Losers

by Matthue Roth

  Kids passed me by. Kids said “hi”—not a first-day-of-school “hi” where the teachers force you to smile at each other and play nice, but the noncommittal, how-ya-doin’ “hi” that signifies that the two of you are on the same level.

  In reply, I nodded. A cool, detached nod. A nod in time with the music, which I still did not like, but which was pleasantly bland, agreeable to my sensibilities, coating my nerves with a light, white-chocolate-flavored layer. I might not come out from this party with any friends, and I might not learn any deep life lessons, but, dammit, I was having a good time. Hell, I was discovering what it meant to have a good time, independent of my dorky friends, independent of my parents. And that might have been enough of a life lesson for me.

  I felt a finger on my shoulder.

  “Hey, you’re kind of cute. Do I know you?”

  I caught hold of the finger with all five of my own and I spun around, still clamped tight, tracing the visiting finger to its owner.

  It wasn’t that hard. Even if I hadn’t been holding on to her finger at that moment, she would have been impossible to miss. Three layers of smart-looking pink—tank top, the fluorescent trace of a bra strap beneath it, and a studded pink leather jacket that looked like it was straight out of a movie, high shoulder flaps and wide ‘70s lapels—hugged her conventionally hourglass form, both concealing and teasing in a way that made it impossible not to look at her. Bright blue eyes peered out from under impeccably tossed blond hair, alternately dirty and bright yellow streaks. A pink headband held it all together.

  “I’m sorry?” I said quickly—one of the only English phrases I could always say perfectly quickly, guaranteed to be without a trace of an accent.

  “I’m Devin Murray. This is my party. Who are you here with?”

  I fought the natural impulse to say, No one brought me—I live down the street and your American hip-hop music is drowning out my ability to sleep. Instead I just smiled and nodded—the cool kid response.

  “What? Can you not speak English?”

  “What?” I said, caught off guard. “Oh, yeah, of course I can. I’m Jupiter.”

  Her momentary falter of a smile leaped back into full bloom. “Oh. Sorry. It must be the music—I mean, it needs to be loud, but only so we can complain about it, you know?”

  “Of course,” I agreed. “Wow, Devin. That actually sounds sort of profound.”

  “Yeah. I like to think I can manage profound, once in a while. So—uh—how did you get here?”

  That question again. I’d managed to dodge it once, and I wasn’t sure if my luck could hold out a second time. The possibilities leapt up in my mind like a Choose Your Own Adventure book—one of the sadistic ones where, at the end of every choice, you died.

  I decided to go with the truth.

  “My friend Vadim hacked onto your secret online diary,” I said.

  She looked at me like she was trying to decide whether or not I was lying. I think eventually she settled on lying, because in one hot moment, she burst out in a huge, quick balloon pop of a laugh. “No, seriously,” she said. “Are you with Crash Goldberg and his posse? Because I think they’re about to—”

  At that moment, there was a massive, resounding explosion that flared in the far corner of the warehouse. An explosion that probably nobody else in this entire party would realize came from approximately five full-size barrels of raw castor oil, the kind used in powering T-3400 power generators and in greasing assembly-line conveyor belts to run smoother. Screams came out. It took me a second to recognize those screams as the girls’ soccer team, that slightly annoyed but mostly flirty screaming that they did just to get attention.

  The fire clouds were dying. People stood around, lightly applauding.

  What was I doing here? Among the popular kids, among these fifteen-year-olds who dress up like thirty-year-olds trying to look barely legal? These were the popular kids. These were the kind of kids I’d gotten teased by in elementary school, then ignored by in middle school. I remembered being relieved when the ignoring started. Why was I now trying my hand at climbing that stupid social ladder? Why was I having to smile and endure those girls who made girlish synonymous with helpless? I tried to think about what MARGIE would say if she was here, and failed.

  God, my realizations were really hitting tonight, weren’t they? Bullseye after bullseye. Devin saw my look of exasperation, and she rolled her eyes. “I mean, it’s cool that Crash and his posse are so into spectacle, but do those girls have to act so five-years-old every time they blow something up?”

  At that moment, a guy in a bright orange federal prisoner’s uniform and a Che Guevara cap, eyes as big and hungry as a wolf’s, with a face that could only be described as crazy-looking, zoomed past. He threw his hands on my shoulders and pogo-jumped way over my head, his face a few inches from Devin’s. He swung on my shoulders. “Hey, Devin, man,” he said in a wild voice that befitted the rest of him. “Did you like the show?”

  “Yeah, gorgeous, Crash. It was beautiful.”

  “Now that was real American-made pyrotechnics. Rita designed the detonators out of Radio Shack toaster ovens, and McNeff the crime dog hooked us up with some juicy transistors.” He mopped a trickle of sweat—oil?—off his brow. He suddenly glanced down, right into my eyes, and gave an approving pat on my back. “Hey, dude. Are you enjoying the festivities?”

  It had been so long since it was my turn to speak that I almost forgot to do it. “Oh, yeah, absolutely,” I piped up at last. “It was awes—”

  “By the way, thanks for inviting your friend,” said Devin. “We’re all totally into Jupiter. He’s a few notches up from the usual hackers.”

  “Oh, um, definitely.” Crash, still perched atop me, nodded approvingly.

  “Are you gonna get some of your peons to clean that up? I have a three thousand dollar deposit on this place…”

  “Already done, my good lady.” He climbed off my shoulders, gave a salute, and scampered off.

  Now that this Crash kid was gone, Devin turned her attention back to me.

  “Heh heh.” I gave a little nervous laugh. I was sure the game was up now.

  “Yeah, I know. He’s kind of a dork, isn’t he? But it takes all types to make the world go round.” She looked around the place like a monarch surveying her kingdom. Some of the soccer team girls were just now coming down from their spaz-outs, and a bunch of guys in sports-team jackets were calming them down, giving them neck rubs. “After all,” she noted, “nothing sets off jock love like a nerd attack. And, by the way, you utterly aren’t from around here. I’ve been listening for it in your voice.”

  Panic. Sheer, total panic.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “You think I’m crazy? Look, I’m from East Falls. Which is practically the capital for stuck-up, prissy princesses who are stereotypes of stereotypes of themselves. I grew up speaking half like a movie character and half like I was born in England. Then, in fifth grade, I started taking swimming lessons downtown. Olympic-size pool, taught by a former underwater stunt double from L.A.—all that impressive stuff. But the other kids there had all grown up downtown. They could spot my phoniness three lanes away. So I listened to the way I was speaking, and then I listened to the way they were speaking, and I just dropped it.”

  “You just dropped it? How?”

  “Okay, let me try. Um. Did you hear how you said dropped? You swallow up the o, you roll the r, and you squish the p and d together at the end. Listen to the way I said it, just from what you remember.”

  “Dropped.”

  “Close. Dropped.”

  “Dropped.”

  “Now try it slower.” She said dropped again, in slow motion. I repeated her. She shook her head no. Then she reached over and took my hands in hers.

  She lifted them to her face. I could feel my entire body heating up, the knuckles between my fingers stiffening. She placed them gently on her cheeks and throat.

  “Feel
the way I say it.”

  “Say it.”

  “Dropped.”

  “Draah-ppeht,” I echoed her. I felt ludicrous saying it, being made to say that same word again and again. I felt like a domesticated parakeet. I cleared my head. I couldn’t second-guess myself now. I felt like I was on the brink of learning some forbidden knowledge, standing on the precipice of this giant mountain that was going to be the rest of my life.

  “Once more,” Devin said, smiling at me. “Say it.”

  “Again?” I asked.

  Devin nodded.

  “When I move, you move,” she said. My hand tensed into her cheek. She squeezed my fingers, enthusiastically, supportively. Her mouth convulsed, danced through the word like a ballerina in slow motion, voguing and pirouetting each step in one one-hundredth of normal speed, slowed down beyond the range of any normal household DVD player, moving and reacting to every microsyllable in the word.

  I said it again. The moment felt like hours in my head, every part of every sound. My mouth imitated hers. For the merest fraction of a second, my mouth became hers, more vivid than a 3-D movie, more intimate than making out. And it sounded, it felt, absolutely perfect.

  “Just like that?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “Just like that.”

  The moment felt perfect, the stars and planets and even passing meteors in total alignment. It was so intimate that I wondered whether we were supposed to make out. The whole idea of making out was still a foreign notion to me, and I was still unclear on the details of its choreography—was it a single moment when both involved parties felt a sudden, unavoidable rush of hormones at the same time? Was it something that both of you had to have in the back of your minds the whole time, darkly hinted at through the course of your conversation, and as soon as one person was too overt and crossed the line, you both erupted into passionate kisses and feeling-upness? Or did it just happen when we ran out of things to talk about?

  I wondered if I was supposed to make the first move.

  Devin reached out and grabbed hold of a guy’s shoulder. A tall, well-built, muscular guy who, at rough approximation, was twice my size. He was one of the jocks who had been roughhousing around the keg, trying to out-stupid a bunch of other, identical jocks in front of the soccer girls. For a second, I thought Devin was going to tell him that I wasn’t allowed to be here and ask him to take me out back and beat me up. Then I reconsidered, and decided that she was about to introduce him as her boyfriend, which might produce the same result.

  “Hey, Reggie, this is Jupiter Glazer,” she said, hugging his arm in a way I found both off-putting and nervousness-inducing. “Reg, Jupiter came here with Crash Goldberg and that circus, and, in his short residency at the party, he’s already outgrown them. Feel like showing him around?”

  “Sure, babe,” he said, kissing her on the cheek in that noncommittal, mixed-sex way that popular kids do when they’re trying to be adultlike, as if to say, We can get some any time we want to, so we don’t need to prove it.

  Reg wrapped one firm, worked-out muscular arm around me, leading me away. I glanced behind me toward Devin, flashing her a quizzical expression. Suspicion loomed in my head that she was just trying to get rid of me.

  As if she could hear my thoughts, she shook her head, and the curls at the ends of her hair shook in agreement. She mouthed the words at me, “Work your accent,” and winked before turning away to address a crowd of short-skirted girls. I couldn’t help but wonder why she couldn’t have introduced me to them instead.

  “So, Jupe,” said Reg, once we were clear, “what have you been up to, and how the hell did you wind up at one of Devin’s social drink-a-ramas?”

  Reg Callowhill! Oh, oh, whoa. In all the madness of the crowd that was Devin Murray, I hadn’t even realized who she was talking to—Reg Callowhill, who used to be my Frisbee partner in the JCC community kindergarten. When we were five, we were unbelievably tight. We had each other’s backs like old-school gangsta rappers. The next year, his parents sent him to private school, and I was left to flounder by myself in Wilson Goode Elementary School. Since then, Reg had moved on to bigger and better while I had somehow managed to stay true to my loser roots.

  For some reason, there was no question in my head about opening up to him. I hadn’t drunk anything, but I was feeling giddy anyway.

  “I don’t,” I babbled to him. “I live right around here, and one of my friends got wind of the party, and my parents were screwing with me—for a change—and I was just, like, what the hell. I can jump right out my window, you know? I just needed to escape. I mean, this has been practically the worst week ever—I just started at North Shore—”

  “Whoa, no way! You’re at North Shore? I just transferred out of Blessed Sacrament. I’m at North Shore, too!”

  I was about to say, No duh, Reg—in case you haven’t noticed, you’re already in line to be King of the School, and the rest of the students only think I’m important when the person who’s beating me up is important. But then I realized that if he hadn’t heard any news of my run-ins with Bates, it was actually a good sign. Maybe my reputation, as carcinogenic as it had been to start out, was not etched in stone for all eternity.

  “Here,” he was saying, “let me show you around. That’s Crash Goldberg. You know him, I guess—Crash, get your hands off her, she’s gay!—and these are the guys. Guys, this is Jupiter. He’s cool, so treat him good. Hey, somebody get him a beer?”

  In a few minutes, I was playing it totally cool, beer in hand, telling wildly entertaining stories about my exploits over the first week of school and my adventures hanging out in the Yards. Because they were drunk, they all thought every word I said was the funniest, most diabolically clever thing in the universe. Because I wasn’t, I kept on top of the game, keeping them laughing, making sure they were never laughing at me. I was only pretending to sip my beer—not because I was a prude or anything, but because I didn’t really trust myself to get drunk in a room full of potential hazards to my physical being. My parents had raised me on mother’s milk and vodka, and if there was one thing I knew how to do right at this party, it was to carry my alcohol.

  These jocks were seeming alright, but, you know, I didn’t need to push it. Finally, one of them slapped me on the back, laughing so hard he was wheezing, and said, “Jupiter, you are the greatest. I don’t even know why you’re the greatest but you are, man. You tell that Bates punk, if he ever messes with you, he’s gonna have to deal with us, you know?”

  “Uh…yeah,” I said uncertainly. “I know.”

  And then everybody laughed, and everyone raised their beer mugs high, and everyone but me swilled a giant, football-team-size gulp.

  The truth was, I wouldn’t depend on any of these guys to leap to my side in a fight. I barely trusted them to remember me by Monday morning. If Bates did lay into me, and any of Reg’s friends came upon it, I doubted very much that anyone but me would sustain the worst of the damage. But I appreciated the sentiment, and I was enjoying being the center of the crowd and having people actually listen to me. At some point over the course of the evening, I remember catching Devin’s eye—she was mostly engaged in flirting with the lead singer of a local punk band, which, in my newly social state, I didn’t mind at all—and she just nodded approvingly at me, as if to say, You finally got it, Jupiter.

  I have to say, this whole not-having-an-accent thing was definitely agreeing with me.

  Later that night, a gang of guys in North Yardley High jackets showed up, prematurely ending the party when they tried to forcibly abduct the keg and roll it out to their pickup truck. Someone began screaming that someone had a gun. The screaming got everyone scattering, and the frenzied snatches of conversation—“A gun?” “A gang broke in!” “Where’d our ride go??”—spread the panic like an airborne disease. At first I tried to ignore it, since people were talking to me and I was actually having a good time. But the crowd got smaller and smaller as the non-Yards folks edged away from the newc
omers and made excuses to leave. The fighting over the keg rose in tone and volume. One of Devin’s guy friends was trying to make them stop; they pushed him around like a rag doll. Finally, one of the guys just decided to tip it over. The keg hit the floor with a bang, and someone yelled out “Guns!” and then I found myself suddenly using my amazing new accent to talk to no one but the air.

  I decided that maybe it was time for me to make my exit.

  I began to head casually to the door where everyone else was stampeding. I knew from the Yards that gangs never went after the people who weren’t panicking; if you didn’t think you were in trouble, they, more often than not, weren’t about to give it to you. For a second, I felt like my old self, and the idea that my Yards-ness was something I could turn off and on, like a mute button or email encryption, both enthralled and terrified me.

  About halfway to the door, something made me stop and turn around.

  The Yardley gang was in full effect now, moving the keg out the door, getting down to the music that lingered on the turn-tables, a bizarrely hip-sounding remix of a They Might Be Giants song. It seemed not to match the actual scene unfolding: the room almost empty, all movement either slowed down or completely stopped, the Yardley guys looking fiercely triumphant. Three of them were bent over the keg, wheeling it in some way. Two more followed around Devin, who was whispering to her friends, presumably trying to convince them not to leave. A few others were clustered around, draining the remains of the bar and having a good time. One Yardley guy was necking hard-core with a girl against the bar, clawing his dirty hands under her leather jacket and all over her white tank top. He backed off, fumbling for a half-full glass on the bar, and the girl pushed her peroxide-blond hair out of her face.

  I grinned wryly, almost knowing who I’d see. Her eyes, almost at once upon pulling away from the guy, focused on me.

  It wasn’t such a surprise. I mean, I was almost alone, one of the last remaining North Shore kids at the party. I didn’t have an hour’s ride back home, I didn’t have to hustle a ride to my neighborhood, and, of course, I didn’t know any good after-parties. My shadow cast across the length of the warehouse floor by those rented house-party lights, the solitary figure left where I was standing, and the only target for the eyes of a girl coming out of a hot and heavy make-out session.