Loser (7 page)

At Satterfield Elementary you can't go any higher than fifth grade, so fifth-graders rule the school. When other students look at you, most of what they see is bigger and better. You know more. You eat more. You draw better. You sing better. You throw farther and run faster. You go to the head of the line. You drink longest at the water fountains. You even talk louder and laugh harder.

If you have made it through the first four grades, fifth grade is your reward. The payoff. And it comes in ways that aren't even visible. It comes as a feeling whenever you are in the presence of kids from the lower grades, a feeling, even though nobody says it, that you are the most important. Fifth grade is a great time to be alive.

All of this greets Zinkoff when he returns to
school, and he loves it. He loves being a fifth-grader.

Something else is there too. It has been growing through the summer after taking root in the yellow dust of the playground. It has invaded the school building and multiplied abundantly. As Zinkoff's classmates return in September, many of them pick it up along with their new pencils and other school supplies.

It is the word. It is Zinkoff's new name. It is not in the roll book.

Rarely does anyone say his new name to his face, but it is often said behind a giggle or a cough. It comes from here, from there. Zinkoff sometimes senses someone being called, but the sound of it is not the sound of his name as he knows it, so he does not turn.

And then one day, for no good reason, hearing the name, he does turn. But no one is looking at him, so he thinks he must be mistaken. And the voices continue, and again he turns, and again. But no one is ever looking, no one ever seems to have spoken. It is as if the voices are
coming from the walls and the clocks and the lights in the ceiling.

Loser.

The discovery and renaming of Zinkoff is a great convenience to the student body. Zinkoff has been tagged and bagged, and now virtually everything he does can be dumped into the same sack. His sloppy handwriting and artwork, his hapless fluting, his mediocre grades, his clumsiness, his birthmark—everything is seen as an extension of his performance on Field Day, everything is seen as a matter of losing. It is as if he loses a hundred races every day.

But except for the voices of the clocks, Zinkoff is unaware of all this. He is too busy thinking about himself to notice what others are thinking. He is busy growing up. He is busy growing out.

By the start of fifth grade Zinkoff has grown out of a whole flock of beliefs: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, rabbits' feet, talking dinosaurs, the Man in the Moon, unicorns, gremlins, dragons, sidewalk cracks. Though he is
still scared stiff of the dark in the cellar, he no longer believes in the Furnace Monster. Beliefs are just flying off him. Thus unweighted, he can feel himself growing taller.

He no longer wears paper stars on his shirts, though he does continue to accept congratulations. He replaces his little-kid giggle with a big-kid laugh, which he works on in his bedroom—to the annoyance of Polly, who thinks she is always missing something funny. He no longer yells “Yahoo!” (But he still wants to be a mailman, and he still says his prayers at night.) He admits to sleeping.

He tries to outgrow being clumsy, but it doesn't work. His handwriting is still atrocious, but only to others, not to himself, so he doesn't worry about it.

One Saturday his mother has a yard sale. She asks him if he minds her selling some of his old toys, the ones Polly has no use for. “No problem,” he says. Then she brings out his old giraffe hat. Would he mind her selling this? He looks at it. Faded, fuzzworn. Hasn't seen it in years.
Whatever once possessed him to put that silly thing on his head? “No problem,” he says, and feels himself pop up another half inch.

He loves growing up, loves feeling himself take up more space in this world.

He is allowed to go farther from home now. He has a bike, a secondhand yard sale two-wheeler with a junior rattle of its own that reminds him of his father's car, so he calls it Clinker One. He loves it. He's allowed to ride it almost anywhere in town, as long as he stays on the sidewalks and walks it across streets. Sometimes he obeys, sometimes not.

His favorite place to go is the nine hundred block of Willow Street, where he delivered the mail on Take Zinkoff to Work Day when he was seven. The Waiting Man is still there, at the window, staring up the street, his hair longer about the ears, missing more on top. One thing Zinkoff has definitely not outgrown is thinking about the Waiting Man. Sometimes he parks his bike and walks up the street so the Waiting Man will be looking right at him. But even then the Waiting
Man doesn't seem to see him. Sometimes he stands under the window, hoping the Waiting Man will turn his head, at least that. But he never does.

So fierce is the Waiting Man's concentration, so endless his patience that Zinkoff half expects the missing-in-action brother to burst into existence one day right there on the sidewalk. Twice, in fact, he dreams that a soldier toting a rifle on his shoulder is walking toward him. The longer the soldier does not really appear, the worse Zinkoff feels for the brother in the window. He cannot believe the world will allow such waiting and wanting to go unrewarded.

For several excited days he has an idea. He will dress himself in camouflage pants and shirt, pull on some boots and find an old rifle or BB gun somewhere and go walking up Willow Street—just to give the man a moment or two of happiness. But he soon realizes that would be cruel, and he ditches the whole idea.

Sometimes as he pedals up the nine hundred block the lady with the walker is there on her top step. Whenever she spots him she calls,
“Mailman! Oh, mailman!” After a while he always makes sure he has a letter for her, a little note that says “Hi, how are you?” or “I hope you are feeling well.” He's older now, so his letters don't have to be nonsense.

And now there is someone new, a little girl. Her brown hair is always gathered in a puppy tail with a yellow band. Apparently she has only recently learned to walk, because she lurches when she takes a step and her little dumpling knees wobble. She can never get far, however, as she is attached to a leash.

The leash is a length of clothesline. One end is hooked to a harness which the little girl wears like a strap jacket. Sometimes the other end is tied around an ancient bootscrape, sometimes it's in the hand of the little girl's mother, who in warm weather sits on the front steps reading a book.

“I never saw a person with a leash on,” Zinkoff says one day, curiosity drawing him and his bike to the curb. He's thinking how he would have hated a leash.

The mother looks up from her book and gives
him a fine smile. “I never did either,” she says. “I lived on a farm and all my mother had to worry about was me being run over by a chicken.”

Zinkoff laughs. “Does she like it?”

The mother looks at her daughter. “I don't think she likes or dislikes it. Yet, anyway. As far as she's concerned, this is just the way life is. First you crawl, then you get a leash. If she starts to complain, I guess we'll have to have a chat.”

“She talks?” says Zinkoff.

The mother laughs. “About three words. That's why I win all the arguments. So far.”

Whenever they are out front, Zinkoff stops his bike to say hello. He finds out that the little girl's name is Claudia. After a while, Claudia begins to recognize him. She totters out to meet him at the curb, the leash's limit. She seems to be a giving person. She always reaches down into the gutter and picks up something—a pebble, discarded chewing gum—and holds it out to him. It's always dirty, her mother always scolds her, and Zinkoff, not wanting to be ungrateful, always says a formal “thank you” to Claudia and pockets the gift.

 

On days when he doesn't cruise nine hundred Willow he often rides to Halftank Hill. Halftank Hill is in the park and the best part of it is a grassy, evilly steep slope that commands:
Come down me!
And they do, kids from all over town, in all seasons of the year. They sled down, they run down, roll down, tumble down, bicycle down, tricycle down, Rollerblade down, skateboard down, trashcan-lid down.

Early in his life, when Zinkoff raced cars along the sidewalk, he had believed himself to be the fastest kid in the world. Now that he knows this to be untrue, Halftank Hill has become all the more appealing to him.

Sometimes he runs, because it is the only way he can experience, for just a moment, a particularly fascinating feeling. Halfway down the hill he can feel himself losing control, his legs cannot keep up with his speed. He feels as if he is coming apart, running out of himself, leaving himself behind.

Sometimes he bikes it. He aims the front tire over the grassy crest and down he goes, and for
those few seconds nothing can convince him that he is not the fastest thing in the universe, and even though he's too big now to yell yahoo he yells it anyway: “Yahoo!” And rediscovers every time that no one is slow on Halftank Hill. And there are no clocks.

Sometimes he doesn't want to ride anywhere in particular. Sometimes he doesn't want to ride fast. He just wants to ride. That's when he aims Clinker One for the alleys, where cats and little kids roam but no cars, a bicycle's boulevard, and he rides, just rides, and it's good enough.

And so Zinkoff's life in fifth grade is filled with things new and interesting and good enough. And until the day of the test-that-is-not-a-test, it never occurs to him that something has been missing.

It isn't a schoolwork test. There has been nothing to study for. There has been no warning. One day in fifth grade the teacher, Mrs. Shankfelder, simply passes out booklets with blue covers. Barry Peterson says, “Is this a test?” and she says no, she calls it some big word. But Zinkoff looks at it and sees that there are questions and there are little egg spaces to fill in for answers. It's a test.

Every other school test Zinkoff has ever taken has been about some classroom subject: arithmetic, geography, spelling. This test seems to be about himself. What does he think about this? Why does he do that? Which one of these does he prefer?

Halfway through, Zinkoff has to admit this is the first test he has ever taken that is almost fun. It's one more thing this year that makes him feel grown-up. Most of the answers come easily to
him, until on the next-to-last page he arrives at a question that stumps him:

Who is your best friend?

Unlike most of the other questions, this one isn't multiple choice. No little eggs to fill in, just a blank line that needs a name.

If he had this test back in second grade, he would have filled in Andrew Orwell's name. But Andrew, his neighbor, has long since moved, and no obvious replacement comes to mind.

Oh sure, Zinkoff has friends. There's Bucky Monastra, who he plays marbles with. And Peter Grilot, the second sloppiest kid in class. And Katie Snelsen, who smiles at him every time she sees him. Friends all, but not best friends.

He knows what a best friend is. He sees them all over. Best friends are Burt O'Neill and George Undercoffler. Or Ellen Dabney and Ronni Jo Thomas. Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other's house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other's parents. You can't pry them apart.

Zinkoff doesn't have anybody like that. Most
of the time he doesn't think about it. But now and then he does. He wonders what it would be like to be so stuck to another kid that you could walk into his kitchen and his mother wouldn't even look up because she's that used to you, and she would say, “Wash your hands and sit down, you're late for dinner.” It seems kind of neat, thinking of it that way, and sometimes he regrets he doesn't have a best friend. But then he usually thinks about his own mother and his father and Polly and he thinks about the nine hundred block of Willow and he figures he is doing okay.

Until he comes to this question—
Who is your best friend?
—and that blank space seems to be saying to him:
If you don't have one, you'd better get one.

He skips over the question to finish the rest of the test. He returns to it. Time is passing. Pretty soon Mrs. Shankfelder will say, “Pencils up.”

Best friend…best friend…

“One more minute,” says Mrs. Shankfelder, who does not usually give a warning.

He panics. He looks around the classroom, too bad if the teacher thinks he's cheating. His eye settles on Hector Binns, way up in the first
row. Hector's head is down, his shoulders hunched. He's working away on the test.

Hector Binns has been in Zinkoff's class since first grade, so of course Zinkoff knows who he is. Over the years they have found themselves at the same water fountain or monkey bar rung. But Hector Binns, being a B, has always sat far from Zinkoff, and Zinkoff's information about him is spotty at best. This is the sum of what he knows: Hector Binns wears glasses, he is about Zinkoff's height, he loves black licorice and he's always cleaning out his ear with a paper clip. And now that he thinks of it, there's one more thing: As far as Zinkoff knows, Hector Binns is available. He has no best friend either.

“Pencils up.”

Quickly he fills in the blank, misspelling both first and last names: “Hecter Binz.”

 

He can hardly wait for recess. He finds Hector Binns by the bicycle rack, working on his ear with a paper clip.

“Hi, Hector,” he says. “What's up?”

“Huh?” replies Hector Binns. Zinkoff repeats,
“What's up?” but Hector doesn't seem to hear. Maybe his hearing goes bad when the paper clip is in his ear. Otherwise, he doesn't seem unfriendly, so Zinkoff just stands there.

Binns goes at his ear with a gusto that Zinkoff has never noticed before. He digs and scrapes, wincing in pain or pleasure, Zinkoff can't tell which. He pulls out the paper clip and examines it. To Zinkoff's eye it's clean. Binns plunges it into the other ear. Dig, scrape, wince. This time the clip comes out with a tiny waxy orangish crumb clinging to the end of it.

Binns pulls from his pants pocket a small brown plastic bottle, the kind that pills come in. He brings the bottle to his mouth and for an instant Zinkoff thinks he's going to eat it, but he simply pulls off the white flip-top cap with his teeth. He taps the paper clip on the rim of the bottle and in falls the waxy crumb. Zinkoff notices that the bottle is half full. Binns returns bottle and paper clip to his pocket. Only then does Binns seem to notice that he is not alone.

The obvious question crawls to the front of Zinkoff's tongue, but somehow he holds it back.
“So,” he says, “who did you answer for best friend?”

Binns pulls out a pack of black licorice sticks from another pocket. He rips off half a stick and begins to chew. “Nobody,” he says.

“Really?” says Zinkoff. “You left it blank? Can you do that?”

Binns shakes his head. Except for that first moment, his eyes never meet Zinkoff's. He always seems to be looking into the Beyond. “I wrote Nobody. The word Nobody.”

“Oh,” says Zinkoff, nodding, thinking he understands. “Nobody. Okay.”

Binns stuffs the rest of the stick into his mouth and returns the pack to his pocket. “Nobody is my lizard.”

Zinkoff stares at the eyes that stare at the Beyond. Suddenly he gets it. “Oh! You have a lizard named Nobody.”

Binns blinks, which Zinkoff takes for a nod.

“And you put him down as your best friend.” Another blink. “Okay, I got it.”

Hector Binns collects earwax and has a lizard named Nobody, who he calls his best friend.
Zinkoff figures his choice is looking better by the minute.

“Know who I put down?” he says.

“No,” says Binns.

“You,” says Zinkoff.

Binns blinks. His eyes disconnect from the Beyond and slide over to Zinkoff's face. “Huh?” he says.

Zinkoff grins. “Yeah. I put your name down.”

Binns's eyelids flap as if they're trying to take off. “Me? Why?”

“Because I had to put
somebody's
name down, and I thought of you.”

“But I'm not your best friend.”

“I know. And I'm not yours either. But I thought maybe we
could
be, I mean, since I wrote your name down and all.”

Hector Binns isn't answering. His eyes have gone back to the Beyond.

Zinkoff doesn't know the word negotiation, but that's what this is. He tries to think of something he can offer, something to sweeten the pot. “I make a mean snickerdoodle cookie!” he blurts.

Binns's left cheek bulges out as he chews on his
licorice wad. When his teeth appear, they're outlined in black, as if cartoon-drawn. As a fifth-grader, Zinkoff knows cool when he sees it. He takes a stab at cool himself. He shuffles his feet. He hooks his thumbs into his waistband. He gazes off into a Beyond of his own. “So,” he says, tossing in a shrug, “what do you think?” Making it sound like, “Not that I care one way or the other.”

Binns sniffs. He turns his head until he's looking down over his right shoulder. His lips slide to the side of his face, the far corner of his mouth opens like a little eye and out comes a black dollop of licorice juice. It falls to the ground. At last he speaks, and answers Zinkoff's held-back question. “What I think is, when I get enough wax I'm gonna make a candle.”

Wow! An earwax candle! Zinkoff is willing to bet that Binns has not shared this blockbuster information with anyone else in class.

The end-of-recess bell rings. The two of them trot side by side to the door. “See ya after school?” says Zinkoff.

Binns says, “I guess.”