Losers Read online

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

  “Juuupiter…”

  “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?

  He peered at me through slanted eyes. “Really?”

  “I mean—not that about Ms. Fortinbras, no. Bates, why are you asking me? Is this some mind game where you’re going to lull me into a false sense of security and then dislocate my nose or stick jalapeño peppers up my butt or sacrifice me to goats?”

  Bates winced at the bit about the jalapeño peppers, but other-wise, he squinted at me like I was speaking in tongues. “Hey, look, man, if you don’t want to talk, you can just go,” he said. He gestured toward the boulevard that lay before us.

  “And you’ll just let me?”

  “Well, no. I mean, I’ll probably give you a black eye or something, but just for aesthetic purposes. I can’t just let you walk away empty-handed.”

  I considered. “Okay…so what do you want to talk about?”

  Bates waited, as if he hadn’t at all expected me to choose that option. When he finally did speak, he did it in a completely different voice—methodical, plotted out, as if he was taking baby steps on the moon.

  “I want to go downtown with you,” he announced at last.

  “What?” I said, and then, “Why?”

  “To meet guys,” said Bates.

  8. SAME DEEP WATER AS YOU

  The day was clear, not a cloud in the sky. The outside temperature was exactly the same as the temperature of a warm bowl of soup, and the wind was a tepid massage rubbing at my skin. Bates’s face was honest, plaintive. As if his meaning was clear as day and I was the one who was being completely obfuscating, instead of the other way round.

  I looked at him askew. “You mean, like, other kids to beat up? Or metal guys—like, other guys like you? I’ve only been down there a few times before, I swear, I don’t know where any concerts or anything even are.”

  “No,” said Bates matter-of-factly. “Like, guys to date.”

  I didn’t know how I got roped into these things. Most of the problem-child moments in my life, from the time I swallowed all the glue in first-grade arts and crafts class and onward, began the same way—I started taking people seriously and didn’t know how to stop.

  We climbed on the bus together that day. The driver was my regular driver, who gave me an even weirder look than usual. I popped in an extra token for Bates. He nodded curtly at the driver, brushed past me, and went straight to the seats in the back where he plopped himself down, taking up the entire row. He sat with his legs spread wide, elbows resting on his knees, hands dangling absently between them. His eyes went straight forward. His nose twitched as if he was sniffing the air for danger. I noticed that he had left his staff back at school. Every few minutes, he would glance over at me, making sure I was still there, that I hadn’t wandered off and was still sitting up straight in my seat. When the window views started changing from run-down ghetto neighborhoods to gas stations and warehouses and then to skyscrapers and coffeehouses, his gaze never left me.

  “Th-this is downtown,” I managed to stutter. “So, whe—uh, just where exactly were you thinking that you wanted to go?”

  Bates’s lips barely cracked open. In the small division of his mouth, his teeth still gripped each other.

  “Just go wherever you usually go,” he snarled.

  I yanked the stop cord at Twelfth and Vine, one of the places I usually liked to get off. The main downtown action was still a few blocks away, but I liked to walk for a few blocks to get myself out of school mode and into the swing of things. Twelfth and Vine, I figured, was far enough away from the coffeehouses and record stores so I could avoid being publicly embarrassed, but still populated enough so that Bates wouldn’t be tempted to dump my body somewhere.

  I scampered down the rear steps. Bates was right behind me. The bus deposited us on th
e corner, a graffiti mural facing us to one side, the early autumn wind blowing at us from the other. I folded my arms, looked one way first and then the other, and scrunched my face up in confusion.

  “Do what you’d normally do. Pretend like I’m not even here,” Bates instructed.

  I gave him one last look of uncertainty. He gave a firm nod. I turned around, looked in the direction of the city, and plotted. The coffeehouse, where we would be seen, inspected, and on display for the entire community of people, was out of the question. So I turned down South Street, into the swarming throng of bizarre-looking locals and European tourists who mobbed the sidewalk, and headed for Repo Records.

  From down the street, I could see their sign hanging. Only the interlocking Rs and part of a vinyl record were visible, the rest obscured by band stickers and concert posters. I don’t want to sound too melodramatic, but I got a little chill. In this dangerous jungle of leading Bates around, it was like I’d sighted my backup.

  We stopped in front of the door.

  Or, rather, Bates stopped me. “No one around here’s gay,” he hissed in my ear. “Take me somewhere else.”

  “I don’t know anywhere else,” I insisted.

  Bates’s grip on my shoulder tightened. “Stop being kvetchy,” he said. “Or I’ll—”

  Heat rushed to my face. Suddenly, I felt all the fear in my body changing to something else. At first I thought it was anger, but then I realized—it was annoyance. Bates might still be bigger than me, and he might still be one step away from beating me into chewing gum, but he wanted something from me. And that meant, one way or another, that I was in control.

  “You’ll what? Look, Bates—I am about ninety-nine percent as clueless as you. This is the only place I’ve ever seen any kind of gay, lesbian, or otherwise non-heterosexually themed people or propaganda on display in any store, ever. I seriously don’t know what you’re expecting from me, or where else to take you, or what I’m supposed to do to prevent getting a bloody nose by the time this is over. So unless you know where the local underground disco bar is or unless you’ve got a better idea, this is our first stop. Got it?”