Losers (16 page)

I felt like the total opposite of a loser. I didn't care what I was doing or who was around to watch me. I just wanted to be exactly where I was, doing exactly what I was doing.

“O
h, man,” I said, my head going wild on a sugar buzz. “I have no idea how I'm gonna get home. Can I just tell you guys, it's eleven o'clock and my parents have probably already issued a police bulletin on my ass?”

Bates lay sprawled out on the concrete outside the theater. Both his face and his massive, solid stomach stared up at the sky. His lungs rose and fell like the tide, taking in deep, unrestrained breaths to replace all the air he'd lost in the pit.

“Relax,” he said. “I'm going back to the Northeast, too. The El runs till midnight. We'll take it to the end of the line, and we can split a cab from there.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “With whose inheritance?”

“With mine,” said Bates, sounding more distant and on-his-own-planet than ever. “Don't worry about it. Just luxuriate for a minute with me, Jupiter. Live in the moment.”

I took another glance down at him on the ground, lying there and making time with the cobblestones. Crash stood around the corner, trying to bum cigarettes off of straight-edge
kids who kept threatening to beat him up for asking.
Live in the moment.
One day I really would be able to do that. For now, though, I had to content myself with the first step: channeling my neuroticism into watching the only person in the world who really mattered—who was two hundred pounds and frequently threatened to pound me into a pancake and top me with blueberry syrup—as he lay drunkenly on the sidewalk, swinging his fists at the stars.

Behind us, hordes of people poured out of the concert hall doors, singing the lyrics to the band's final encore. A few of them stopped to gape at Bates, earning little more than the shake of a fist in their direction and a warning grimace. “Did he have anything to drink?” I whispered in Crash's ear.

Crash shook his head. “Nada, man,” he whispered back. “I swear, sometimes I think that, compared to him, I'm almost normal.”

Almost normal.
Succumbing to a sudden realization, I wondered if this was the first time I'd ever heard the word
normal
used pejoratively. Growing up in the Yards, normal had never been a bad thing. I wished I could talk normal, act normal, be normal. Even at that fateful first party, I'd spent the whole night wishing I could fit in, and holding my breath out of fear that I didn't. Now I was standing downtown with the star of that party, watching our mutual acquaintance attract the attention of a whole crowd of onlookers.

Suddenly, Bates stopped muttering under his breath. He jumped up, right onto his feet, and started walking away.

“What the hell are you waiting for?” he called over his shoulder. “You want me to take you home or not?”

At the subway, Bates slipped two coins in, one for him and one for me. Crash ducked under the turnstile when no one was looking. They both lived in East Falls, on the other side of the city, but Crash said they'd ride the El to the end of the line with me and then get on the last subway of the night back in the other direction. Neither of us knew what to say, but neither of us felt like ending the night quite yet. Two stories below Market Street, we could still hear thudding, thumping trance music coming from the clubs above us.

A couple sat on a bench in the station, making out with a passion and furiousness that blocked out the rest of the world for them. Crash stood right next to them and watched. Two old women with grocery carts were talking in Russian. Bates elbowed me and I translated. I said they were listing the narcotics they'd bought and where they were going to sell them.

The train didn't take long in coming. We got on a few cars down from the old ladies. The couple didn't even notice that the train had showed at all, and Crash barely did. He raced across the platform just as the doors were closing, got his left foot caught in the door, and yanked it out just as the conductor was yelling at him over the speaker system.

“Yaaaargh,” moaned Crash, nestling his bruised ankle as he writhed on the floor.

“Friggin' klutz,” said Bates as he swung into his own seat.

The train was empty. There was no sound but the grinding of wheels on tracks and the whir of the air-conditioning. It felt way too late in the year for air-conditioning to exist. I took the seat behind Bates. Each seat was big enough to hold two people, but Bates had his feet up. I slid into the seat behind him, pulling my feet onto the cushion in the other direction, so I could face him.

“Hey, Bates,” I said. “Why were you acting like that before?”

“What?” he said. “You mean, on the ground?”

“Yeah. Were you stoned?”

He looked at me askew. I'd never been a drug user. I didn't know what being stoned was like. It seemed like it must be like that—acting like you're in a totally different universe. I imagined that was what the café hipster kids must do—all get stoned together and lock themselves in a room all night.

“Jupiter. Do you even know what being stoned
is
?”

I gulped.

“Yeah—uh—sure,” I admitted, measuring the volume of my voice to sound casual. “It's when you smoke too much marijuana.”

He burst out laughing. He laughed like coughing, as though all the phlegm in his throat was going to congeal and coalesce.

“What's wrong?” I asked, stricken. “Isn't that what it is?”

“Yeah,” he answered, rubbing his chest and coming down. “No, Jupe, I was not stoned. I was just, I dunno. What my shrink would call
acting out
.”

“Your shrink?” Was Bates really psycho? Had he ever been institutionalized?

“She's just this lady my parents send me to. A
socialization therapist
or whatever. They get freaked out whenever I open my mouth, and every few months they need reassurance that I'm not going insane or some shit. So they send me there, and she interviews me for an hour and tells them that I'm fine. I don't know what she would make of
that
monkey over there.”

He shot his thumb over his shoulder, gesturing to where Crash was now hanging upside down from the bars on the
ceiling, from the very foot that he'd just been moaning on the floor about and threatening to sue the city for a new leg.

“Oh. Right.” I was speechless, having nothing in my own life to compare this to. The closest I'd ever gotten to therapy was being sent to my room and then crawling out onto the roof to stare at the stars. Maybe my parents weren't so screwed up, I decided.

“Yeah, well, anyway, it's fun. You get to tell her whatever you want and she has to take you seriously. I make up a new disease every time I come in. She keeps thinking that I'm gay, but I think she's supposed to say that about everyone.” He let out a loud guffaw—mostly, I think, for the benefit of Crash, who I'm sure didn't know anything close to the truth. I looked over at him, but Crash had left his perch on the handlebars and emerged in the seat directly behind me. His head popped up like a weasel.

“What are you guys talking about?” he shrilled. “Is it fun? Is it about me?”

“We were just saying what a massive ego you have,” said Bates, totally unexpectedly.

“Well, you know, it's actually a learned talent. I mean, you can't just go into the business of being me and expect people to start loving you for the person you are without a little free advertising. It never hurts to get your name out—” he said, smoothly and smartly.

And then he suddenly stopped talking because someone had, at that moment, shoved a knife in his face.

The knife was as long as my forearm. It was shiny and clean, and seemed a glowing, lightsaber white as it reflected the
subway car's fluorescent lights. It waved in the air, pointed vaguely at Bates's face, the tip of the blade hovering this way and that with an air of easy threat, as if at any moment it could decide of its own accord to burrow itself in his neck, or to change course and fly out at one of us.

At this point, both Bates and Crash were facing out. I was facing them, which meant I was sitting with my face toward the window. We had just ridden past the Ben Franklin Bridge, a brilliant shade of aqua blue, standing out against the harsh grays and slates of the Philadelphia skyline. The Delaware River flowed quietly, meditatively, dotted with a million tiny glowing waves and lights that reflected the city skyscape.

The knife, too, reflected the brightly glowing lights of the subway car. Only, those were fluorescent and dirty and cold.

And I could see Crash's face in its dull steel, and he looked like I'd never seen him before, like a totally different person.

He looked scared shitless.

“Come on!” roared the guy who was brandishing the knife. “Give us your wallets!”

Us
? I thought. I felt my blood racing, my heart hammering in my rib cage, my veins beating against my outer layer of skin. An instant, viscous layer of sweat burst out, soaking my shirt in seconds. I listened intently, terrified. I glanced at the reflection of the muggers in the train window. There was a whole gang of them, too many to count. Five? Six? Eight? They were talking too loud. My head was spinning too fast.

Bates stirred in his seat, fidgeting. I wasn't sure where this fell in the spectrum of his fierce and antisocial urges—whether he was going to spaz out and go crazy or whether he'd be so freaked out by someone who
wasn't
him bullying him that he'd
back down instantly. A small part of me, totally scared and totally tailspinning, was hoping that he would start to rage like a mountain lion, hulking out and throwing his fists everywhere, attacking everyone and everything. An out-of-control Bates was still better than an in-control crazy, screwed-up Yards gang with weapons. Not by much. But better nonetheless.

Bates made his move.

Snarling and glowering, he rose to his feet. “Listen up, you mammalians,” he growled. “You wanna talk to me like that, you best be talking out of your mouth and not some other—”

“You gonna argue with this?” the main guy said, thrusting the knife closer to Bates. Now it was right up against him. The blade dug into the fatty fold of skin between his neck and chin. It pressed the skin neatly back, straining it, bisecting it in an even crease. Soon it would start cutting in.

Bates's eyes swam with determination. The other guy's friends stared at him. Everyone had thought it would be a simple game, their wills against ours. I don't think either of them expected to have their bluff called.

Then came an explosion from the mouths of one of the other guys in the gang.

“Don't!”

He jumped for them both. He seized the hand of the guy with the knife at the same time as he grabbed Bates's forearm. I don't think he knew what he was doing. I mean, I don't think
anyone
knew what they were doing, but this was a particularly advanced degree of stupid—like plunging into a dark room when you're in a mad scientist's house and there's one of those biohazard signs on the door.

But sometimes, you just gotta throw yourself into it.

Bates tumbled backward over the seat. The guy with the knife soared through the air, flying into the rest of his gang, literally bowling half of them over so they were arranged on the floor in various positions of Twister-like complexity. Bates, meanwhile, was clutching the top of the seat with both arms, holding on for life in a position that, in different circumstances, would have been doing serious damage to his ego. His legs hung upside down in the air. His arms were sprawled out, clutching the pillowy plastic fabric, feet jammed in my face. I don't know how he managed to roll into that position, but there he was.

It was a precarious balance. Too precarious. The visual absurdity of Bates's massive body hanging upside down by a thread, just the utter weirdness that our assailant was lying in the main aisle of a deserted subway car racing across the city, was enough to freeze us all.

And then Bates collapsed.

He fell right into me. Or
on
to me, I should say. I fell on the floor, Bates rolled on top of me, and off of me, and then straight into the gang guys.

In a flash, the members of the gang scrambled to their feet. Two of them grabbed Bates by his arms and held him tightly, like a convict going to the guillotine. They forced him down, brought him to his feet. I backed up against the wall, feeling even more afraid, and even more conspicuous than before.

And then, in the silence that followed, as I trembled and the gang members panted and everyone wondered whether the leader of the pack, the wild one, was really going to use that knife, there came a single, cogent, bewildered exclamation.

“What the hell are
you
doing here?”

I blinked.

I started, actually recognizing the voice before the face. She was just standing there, mixed in with the rest of the gang—short, stocky, bleach-blond pixie haircut, boobs jutting out like they meant business, hands on hips, out of uniform, looking more than anything like she was
pissed off.

“Yo, hey, what's up Margie?” I said quickly, the words tumbling out of my mouth with a fear that bordered on religiousness. “What are you doing here?”

“Dude, this is what we
do
at night,” she said. “You live in the Yards, you know what goes on. This is my man. His name's Jimmy.”

At that moment, none of that information was entering my brain. I was only barely aware that she was even speaking. I nodded to Jimmy severely, maturely. “Nice to meet you,” I said.

Jimmy, baffled, offered a wave of his hand.

“Hey.”

“What the hell's your name, anyway, kid? I keep running into you, but we never get around to—”

“It's Jupiter,” I said quickly, answering her while actually cutting off the end of her question. It wasn't really a question, anyway, though. It was somewhere between small talk and getting the particulars of our meeting out of the way.

“For real?” she said, still staring at me like I was a phantasm that she didn't quite believe in. “Well, whatever. Cool. Your parents name you that?”