Loser (10 page)

Graduation Day is just that: one day.

Then comes the next day.

And the next.

Zinkoff puts away his flute, puts away his backpack, puts away his memories of Graduation Day and gets on with the rest of his life.

To Zinkoff and to all the kids in this brick-and-hoagie town, summer is like a great warm shallow lake. Some frolic and splash. Some strike out for the distant shore, too far away to see. Some just stand there, digging their toes into the sandy bottom. It is warm and sunny and lazy and you can leave your feet if you want to, because in the warm waters of summer, everybody floats.

Zinkoff rides his Clinker One with a new kid from up the block. They cruise the park. They race down Halftank Hill. On his bicycle he is graceful.

For most of July he goes Monopoly crazy. He carries the game with him everywhere, always keeping his favorite piece, the top hat, in his pocket. He gets up games with his parents and with Uncle Stanley and the neighbors and the Oh Mailman Lady. When he can't find anyone else, he resorts to Polly, who begs him endlessly to play. It's never long before his properties cover the board and his stack of money practically scrapes the ceiling. But it's no fun, she's so easy to beat. He tries to make it fun by trouncing her so badly that she'll get mad and stomp off, maybe throw a tantrum, which is always entertaining. But she doesn't. She doesn't seem to care, or even notice, that she's losing. She just loves to roll the dice and loves wherever she lands. He's the one who winds up mad.

Then they go away for summer vacation: three days at the beach. They stroll the boardwalk. He shakes hands with Mr. Peanut and eats an ice-cream and waffle sandwich and a chocolate-covered frozen banana. While Polly digs holes in the sand, he hunkers in the surf and dares the ocean waves to knock him over.

Back home, he pesters his parents to join the swim club, but they say it's too expensive. So he does what a kid has to do: He smells the cedar chest in his parents' bedroom, he decapitates dandelions, seesaws at the park, licks the mixing bowl, rides his bike, counts railroad cars, holds his breath, clucks his tongue, tastes tofu, touches moss, daydreams, looks back, looks ahead, wishes, wonders…and before he knows it, miraculously, the summer is over.

 

Monroe Middle School is scary, it's so big. Four elementary schools feed into it. There are no swings in the playground. There's no playground. No recess. All day long he bounces from room to room, teacher to teacher. Every forty-five minutes it's back into the hallways, the cattle drive.
Moooo!
Eighth-graders tower over him, knock him off balance barging through. When he sees a familiar Satterfield face he beams and waves.

One day the face he sees stops him cold. He calls out, “Andrew!” It's his neighbor from the old days.

Andrew looks but keeps walking. He does not seem to recognize Zinkoff. “It's me. Zinkoff. Donald.”

Andrew nods. “Oh yeah. Hi.”

Zinkoff runs to catch up. Andrew has really grown since he saw him last. He's five inches taller than Zinkoff. If Zinkoff didn't know better, he'd think he was an eighth-grader. It's not only his height, but the way he carries himself. Unlike most of the other slinky, slumpy sixth-graders, Andrew gives the impression that he belongs here, that he doesn't have to apologize for having been born.

Zinkoff feels a little funny having to look up. “Andrew, you got tall!”

Andrew looks over his head, looks down at him. “Yeah. And it's Drew.”

Zinkoff is confused. “Huh?”

“My name's Drew now.”

“Oh? You changed it?”

“Yeah.”

Zinkoff has never seen Andrew's—Drew's—new home out in Heatherwood, but he can picture
it with its driveway and tree out front, and Zinkoff nods, for it somehow seems to add up: new house, new name. “Cool,” he says. They're walking side by side now. “Your father still a banker?”

Drew looks down at him. Only his eyes come down, not his face. “Your father still a mailman?”

Zinkoff is about to answer when a bell rings. It's not the one for the next class, it's coming from Drew's backpack. Drew takes out his cell phone and answers it. He's talking away on the phone as he veers off and into his next class.

Zinkoff sits in class—anywhere he wants! He sits front row smack in the middle. He rushes ahead to classes so he can get to the seat first. Every time he sits in the first row, he thinks of Mr. Yalowitz. He misses him.

He joins the band. Meets flutists from the other grade schools. They compare flutes.

He signs up for Camera Club. And Video Club. And Model Car Club. And Library Helpers. But has to drop all except Library Helpers because they interfere with band practice.

He misses a stairway step one day and tumbles
heels to ceiling down to the landing. He's on his hands and knees for minutes picking up pencils, erasers, books, ruler, triangle, multi-template, his lucky pink bubblegum stone, cookie pieces, Monopoly top hat and other spillage from his backpack and pockets. Most students rushing to class zigzag through the disaster. Two eighth-graders, laughing, not noticing, walk straight through, crunching cookies underfoot.

Arithmetic, which had become math, now becomes geometry. Squares and rectangles, okay. But then hexagons, pentagons, octagons, gobbledeegookgons. He can't get it. He's bad at shapes. He's transferred back to math.

Band is not just band anymore. It's marching band. At first Zinkoff thinks,
Great!
He pictures himself in a fancy uniform, golden braid, doodads, a plumed hat high as the old giraffe. But there are no uniforms. You get them in high school. Middle school is for learning the basics.

They practice on the parking lot, learning to play and march at the same time. For the first few days they do a simple straight-ahead march.
Walking and playing. No sweat, thinks Zinkoff.

Then they start on turns. First, a ninety-degree turn. Left, then right. Then forty-five-degree turns. Then about-face turns. Zinkoff cannot seem to get the hang of it. He's okay with either one: He can march without playing, or play without marching. But when he tries to put them together he marches into parked cars, the bike rack, his fellow marchers. It's like bumper cars at the fair. On his worst day he runs into the tuba and bloodies his nose and is told to go home.

But he doesn't give up, and nobody tells him not to come back.

 

There are two outdoor baskets behind the school. When there's time the kids play pickup games. One of the baskets still has a net hanging from it. The eighth-graders get that one. The other goes to the sixth-and seventh-graders.

Zinkoff hangs around, hoping to get picked. The pickers are always two big-shot athletes. No one elects them. They don't earn it by making
foul shots or anything. They simply appoint themselves and no one argues. Gary Hobin is often a picker. So is Drew Orwell.

The pickers stand at the foul line and look over the troops. They take turns picking. You know how good a player a kid is by how early he is picked. When ten players are picked, the unpicked retreat to the sidelines and wait for the game to end—ten baskets—so they can get another chance.

Zinkoff loves basketball now. He keeps waiting game after game. The pickers keep picking, usually the same players. Standing there during picking time, Zinkoff tries to look good. He puts on his game face, he scowls. Anybody can see this kid can score. Once, Drew Orwell looks right at him and he's sure this is it, he can already hear his name, it's forming on Drew's lips—“Zinkoff!”—but the name that comes out is…

“Nedney.”

 

And so September becomes October, and October becomes November and December and
the grass turns to hairbrushes and the bus riders fog the windows with their breath. The band comes inside and the pickup players come in and the football teams. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Basketball. Tests. Assignments. Projects. Report cards. Cheers. Groans. Waiting for snow.

The school in winter.

And Zinkoff vanishes.

Not to himself, of course. To himself he is very much there, every minute: laughing, burping, biting his pencil eraser. Like everyone else, he is the star of his own life. He is seen and heard almost every day by the other band members and by his sixth-grade friends.

But to the great dragonfly's eye of Monroe Middle School, he is unseen. Even the thing that got him noticed at Satterfield—the losing—is gone. All of that is forgotten, left behind like candy wrappers. The clocks here tell nothing but time. Zinkoff is not a loser here. He is less than that. He is nobody. Long before the first snowfall, he sinks into nobodyness.

The flake rides in on the fringe of a northwest wind: sails high over Heatherwood before swinging toward the tarpaper roofs of the town, flies over Halftank Hill and Eva's Hoagie Hut and the post office, makes a beeline down Willow Street and on to the grass and asphalt sprawl of Monroe Middle School, dances for a moment outside a second-story window, leaps the spouting and, as if finally tired of it all, falls upon the roof.

In the classroom below, an eighth-grader looks up from the paper where he doodles. He sniffs. He cocks his head. He looks out the window, squints, half rises from his seat. His eyes widen, he throws up his arms:

“SNOW!”

Within seconds the whole school knows.

“It's only flurries.”

“That's just the start.”

“Could be a blizzard.”

“Snow day tomorrow!”

“Pray!”

By lunchtime it's still flurries. The students crowd at the windows of the cafeteria, chanting, “Snow! Snow! Snow!”

“It's only flurries.”

“That's all it's gonna do.”

“It's tricking us.”

“It's not sticking. Look. The ground's dry.”

By seventh period a new wind from the south blows the flurries away. The sky is white and still.

“Rats!”

By school day's end wet fat flakes splat on the students' upturned faces as they leap out of school.

“Snow day!”

“Snow day!”

“Snow day!”

Zinkoff loves school, but he loves snow days too, and tomorrow looks sure to be one. As he steps from the bus near his home, he sees that the snow is sticking. The sidewalk is already white. He
projects how deep the snow will be on Halftank Hill by tomorrow morning and he shouts, “Yahoo!” forgetting he doesn't say that anymore.

Since it is wet, the snow packs readily into balls, and snowball fights break out up and down the street and all over town. Front steps and car hoods are scraped clean as fast as the flakes can fall.

Three-minute dinners are the rule. Take off your gloves, gobble something down, ignore your mother's grumbling, on with the gloves, back outside, discover: The snow's up an inch!

 

It's dark by now, and there's something about snow falling under streetlights that makes a kid stop and look. But not for long. Snowballs fly out of the darkness, through the flake-falling tents of light, back into darkness.

The first snowplows come rumbling through. Except it's not a snowplow, it's a tank, and that's a bazooka in your hand. Bam!

Zinkoff is winding up for a tank attack when he first notices the light going by a block away. Then another, flashing red, white and blue. Kids are
turning, throwing arms slack. Someone is running.

He joins others heading for the lights. What could it be? Fire? Murder? Snow fights continue, but they're rolling skirmishes now, snow scooped on the run. Over one block, down two, over one.

It's Willow Street. The nine hundred block. It's lit up like a carnival.

Police cars, emergency vehicles: a parade of them up the street, the snowy humps of parked cars pulsing in the swirling lights, people shouting, running, watching from the steps. Hiss of radio voices. The snow is trampled on the sidewalks, rutted in the street.

Zinkoff ricochets like a pinball off milling bodies. Through the glittering snowfall he spots the Waiting Man glowing in his window. He looks like George Washington. He hears fragments:

“…lost…”

“…little girl…”

“…mother…”

“…freeze…”

“…frantic…”

“…leash…”

It's Claudia, the little girl on the leash.

She's lost.

For some reason he's not surprised. He imagines her sneaking off when her mother's back is turned. He imagines her squirming out of the harness, flinging away the leash, throwing her arms in the air with a great “Yahoo!” and bolting into the snow and down the street, free at last, much as he did when he was first allowed outside alone.

The lights cluster brilliantly up the street at Claudia's house. He thinks he sees her mother in the mob at the front step. He hears someone cry out.

He pulls off one glove. He has to do it one finger at a time; it's not easy because the glove is icy and wet. The glove is wet because the balls he has been throwing have been more slushballs than snowballs, because slushballs as everybody knows fly truer and harder, the only problem being they sog up your woolen gloves with icy wetness which, funny, you don't even notice until you stop throwing.

He pulls off the glove and reaches into his pants pocket and takes out his lucky stone, Claudia's gift, the pink petrified clump of bubblegum. He rolls it in his cold, wet fingers. He remembers a conversation with Claudia's mother. He remembers her saying something funny about being run over by a chicken. He remembers her saying that if Claudia ever started complaining about her leash, they would have to have a chat. He wonders if Claudia complained, or did she just skip that and take off?

He returns the lucky stone to his pocket. The lights are spilling across his eyes.

He begins to pull his glove back on, but the glove is colder than the night air. He removes the other glove. He stuffs them in his coat pockets, then discovers there's no warm place to put his hands. He takes the gloves from his pockets and stands there staring at his hands. He appears to be blushing in the red light spinning atop a nearby truck. He stacks the gloves neatly one upon the other and lays them on the top step of the nearest house.

He starts walking. A snowball hits him in the back.

“Hey, Zinkoff! C'mon!”

The other kids are still battling away. Snow warfare gains a new, thrilling edge when waged in the glare of police lights. Zinkoff walks on.

It seems like the whole town is either on the street or staring from the windows. Everyone is carrying a flashlight. The night is lights and eyes. A toddler in ski pajamas calls from a doorway: “Mommy! Can I look too?” The mother yells, the door slams shut.

The eight hundred block is a little less busy and bright but just as trampled. In the seven hundred block the light comes only from the windows. The search here is quieter: misted breathing, murmurs, the squeak of boots in snow. Once again he is aware of the falling flakes.

Two more blocks, and the sidewalk snow is untouched. He is alone. The words that have been inside him come out now in a whisper:
I will find her. I will find her.

He walks on.