a veritable invitation to inquire into the workings of my social life. It would be just about the worst conversation topic ever…except maybe for the subject that we were currently talking about. It was moments like these that turned me into a believer, that had me reaching out with my mind and trying to conjure God.
Please, change the conversation topic. Please, change the conversation topic…

My mother glared sideways at me for a second, but then she put up her hand to keep me quiet. Her gaze was locked on my father.

“Vaclav, what are you talking about?” she said. “What do you mean?”

He bowed his head, staring the coleslaw on his plate head-on.

“I am thinking they will ask us to move,” he said.

The next morning, I walked down the dirty, aluminum-can-lined block as usual, and waited at the graffiti-encrusted bus shelter. My parents paid next to nothing to the company for renting the warehouse, but they also earned next to nothing. It was a trade-off. They would never have a chance to earn enough to get themselves off their feet, but they would never need to, either.

The bus came. I dropped my token into the slot and probed my wallet, counting the amount of tokens I had left. Four. Two days before I would have to ask my parents for money to buy another pack. Even at the reduced rate, it was still eleven bucks a week they were paying. For me to get to school. For me to keep on living.

And, with my new little secret, I was using up bus tokens even faster.

I saw Margie four more times in the week after my coffeehouse revelation: once at a free They Might Be Giants concert at Penn's Landing; once at a different coffeehouse, leaving just as I was going in; and twice on the bus home from one of my nights out in Center City. Calling them “nights out” was a bit of an exaggeration, since I had to be home for dinner at seven, but going downtown, even for an hour or two, counted. It was enough of an escape from the Yards to count. My parents weren't taking the news from the notice well, and were talking to the management on a daily basis to try to work it out. I wanted to be as far from those conversations as possible without crossing state lines.

I couldn't be sure that it was actually Margie each time—bumping into her in the café, I'd only seen the back of her hair
and caught a faint whiff of a perfume that smelled like something she would wear—but it had to be her at least one of those times. Besides, actually
talking
to Margie wasn't what I was after. Right now, having a crush was enough.

Downtown life itself was fabulous. I was learning more and more about how to be an eccentric college student each day, and I hadn't even passed ninth grade. Every afternoon after school let out, I sat in one of the coffee shops or diners that lined South Street, eavesdropping on conversations to learn the language and cadence, making my single cup of coffee last for hours. I would go into the music stores, run-down independent places, their walls and windows plastered with concert posters for bands I knew nothing about, and listen to the strange music that the clerks played when nobody else was in the store. I would set myself up in one of the anonymous and dusty aisles in the back—bluegrass and old radio shows were my favorites—and sit there for hours, my eyes closed, absorbing the songs. At first it was about the lyrics, those half-swallowed, half-mumbled words of the language I was trying to learn, but the more I got into it, the more it became about the music. Every so often, I would stick my head out, walk up to the front desk, and ask one of the unspeakably knowledgeable clerks (who looked tortured and introverted so that I both identified with and lived in fear of them) the name of the band that was playing.

“Oh,” they'd say casually, “it's the Dead Milkmen.”

“Oh, it's Sui Generis.”

“Oh, it's Flossie and the Unicorn. Why, what do you think of them?”

That last part—the question part—they never said, except in my head. It was my one wish, above everything else, that I
wasn't the only human being ever to have this bonding experience with music, that someone else was just as lonely as I was, sitting one aisle over in the Cajun/zydeco section, and one day we'd meet. I'd say the first line of a Sui Generis song. Then she (it was always a she) would reply with the call-and-response next line, and we'd never stop talking for the rest of our lives.

But every time I made my mind to get up and look in the next aisle over, it was empty.

In school, I sang songs between classes, walking from one class to another. I felt cool and eccentric, batty in that way that I was so cool that I could do anything I wanted. I got stares. But, for the most part, they were
we-think-you're-alright
stares. I didn't really care about anyone who stared at me in another way.

Of course, there were the South Lawners like Bates and his cronies, who skipped classes like stones, who looked at me askew no matter what I did. I knew Bates was angry about my escape from him and his staff, but he was biding his time for a rematch, I was sure. I was lying low. I tried not to let him or the rest of them get to me. Along with most of the rest of the average kids, I walked past them as quick as I could, pretending they didn't exist. I sang the words a little softer until I was whispering, and then I whispered a little softer until I wasn't doing anything.

The whole time, I was hoping, kind of in the back of my mind, that somebody would recognize the words.
No shit!
they'd say.
Is that a Dead Milkmen song? Man, I
love
the Dead
Milkmen. I can't believe somebody else knows—

The only problem was, nobody else ever did.

“D
ude,” Vadim said to me one day after school, “you will not
believe
these guys.”

“These guys” were his geek posse. Since I'd been escaping downtown, I hadn't really gotten an update from Vadim and his new life for a while. Now he was giving me the full-blast catch-up. It was his only real acknowledgment that it had been a while since he'd seen me on the bus home.

“Between them, it's, what do you say, a whole
cavalcade
of knowledge. They're, like, a superhero team. This one girl, she does freelance work for the CIA because she is an insanely good hacker. They don't even know she's too young. All she had to do was give herself a Social Security number for cashing her checks. Another girl is plotting the entire surface of Mars using fractal geometry. It's a whole culture of nerds. And it doesn't even matter that I don't speak good English. This guy Felix, he came over from Brazil three and a half years ago, and still doesn't speak a word of English. But his math skills are so phenomenal that the administration doesn't kick him out, they just
let him take six periods a day of math. Everyone's like that. They're all like that. And they're tough, too. When Freshman Day comes, the South Lawn won't touch these guys at all. Now I officially have a free ticket out of getting beat up when everyone else is getting beat up. So what do you think? Isn't that amazing?”

Vadim sat on the edge of the swivel chair in his room, expectant, his mouth hanging open, waiting for me to respond.

“Did you call me
dude
?” I said.

“Jupiter, did you listen at all to me?”

“Yeah, utterly. You know someone in the CIA, right?”

“
Juuu
piter…”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” I said. I actually
was
feeling bad. “Look—I really
am
interested in your new world at school, but the truth is, I can't stop thinking about downtown. Listen, Vadim, I need to tell you. It's like a whole new—”

“And another thing,” Vadim said without blinking, as if I hadn't interrupted him at all. “I think I like this girl.”

Conversation stop.

When I was ten and Vadim was eight—back when he was only one grade below me—he liked this girl. He liked her so much, he figured out how to reprogram the standardized test machine in our school so that everyone but her would fail completely, and she'd get a hundred. He did this a week before Valentine's Day, and then, when they were waiting outside the principal's office, he informed her of the intention behind his gesture.

She whacked him in the chin with her mini-handbag, walked out without another word, and then got Butch Warrington, the
biggest, meanest, smelliest kid in school—who was also her boyfriend at the time—to chase him home every day for the next week.

That was one of Vadim's easier pursuits in the world of girls.

Neither Vadim nor I was what one would refer to as desirable. We didn't have a lot of friends, we had bad haircuts, and we both spoke poor English (well, until recently we both did). But that didn't stop us from wanting. For my own part, I played my cards cool and sparingly, mostly resigned to the wild fantasies that leaped through my brain, in one hemisphere and out the other. But Vadim, for all his knowledge in the higher disciplines, could never bring himself to admit that he was utterly clueless in the realm of carnal knowledge.

I listened as he told me about his newest daydream. Her name was Cynthia, and she was the girl who was plotting out coordinates on the Martian surface. She hadn't actually spoken to him yet, but he was already figuring out a way to make the newest round of NASA satellite photographs spell out their names.

As he talked, I started thinking about my new popularity, the fact that I was now friends—or, at least, on speaking terms—with the most popular girl in ninth grade. I thought how easily I had made friends at the party, and how contagious that popularity was.

But the truth was, I didn't want to be popular. If I
was
, I wouldn't complain, but being cool and acceptable and approachable in everyone's minds didn't have much value for me. What I wanted, what I was ultimately after—what my fantasies were about—was something greater.

I wanted to be wild.

“So, what do you think?” Vadim was saying. “Will you meet her for me?”

“Will I what?” I was lost.

“Exactly,” he said. “Come to the steps with me. We can hang out with my new friends, and you will check her out. You can tell her good things about me, see if you think she's worth, you know, getting to know. Just try to see if you can tell what she thinks of me. You're good with people, Jupiter. Do you think you can?”

“Sure,” I said—that kind of
not
-sure sureness that directly referred to the fact that I had not been listening to him this entire time. I couldn't even remember her name.

“Thanks, Jupiter,” said Vadim, clapping my shoulder as he stood. “I do really appreciate it a lot.”

I was about to correct his English, but he was gone.

My classes had finally stabilized. The first day that I left Mr. Denisof's last-period class and realized that I hadn't needed to look at my roster all day, I knew that North Shore had finally sunken into my brain and took root. My classes were going alright, and I'd even managed to get some credible work done. I wasn't part of Vadim's Illuminati or anything, but I didn't need to be. I was finding my place.

Much to my sadness, Ms. Fortinbras stopped subbing in our English class. Our new teacher came in, a paleoanthropic, wheezing hunchback of an old lady named Mrs. Pearltrusser. On the first day, she passed back mothy and yellowed stacks of
Paradise Lost
, collecting the copies of
Ender's Game
that Ms. Fortinbras had offered us. Meanwhile, Mr. Denisof still treated
me like an ugly stepsister, calling on me for the hard questions and ignoring me whenever I raised my hand. But I was still managing to tread water.

After school, Vadim helped me with my homework. Then I helped Devin with her homework. I struggled to get downtown as often as I could, hopping through the back door into crowded buses, or walking up to the Broad Street subway and sliding under the turnstile as soon as the fare officers had their backs turned.

And, for the most part, I was successfully managing to avoid Bates.

That day I was feeling, as The Cure said, a two-chord kind of cool. Some guy I didn't know invited me to a party downtown that Friday night, and although I knew I wouldn't be able to go, I thanked him and wrote down all the details—just because information was commerce, and I wanted to feel valuable. I skipped Mr. Denisof's class and, just as I said I would, met Vadim on the nerd steps and let him introduce me around to his new crew. Satisfaction positively oozed from the pressed collar of his pinstriped shirt.

He leaped to the bottom of the stairs, which made it really hard for this to appear casual. “Hey, guys,” he said, standing in front of them all, as nervous about speaking to a crowd as a first-year teacher on the first day of school. “I'd like you to meet Jupiter, my best friend. We grew up together in Russia, and then we grew up together here. He—uh—he is really cool, and he knows almost as much about
Doctor Who
as me, and he's never skipped a grade cause he's kind of an underachiever but he's a really cool guy anyway. I, uh, promise.” He took a step back.

I don't know if he was waiting for an official proclamation that he was allowed to bring me up on the stairs with him, or for something else, but if he was expecting any sort of impressive, united reaction, he didn't get it. Most of the people there barely looked up from their laptops.

That didn't deter Vadim one bit. He grabbed my arm and pulled me down onto one of the first steps. There was barely any room, and I squeezed myself between Vadim and this distant-looking, pale-skinned girl who he introduced to me as Cynthia Yu. Her eyes flickered away from her laptop for a fraction of a second, barely acknowledging my presence.

Vadim, whose small, Cabbage Patch body hardly fit into the space where he sat as is, grasped his kneecap, trying to pull his legs crossed. He leaned back onto the step above him, stretching out his arms and looking even more gawkward. “Jupiter, this is Cynthia,” he said, oblivious to her obliviousness. “She's been really cool, showing me around and making sure that I know where all my classes are and that people talk to me and stuff. Cynthia, this is my friend Jupiter.”

I nodded politely to her. She raised an eyebrow and flickered a momentary smile—sympathetic?—my way. I looked at Vadim for help.

Vadim had engrossed himself in the pages of a huge, dusty-looking textbook that sat in the lap of a fat, dusty-looking guy with a white-kid Afro. He stopped pretending to look and leaned over. “Isn't she great?” he hissed in my ear.

I smiled and sank into my stair.

Half an hour later, I'd listened to more snot-coated laughs about math jokes than I'd ever wanted to hear. I was bored out of my skull, and my verdict on Cynthia Yu remained unchanged.
It didn't take a world-renowned specialist in adolescent behavioral psychology to see that she didn't have the hots for Vadim—not to mention the conversational skills, attention span, or social capability for Vadim, either. And I was not a world-renowned specialist in adolescent behavioral psychology.

“So?” Vadim demanded eagerly once we'd left the Tesseract Fan Club. “What do you think, Jupe?”

“I'm really glad you introduced us,” I said inoffensively, in my best politician voice.

“Well, yeah, but what do you
think
?” he said with an impatience like the Lord waiting for the right moment to rain down fire and brimstone on Gomorrah.

“Oh, man,” I said. “You really want to know?”

Vadim bobbled his head enthusiastically.

“More than anything,” he said. “What do you think, Jupiter? Do I have a chance?”

I sighed. I scrunched up my forehead. I thought about how to break it to him easy.

I opened my mouth.

Five minutes later, I was finished.

“Never talk to me again,” said Vadim. His face had turned as red as that physics experiment that he'd accidentally blown up the lab with last year, and a similar smell of smoke was coming from his ears.

He gave a huge huff, shoved his heaviest textbook into my stomach, and stormed away from me.

In the first-floor hallway, foot traffic was backed up through the main entrance, four thousand students trying to fit through
three narrow sets of double doors. Because of the sudden infusion of bored and sweaty teenagers into the corridor, and because of the humidity in the air, the south doors were wide open, ushering in a half-stale breeze that made the hall almost bearable. I could see straight out to the South Lawn. It was empty today. If the coast was clear, I would have to spend less than two minutes running down the hill on my way to the downtown bus. And it would cut out three blocks of walking.

Was I really going to push my luck?

Of course I was.

I poised on the step, the threshold of the South Lawn. I looked left, looked right. In the distance, Crash Goldberg and his friends were clustered in a circle, madly cheering someone (or something) on.

I tentatively climbed down the steps, walked a few cautious inches onto the Lawn itself. The sun had never shone this bright above Philadelphia, and the street was never so empty. The grass had never looked so green.

I felt a big hand dig into my shoulder. Nails filed sharp, fingers as fat as sausages. Even before I turned around, I could smell breath, hot and salty like raw meat, crusting my ear.

Bates screeched to a halt behind me. His shoes dug into the gravel beneath our feet. A rock flew into my shoe, and when I leaned back into my heel, it dug into a tendon and hurt like mad.

His face had an eager expression on it. I knew what that meant.

I ran.

Branches scratched at my bare arms. Leaves smacked my face. He caught me quick, before I even made it to the curb.

“What do you
want
, Bates?” I said. I don't know what made me so forthright. I knew, or at least strongly suspected, it was going to get me killed. But, in the on-off switch of my brain, I almost didn't care anymore. It was like, we'd come this far, and he'd tortured me this long. I was not going to live like this until the end of high school. Dammit, I had played the system just as well as he had; I had earned my right to be here.

Bates spun me around. I was facing him straight on. The bloodshot eyes, that raw meat smell. I was getting way too familiar with this position.

His face, if still stuck in its omnipresent snarl, felt—if not more comfortable—at least a little bit familiar.

“So, like,” he said. “What's your deal?”

Those words, coming from his mouth, sounded so weird. Like alien language, like he was possessed. From Bates, it felt somehow wrong, like they should be growls or curses or a throaty leopard snarl. Did Bates speak that way to his mother? Did Bates even
have
a mother? So many questions were popping up in my head, I didn't even have time to contemplate what I was actually supposed to answer.

“What's my deal?”

“Yeah. What's with you? I see you with the geeks, the preps, the shitsville ghetto kids. When you're in the same shit I am with Mayhew, you get out of it. What's your deal—you been getting it on with Ms. Fortinbras or something?”

“
What
?”

“No offense, man. I'm just askin'—I respect your privacy and all that.”

“Well,
no
.” I felt a trembling begin in my wrist, work its way up my arm and then back down my spine—actually, I
had
had
a few thoughts about Ms. Fortinbras being pretty hot. And when you considered she was a teacher, which you'd think would be something to decrease her hotness, it actually, in my mind, did the total opposite. She was smart and funny and insipid as all hell, and she had a great body, and we totally had to do whatever she said. How had Bates known that about me? Had he been playing some crazy Satanic mind games, burning goats to see into my head?