Losers Page 6

  “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.

  5. 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 heys and yos and what’s ups. 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-glas
s 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.

  Finally, they stopped in front of a short stairwell that seemed to lead nowhere. Through its dim, cobwebby top, Vadim could see a rusted brass sign on the door, a door that hadn’t been opened in years, that read JANITOR’S CLOSET—NO ADMITTANCE.

  Up and down along the stairs, though, sat a good dozen or so of the smartest, geekiest, most socially unaware and fashionably clueless ninth-through-twelfth-graders that Vadim had ever set his 45/20-prescription eyes upon.

  They were all genders, but mostly male; all races, but their skin glowed with the uniform mint green sheen of those people who derived most of their light from a computer screen, rather than from the sun. The four kids highest up the stairs were clustered around the new English edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, fighting over a mistake in translation. Two steps down from them, a girl of unspeakable beauty swept her fingers over her computer keyboard, a dirty red landscape on the screen, calculating the odds of recurring fractal patterns on the surface of Mars. At the bottom of the stairs, four people were actively engaged in a yelling match over what looked to Vadim like the most violent, heatedly intense, full-contact game of Scrabble he had ever seen. Dr. Mayhew didn’t even have to open his mouth; Vadim was already sold. At that moment, the principal could have told Vadim to jump off a bridge, and Vadim would only have asked at what trajectory he should hit the water.

  Dr. Mayhew, never one to linger in a moment, cleared his throat.

  The Scrabblers froze mid-spelling, looked up from the board, and rotated their heads north.

  “Consuela Cortez,” Dr. Mayhew said. Even in his regular speaking voice, everything sounded like an announcement. “Would you mind coming forward?”

  From the hazy heights of the top of the staircase, a heavy, suspicious-looking girl, her hair neatly swirled in the shape of a question mark from the back of her head all the way down to the small of her back, descended.

  “Yeah?” sh
e said, sounding bored. “What do you want, Mayhew?”

  “This,” boomed Dr. Mayhew, ignoring the obvious besmirching of his title, “is Vadim. He’s a first-year student. I think he might be able to find his place among you. I’d appreciate it if you could take him under your wing, show him the ropes, mind that he doesn’t take off in the—” he cleared his throat “—in the wrong direction.”

  Consuela continued her slow, laborious descent until she was standing opposite Vadim. He was small by anyone’s standard, not making it up to most people’s line of sight, but to Consuela, he was barely a blip. His tiny head just barely reached the bottom curvature of her breasts. At that moment, his eyeballs were currently rotating upward, coming into an eventual contact with her downward-orbiting eyes. Through the double layers of glasses that shielded both their sets of eyes, they made slow contact.

  “Vadim,” she grunted. “What’s your deal?”

  “Hey,” Vadim said, speaking slowly and carefully. “I’m trying to get out of this place. I got kicked out of Decanometry on the first day ‘cause our teacher said to graph a ten-dimensional plane, and I tried to launch a tesseract into the equation.”

  Consuela let out a low whistle.

  That was when Vadim noticed it. All the activity that had ceased when he’d first arrived hadn’t picked back up again. Everyone’s eyes were on him. Everyone was analyzing him, trying to see how he’d slip up.

  What he’d just said, that was what they were waiting for.

  “Niiice,” cooed a voice from the top of the stairs. “Factoring by way of tesseract. Most kids are into Deco, or they’re into A Wrinkle in Time, but the overlap is where it counts.”