Loser (8 page)

At dinner that day he says at the table, says it casually to show it's an everyday thing, “I'll be going over to my best friend's house one of these days.” Hoping his parents will take the bait and ask him who his best friend is.

They do. His mother's eyebrows go up. “Oh?” she says, “And who would that be?”

“Hector Binns,” he replies, tossing it out casually, being cool, liking the sound of it.

“Isn't he in your class?”

“Yeah. He sits in the front row. He loves licorice.”

“Loves it, huh?” says his father.

“Yeah.”

“I hate licorice,” says Polly. “Licorice smells.”

“He's making a candle,” he tells them.

“That's nice,” says his mother.

“Out of earwax.”

Everyone stops eating and stares at him.

“Earwax?”
says his mother.

“Eewwwww!” goes Polly.

“Is that possible?” says his father.

Zinkoff feels a surge of associated pride. He looks his dad in the eye. “He's doing it.”

Several days later he visits Hector Binns's house. He walks right in and plops himself down in a chair, because that's how you do it with a best friend: You walk right in and plop yourself down. When Binns's mother spots him her face goes all funny and she says, “Who are you?” But then Binns himself comes in and takes him off to his room.

They spend some time looking at Binns's stuff. He meets Nobody the lizard. Then Binns tells him to wait in the hallway and closes the bedroom door. When he opens it, he holds in his hand a brown pill bottle already filled with earwax. “This is the first one,” he says. “I keep it hid.”

Zinkoff can't believe he's being allowed to see it. He feels truly honored.

Riding home that day on his bicycle, Zinkoff notices the marks dotting the sidewalks. Black licorice spit marks. He smiles.

 

Zinkoff is determined to be the best best friend he can be.

One day Barry Peterson calls Binns “Heckie.” Zinkoff knows Binns hates being called that, so he says to Peterson, “Hey, that's not his name, it's Hector.” Because that's what you do, you stand up for your best friend.

And you eat lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he's the first person you think of.

Zinkoff does all of this, and more. He starts eating black licorice. He pretends it's chewing tobacco. He walks around with a chaw bulging from his cheek. He tries spitting pretend tobacco juice, but his mother puts a quick stop to that.

Binns is probably the most interesting person Zinkoff knows, with the possible exception of the Waiting Man, and Zinkoff soon decides he needs
to be interesting too. It's around that time that he discovers in one of his pockets a clump of petrified bubblegum. It's a gift from Claudia, the little leash-and-harness girl. It looks like a pink stone. He appoints it his lucky piece, which he will carry with him always and rub when he needs some luck. He feels more interesting already.

About a week into the best friendship, Zinkoff asks his mother if he can invite Binns to sleep over. She says sure. Excited, Zinkoff runs to the phone and calls Binns. Binns says, “I guess.” Binns never says “yes.” He always says “I guess.”

But the sleepover has problems. Binns turns out to be a kicker and a roller. Actually, he's a regular bulldozer in bed. Zinkoff wakes up to find himself thumping to the floor. He climbs back into bed, and as soon as he gets to sleep it happens again. After the third time he takes the extra blanket from the closet and makes himself a bed on the floor.

Except for his bed, after that night, he shares everything he can with his best friend: the lunch in his paper bag (he has outgrown the lunch pail
too), the allowance in his pocket, the candy in his hand, the joke in his giggle. He shares the nine hundred block of Willow with him. He introduces him to little Claudia on the leash. They walk their bikes past the Waiting Man. The lady with the walker isn't on the front step that day, so for days afterward Zinkoff keeps asking Binns if he wants to go back, because he wants Binns to hear her say, “Oh, mailman!” But Binns keeps saying, “I guess not.”

There is one thing more special than any other that Zinkoff intends to share with Binns. He saves it for weeks and weeks, and when he can no longer bear to wait, he gives it to Binns. He gives it to him after school one day in a brown paper lunch bag. Binns opens the bag. In it is a little tin that says “Altoids.” Zinkoff found the tin on the street. Binns opens the Altoids tin and stares.

“What is it?” he says.

Zinkoff beams. “Wax.”

Binns stares, first at the contents of the tin, then at Zinkoff. That's all he does, stare.

“It's mine,” says Zinkoff. “From my own ears.
I've been saving it up. I know it's not much, but I couldn't wait any longer. I figured you could add it to yours and get enough for a candle faster.” He doesn't tell him that he tried to get Polly to contribute, but she refused.

Binns looks into the Beyond. He bends a licorice stick and stuffs it into his mouth. He slowly closes the lid of the Altoids tin and hands it back to Zinkoff. “I guess not,” he says.

Zinkoff shrugs. “Okay.” He understands. When a kid is making an earwax candle, he wants everything to come from his own ears. Zinkoff figures maybe he'll save up for a candle of his own. He wonders if that would count as a science project.

And then it's over.

When is it over?

Zinkoff doesn't know for weeks. He is only dimly aware of things, dimly aware that as time goes by he seems to be seeing less and less of Binns. He rides to Binns's house and Binns isn't there. He phones. Binns says he has homework to do. He asks Binns this, asks him that. Binns always seems to say, “I guess not.” Even Binns's voice over the phone seems to shrug, seems to be looking into the Beyond.

And then one spring day on the way to school Zinkoff sees a cluster of licorice spit marks on a sidewalk, and it makes him feel a little sad and remembery, and just like that he knows: It's over.

And something new begins.

On that same spring day something happens to Zinkoff. An A happens to him. A's almost
never happen to Zinkoff, absolutely never in major tests. But this was a major test in Geography, his favorite subject, and somehow he has aced it. In fact, his A is the only A in class—a fact which Mrs. Shankfelder announces while holding up his test paper for all the world to see.

Zinkoff gets an ovation, his first ever. Several kids stand. Barry Haines even whistles, though probably more to show off his whistle than to honor Zinkoff. Congratulations continue to pour in all day. Pats on the back. Playful punches in the arm. Hair mussings. He wonders if it happened because he rubbed his lucky pink bubblegum stone before taking the test.

In the playground people want to see it. They snatch it from Zinkoff's hand and rub it over their faces and chests and under their arms like a washcloth, rubbing in the A juice, sighing, “Ahhh!” and everyone laughs, and Zinkoff laughs hardest of all.

Like gaudy birds, his name flies in new forms across the schoolyard:

“The Zink!”

“The Z man!”

“The genius!”

“The Zinkster!”

It never occurs to Zinkoff that all the fuss is more than a simple A can account for. It never occurs to him that the loudest and showiest of his congratulators are really not congratulating him at all, but mocking him for blundering into the only A he is ever likely to get.

Zinkoff does not see this.

All he sees is that he seems to have acquired the power to make people happy. The very sight of him brings smiles and twinkly eyes to his schoolmates. Spotting him, boys jerk to a halt, plant their legs as if straddling a motorcycle, thrust a pair of finger-pistols at him and bellow: “There he is!”

Hands sprout like weeds to be high-fived.

“Yo Zink!”

As he comes to the dinner table one night, he stands for a moment at his chair. He thumps his chest with his fist, declares “Ahm da Zink!” and sits down.

His mother and father look at each other.

His sister Polly says, “You da
what
?”

And then this too is over, and like the best friendship, it's over before he knows it. In fact, it has never been quite what he thought it was in the first place.

One day Zinkoff notices that, except for Katie Snelsen and a few others, no one smiles at him anymore. No one is high-fiving him, no one yo-Zinking him. He thinks about it, and he figures he knows why. Field Day is coming. And no one takes Field Day more seriously than fifth-graders. And that's what Zinkoff thinks it is, merely a turning of attention from himself to Field Day. He has heard his last “Yo,” seen his last smile. Okay, he thinks, no problem, and he puts on his own game face.

He brings chairs from the kitchen to the backyard and practices the weave-around-the-chairs race and the one-foot hop and the hiney hop. He goes out onto the sidewalk, and just as he did when he was little, he races cars to the end of the block, and it surprises him that the cars seem so
much faster these days. He does jumping jacks.

Meanwhile in school, Gary Hobin is rising to prominence, as he does every year around Field Day time. Field Day is still two weeks away when Hobin goes to Mrs. Shankfelder and asks her to pick the four teams now. “We want to have time to practice together,” he says.

So Mrs. Shankfelder writes across the top of the greenboard:

Then she writes each student's name on a slip of paper and mixes them in a box. She calls Ronni Jo Thomas up front and tells her to turn her head away and pick a slip from the box. The first name out of the box goes in the RED column, the next name in the YELLOW column, and so on until each student is assigned to a team.

Gary Hobin is a Yellow.

So is Zinkoff.

“Oh no!” blurts Hobin the moment he sees Zinkoff's name go up under his.

The teacher turns from the board. “Pardon me?”

“We can't be on the same team again,” says Hobin. “We're supposed to be on different teams each year, to make it fair.”

Mrs. Shankfelder frowns. “Don't be silly. There's no such rule.”

Hobin snarls under his breath, “There is now.”

Ten minutes later Zinkoff receives a note on his desk. The note says, “Forget Yellow. Join another team.”

On the playground at lunchtime, Hobin comes to Zinkoff. “Did you get the note?”

“Yeah,” says Zinkoff. “What's it mean?”

“It means what it says. You're not a Yellow. Join another team.”

“But I
am
a Yellow. Mrs. Shankfelder said so.”

Hobin is taller than Zinkoff. He leans down until his eyes are locked into Zinkoff's. Zinkoff can smell the hot dog on his breath. “Listen,” says Hobin, “you're not gonna make me lose again. There's no way you're gonna be on my team. Y'understand? Forget it.”

Zinkoff is confused. A week ago, Hobin was high-fiving him and calling him “The Zink!” And now this.

“But I practice,” says Zinkoff. “I'm good now.”

Hobin laughs. “You're a loser. You lose. Go lose with somebody else. You're
not
a Yellow.” He walks off, turns back. “And you can't even walk right.”

It's in Zinkoff's mind to say “But I got an A!” but he knows it will make no difference.

Each team has a captain, Hobin, of course, being captain of the Yellows. In the days that follow, Zinkoff approaches each of the other team captains and asks if they could use a new member. Each one says no.

Zinkoff does not know what to do.

He is tempted to tell Mrs. Shankfelder of his problem and let her handle it. But he thinks better of it.

He is too embarrassed to tell his parents, to admit that no one wants him on their team.

He rubs his lucky pink bubblegum stone, hoping to change his luck.

And he continues to practice. If anything, he
practices even harder and longer. He is not home for dinner on the last day before Field Day, and his mother has to send Polly out to find him racing cars two blocks away. And even as he gasps for breath walking home, listening to Polly harp at him, he knows what he will do.

He gets up as usual the next day and heads off to school, but he does not arrive. He veers and walks the other way. In the distance he hears the late bell, and he wants to run to it, but he does not. He walks the streets of town. He looks at his feet, trying to see what Hobin sees.

The town is the same and not the same. The same brick housefronts and sidewalks, but no kids. He feels the picture he lives in has been tilted. He has never been so aware of air, the space around him. He feels like he did when he wandered by mistake into the girls' room. (He is the only person he knows to have done so more than once.) A woman across the street in a flowery bathrobe leans from her front door to pick up a newspaper on the step. A yellow cat, emerging from an airshaft, studies him for a moment and darts back in.

He tries walking the alleys, and that's worse. He's unhappy everywhere. He is nowhere. He wishes to be somewhere. He wishes to be with people. But he cannot go to school, and he cannot go home. Ultimately he walks to the nine hundred block of Willow.

As he heads up the sidewalk he is comforted to see that the Waiting Man is there, even at this strange time of day. He waves to the Waiting Man and aches for a wave in return. It occurs to him to do a silly little dance, to see if the Waiting Man will smile, but he chickens out.

Claudia, the little girl in the harness, is not outside today. He is tempted to knock on the door. “Can Claudia come out and play?” How silly would that sound? Him eleven years old.

“Oh, mailman!”

He turns. She's across the street, leaning on the walker. He runs to her. He wants to hug her, he's so happy she's there.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” she says. It sounds funny, “Hi” coming from such an old person. He has the impression
he could teach her to speak, like a talking bird. She reminds him of a bird, the thin legs sticking out from the bathrobe. School mornings must be the time of bathrobes.

“Come on in,” she says. As if she knows he needs to be someplace. She doesn't say, “What are you doing here, it's a school day.” She doesn't say, “What's going on?” or “Where's your bike?” She just says, “Come on in,” as if this happens all the time.

He goes in.