Losers

by Matthue Roth

  “She is. But now her skin turns into diamond, too,” Vadim replied. “Hey, do you know Devin Murray?”

  “Devin?” I shot up. “She’s—uh, she used to go to Malcolm X with us last year. She did that sexy dance last Christmas with the girls in Santa Claus miniskirts.” What I wasn’t saying was that she was also, hands-down, the hottest girl in our grade—both in the traditional babe sense and in the very real sense, too, the kind that, every time you look at her face, it seems like her eyes are even bigger and her cheeks are even smoother than you remember her. She had the kind of face that was both totally honest and totally unapproachable—and she had the reputation to go with it. The longest she had dated anyone was Reg Callowhill, who was both an all-city lacrosse player and went to private school. Eight months after their second-date breakup, the world was still talking about it. “Why do you ask?”

  “‘Cause she’s got an online journal, and she just posted this announcement about a party tonight in the Yards.”

  “The Yards? No way, Vadim—it’s gotta be a practical joke. Her family lives on the other side of the Northeast, in those luxury converted lofts. She’d never be seen in public around here, let alone…”

  “I’m telling you, it’s right here. I completely just found her secret online journal.”

  I glanced at the monitor. Sure enough, at the top it said Devin’s World of Secrets, and the background colors were yellow and red, North Shore’s official color scheme. Trust Devin to wave the patriotic flag fresh in the first week of school.

  “ ‘It’s the social event of the season,’ ” Vadim read. As he went on, the words sounded like alien dialect coming from his mouth, popular-girl grammar with his thick Russian accent. “ ‘Come one, come all, to the first annual North Shore Opening Week Stress-Free Zone! Mixers, pyrotechnics, and an iPod DJ station. Help the North Shore freshman class kick it in style, and get those party impulses out while we still can.’ ”

  He had me convinced—at least, convinced enough to put down the comic and come spy on Devin’s World of Secrets.

  “How did you find this, Vadim?”

  “My parents were saying I needed to get out more, so I Google Alerted the words ‘North Shore,’ ‘freshman,’ and ‘party,’ and this was the first thing that came up.”

  “And you’re sure it’s the same Devin, the same North Shore? Her last name’s on it?”

  “Well, no. And if you read the entry, it appears like she’s taking great pains not to reveal her real identity. All her friends are mentioned by first names only. But if you click here, you can see her user profile—her home city is Philadelphia, and her email’s devinm at whatever. Hey, isn’t this right near the factory?” He had just hit the browser’s back button, and now we were back on the invitation. His finger was extended toward the screen, aiming directly at the party’s address. It was a few blocks from where I lived.

  “How the hell is everybody going to get there?” I said, ignoring the larger and more logical question of how in the hell did North Shore kids know that the Yards even existed?

  Vadim had an answer for that one, too. I should not have been surprised.

  “Either the bus system is doubling its output overnight,” he said, “or kids who live in more financially gifted neighborhoods are allowed to drive way before the legal minimum. Well——either that, or they all have absolute suckers for parents.”

  Vadim scrolled down.

  “Yep, I was right.” He cleared his throat and read, “‘If u need a ride, give me a call. And please’—this part is in all caps—‘DO NOT MENTION ANYTHING ABOUT THIS TO MY PARENTS!!! They are OUT OF TOWN for the weekend!’ I wonder why she’s not having the party at her own house, then?”

  “Don’t be depraved,” I said, swigging the bottle of warm Jolt. “She’s probably saving that for her own private after-party. Or for her boyfriend of the moment. That’s what popular people do.”

  “You think the rest of the school was meant to see this?” Vadim asked. He lowered his voice, although I bet he didn’t even realize it. “Or do you think it was just meant for her friends?”

  “Does it matter?” I finished the Jolt with one final, belch-inducing gulp. “I think we’ve seen enough to consider ourselves invited.”

  I got home that night at 7:00, almost a half hour after the factory closed. With thoughts of Devin’s party still filling my head, I wrapped both my hands around the two-foot-tall door handle and swung open the single heavy door.

  Or, at least, I tried to. It took me a minute of pulling and grunting before I realized it was locked. Padlocked. From the inside.

  “Hold on,” came my father’s voice, sounding distant and distorted as it came through the sheet metal. “Is already locked up for night. I open.”

  “Why the hell did you lock the door, Dad?” I called through it.

  “Your mother she does not want the door open so late. Also, have been break-ins in the area lately. Also, we don’t know what time you get home. Also—”

  The door, with a massive nerve-rending squeal, slid open.

  “I do not intend leaving open for the whole night long, waiting for you.”

  Without saying a word, he let go of the door, turned, and started to walk away, back toward the house area of the factory—the small alcove with partly upholstered sofas and a TV; the makeshift kitchen that had been makeshift for years, with plywood countertops marking its borders; the second-floor foreman’s office, looking over the assembly line and the main room of the factory, which was converted into my parents’ bedroom.

  Yeah, this was where I lived.

  Seven years ago, but I still remember it. The three of us sat in a gloomy, drab-looking room that looked like both the airport in Russia and the North Shore principal’s office. We sat in a line: my father, me, my mother. I had never been on the same level with them, physically, before. Even at the doctor’s office, one of them was always standing. And I had never before seen them looking as glum as they did now, facing a huge, monstrous desk, and a balding man whose glasses seemed to be larger than his head.

  He was from the Jewish Federation. He was from the organization that, as far as I could understand, had brought us here. To America.

  He spoke a lot. Occasionally, one of my parents would interrupt. I only gleaned a few words: housing developments and integration into normal American neighborhoods and there’s simply no room for more families.

  I kept thinking, He keeps calling us the Moore family.

  At the very, very end, I remember him saying something to my father, and my father’s voice brightening in response. It sounded like an offer. It sounded like he was offering us a deal.

  It sounded like my father was taking it.

  “It’s about the house,” the man was saying. “The new housing developments are still full, and we haven’t been able to allocate enough additional funding to secure you a house of your own.”

  “But the condos…?”

  “The condos are more expensive than the houses.”

  “Oh.” The threat of being sent back to Mother Russia loomed large above our heads.

  The director offered a conciliatory smile. “We have, however, located a housing facility that does hold a couple and a seven-year-old boy, as per your specifications. It’s…well, it’s good and bad.”

  “Good and bad?” My parents had learned quickly that, when you don’t speak a language, the easiest way to reply was to repeat back the last thing you heard as a question.

  “Let’s get the big news out of the way first: it’s a factory.”

  “A…factory?”

  “That’s right. The good news is, the Federation will be able to cover a large portion of your rental costs.”

  “A factory what makes stuff? Factory is…active?”

  “That’s right. But the good news is…well, the location made it easy to find you folks jobs.”

  I stepped over the track and struggled to pull the door shut. It was the front door to our house—and yet
, unsurprisingly, it didn’t seem at all like coming home.

  “Dad,” I said, “it’s seven o’clock in the evening. The sun hasn’t even set all the way. I was just over at Vadim’s house.…”

  He didn’t turn around. “What you were not doing over there?”

  “Dad, you’ve got the grammar all wrong. It’s ‘what were you doing over there.’”

  “No, I am right. What you were not doing is helping us like is your job. We have deadline today we not make. And what is more, we trust you come and then you not come. Not even phone call. How I am suppose to trust you when—”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I just needed to let loose—”

  “You just need to what? You just need to work. You need to help pay for going out to the Country Club, Jupiter Glazer!”

  If we lived in a normal house, this would be the point where one of us walked out of the room, slammed the door, and possibly broke a doorknob or a window while doing it.

  The fact was, though, our entire house was a big, ugly, mangy, turn-of-the-century, dust-infested, single-room factory.

  At some point, it was one in a fleet of identical factories, all owned by the same huge corporation. At some point, that huge corporation decided—as would any sane person—to get the hell out of the Yards. And the factories got packed away, boarded up, auctioned off, and downsized.

  And that’s how we ended up here.

  Fifteen years ago, the factory had functioned at full capacity, working 24/7 to supply the American public with new elevator parts. Chain hoists, counterweights, electric motors, and hydraulic controls—there were assembly lines for each one. Gradually, sections were abandoned as business dropped off. Now, we lived in the abandoned parts of the factory.

  “It’s not that bad,” I remember my father telling my mother. “At least it comes with a job.”

  And so, with only the smallest amount of social awkwardness, they joined the twelve-person crew of the elevator factory.

  My father, shaking his head, racketed up the stairs, two at a time, to the foreman’s office. They more or less still used it as a foreman’s office, only, because it was a workspace from nine to five and our house for all the leftover hours, my parents kind of used it as their office for when they needed to get away from me, too.

  I checked out the day’s damage.

  To the left was the kitchen area, a big open space with a stove and dining table and the countertops that had been there as far back as I could remember. My mother was in there, slicing up beets for the night’s dinner.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “I’m home from school.”

  As if she couldn’t tell.

  True to form, she didn’t look up. My parents either had a psychic connection, or a really good sense of smell—whenever one of them was mad at me, the other could detect it in the air.

  In my partitioned-off room, I checked my phone and found a new text message from Vadim waiting for me. How was the damage?

  I typed back: Nothing unexpected. We were used to doing damage control for each other after one set of our parents went on a rampage.

  After a second, my phone buzzed again. Just saw 2 Lexuses heading yr way. U really going?

  I hadn’t forgotten about my promises. My bragging.

  Of course I was going.

  As I scrambled to get dressed—which basically translated into throwing off one T-shirt and jumping into a new one—I made an instant checklist in my head.

  Things that sucked about living in a warehouse:

  Never being able to get away from work. How cold it got in wintertime. The fact that, every second I was there, it was an active, painful reminder that my family was dirt poor.

  Things that made the warehouse dealable, if only barely:

  How big it was. And how soundlessly I could sneak out.

  4. A NIGHT LIKE THIS

  Right across from my bedroom window was the rooftop of the next factory over. I could never get the window to close all the way, and even in the summer there were drafts that kept me up late at night. Where else in the universe got drafts in the summer? Only the Yards, I guess—only inside this little piece of heaven in the shape of an industrial warehouse. So I was meticulous about oiling my window twice a month (I borrowed some castor oil from the assembly line downstairs), and that night when I pushed the window, the hinges flipped open without a sound.

  It was a four-foot drop to the roof next door. Fortunately, the walls hugged each other tight. Not more than six inches separated the two buildings. My feet touched down. From there, I used a ladder that went from the roof to the ground.

  Once my feet touched pavement, I was running free.

  The address from Devin Murray’s Web site was a few blocks away. Mostly I used the back alleys. In a few, people were out, sitting on bridge chairs around a streetlight or a backyard light, playing cards or listening to beat-up boom boxes or just chilling out in wifebeater shirts and sandals. I almost stumbled over Mr. Diggory, the wino who sometimes slept out here, but realized I was about to step on a breathing stomach and jumped a foot to the left, knocking over his wine bottle. I stopped and reached into my pocket for change to replace it, but he started to chuckle. “Don’t worry about it, kid,” he told me, not unkindly, as he brushed off his pants. “You probably done me a favor, anyway.”

  That was one of the things I liked about the Yards: No matter how screwed up everyone was, we all still met each other’s eye.

  You could see the party from blocks away. My first indication of its existence was a bunch of lost-looking kids in club clothes glancing at a printed-out set of directions on a corner. On an opposing corner, some drug dealers that I went to middle school with last year were laughing at them. The air was cool, stiff like winter, as if signaling the approach of an oncoming cold. Tonight seemed especially foreboding—the beginning of school, the first weekend of a new social scene, all of this curious information about my new high school’s online underground social calendar.

  You know the difference between bad parties and good parties? At bad parties, the only people there are your friends; at good parties, everyone in the universe is there. And this party definitely, definitely had everyone. Devin Murray certainly knew how to network. The trance kids were spinning music, the AV nerds were projecting a light show on the wall, and the jocks were busy trying to lift a massive, sumo wrestler-size beer keg out of the back of one of their minivans. So far, the effort was being met with little luck. Not that it mattered. Sajit, the class’s token gay stay-up-and-party prima donna, was tending bar, mixing lavishly colored drinks into elaborate martini glasses, serving them up and trying to lecture people on each drink’s name and social relevancy. Right now, a bunch of the soccer-team girls were staring him down, looking disgusted while he tried to convince one of them to try a Flaming Orgasm. “Forget it,” said one girl, finally. “I can’t deal with that name—it sounds absolutely gross. Just make me a Sex on the Beach.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Sajit was the closest thing to a friend I had here. We grew up in the Yards together and, in elementary school, we used to get beat up together. We rarely actually hung out together, but common black eyes was the sort of bond you don’t just take for granted.

  “Jupiter, my dear friend,” he said once he saw me, following up his words by wrapping an arm around me and taking me behind the bar. “How in the hell did you end up at a dump like this?”

  “I live in a dump like this, Sajit,” I said, looking around to see if anybody heard. “You’ve been over to my house, remember?”

  “Honey, do you think that tonight just happened?” Sajit asked. I knew he was exaggerating his Pollyanna ‘tude for the night, but I think he was only doing it for the effect. “Tonight is a gift from heaven. You might live around the corner from here, but tonight, you get to pretend you have no idea where the hell you are.” He pointed at my chest, then turned over his hand, cupped it, and blew into it like he was blowing pixie dust all over me.

  “What do you
mean?” I asked, knowing full well what Sajit meant, but feeling the need to keep him talking, to hold on to my conversation partner and to keep pretending that I knew what was going on here.

  “You could be from downtown, South Philly, East Falls, even. You could have borrowed your parents’ car, or rented one of those limos outside. It’s the first weekend of school. Nobody here even knows who you are—oh, Jupiter, don’t look like that; nobody in this place is going to recognize you from that scene with Bates. It’s too dark and mood-lit. And, even if they do, whose side do you think they’ll be on? Forget about the first first impression you made. Right now is when you make your real first impression. You’re already wearing the coolest clothes of anyone here.”

  “What, jeans and a black T-shirt?”

  “What, do you not read Vogue?” Without waiting for an answer, Sajit took me by the shoulders, spun me around, and gave me a soft kick on the butt with his foot. “Now, stop talking to me and get out there and mingle.”

  I was about to reply with a “yes, sir,” or some other typically dorky comment, but Sajit, social butterfly that he was, had already sprinted over to the far side of the bar, and started lecturing some jocks on the seductive qualities of certain Belgian beers.

  I left my leash of Sajit, entering the vague and scary no-man’s-land of the party. Navigating a party alone could be the most amazing experience ever, or it could be the worst. There were so many people to see, and so many conversations going on, and the only way to really be a part of them all was to be a part of none of them. I stood back, letting all the conversation trails flow through my ears. I watched jocks flirting with jocks, goths discussing deep and impressionable matters in dark corners, the punk-rock kids dancing to lame pop-rock ballads in front of the speakers, and the normal kids, the ones who either transcended labels or feared dropping into a category, walking around the cliques and amongst themselves, dropping in and out of conversations with a casual, nonthreatening, no-stick attitude.