Losers (7 page)

Finally, they stopped in front of a short stairwell that seemed to lead nowhere. Through its dim, cobwebby top, Vadim could see a rusted brass sign on the door, a door that hadn't been opened in years, that read
JANITOR'S CLOSET—NO ADMITTANCE.

Up and down along the stairs, though, sat a good dozen or so of the smartest, geekiest, most socially unaware and fashionably clueless ninth-through-twelfth-graders that Vadim had ever set his 45/20-prescription eyes upon.

They were all genders, but mostly male; all races, but their skin glowed with the uniform mint green sheen of those people who derived most of their light from a computer screen, rather than from the sun. The four kids highest up the stairs were clustered around the new English edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, fighting over a mistake in translation. Two steps down from them, a girl of unspeakable beauty swept her fingers over her computer keyboard, a dirty red landscape on the screen, calculating the odds of recurring fractal patterns on the surface of Mars. At the bottom of the stairs, four people were actively engaged in a yelling match over what looked to Vadim like the most violent, heatedly intense, full-contact game of Scrabble he had ever seen. Dr. Mayhew didn't even have to open his mouth; Vadim was already sold. At that moment, the principal could have told Vadim to jump off a bridge, and Vadim would only have asked at what trajectory he should hit the water.

Dr. Mayhew, never one to linger in a moment, cleared his throat.

The Scrabblers froze mid-spelling, looked up from the board, and rotated their heads north.

“Consuela Cortez,” Dr. Mayhew said. Even in his regular speaking voice, everything sounded like an announcement. “Would you mind coming forward?”

From the hazy heights of the top of the staircase, a heavy, suspicious-looking girl, her hair neatly swirled in the shape of a question mark from the back of her head all the way down to the small of her back, descended.

“Yeah?” she said, sounding bored. “What do you want, Mayhew?”

“This,” boomed Dr. Mayhew, ignoring the obvious besmirching of his title, “is Vadim. He's a first-year student. I think he might be able to find his place among you. I'd appreciate it if you could take him under your wing, show him the ropes, mind that he doesn't take off in the—” he cleared his throat “—in the wrong direction.”

Consuela continued her slow, laborious descent until she was standing opposite Vadim. He was small by anyone's standard, not making it up to most people's line of sight, but to Consuela, he was barely a blip. His tiny head just barely reached the bottom curvature of her breasts. At that moment, his eyeballs were currently rotating upward, coming into an eventual contact with her downward-orbiting eyes. Through the double layers of glasses that shielded both their sets of eyes, they made slow contact.

“Vadim,” she grunted. “What's your deal?”

“Hey,” Vadim said, speaking slowly and carefully. “I'm trying
to get out of this place. I got kicked out of Decanometry on the first day ‘cause our teacher said to graph a ten-dimensional plane, and I tried to launch a tesseract into the equation.”

Consuela let out a low whistle.

That was when Vadim noticed it. All the activity that had ceased when he'd first arrived hadn't picked back up again. Everyone's eyes were on him. Everyone was analyzing him, trying to see how he'd slip up.

What he'd just said, that was what they were waiting for.

“
Niiice
,” cooed a voice from the top of the stairs. “Factoring by way of tesseract. Most kids are into Deco, or they're into
A Wrinkle in Time
, but the overlap is where it counts.”

That came from the girl with the Martian surface on her laptop. Having made her opinion known, she lowered her eyes back to her laptop screen, adjusted the collar of her shirt, and continued working.

That girl, Vadim would soon learn, was Cynthia Yu, an absolutely brilliant fourteen-year-old behavioral mathematician who passed her summers at the University of Pennsylvania's Artificial Intelligence department.

Right now, Vadim didn't pay too much attention to the messenger. I knew that all he needed to hear was that he was approved of. Then his blood pressure would lower, and his heart would stop thudding against his ribcage and return to its normal rhythm.

Consuela, similarly satisfied, wrapped her arm around his shoulders and started introducing him around. From that moment on, Vadim didn't care about skipping another grade, transferring schools, or what his Decanometry teacher thought
of him. He'd found a community, and that—for now, at least—was all that mattered.

Between fourth and fifth periods, I looked up in the hallway and saw Bates's staff drifting above the crowd. I worked up the courage to approach him about it.

“Hey, Bates,” I said, flashing him my friendliest smile. “Good to see you all freshly re-staffed. How you doin'?”

He threw me against the closest locker. The metal slits dug into my spinal cord. His forearm tightened like a knot around my Adam's apple, and I felt the staff wedged in the unbearably narrow area between my ear and the rest of my head.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “You want to run that by me again??”

I winced. When someone squashes your neck from the front, your first instinct, no matter what, is to pull back. Even if pulling back means digging yourself even harder into a sharply molded locker with jagged points that push hard into your skin, more painful than your assailant's choking hold.

“
Mister
Bates!” came the familiar monotone of Dr. Mayhew's voice from down the hall. “We've received those Freedom of Religion pamphlets for you from the ACLU. Congratulations again on your recent victory…”

The tone of his voice deepened, got lower and grew more suspicious as he saw Bates holding me in such a compromising position. But Bates's hold loosened as he turned around and I managed to slip out and duck into the oncoming tide of students. I massaged my neck, looking around to see whether anyone had noticed the newest assault on my dignity.

Then I heard a squeal and turned to see the girls' soccer
team waving at me. The bitter taste in my mouth suddenly tasted a lot like candy.

The first day or two of being popular—no, let's not get ahead of ourselves. The first day of not looking like a punching bag was pretty dizzyingly amazing. After that, it was just dizzying. Wednesday afternoon, I spotted Sajit coming out of the girls' bathroom, surrounded by a throng of stomach-sucking soccer—team girls, all bouncing in one communal laugh. He caught my eye, twisted out of the crowd, and matched my pace.

“
Juuu
piter,” he crooned in that way only he said my name. “I keep hearing all these
things
about you, man. How come it's all in the third person?”

“Which third person?”

“From
other
people, you fnord. You're quite the celebrity, you know. Your name is on the girls' bathroom wall. You've officially become one of the popular kids.”

I grinned. I couldn't help it, I was really impressed with myself. “Really? What does it say?”

“Oh, nothing. Just a phone number that isn't really yours. But how are you doing? How does it feel?”

The grin flickered for a second. Sajit noticed it; not much slipped beneath his radar. “What does that mean?”

“Well…” I hesitated. I couldn't help it—I never liked to spoil a surprise, or to point out that part in the movie where you could see the overhead microphone, and I felt way guilty questioning my blessings.

He nodded me on.

“It's great that I'm not getting laughed at by the those kids anymore,” I said. “But, since when did I ever start
liking
them?”

We both stopped in our tracks. It was a difficult question, and a valid one.

But Sajit had always been the master of positive thinking. Ever since first grade, when he tore open the ice packs that we nursed our black eyes with and discovered that you could suck the ice, he had his own way of looking at things. “Don't knock the hustle,” he said simply. “You don't have to play the game. Just enjoy sitting at the top of the board.”

And that was that.

From where I stood, my newfound popularity was definitely tasting better than my old lack of it, but, oddly enough, I wasn't feeling at all satisfied. By the end of the week, it had started to feel as though everyone on the attendance list of North Shore High had said hi to me, but I still hadn't managed to have one decent conversation—with the exception of Devin Murray, who it seemed like I now had to avoid. The less she found out about me, where I came from and where I currently resided, the better.

The last period bell rang. Mr. Denisof talked straight through its blanketing shrill, but we gathered up our books and jammed them into our backpacks. “Read chapters three and four, answer all the odd-numbered questions, and, Jupiter Glazer, don't think I've forgotten you,” he announced, seemingly oblivious to the tide of students running past him and through the door.

“Sir?” I was still stuck in my seat.

“You might think you're smart, waltzing right back in like nothing happened. But I've got my eye on you,” he told me. “I would advise you not to forget that.”

I gave a summary nod, zipped my backpack shut, and ran
out. I didn't know what sort of veiled threats he was intimating, but I knew I couldn't think about it anymore. From the time first period started at 8:16, I'd gone through six hours and forty-five minutes of consecutive thinking. I needed to give my brain a break.

So that's what I did. Outside, there was a stream of kids making their way from the front doors to the bus stop, a single huge wave that seemed to grow into a pool that mobbed each passing bus, flowing into its doors. The crowd going toward the Yards seemed surprisingly crowded, given both that it had a reputation for being the dumbest neighborhood in the city and that Devin couldn't seem to find anyone at our school who actually lived there.

I'd been dealing with crowds all day. Another pack of hungry and horny teenagers was not what I felt like experiencing right now.

I turned around, thinking I'd climb back up the hill and back into school, see if anyone was doing anything remotely interesting, since now I didn't have a job to get back to. Maybe I would try to track down Vadim.

All those thoughts vanished in the moment I set my eyes on the door.

Standing there, a bit like a lion trying to decide which herd to hunt down first, chest puffed out, long hair blowing in the wind, was Bates, twirling his pointed staff over his head.

I retreated. One foot behind the other, slowly. If you didn't move fast or act afraid, lions wouldn't pounce on you, right? No, that was snakes. Lions weren't blind. Lions could see fear, smell fear, watch fear eat at your nerves and your vital
organs until you were a cowering, blubbering mass trying to act cool and back away. Then, like a lazy Sunday afternoon decision, they would leap on you and rip you to pieces with their pinkie claw.

That was how Bates was looking at me right now.

I glanced behind me, looking for the huge crowd that would swallow me up. It was twenty or thirty feet away. Bates's staff had stopped orbiting above his head. Now he held it like a spear, pointing at me.

His mouth drew open with a piercing, throaty, guttural yell.

Really?
I thought.

Which was when he started to run straight at me.

I ran, too. My backpack bouncing off my back, the curls of my hair whacking in my eyes, pavement, turf, and unmowed grass fell beneath my feet. I tasted wind. Bates had managed to chase me on a diagonal, away from the after-school mass, and my sudden gratitude at not being publicly shamed was now holding a distant second to my desperate, agonizing wish for a crowd to hide in. He chased me through the empty sports field, past the swinging unlocked doors, through the hole in the fence. Across the street from the school was a row of shady-looking high-rise apartments, the kind mostly known for being backdrops for crime shootings on prime-time TV.

There was a red light. I ran across five lanes of stopped traffic. Bates jumped off the curb, giving another war whoop, his staff ready to harpoon.

I reached the far side. There was a barbed-wire fence surrounding the shady apartments. Great—I wasn't even allowed
in
. I glanced around, looking for something to hide behind.

And then I saw the bus.

And then the light turned green.

I hammered on the door. From the line of windows, the people who were already on the bus stared disdainfully down at me. The driver's head swung toward me, pissed, then reached over to swing the door open. “Alright, but I'm not doing this every day,” he griped as I climbed on.

I dropped in my token, grateful for the opportunity to continue my natural life span, and collapsed into an empty seat.

I turned to the man next to me, a tough-looking bald man in a plaid shirt with no sleeves. Mustering the last leftovers of my Friday-night charisma, I smiled at him and asked, “What direction is this bus going in?”

He looked at me like I was crazy.

“Downtown,” he said.

Downtown was a whole other world. A million cars chugged slowly down streets, and a thousand people swarmed around you at any given moment. The sidewalks were too impossibly small for the amount of people that were populating them. You felt like you needed to move, to move in time with the human conveyor belt around you, or else become trapped in the onslaught, crushed into a grate. Downtown was busy, deliciously busy. People watching was not just for those of us who lived in the margins of society. You almost didn't have a choice—you
had
to stare. Downtown was like spacewalking—your feet never touched the ground, and your hands, when you twitched them, felt aware, dangerously aware, that there was nothing that lay between them and the open depths of outer space, just
empty air that could suck you out of your clothes at any moment, catapulting you into forever.