Losers

by Matthue Roth

  That came from the girl with the Martian surface on her laptop. Having made her opinion known, she lowered her eyes back to her laptop screen, adjusted the collar of her shirt, and continued working.

  That girl, Vadim would soon learn, was Cynthia Yu, an absolutely brilliant fourteen-year-old behavioral mathematician who passed her summers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Artificial Intelligence department.

  Right now, Vadim didn’t pay too much attention to the messenger. I knew that all he needed to hear was that he was approved of. Then his blood pressure would lower, and his heart would stop thudding against his ribcage and return to its normal rhythm.

  Consuela, similarly satisfied, wrapped her arm around his shoulders and started introducing him around. From that moment on, Vadim didn’t care about skipping another grade, transferring schools, or what his Decanometry teacher thought of him. He’d found a community, and that—for now, at least—was all that mattered.

  Between fourth and fifth periods, I looked up in the hallway and saw Bates’s staff drifting above the crowd. I worked up the courage to approach him about it.

  “Hey, Bates,” I said, flashing him my friendliest smile. “Good to see you all freshly re-staffed. How you doin’?”

  He threw me against the closest locker. The metal slits dug into my spinal cord. His forearm tightened like a knot around my Adam’s apple, and I felt the staff wedged in the unbearably narrow area between my ear and the rest of my head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You want to run that by me again??”

  I winced. When someone squashes your neck from the front, your first instinct, no matter what, is to pull back. Even if pulling back means digging yourself even harder into a sharply molded locker with jagged points that push hard into your skin, more painful than your assailant’s choking hold.

  “Mister Bates!” came the familiar monotone of Dr. Mayhew’s voice from down the hall. “We’ve received those Freedom of Religion pamphlets for you from the ACLU. Congratulations again on your recent victory…”

  The tone of his voice deepened, got lower and grew more suspicious as he saw Bates holding me in such a compromising position. But Bates’s hold loosened as he turned around and I managed to slip out and duck into the oncoming tide of students. I massaged my neck, looking around to see whether anyone had noticed the newest assault on my dignity.

  Then I heard a squeal and turned to see the girls’ soccer team waving at me. The bitter taste in my mouth suddenly tasted a lot like candy.

  The first day or two of being popular—no, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The first day of not looking like a punching bag was pretty dizzyingly amazing. After that, it was just dizzying. Wednesday afternoon, I spotted Sajit coming out of the girls’ bathroom, surrounded by a throng of stomach-sucking soccer—team girls, all bouncing in one communal laugh. He caught my eye, twisted out of the crowd, and matched my pace.

  “Juuupiter,” he crooned in that way only he said my name. “I keep hearing all these things about you, man. How come it’s all in the third person?”

  “Which third person?”

  “From other people, you fnord. You’re quite the celebrity, you know. Your name is on the girls’ bathroom wall. You’ve officially become one of the popular kids.”

  I grinned. I couldn’t help it, I was really impressed with myself. “Really? What does it say?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just a phone number that isn’t really yours. But how are you doing? How does it feel?”

  The grin flickered for a second. Sajit noticed it; not much slipped beneath his radar. “What does that mean?”

  “Well…” I hesitated. I couldn’t help it—I never liked to spoil a surprise, or to point out that part in the movie where you could see the overhead microphone, and I felt way guilty questioning my blessings.

  He nodded me on.

  “It’s great that I’m not getting laughed at by the those kids anymore,” I said. “But, since when did I ever start liking them?”

  We both stopped in our tracks. It was a difficult question, and a valid one.

  But Sajit had always been the master of positive thinking. Ever since first grade, when he tore open the ice packs that we nursed our black eyes with and discovered that you could suck the ice, he had his own way of looking at things. “Don’t knock the hustle,” he said simply. “You don’t have to play the game. Just enjoy sitting at the top of the board.”

  And that was that.

  From where I stood, my newfound popularity was definitely tasting better than my old lack of it, but, oddly enough, I wasn’t feeling at all satisfied. By the end of the week, it had started to feel as though everyone on the attendance list of North Shore High had said hi to me, but I still hadn’t managed to have one decent conversation—with the exception of Devin Murray, who it seemed like I now had to avoid. The less she found out about me, where I came from and where I currently resided, the better.

  The last period bell rang. Mr. Denisof talked straight through its blanketing shrill, but we gathered up our books and jammed them into our backpacks. “Read chapters three and four, answer all the odd-numbered questions, and, Jupiter Glazer, don’t think I’ve forgotten you,” he announced, seemingly oblivious to the tide of students running past him and through the door.

  “Sir?” I was still stuck in my seat.

  “You might think you’re smart, waltzing right back in like nothing happened. But I’ve got my eye on you,” he told me. “I would advise you not to forget that.”

  I gave a summary nod, zipped my backpack shut, and ran out. I didn’t know what sort of veiled threats he was intimating, but I knew I couldn’t think about it anymore. From the time first period started at 8:16, I’d gone through six hours and forty-five minutes of consecutive thinking. I needed to give my brain a break.

  So that’s what I did. Outside, there was a stream of kids making their way from the front doors to the bus stop, a single huge wave that seemed to grow into a pool that mobbed each passing bus, flowing into its doors. The crowd going toward the Yards seemed surprisingly crowded, given both that it had a reputation for being the dumbest neighborhood in the city and that Devin couldn’t seem to find anyone at our school who actually lived there.

  I’d been dealing with crowds all day. Another pack of hungry and horny teenagers was not what I felt like experiencing right now.

  I turned around, thinking I’d climb back up the hill and back into school, see if anyone was doing anything remotely interesting, since now I didn’t have a job to get back to. Maybe I would try to track down Vadim.

  All those thoughts vanished in the moment I set my eyes on the door.

  Standing there, a bit like a lion trying to decide which herd to hunt down first, chest puffed out, long hair blowing in the wind, was Bates, twirling his pointed staff over his head.

  I retreated. One foot behind the other, slowly. If you didn’t move fast or act afraid, lions wouldn’t pounce on you, right? No, that was snakes. Lions weren’t blind. Lions could see fear, smell fear, watch fear eat at your nerves and your vital organs until you were a cowering, blubbering mass trying to act cool and back away. Then, like a lazy Sunday afternoon decision, they would leap on you and rip you to pieces with their pinkie claw.

  That was how Bates was looking at me right now.

  I glanced behind me, looking for the huge crowd that would swallow me up. It was twenty or thirty feet away. Bates’s staff had stopped orbiting above his head. Now he held it like a spear, pointing at me.

  His mouth drew open with a piercing, throaty, guttural yell.

  Really? I thought.

  Which was when he started to run straight at me.

  I ran, too. My backpack bouncing off my back, the curls of my hair whacking in my eyes, pavement, turf, and unmowed grass fell beneath my feet. I tasted wind. Bates had managed to chase me on a diagonal, away from the after-school mass, and my sudden gratitude at not being publicly shamed was now holding a distant second to my desperat
e, agonizing wish for a crowd to hide in. He chased me through the empty sports field, past the swinging unlocked doors, through the hole in the fence. Across the street from the school was a row of shady-looking high-rise apartments, the kind mostly known for being backdrops for crime shootings on prime-time TV.

  There was a red light. I ran across five lanes of stopped traffic. Bates jumped off the curb, giving another war whoop, his staff ready to harpoon.

  I reached the far side. There was a barbed-wire fence surrounding the shady apartments. Great—I wasn’t even allowed in. I glanced around, looking for something to hide behind.

  And then I saw the bus.

  And then the light turned green.

  I hammered on the door. From the line of windows, the people who were already on the bus stared disdainfully down at me. The driver’s head swung toward me, pissed, then reached over to swing the door open. “Alright, but I’m not doing this every day,” he griped as I climbed on.

  I dropped in my token, grateful for the opportunity to continue my natural life span, and collapsed into an empty seat.

  I turned to the man next to me, a tough-looking bald man in a plaid shirt with no sleeves. Mustering the last leftovers of my Friday-night charisma, I smiled at him and asked, “What direction is this bus going in?”

  He looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Downtown,” he said.

  Downtown was a whole other world. A million cars chugged slowly down streets, and a thousand people swarmed around you at any given moment. The sidewalks were too impossibly small for the amount of people that were populating them. You felt like you needed to move, to move in time with the human conveyor belt around you, or else become trapped in the onslaught, crushed into a grate. Downtown was busy, deliciously busy. People watching was not just for those of us who lived in the margins of society. You almost didn’t have a choice—you had to stare. Downtown was like spacewalking—your feet never touched the ground, and your hands, when you twitched them, felt aware, dangerously aware, that there was nothing that lay between them and the open depths of outer space, just empty air that could suck you out of your clothes at any moment, catapulting you into forever.

  The bus pulled up right into a terminal near City Hall. I climbed off the back doors, skated down the stairs, and sprung, feetfirst, into the crowd.

  I had no destination. I had no deadline—well, not unless you counted factory work, which I didn’t anymore. I had no plans, except to walk around, maybe get a coffee, and check out the center of the city that had taken half my life.

  It really did feel like landing on another planet. It’s not like I’d never been downtown—my parents used to take me every year for the Fourth of July and the New Year’s parades—but I’d never felt it out in terms of being an actual city.

  Chestnut Street felt just like the movies, homely Colonial trees leisurely draped across buildings, their brick walls a red as fresh as just-cooked bread. It was four or so in the afternoon, too early for businesses to let out, but a few businesspeople crawled the streets anyway, window-shopping and laughing with unseen spouses on their cell phones.

  Most people I was watching, though, were of another caliber entirely.

  The first one I noticed was a girl. Tall, thin, with impossibly long and stringy hair, she was wearing all black, but her clothes were varied enough in style and texture, a tweed black vest over a shiny black shirt, so they didn’t even look all black. She was older than me, but only by a few years, her skin still fresh and soft and unwrinkled, her iPod sticking out from a pocket of her vest. I watched her go by, not checking her out, more just staring in awe of her. It was so cool. I’d never judged a person by their clothes before, but her clothes were so cool, it was impossible not to. She was the kind of person, I decided in a flash, that I could grow up to be.

  She passed me in her flurry of a walk, disappeared inside a record store a few buildings down. I debated following her in—and do what? Stalk her?—but life didn’t give me a chance. I spotted a whole group (of kids? people? girls and guys together?) walking along the other side of the street. I ducked between two cars, trailed behind them for a block or so, following as they cut along side streets, walked in the middle, ignoring cars and traffic lights. The whole time, they were talking about this book they’d all read.

  I’d read that book last year.

  At the time, I’d wanted to talk about it with someone, with anyone, but I couldn’t find anyone in the Yards who’d even heard of it. I’d sat Vadim down, expecting him to at least listen to me, but when I told him, he was like, “What do you want to tell me about a book for?” If they didn’t have comics or quantum theory in them, Vadim said, you might as well just hide books in a library where nobody would ever read them.

  I lost track of them and of their conversation about the time we crossed onto a small street where winding ivy blanketed all the buildings like camouflage. There was a tiny coffeehouse about halfway down, drenched in the wafting scents of smoke and ground coffee beans. The few vacant tables outside (it was starkly warm outside, still summer, but just barely) belied its packed interior. More of these creatures sat inside there, talking to one another, typing away on laptops and reading books and posing in their seats. They wore wacky, nonjudgmental clothes, goofy plaids and neon paisleys, Sherlock Holmes hats and tacky ‘80s belts. Each of them looked like the kind of person I could become best friends with and talk to for hours.

  I wanted to find out how to start.

  I went in and ordered a café au lait, very nervous when I pronounced the name. I took it, along with the fortune cookie that came on the saucer, and sat at the vacant end of a long, packed table. Café au lait was just coffee with milk, but somehow it always tasted better than when I tried pouring milk in my regular coffee—some sort of barista magic that only those professionally trained in the ways of the coffeehouse could bring about. I wanted to take out my journal and write—following the example of the plurality of the folks in the coffeehouse—but, I realized ashamedly, I didn’t have a journal. I contented myself with taking out one of the spiral notebooks from my new semester of school (all our teachers wanted us to have three-ring binders, anyway) and started writing lines from my new songs in there, verses of poems I had to memorize in years past, anything I could think of to keep my hands busy. My eyes were surveying the people around me, their habits and conversations and eccentric, nonconformist ways of existing, and suddenly, thrillingly, it felt like a mission.

  I wanted to learn how to be like this. Older. Independent. Untouchable.

  6. FASCINATION STREET

  I thought I had everything totally figured out. I kept feeling that way, right up to the second I stepped into my house.

  “Jupiter, you cannot quit the work now. This is family business, and you are family. If you want to live in our house, you must pitch in to help us keep the house. You not understand that?” That was my mother. She was always yanking the umbilical cord when she needed to reel me in.

  I pretended to ignore her.

  That brought in the second wave of assault, my father, who was a less effective communicator but would not give up so easily. “Jupiter, you listen now! We bring you to this country! We make you good living, pay for good food. Now worst time of year for us. You need help us!”

  I turned around, finally acknowledging their existence. “Look, guys,” I said in the calmest, most rational voice I could muster. “I realize this is a difficult season for the operation, and you’re both under a lot of pressure to perform and to succeed. And I am perfectly capable of realizing that the corporation has done us a great favor by letting us live here. I just can’t manage the time right now. I’m sorry, but I really can’t.”

  “This is no excuse, we know high school is hard but we need you.”

  “You don’t know anything,” I said. “You’ve never gone through this. You don’t understand.”

  “We understand! You not understand! We understand!”

  “Mommmm�
�”

  “Jupiter, viros umnik na moyu golovu—”

  This is what they did, pulling out all the stops. When they reached the limits of their English, they retreated into their native tongue.

  “Mom, I don’t want to—”

  “Poka tebe tvadsat odin ne ispolnitsa budesh rabotat kak milenkiy—”

  “Stop it!”

  Whoa. That came out about fifty thousand times louder than I’d intended it to sound. Actually, the voice that came up from my trachea and out through my lips was huge and vibrating, louder than I ever thought it could go. I took a few steps back. We all took a few steps back.

  But I could feel the veins in my wrist throbbing, the anger in my body still hot.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Stop speaking Russian. I am through with that language. I’m just through with it. Never speak it to me again. If you want to yell at me, do it in English.”

  I waited, panting. It was this weird showdown that we hadn’t known was a showdown until just now. All of a sudden, none of us was sure what to do.

  After a few beats, I stopped standing there and went up to my room. I swung open my window and climbed out on the roof, savoring the cold Septemblurry air, breathing in deep gulps of freedom.

  I was sitting in a used bookstore on Second Street, thinking very hard about things that felt too unimportant to waste my time thinking about—how to become independent and untouchable—but mostly, I was just loitering. It seemed like for every minute I spent in active participation with other human beings my own age, I required half an hour of time to digest and process the experience. At this exact moment I was thinking about Vadim, wondering if there was an actual mathematical equation to take someone like us—an antisocial, emotionally isolated Russian Jewish kid with no cultural background and nothing in common with anyone at our school but age—and turn him popular. Subtract sixty percent of an accent, divide by the amount of people who recognize you by sight, recalibrate into terms of a warehouse party in (everyone-but-me-wise, anyway) the middle of nowhere, and the figure that emerges will be…what?