Loser

by Jerry Spinelli

  Mr. Yalowitz gives a chuckle. “Independent little critter, aren’t you?”

  Zinkoff isn’t sure if his teacher’s remark is a statement or a question, nor does he quite understand what it means. But he likes the sound of it and decides it must be good, whatever it is. He looks down at the teacher and beams. “Yes sir!”

  The teacher makes himself comfortable while his student finishes the job. When Zinkoff returns to his front-row seat, the class applauds. Someone even whistles.

  By placing Zinkoff up front, by spotlighting Zinkoff with clever remarks, Mr. Yalowitz unwittingly hastens the others’ discovery of him. Something else hastens that discovery too: new eyes.

  By the end of third grade, most of the kids’ baby teeth were gone. The permanent ones had arrived in their mouths. Around fourth grade something similar happens with eyes. The baby eyes don’t drop out, nor are there eye fairies around to leave quarters under pillows, but new eyes do arrive nevertheless. Big-kid eyes replace little-kid eyes.

  Little-kid eyes are scoopers. They just scoop up everything they see and swallow it whole, no questions asked. Big-kid eyes are picky. They notice things that the little-kid eyes never bothered with: the way a teacher blows her nose, the way a kid dresses or pronounces a word.

  Twenty-seven classmates now turn their new big-kid eyes to Zinkoff, and suddenly they see things they haven’t seen before. Zinkoff has always been clumsy, but now they notice. Zinkoff has always been messy and atrocious and too early and giggly and slow and more often than not wrong in his answers. But now they notice. They notice the stars on his shirts and his atrocious hair and his atrocious way of walking and the atrocious way he volunteers for everything. They notice it all. Even the dime-sized birthmark on his neck below his right earlobe. It has been there for ten years, but now they notice and they stare and say, “What’s that?”

  When the teacher returns graded papers, they peek over Zinkoff’s shoulder and see that he never gets an A. When the music teacher comes and demonstrates instruments and passes out sheets to sign up for lessons and orchestra, they peek again and see that the silly goose signed up for all eight instruments.

  Those who practice with him in the school orchestra notice that he is given the “thunder drum,” as the teacher calls it. They notice that every time he pounds the drum he is three beats early or three beats late, and they wince and roll their big-kid eyes at each other and scowl at the teacher as if to say, Do something.

  And she does something. She gives him a flute, the least damaging instrument. Still he often veers off course, a wanderer among the clarinets and violins. The orchestra kids tell the rest of the kids, the rest of the kids tell their parents, and when the chorus and orchestra recital takes place that spring nearly everyone in the audience keeps an ear peeled for the lost, solitary squeak of Zinkoff’s flute.

  It is in the first week of June of that year that Zinkoff is most profoundly discovered. It happens during Field Day.

  16. Field Day

  Field Day is many years old at Satterfield Elementary. It began as a day of fun. A day to celebrate spring. An outdoor treat for the students.

  And Field Day still is fun for the little kids, the first-, second-and third-graders. But for the fourth-and fifth-graders, the big kids, it is less about fun and more about winning and losing.

  The little kids take part in events designed just for them: the potato roll, kick the pillow, basketball boomerang, shadow bonkers. For the big kids it’s races. Ten kinds of races, all of them relays. There’s the sack race and the run-backwards race and the hop-on-one-foot race and the race-backwards-while-sitting-on-your-rear-end race. The first nine races are like that: goofy, unusual. The last race is just a plain race. To the big, fast kids, it is the only real race.

  Each classroom is divided into four teams—eight teams per grade. Each team has a color. Students compete only against those in their own grade.

  Mr. Yalowitz is the coach. From home he has brought in strips of dyed material: headbands. Team colors for his classroom are purple, red, green and yellow. Zinkoff is on the purple team.

  Before they go out for Field Day Mr. Yalowitz gathers his students around him and says, “I’m rooting for all you guys. Reds, Greens, Purples, Yellows. It’s those other fourth-grade measles I don’t like.” The kids laugh. He’s always telling them that they are better than the other fourth-grade class and that they and their teacher, Mrs. Serota, are measles. “So let’s go out there today and beat the pants off ’em!”

  They pile hands into the huddle and explode from the classroom and stampede shrieking down the hallway and into the sunshine.

  The Purple team has seven members. The best athlete among them is a boy named Gary Hobin. Tall and long of leg, Hobin is not only the fastest Purple, he is probably the fastest kid in all of fourth grade. He is also a take-charge kind of kid, and when he says, “I’m leading off every race,” none of the Purples disagree. But when Coach Yalowitz hears about it, he says, “Nobody runs every race. You rotate so everybody gets a chance.”

  Everybody does get a chance, but Zinkoff gets less of a chance than the others. He “runs” the second leg of the race-backwards-while-sitting-on-your-rear-end race—or, as the kids call it, the hiney hop—and is quickly left behind by the other seven teams. But Yolanda Perry and Gary Hobin are the final two legs, and they bring the Purples back to a rousing victory by a nose, so to speak.

  In the hop-on-one-foot race, even an incredible final leg by Hobin is not enough to make up the ground lost by Zinkoff, whose two feet are not always enough to keep him upright. The sight of Zinkoff tilting, tottering, lurching, falling, brings howls of laughter and mock cheers from the sidelines.

  Nevertheless, going into the final event the Purples have the highest point total of any fourth-grade team. To win the championship, all they have to do is not finish last in the big race. Naturally, six of the Purples have no intention of allowing Zinkoff to compete. And naturally, Gary Hobin will run the most important leg, the last leg—the anchor leg—and will propel the Purples to glory.

  But the coach has other ideas.

  “Zinkoff runs anchor,” he says to the seven gathered Purples.

  Everyone turns to stare at Zinkoff, who is doing jumping jacks to keep in shape.

  Gary Hobin squawks, “What?”

  “You run third leg,” says the coach. “Give him a nice lead.” And off he goes to counsel the Reds, Greens and Yellows.

  Six Purples glare at Zinkoff. Gary Hobin balls his fist and holds it an inch from Zinkoff’s face. “I’m gonna give you the biggest lead anybody ever saw. You better not lose it.”

  “I won’t lose it,” says Zinkoff. “I always save my best till last.”

  Which in fact is not true at all, but Zinkoff imagines it to be, and it sounds like a good thing to say at the time.

  The big final race is run across the length of the playground, through the yellow dust and tufted grass. The starters for the eight fourth-grade teams line up at the sliding board and take off at the principal’s “Go!” The second runners crouch at the far end, waiting to be tagged on the back by the leadoffs.

  At the first exchange the Purples are in second place. By the time the second runner tags Hobin, they are five yards ahead. Hobin blasts out of his crouch and spins dust like a yellow tornado. True to his word, Hobin gives Zinkoff such a lead as has not been seen all day. When he tags Zinkoff, the other runners are only halfway down the track. “Go!” Hobin yells, and Zinkoff goes.

  Zinkoff’s legs churn up the dust. His arms whirl like his mother’s Mixmaster. His face is a pinched, grimacing lemon of effort. And yet—somehow—he goes nowhere. When the other anchors take off he is barely ten yards down the track. “Run! Run!” Hobin screams behind him. Unable to contain himself, Hobin leaves his place and runs up alongside Zinkoff and screams in his ear, “Run, you dumb turtle! Run!”

  Zinkoff runs and runs, the flap of his headband bobbing behind like a tiny purple tail, and he is still r
unning long after the others have crossed the finish line. Zinkoff comes in dead last. The Purples come in last. The Purples lose the championship.

  The Purples tear off their headbands. They slam them to the ground, stomp them into the yellow dust. Zinkoff is bent over, gasping from his great effort, catching his breath. Hobin comes to him. He kicks dust over Zinkoff’s sneakers. Zinkoff looks up. Hobin sneers, “You’re a loser. A stinkin’ loser.”

  Other Purples pile on.

  “Yeah. You stink at everything. Why do you even do stuff?”

  “Yeah. Why do you even get outta bed in the morning?”

  “He prolly even screws that up!”

  One Purple shakes his fist. “We coulda had medals!”

  They file by. Some whisper the word. Some say it aloud. Each pronounces it perfectly.

  “Loser.”

  “Loser.”

  “Loser.”

  “Loser.”

  “Loser.”

  He hopes his parents won’t ask him about Field Day at dinner, but they do. They say, “How’d it go?”

  “How’d what go?” he says.

  “Field Day.”

  “Oh, okay.” Trying to sound like it’s not worth talking about. Don’t ask who won, he prays.

  And they don’t. They ask: “Was it fun?” and “What was your favorite race?” and “Did you get all sweaty?”

  And he thinks he’s out of the woods when Polly pipes up: “Didja win?”

  He screams at her. “No! Okay?”

  And everybody stops chewing and stares and he runs from the dinner table crying. He half expects his father to follow him up to his room, but he doesn’t. Instead, he calls up: “Hey, want to go for a ride?” Zinkoff is always asking to go for a ride, and his father always says not unless there’s someplace particular to go, or it’s a waste of gas.

  Zinkoff doesn’t need to be asked twice. He flies downstairs and off they go in Clunker Six. There’s some chitchat in the car, but most of it goes from his father to the jittery dashboard. “Easy there, honeybug…no big deal…I’m right here…” The rest is just a ride to no place in particular, wasting gas galore.

  Even in bed that night Zinkoff can still feel the shake and shimmy of the old rattletrap, and coming through loud and clear is a message that was never said. He knows that he could lose a thousand races and his father will never give up on him. He knows that if he ever springs a leak or throws a gasket, his dad will be there with duct tape and chewing gum to patch him up, that no matter how much he rattles and knocks, he’ll always be a honeybug to his dad, never a clunker.

  17. What the Clocks Say

  At Satterfield Elementary you can’t go any higher than fifth grade, so fifth-graders rule the school. When other students look at you, most of what they see is bigger and better. You know more. You eat more. You draw better. You sing better. You throw farther and run faster. You go to the head of the line. You drink longest at the water fountains. You even talk louder and laugh harder.

  If you have made it through the first four grades, fifth grade is your reward. The payoff. And it comes in ways that aren’t even visible. It comes as a feeling whenever you are in the presence of kids from the lower grades, a feeling, even though nobody says it, that you are the most important. Fifth grade is a great time to be alive.

  All of this greets Zinkoff when he returns to school, and he loves it. He loves being a fifth-grader.

  Something else is there too. It has been growing through the summer after taking root in the yellow dust of the playground. It has invaded the school building and multiplied abundantly. As Zinkoff’s classmates return in September, many of them pick it up along with their new pencils and other school supplies.

  It is the word. It is Zinkoff’s new name. It is not in the roll book.

  Rarely does anyone say his new name to his face, but it is often said behind a giggle or a cough. It comes from here, from there. Zinkoff sometimes senses someone being called, but the sound of it is not the sound of his name as he knows it, so he does not turn.

  And then one day, for no good reason, hearing the name, he does turn. But no one is looking at him, so he thinks he must be mistaken. And the voices continue, and again he turns, and again. But no one is ever looking, no one ever seems to have spoken. It is as if the voices are coming from the walls and the clocks and the lights in the ceiling.

  Loser.

  The discovery and renaming of Zinkoff is a great convenience to the student body. Zinkoff has been tagged and bagged, and now virtually everything he does can be dumped into the same sack. His sloppy handwriting and artwork, his hapless fluting, his mediocre grades, his clumsiness, his birthmark—everything is seen as an extension of his performance on Field Day, everything is seen as a matter of losing. It is as if he loses a hundred races every day.

  But except for the voices of the clocks, Zinkoff is unaware of all this. He is too busy thinking about himself to notice what others are thinking. He is busy growing up. He is busy growing out.

  By the start of fifth grade Zinkoff has grown out of a whole flock of beliefs: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, rabbits’ feet, talking dinosaurs, the Man in the Moon, unicorns, gremlins, dragons, sidewalk cracks. Though he is still scared stiff of the dark in the cellar, he no longer believes in the Furnace Monster. Beliefs are just flying off him. Thus unweighted, he can feel himself growing taller.

  He no longer wears paper stars on his shirts, though he does continue to accept congratulations. He replaces his little-kid giggle with a big-kid laugh, which he works on in his bedroom—to the annoyance of Polly, who thinks she is always missing something funny. He no longer yells “Yahoo!” (But he still wants to be a mailman, and he still says his prayers at night.) He admits to sleeping.

  He tries to outgrow being clumsy, but it doesn’t work. His handwriting is still atrocious, but only to others, not to himself, so he doesn’t worry about it.

  One Saturday his mother has a yard sale. She asks him if he minds her selling some of his old toys, the ones Polly has no use for. “No problem,” he says. Then she brings out his old giraffe hat. Would he mind her selling this? He looks at it. Faded, fuzzworn. Hasn’t seen it in years. Whatever once possessed him to put that silly thing on his head? “No problem,” he says, and feels himself pop up another half inch.

  He loves growing up, loves feeling himself take up more space in this world.

  He is allowed to go farther from home now. He has a bike, a secondhand yard sale two-wheeler with a junior rattle of its own that reminds him of his father’s car, so he calls it Clinker One. He loves it. He’s allowed to ride it almost anywhere in town, as long as he stays on the sidewalks and walks it across streets. Sometimes he obeys, sometimes not.

  His favorite place to go is the nine hundred block of Willow Street, where he delivered the mail on Take Zinkoff to Work Day when he was seven. The Waiting Man is still there, at the window, staring up the street, his hair longer about the ears, missing more on top. One thing Zinkoff has definitely not outgrown is thinking about the Waiting Man. Sometimes he parks his bike and walks up the street so the Waiting Man will be looking right at him. But even then the Waiting Man doesn’t seem to see him. Sometimes he stands under the window, hoping the Waiting Man will turn his head, at least that. But he never does.

  So fierce is the Waiting Man’s concentration, so endless his patience that Zinkoff half expects the missing-in-action brother to burst into existence one day right there on the sidewalk. Twice, in fact, he dreams that a soldier toting a rifle on his shoulder is walking toward him. The longer the soldier does not really appear, the worse Zinkoff feels for the brother in the window. He cannot believe the world will allow such waiting and wanting to go unrewarded.

  For several excited days he has an idea. He will dress himself in camouflage pants and shirt, pull on some boots and find an old rifle or BB gun somewhere and go walking up Willow Street—just to give the man a moment or two of happiness. But he soon realizes tha
t would be cruel, and he ditches the whole idea.

  Sometimes as he pedals up the nine hundred block the lady with the walker is there on her top step. Whenever she spots him she calls, “Mailman! Oh, mailman!” After a while he always makes sure he has a letter for her, a little note that says “Hi, how are you?” or “I hope you are feeling well.” He’s older now, so his letters don’t have to be nonsense.

  And now there is someone new, a little girl. Her brown hair is always gathered in a puppy tail with a yellow band. Apparently she has only recently learned to walk, because she lurches when she takes a step and her little dumpling knees wobble. She can never get far, however, as she is attached to a leash.

  The leash is a length of clothesline. One end is hooked to a harness which the little girl wears like a strap jacket. Sometimes the other end is tied around an ancient bootscrape, sometimes it’s in the hand of the little girl’s mother, who in warm weather sits on the front steps reading a book.

  “I never saw a person with a leash on,” Zinkoff says one day, curiosity drawing him and his bike to the curb. He’s thinking how he would have hated a leash.

  The mother looks up from her book and gives him a fine smile. “I never did either,” she says. “I lived on a farm and all my mother had to worry about was me being run over by a chicken.”

  Zinkoff laughs. “Does she like it?”

  The mother looks at her daughter. “I don’t think she likes or dislikes it. Yet, anyway. As far as she’s concerned, this is just the way life is. First you crawl, then you get a leash. If she starts to complain, I guess we’ll have to have a chat.”

  “She talks?” says Zinkoff.

  The mother laughs. “About three words. That’s why I win all the arguments. So far.”

  Whenever they are out front, Zinkoff stops his bike to say hello. He finds out that the little girl’s name is Claudia. After a while, Claudia begins to recognize him. She totters out to meet him at the curb, the leash’s limit. She seems to be a giving person. She always reaches down into the gutter and picks up something—a pebble, discarded chewing gum—and holds it out to him. It’s always dirty, her mother always scolds her, and Zinkoff, not wanting to be ungrateful, always says a formal “thank you” to Claudia and pockets the gift.