Losers, Inc.

by Claudia Mills

  Would Lizzie see them? Did anybody ever actually look at a school bulletin board? Until this morning, Ethan never had. It was a flaw in the plan that none of them had considered. Ethan decided he’d better mention the flyers to Lizzie during Peer-Assisted Learning. He had to say something to her, anyway, after being so cold and silent all through class yesterday.

  No one teased Ethan about Lizzie today. There were no hearts with his initials in them scrawled on any chalkboards, no annoying chants of “Eeee-than!” and “Lizzz-ie!” Ethan had never seen an episode of teasing end more quickly and completely.

  In math class, Ethan pulled his desk promptly over to Lizzie’s, without waiting for her to move her desk.

  “Um—Lizzie?” It was the first time he had ever spoken to her without her speaking first. She looked up, her thin, freckled face flushing with pleasure.

  “I don’t know if you saw, but there’s a flyer on the bulletin board. It’s for, like, a poetry contest—and, well, I know you write poetry, and…” His voice trailed off.

  “A contest? No, I didn’t see it, but I love contests. I enter them all the time. I never win, but you have to keep trying, right? I read somewhere that some famous writers have their books rejected twenty or thirty times before they’re finally published. And you definitely can’t win if you don’t enter.” Lizzie opened her math book. “It was nice of you to tell me,” she said softly.

  Now Ethan was blushing. Of course, it wasn’t nice of him to tell her about the contest. It was probably the single meanest thing he had ever done in his life.

  He felt less mean, or at least less bad about being mean, when Marcia came up to him at lunch.

  “I copied this out of Lizzie’s notebook when she was getting changed for gym,” Marcia said.

  This time Ethan held the poem firmly so that Marcia couldn’t snatch it back.

  To Ethan

  I will love thee in the winter,

  When the ice and snow lie deep.

  I will love thee in the spring,

  When the budding willows weep.

  I will love thee in the summer,

  When the sun burns hot and bold.

  I will love thee in the fall,

  When the aspen leaves turn gold.

  I will love thee all year long.

  Love eternal is my song.

  One season of love from the Lizard was terrible enough. Her eternal love was something no one could be expected to bear.

  * * *

  During study hall, Ethan read ten more pages of A Tale of Two Cities. He had kept on schedule all weekend, so that he was up to page 260 now. He had begun thinking of each page read as an offering to lay at Ms. Gunderson’s feet. Two hundred and sixty offerings to lay before her black ballet-type shoes, the ones with the long, skinny straps that wound around her ankles.

  He was becoming a faster reader, too. When he closed A Tale of Two Cities on page 260, there were still a few minutes left in study hall. Ethan closed his eyes as if he were sleeping—next to him, Julius was asleep—and thought some more about the science fair. It was three weeks away, but he wasn’t going to leave his experiment to the last week, not this time.

  He’d have to get all different kinds of balls and figure out what they were made of. Maybe the library had a book on balls. The school librarian, Ms. Dworkin, was nice, even if she yelled at Ethan and Julius sometimes for talking. Maybe she could help Ethan find out which balls were made of what.

  Then he’d test them by bouncing them on various surfaces—hard, soft, rough, smooth—and measuring the results. He’d have to make sure he bounced them all the same way every time, though. That would be the tricky part. Maybe he could rig up some kind of machine that could bounce balls uniformly.

  After school, Ethan went to Julius’s house. Julius lived about a half mile from Ethan. It was an easy walk or bike ride now that they were older, but Ethan remembered how far it had seemed when they had first become friends, back in second grade. Back then Ethan’s parents had thought he was too little to go that far from home on his own, and Peter had had to take him to Julius’s, riding his big bike next to Ethan’s small one.

  It was hard to believe that he and Julius had been friends for so many years. Even in second grade, they had been losers together. Ethan remembered that the class had been assigned that year to build a shoe-box diorama for Presidents’ Day. He and Julius had used real maraschino cherries on the cardboard cherry tree that George Washington was chopping down in their diorama, and a colony of ants had found them.

  “What do you want to eat?” Julius asked after they had shed their coats and boots in the mud room. “There’s ice cream, or we could do a frozen pizza.”

  “Pizza,” Ethan said. Ice cream reminded him too much of Julius’s science fair project. He didn’t know if he should mention the project or not. Neither Ethan nor Julius had mentioned the science fair to each other during the past week. But it seemed strange not to even talk about their projects.

  “Speaking of ice cream,” Ethan said, trying to sound casual, “how’s the science project coming?”

  “Great,” Julius said. He sounded as if he meant it, almost as if he were bragging. But Julius never bragged.

  “Are you still doing it on ice cream?”

  “Uh-huh. Grace thinks it’s a fantastic idea. She said that everybody makes all these claims all the time about fat-free foods and how terrific they taste, and it’s a wonderful idea to really go out and test them.”

  Julius’s confident use of her first name startled Ethan. It was true that sometimes he himself thought of her as Grace. The name suited her so perfectly. But he would never have said her name out loud to anyone else, as if he had a right to use it. And he hadn’t thought the ice cream idea sounded all that wonderful. It had sounded to him like an excuse to get your parents to buy a lot of ice cream.

  Ethan waited to see if Julius would ask him what he had decided to do his science project on. He wasn’t sure he wanted to tell Julius. For the first time ever, he felt as if he were competing against his best friend to be the best, rather than competing with him against everybody else, to be the worst. However fantastic Ms. Gunderson thought Julius’s project was, Ethan wanted her to think his project was even better. He could hardly be a member in worse standing of Losers, Inc.

  But Julius didn’t ask, and even though Ethan hadn’t wanted him to ask, when Julius didn’t, Ethan found himself feeling hurt. You’d think best friends would at least take an interest in each other’s projects, even if they had decided not to work together.

  “I have an idea,” Julius said then, as he slid the frozen pizza into the oven. The strained moment had passed, and Julius sounded like himself again. “Let’s look Grace up in the phone book and see where she lives.”

  The idea, simple as it was, had never occurred to Ethan. He hadn’t had as much practice at being in love as Julius had. For some reason, he almost didn’t want to know where Ms. Gunderson lived, in her life outside of school. He felt strangely nervous as Julius opened the Metro Area directory.

  “Here she is,” Julius said, pouncing with his finger halfway down the page. “Gunderson, G. 1250 Alfalfa Lane. 555-8537.”

  Ethan took the phone book and stared at the listing. It made her seem so … real, as if she wasn’t just a figment of his imagination. It was reassuring and yet disappointing, too. Rapunzel shouldn’t have an ordinary street address.

  “If I called her up, what would I say?” Julius asked. “I used to call Stephanie sometimes, but all I did was hang up when I heard her voice.”

  “I don’t know,” Ethan said. If he called her, what would he say?

  The pizza was ready, so the boys fell silent and devoured it.

  “We could ride over to Alfalfa Lane and see where she lives,” Julius said after they’d finished eating.

  Ethan knew he would be sorry for what he said next. “Okay.”

  Alfalfa Lane, it turned out, was only a mile away. Number 1250 was a large, red-brick gar
den-apartment complex. Ethan had passed it many times, but he had never ridden through it.

  “Now what?” Ethan asked. “Which apartment is hers?”

  “I guess we’ll have to look at mailboxes,” Julius said.

  Outside each block of apartments stood a large bank of mailboxes with the names of the residents posted on each one. Ethan and Julius started with the A-block apartments and went in alphabetical order from there. They finally found her in the H’s: H16.

  “At least she wasn’t in the Z’s,” Julius said.

  Ethan felt his heart pounding as if he had just ridden his bike over the Continental Divide. What if she saw them? What if she was with someone? Like, a guy?

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ethan said. “She could show up any minute.”

  He pushed off on his bike. Julius could hang around as long as he wanted. Ethan was leaving.

  Then he saw her, getting out of the small silver Honda that had just pulled into the parking lot. She was alone. So God had answered one prayer even before Ethan had a chance to ask it.

  “Hello, Julius. And Ethan!” Her voice was full of pleasure. “I didn’t know you boys lived at the Meadows.”

  “We don’t,” Julius said, like a dope.

  Ethan had to say something then. “We were just riding by.” As if anybody would take a bike ride all through somebody else’s apartment complex and just happen by coincidence to end up at her door.

  “Well, it’s a beautiful day for a ride,” Ms. Gunderson said. “It feels just like spring.”

  She went into the entrance for apartment H16. Ethan and Julius gazed after her until she disappeared from sight.

  “She knows we were looking for her place,” Julius said. He looked sheepish, but a bit pleased with himself, too. “The way she looked at me. She knows.”

  But it had been Ethan she had looked at before turning to go inside.

  “She knows,” Ethan agreed miserably. She definitely knew.

  * * *

  By Saturday morning, Ethan had collected ten different balls to test, and he had found a library book on balls in the children’s room at the public library. It was actually a book for little kids, full of pictures, but it had lots of information on balls. After A Tale of Two Cities, it was a relief to be reading a book with only 64 pages.

  He was still reading his daily quota of Dickens. He would be finished easily by the time he had to give his book report on Monday, though he still had to come up with something to say in the report. Ms. Leeds would expect more than “I read this whole book. It has 422 pages.” But somewhere in his report, Ethan was going to work in, in a casual, offhand way, the number of pages. He couldn’t wait to see Ms. Leeds’s face when he did.

  When Ethan came downstairs for breakfast, he had A Tale of Two Cities in his hand. Peter was up already, back from an early morning run, even though he had been out late last night at an away basketball game. Peter and their mother were morning people; Ethan and their father weren’t.

  “What’s the book?” Peter asked. “Every time I see you now, you’ve got your nose in some book.”

  Ethan held it up, keeping his finger on page 367.

  Peter looked impressed. Ethan made a mental note: On Saturday, February 8, at 10:07 a.m., Peter Winfield saw the book his brother, Ethan, was reading and looked genuinely impressed.

  “How’d you get started on Dickens?” Peter asked.

  “I don’t know. I just thought I’d try a long book for a change.”

  “Hey, I just remembered something,” Peter said. “This is funny. When I was in sixth grade, one time I read a really long book, the longest one in the class. Is this for one of Leeds’s famous book reports? Mine was, too. What was it? That’s right, The Yearling. It was a great book. A really great book. If you do another long book, read The Yearling.”

  “How long was it?” For some reason, Ethan had to know.

  “I don’t remember. Three hundred, four hundred pages. And sad. It’s the saddest book I ever read.”

  “A Tale of Two Cities is sad, too.” Were all long books sad? You’d think that after someone had read four hundred pages, the least he’d deserve was a happy ending. “Do you have it here? The Yearling?”

  “No. It was from the library. What do you want to make for dinner tonight? Maybe Tex-Mex burgers, with salsa and guacamole? Tell Mom I went over to Josh’s house to study for the math test. What about you? What’re you doing?”

  “I guess I’ll go to the library. There’s something I need to look up.”

  At the library, Ethan found The Yearling listed in the computer catalog. It was by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, shelved upstairs with the adult books.

  There it was. It looked long, all right, longer than A Tale of Two Cities. It was definitely a fatter book, but maybe it was just printed on thicker paper.

  Ethan made himself flip to the last page to check the page number: 400. Twenty-two pages shorter than A Tale of Two Cities.

  He grinned like a fool at everybody he passed all the way home.

  Eight

  Monday, February 10. The bulletin board outside the gym had two enormous pictures of Peter Winfield on it from Friday’s basketball game. In gym class Coach Stevens picked six guys to go to a special weekend basketball camp. Ethan Winfield was not one of them.

  Monday, February 10. Whoever invented alphabetical order? Every single time every single teacher starts with A last names and ends with Z ones. Is it just a coincidence that the president and vice president of Losers, Inc., both have last names from the end of the alphabet?

  Ethan was sitting in Ms. Leeds’s sixth-period English class, waiting for the stragglers to come in from study hall and scribbling a couple of quick entries in Life Isn’t Fair: A Proof. He had been so busy lately bouncing balls and reading Dickens that he had gotten behind in his record keeping. And these days fewer unfair things seemed to be happening in his immediate vicinity. Or maybe he was just too preoccupied with the rest of his life to notice them.

  It was book-report day, and Ethan knew that Ms. Leeds would start with Lizzie, as all teachers always started with Lizzie, and she’d get to Ethan and Julius if there was time, which there probably wouldn’t be, since there were twenty-four kids in the class, and Lizzie could easily fill half a class period all by herself. Ethan looked down again at the page he had written on A Tale of Two Cities. If he had to wait till tomorrow to get his report over with, he didn’t think he could stand it. Especially this time, when his report was practically guaranteed to astonish everybody, most of all Ms. Leeds.

  The bell rang. Ms. Leeds looked up from her cluttered desk. She was a small, gray-haired woman who smiled so much that her face had frozen into a perpetually smiling expression.

  “Let’s get started right away,” Ms. Leeds said. “I want to make sure we hear as many book reports as possible today. Lizzie, what do you have to share with us?”

  Lizzie came to the front of the room. Most kids read their reports from a sheet of paper; some just mumbled something they thought of on the spot. Lizzie’s book reports were always memorized. She clasped her hands behind her back, fixed her eyes somewhere on the ceiling, and let loose her usual torrent of words.

  “I read a wonderful book called Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. It was written in 1847, but the characters in the book are so real that you feel as if they’re living today. When I read this book, I felt as if I were Jane Eyre, a lonely, friendless orphan girl sent away to a cold, cruel boarding school where all the other girls despise her.”

  As Ethan had predicted, Lizzie’s report was long. Many sad and terrible things had happened to Jane Eyre, and Lizzie apparently felt she had to describe each one in detail. Lizzie always loved the books in her book reports, but she seemed to love this one extra much. Maybe it was because she and Jane Eyre were a lot alike. Nobody liked either of them.

  Finally Lizzie finished.

  “David Barnett,” Ms. Leeds called, still smiling.

  B, C, D, E, F, G …
Why did the alphabet have to have so many letters in it?

  David started reluctantly toward the front of the room. To his own surprise, Ethan put up his hand.

  “Ethan?”

  “I was just wondering—do we always have to go in alphabetical order? Every time?”

  Ms. Leeds kept on smiling her same smile. “Why, no. Not at all. Would you like to proceed in a different way today?”

  It wasn’t as if Ethan was exactly eager for his turn; he was just so tired of being last. Though maybe he was looking forward to his report today. “I guess so,” he said.

  “Well, suppose today we go in reverse alphabetical order. Yes, I think that would be quite a refreshing change. Julius, why don’t you go next?”

  David flashed Ethan a jubilant grin. Ethan knew that David hadn’t finished his book yet and was sitting with it open on his desk in the back of the room, trying to turn the pages without Ms. Leeds’s seeing.

  Julius glared at Ethan. Julius never minded bringing up the rear as the only Z in the entire school. He had once said to Ethan, “The way I look at it, this increases the odds that a tornado or an earthquake or a nuclear bomb will strike before I have to go.”

  “Julius?”

  Julius walked slowly to the front of the room. In an expressionless monotone, he read from his paper: “I read A Boy and a Dog, by Maxwell Crumbly. It is about a boy and a dog.” The rest of Julius’s report gave the plot of the book, but it didn’t tell anything about the book. You could have boiled down Julius’s report to two sentences: “The boy gets lost on a rafting trip. The dog finds him.” At the end of the report, Julius read, “This was an okay book. I would recommend this book to boys who like dogs.” And he crumpled up his paper to show that he was finished.

  “Does anyone have any questions for Julius about the book he selected?” Ms. Leeds asked. Her smile was somewhat less bright. No one raised a hand, so she asked, “Where does the story take place? Where is its setting?”