Losers (17 page)

My mouth came open, about to reply. But she pre-empted me, asking instead, “So what are you doing here? And why are you hanging out with these clowns?”

I glanced around, at Bates and the still-hiding Crash Goldberg, who was currently being surrounded by three gutter
punks in gold jewelry and puffy Eagles jackets, each of whom looked more eager than the others to make an imprint of that jewelry in Crash's skull.

I paused. I was on the precipice of telling her everything that had happened since the first conversation we'd had, the first time that I'd met her, in the restaurant. I wanted to tell her about becoming popular, about losing my accent, about hanging out with Devin, and, most of all, about discovering downtown. How there was a world beyond the Yards, and how there were people around that were so cool and how we didn't have to hang out with guys like this, the type of guys who beat me up every day for the first seven years of my public education, the type of guys who probably ridiculed her every time she used correct grammar or spoke in an accent that they didn't understand.

And so I did.

“We're on our way home from a rock show,” I said. “It was this band called Prowler. They're amazing. They aren't big yet, they're just a bunch of café kids who leave flyers lying around downtown, but they're going to be huge. They really could do it. And it's amazing—there are all these coffeehouses and art galleries and even some clubs, and all kinds of people hang out there—” I thought about telling her about Bates's and my adventures at Bubbles, but decided now was probably not the proper time. “And it's really completely amazing. And since we talked that first time, things have gotten really insane. I got popular. Everyone at school knows who I am, and I get invited to parties constantly, and Bates even says that this girl, Devin Murray, the hottest girl in school—she's, like, practically the dictionary definition of conventionally beautiful—and Bates keeps saying
that we should, like, get together, and I even think he might be right. But you know what? I don't really care. Not to sound arrogant or anything, but I'm not interested in her. She's nice, and she's cool and smart and funny—she isn't any of the stereotypes—but it's just that I'm not into her. Or any of the girls downtown. They're interesting and thoughtful and cultured, they're everything that I wanted to get out of the Yards to get away from, but they still live in their narrow little worlds, afraid to talk to me. They aren't like you at all. And I really think—I keep hoping that I'll run into you so I can tell you—I just want you to know, I think you're really amazing.”

Everyone on the train was silent. Bates, Crash, the guy with the knife. The guys who had been looming over Crash, about to capture him or something, actually took a step back. They all waited, curious and uncertain. Everyone looked like they really wanted to hear what was going to happen next.

Then, into the aura of solemnity that I had somehow imposed, someone's voice broke out. It was the guy with the knife.

“Can we
please
get our shit together here, folks?” he bellowed. “I believe we were in the middle of something?”

Margie raised her hand—palm up, fingers stiff together. “Cut it, Jimmy,” she said. “Just get off the train or something, okay? We're in the middle of something.”

Jimmy looked like he was going to argue with her, but the train pulled to a stop just then. The guys who were holding Bates let go of him. Jimmy sheathed his knife quickly, and they all poured out of the subway car.

And then it was just the two of us.

Margie stood in the aisle, and so did I. We faced each other,
suddenly feeling very formal, somehow
meaningful
, as though we were destined to be standing right here, right now. She looked totally different, standing alone in the middle of the car. Her black Guns N' Roses ripped-sleeves T-shirt and cut-off jeans turned her into some sort of postmodern artsy Gothic girl. Her pale skin and even whiter hair made her surreal, luminescent, so vividly and throbbingly
alive
against the dullness of the subway car. Okay, we weren't really alone—Bates and Crash were both sitting on the edges of seats, eyes wide and breath racing, both trying to figure out what had just happened—but, as far as we were concerned, they were in another universe.

Or, at least, as far as one of us was concerned.

“Wow, Margie,” I said. “I can't believe I ran into you again. It was really cool of you to save our lives like that.”

When I called her Margie, her face scrunched into a question mark, but then softened into an expression of grace and understanding. She laughed a little, candid and sort of nervous. “Hey, no problem, Jupiter. Anything I can do.”

“So you'll go out with me, then?” I blurted out.

At once, I realized the severity of my words. I had never asked a girl out before, and I guess I'd always just assumed that it was something that one might bring up naturally in a conversation, along the lines of
How are you?
or
Have you heard the new Cookie Jar record?
As soon as I'd said it, however, I realized the inflexibility of such a question. Like the turning point in our relationship. Like the turning point in my life, and the two vast, extreme directions it could go from here.

“Oh, Jupiter,” she said, sweetly and gently. “No.”

“Oh.”

My
oh
could not have been more different than hers. Margie's
was kind, lilting, easy, and noncommittal, the kind of
oh
that is sung more than said. Mine was like a winter blizzard, sudden and hard, a punch in the stomach. Deflated.

“Jupiter, you
met
Jimmy. He's my boyfriend. Granted, he's not very sociable, but what do ya want? He's actually a pretty good guy. Give or take the occasional knife fight. And he's a vegetarian.”

I'm a vegetarian, too,
I thought about saying, but didn't, because I wasn't.

“Listen, I have to go. I'll grab a taxi at the next stop, hook up with the guys. This is—this isn't what we ordinarily do. They don't even really need money—they have like a
zillion
hook-ups. It's just a thing. It just keeps them busy.”

“Uh…right,” I said, floundering for something to say that didn't sound incredibly juvenile in response to that.

“But…you glad I could get you out of that?”

I grinned. “Yeah, just as they were about to puncture Bates like a big red balloon. That part was cool. Thanks for the rescue, Margie.”

“Hey, no problem.” Like clockwork, the train glided to a stop and the doors slid open. She stepped into the doorway, one (long, thin, ivorylike) hand over the door. She flashed me a smile, which didn't feel charitable so much as purely beautiful, a smile I would have bathed in the memory of for the rest of my life. “I'll see you around, Jupiter.”

“Wait!” I cried suddenly. The train was whirring up; the door was going to shut in a minute.

“Yeah?”

“You know that keg you guys stole from the party I saw you at? The warehouse one?”

“Yeah, I remember. It's still around. Marcus has it in his room with a Flyers flag on top of it. Why?”

A computer voice on the subway loudspeakers said, “
Please
stand away from the doors.” The standard alarm bells started to go off, and all the doors except for hers slid halfway shut and open again.

“You think I could get it back? There's this girl I kind of want to impress.”

She thought for a second.

Then she said, “Tell me her locker number.”

When she stepped off the train, Bates and Crash shot immediately over to where I was sitting. They started gushing, flooding me with questions and exclamations. I tried my best to answer, but I was totally gone—staring out the window at the night, shivering, lost in the wonder of my own gloriously weird life.

We got the letter in the mail a few days later, delivered by certified post. We'd never gotten one of those before. It was a Saturday morning. At first, I think, I didn't even really believe it was true. I mean, did special deliveries even
happen
on Saturdays? But the doorbell rang and my mom walked over to the big grated garage door and grabbed the latch and swung it open.

The letter carrier looked around our suddenly exposed kitchen, confused as anything.

“I need to have somebody sign for this,” he told my mother. “Registered mail. It's addressed to the Glazer family, North Diamond Street at this address?”

“That's us,” my mom said, plucking the letter from his fingers.
Ignoring him, she ran to the kitchen table, grabbed a butcher knife, and sliced it open. Hastily, apologetically, my father scribbled his name across the clipboard.

I leaped up from my stool. The spoon clattered on the edge of my cereal bowl indecisively, wavered for a moment, and finally plunged the wrong way down onto the unfinished surface of the kitchen counter. I felt nervous, but I was afraid to even feel that. It was probably nothing. A letter from our family in Zvrackova, a request for a parent-teacher on the subject of my increasingly lousy grades.

My mother held it up to the light and started to read.

Her face went through a series of emotions. Confusion, impassivity, meditative pleased-ness. “Is us!” she cried, finally, triumphantly. “Is
ours
!”

“What's ours?” I exclaimed, although the sensation in my chest was a curious buzz, as though my lungs and nerves had thrown themselves a preemptory victory party and were well on their way to getting drunk. I hesitated to think that I already knew the answer.

“The factory!” she cried. “The letter is from Goldberg, says that company has found another factory to sell! Our company is going to buy—we don't got to move!”

She ran to my father, flung herself with arms wide, small trails of fat wobbling near her elbows, and squeezed his scant chest tight. He adjusted his glasses. From behind, a single solitary tear gleamed, and in the space of a second—before he waved at me with a still-hugging arm, calling me over to join in the family celebration—I thought it was a diamond, rolling down his cheek.

The next morning in the special schoolwide assembly where a 9/11 survivor recounted his tale of horror and lectured us about how to be upstanding citizens, Devin Murray walked right up to the front row where I was sitting and planted a big, loud, and not totally embarrassing kiss on my cheek. Her lips lingered there for several seconds. It wasn't at all like the hard, quick kiss that my mother gave me on the forehead every night before bed. Devin's was soft, gentle, sensual, and gummy—almost like, in those few seconds and those few centimeters, her entire body had glided against that small square of cheek, stimulating me almost to the point of physical materialization. I shot down fast into the foldable wooden seat, hoping that none of the 690 freshmen in the rows behind me would notice my manifesting arousal. Luckily, they were too busy hooting me on to pay it any heed.

I mean, I didn't even know what my reward was for.

It wasn't until that night, sitting on the roof of the factory—
our
factory—that Vadim told me how a 150-gallon beer keg had spontaneously materialized in the second-floor corridor, directly in front of Devin's locker, when school had opened that morning. And it had sat there, uninterrupted—although several teachers and Dr. Mayhew demanded to know how it had gotten there, what it was doing, but since it was empty, there was no point trying to suspend anyone—until the middle of second period, when Devin phoned the deposit place and had two men in brown delivery uniforms pick it up.

“And that, my friend,” Vadim finished with a flourish, “is how cool you really are. You solve up the whole case, and you don't even have to be there to do it.”

“Thanks,” I said, surprised by the sudden weariness in my own voice. “But I don't really feel like being cool anymore.”

I said it, thinking that it was just a basic statement of fact, like not being hungry anymore at the end of dinner, or not feeling like playing baseball anymore, now that summer's over. But it felt right. Ever since I moved to America, I had teachers and parents and guidance counselors telling me,
You'll find your place.
At first, I thought that it was something you had to win, like first place. As if once I scored an A on five straight tests, then I'd get to hang out with Reg or Devin as a reward.

Now that I had—not that I'd scored any As on tests, but now that I'd hung out with both of them—it didn't feel like such a thrill. The whole idea of
finding your place
seemed to make more sense, at least in my head, but I still hadn't settled on any one place yet. Hanging out with Crash and Bates seemed fun. It wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Hell, it wasn't even what I wanted to do with the rest of my week. But it was cool to know that, whenever I wanted to hang out with them, they were there to be hung out with. I could pretty much go on whatever path I wanted, end up in whatever place I wanted to be in. Even Margie probably was hang-outable—and she wouldn't be that hard to find.

But, for now, here was where I wanted to be. In my own little world, and on top of it. We were well into September by now, and the sunsets were definitely getting earlier. Beneath Vadim and me, the Yards twinkled like the inverted sky of an alternate universe, dull yellow streetlights and fluorescent white factory lights glowing instead of stars. The minty green glow of Vadim's laptop illuminated our faces as we gazed out into the universe below us.

“Dude,” Vadim said, “I bet I could hack into your family's factory software and get all the machines to form little steel
J
s if you wanted.”

“Nah.” I shook my head. “Cool idea, but we'd have to reprogram everything before work tomorrow.”

“‘We'? Does this mean you're rejoining the corporate workforce?”