Loser Read online

  The boy turns to the first-graders, who are keeping their distance. “Whose hat is this?”

  Zinkoff runs forward. He trips over a foot and falls flat on his face. Everybody laughs. Zinkoff laughs. He comes up to the tall red-haired boy. He stands much closer than a first-grader normally gets to a fourth-grader. He looks directly up into the tall boy’s face and proudly announces, “It’s my hat.”

  The boy smiles. He shakes his head slowly. “It’s my hat.”

  Zinkoff just stares up. He is fascinated by the boy’s face. He has never seen a face smile and shake itself no at the same time.

  And he realizes that apparently there has been a mistake. Perhaps the tall boy was at the zoo on the same day Zinkoff was there. Perhaps he bought the giraffe hat first and left it behind by mistake. Whatever, there is no mistaking what the boy said: “It’s my hat.”

  Zinkoff is sad. He has really come to love the hat that he thought was his. But he is not sad too, because he can tell how happy it makes the tall boy to get his hat back.

  The boy is still smiling down at him. Zinkoff already knows that smiles do not like to be alone, so he sends his best smile up to join the one above. “Okay,” he says cheerfully.

  The smile on the tall boy’s face twists and changes. Zinkoff does not know it, but he has just cheated the boy. The boy expected Zinkoff to make a fuss, to try to get his hat back, maybe even to cry or pitch a fit. The boy loves to see first-graders pitch fits. It’s fun. And now he is cheated of his fun, cheated by this smiling, agreeable little insect in front of him.

  The tall boy takes off the hat. He pokes Zinkoff in the forehead with one of the giraffe’s horns. “It’s not mine, you dummy.” He wags his head and snickers. He turns to his friends. “First-graders are so dumb.” His friends laugh. He throws the hat to the ground. As he walks off, he makes sure to step on it.

  Zinkoff picks up the hat. Pieces of grit cling to the fuzzy surface. Suddenly the tall boy turns and looks back. Zinkoff drops the hat in case the boy wishes to step on it again. But the boy only laughs and goes away.

  Zinkoff’s mother is waiting for him after school. All the way home he jabbers about his incredible first day.

  “Do you like your teacher?” she asks him.

  “I love my teacher!” he says. “She called us ‘young citizens’!”

  She pats the top of his hat, which makes him almost as tall as her. “One thousand congratulations to you.”

  He beams. “Do I get a star?”

  “I believe you do.” His mother always carries with her a plastic Baggie of silver stars. She takes one out, licks it and presses it onto his shirt. “There.”

  As he bows his head to look at the star, the hat topples from his head. His mother picks it up. She puts it on her own head. Zinkoff howls and claps. She wears it the rest of the way home.

  Later Zinkoff sits on the front step waiting for his father to come home from work. His father is a mailman. He walks all day on his job but drives to and from the post office in his clunker. The Zinkoffs cannot afford a new car, so Mr. Zinkoff buys used ones. Every time he buys one he gets excited. “She’s a real honeybug,” he says. And then, a month or two later, every time, the honeybug starts to go bad. A retread tire loses its rubber. The carburetor starts coughing. The belts break. He keeps patching it up with duct tape, baling wire and chewing gum. Pretty soon everything is patches except Mr. Z’s faith in his honeybug.

  The day always comes when Mrs. Z whispers to her son, “It’s another clunker.” Zinkoff giggles and nods, but he never says the word “clunker” to his father, as that might hurt his feelings. It is never long after Mrs. Z says “clunker” that the car dies, usually on a rainy morning on the way to work. The car simply refuses to move another inch over the face of this earth, and even Mr. Z knows that it is beyond the help of even a thousand new plugs of chewing gum. The next day he gets rid of it and begins shopping for a new honeybug.

  This cycle has happened four times so far, which is why Zinkoff mother and son, between the two of them, call the current car “Clunker Four.”

  Zinkoff hears Clunker Four long before he sees it. It makes a high squeal that reminds him of elephants in the movies. He runs to the curb as the car rounds the corner and rattles to a stop. As usual there is a smell of something burning in the air. “Daddy,” he cries out, jumping into his father’s arms, “I went to school!”

  “And a star to prove it,” says his father, hoisting him into the house.

  Zinkoff talks about his first day at the dinner table and after dinner and right up until bedtime. As always, the last thing his mother says to him at night is, “Say your prayers.” While she hides his giraffe hat in the trunk with the comforters and fancy tablecloth, Zinkoff transfers the star from his school shirt to his pajamas. He climbs into bed and tells God all about his first day. Then he tells the stars.

  At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother’s plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts.

  This makes him feel close to the unfallen stars left in the sky. He thinks of them as his nightlights. As he grows drowsy in bed, he wonders which is greater: the number of stars in the sky or the number of school days left in his life? It’s a wonderful question.

  7. Jabip

  Here is the surprise: Every day is like the first day to Zinkoff. Things keep happening that rekindle the excitement of the first day. Learning to read his first two-syllable word. Making a shoe-box scene about the Pilgrims. Counting to five in Spanish. Learning about water and ants and tooth decay. His first fire drill. Making new friends.

  At the dinner table Zinkoff tells his parents about his days. But he always waits for his father’s question. “So, what’s new, Chickamoo?” Or “What’s new, Boogaloo?” Or “Kinkachoo.” Or “Pookypoo.” Many things tickle Zinkoff, but nothing more than the sound of a funny word. Words tickle him like fingertips in the ribs. Every time his father comes up with a new one, Zinkoff has to put down his fork and laugh. Usually he leans to one side, as if the funny word has the force of a great wind. Sometimes he even falls off his chair.

  It’s his teacher, Miss Meeks, who comes up with the best one. She stands at the greenboard one day, trying to explain what a billion basketballs would look like. “If you put the first one here,” she says, pointing to the floor, “and line them up out the door and down the hallway and across the playground and down the street—why, they would stretch from here to Jabip!”

  The classroom is a sea of boggling eyes. Wow!

  Someone calls out, “Where’s Jabip?”

  Miss Meeks explains that there is no actual place called Jabip. It’s just her way of saying someplace really far away.

  At that point Zinkoff, in the last seat in the last row, tilts alarmingly to the left and falls from his chair. The teacher rushes to him. His face is red. Tears stream down his cheeks. He’s gasping for breath.

  “Donald! Donald!” she calls, though he is inches away.

  He looks up at her through watery eyes. He gasps, “Jabip!” He pounds the floor.

  That’s when Miss Meeks realizes her pupil isn’t dying, he’s merely laughing.

  It’s a good five minutes before Zinkoff calms down enough for the class to continue. Miss Meeks forbids the class—and herself—to utter the word “Jabip” for the rest of the day. Nevertheless, from time to time there are sudden giggly eruptions from the back row as the word pops back into Zinkoff’s head.

  When he hears Clunker Four coming that day, he runs alongside the car as it coasts to the curb. “Daddy! Daddy! Did you ever hear of Jabip?”

  “Sure,” says his father out the open window. “I
also heard of Jaboop.”

  Zinkoff rolls on the sidewalk. Jabip. Jaboop. He keeps erupting through dinner. Eating becomes hazardous. His parents smile patiently for the first minute or so, then begin telling him enough is enough. But Zinkoff can’t stop. When a bolt of mashed potatoes shoots from his nose, he is sent to his room. That night he giggles through his prayer and into sleep.

  In school for the rest of the week Zinkoff continues to produce outbursts of laughter in the back row. Every outburst triggers laughter from the other pupils. Sometimes, to get him started, a pupil waits until the teacher’s head is turned, then whispers the forbidden word. Sometimes Miss Meeks bites her tongue to keep from joining in, sometimes she gets mad.

  It’s during one of the mad times that she says, “Donald, come up here, please.” When he stands before her she takes something from her desk drawer. It’s a round yellow button. It’s the largest button the students have ever seen, as large as a giant pinwheel taffy. It has black letters on it. “Can you tell me what it says?”

  Zinkoff studies the button. Finally he shakes his head.

  “It says, ‘I know I can behave.’” She pins the button onto his shirt. “And I know you can.”

  Zinkoff has to wear the button for an hour. During that time he does not laugh once. Miss Meeks judges her maneuver a success and returns the button to the drawer. Soon Zinkoff is laughing again. He gets the button back.

  So it goes for several days. Second-graders who wore the button the previous year and who have heard of Zinkoff’s endless giggling ask him in the playground, “Did you get the button today?”

  One day Miss Meeks has to leave the classroom for a while. When she returns she finds Zinkoff’s hand waving in the air.

  “Yes, Donald?”

  “Miss Meeks,” he says, “I laughed when you were gone.”

  And she realizes at last that for Zinkoff the button is not a punishment at all, but a badge of honor. From then on she punishes him by keeping the button in the drawer.

  Button or no button, Zinkoff loves school. One day he awakes before anyone else in the house. He gets himself dressed. He makes his own breakfast. He brushes his teeth and walks off to school. I must be early, he thinks, for he sees no crossing guards or other children along the way.

  He is sitting on the front step waiting for the door to open when he hears Clunker Four. It stops in front of the school and out pop both his mother and father. Both come running.

  “Donald, we’ve been looking all over! You weren’t in your bed!”

  “I came to school all by myself,” he declares proudly.

  His parents look at each other. His mother bites her lip. His father picks him up and says, “You’re very big to do that all by yourself. The only problem is, there’s no school today. It’s Saturday.”

  When Miss Meeks passes Zinkoff on to second grade, she writes on the back of his final report card: “Donald sometimes has a problem with self-control, and I wish he were neater, but he is so good-natured. That son of yours is one happy child! And he certainly does love school!”

  8. Two New Friends

  In the summer between first and second grades Zinkoff acquires two new friends. One is a baby sister, the other is a neighbor. The baby sister is Polly. The neighbor is Andrew.

  When Zinkoff first meets the baby, his mother says, “Look,” and pulls down the blanket. Zinkoff’s eyes boggle. There are two silver stars on the baby’s diaper. This baby is less than one day old. What can she have done already to deserve two stars? He’s never been awarded more than one at a time. “Mom,” he says, “two stars? What did she do?”

  “She did the best thing of all,” says his mother, pulling up the blanket. “She was born.”

  Has Zinkoff been misinformed? “I was born too, wasn’t I?”

  She pats his hand. “Absolutely. You were every bit as born as Polly was.”

  “So,” he says, “how come I didn’t get two stars?”

  “Who says you didn’t?”

  He brightens. “I did?”

  She shakes her head. “Sorry. I was kidding you. That was before I started giving out stars.” Now she needs to pick him up again. “Tell you what—how would you like your being-born stars now? Better late than never.”

  He brightens again. “Yeah!”

  But she’s not finished thinking. “Or how about this? We could make a deal. We could wait until you’re having a really bad day, some day when you could really, really use two stars to pick you up. That’s when you get them.”

  He thinks it over. He hates to wait, but he loves to make deals. “Okay,” he says and shakes his mother’s hand. Then he reaches into the blanket and shakes the baby’s foot.

  A month later the new neighbors move in next door. That same day Mrs. Zinkoff bakes a strawberry angel food cake and carries it out the front door. Her firstborn tags along. “This is how we say welcome,” she says.

  He stands at his mother’s side as she rings the doorbell and says, “Welcome to the neighborhood” and hands the cake to the new lady neighbor, whose proper name is Mrs. Orwell, but whose first name is better: Cherise. Then he is introduced. “This is my son, Donald.”

  Cherise smiles down at him and shakes his hand and says, “Hello, Donald. I have a son too. His name is Andrew. How old are you?”

  “Six,” he replies.

  “So is Andrew.”

  Zinkoff stares at the two ladies in wonder. “Wow! Same as me!” He looks past Cherise. “Is he in there?”

  “He is,” says Cherise, “but he’s hiding. He says he’s never coming out. He’s mad because we moved away from our other house.”

  Zinkoff thinks about this for a moment. He lifts a finger to Cherise. “I have an idea. Tell Andrew my father is a mailman. That will make him come out.” In Zinkoff’s view, carrying the mail is the most interesting job there is.

  Cherise nods solemnly. “I’ll give it a try.”

  Before Zinkoff and his mother get back to their own house, he has another idea. “I’m going to make a special welcome just for Andrew.”

  “Good for you,” says his mother. “A cake?”

  “No, a cookie.”

  His mother does not say no. His parents try not to say no to him unless it’s really necessary. So when he announces that he intends to bake a cookie, his mother simply says, “What kind?”

  He doesn’t hesitate. “A snickerdoodle!” The snickerdoodle is his favorite cookie. Every cookie tastes good to him, but snickerdoodles taste twice as good because of their name. Sometimes his dad says “snookerdiddle” and makes him laugh for an hour.

  Zinkoff’s idea is to bake a snickerdoodle so big that Andrew the new neighbor will have to come out and see it.

  Since he is working on the kitchen table, it seems to him that the largest cookie he can make would be one as large as the table itself. But his mother points out that a cookie that big could not fit in the oven. So he settles for a rectangular cookie that covers the entire cookie pan.

  Every time his mother tries to help, the young chef snaps at her, “I can do that.” So his mother simply gives directions and says “Heaven help me” a lot while her intrepid son makes a mess of the kitchen. Flour and eggs fly everywhere. For weeks to come the family will feel the crunch of sugar grains underfoot.

  Finally, miraculously, the cookie gets baked. He snatches the quilted mitten and potholder from his mother—“I can do it myself”—pulls the hot pan from the oven and sets it on the kitchen table. Impatient as always, he cannot wait for it to cool. He blows over the steaming cookie until he’s out of breath. He flaps his hands over it. At last the pan is cool enough to touch without the mitten.

  He runs next door with it. He rings the bell. Cherise opens the door.

  “Hi, Donald.”

  “Hi, Cherise. I made a welcome cookie for Andrew. It’s a snickerdoodle. I think if you put it on the floor and wait a little while, he’ll smell it and come out.”

  Zinkoff is utterly serious, but for some rea
son Cherise laughs. “Come on in,” she says. “Wait here.”

  Cherise leaves him standing in the living room. He hears whispery voices upstairs. Once he hears a sharp “No!” Then there are footsteps on the stairs, and here at last is Andrew Orwell walking toward him in his grumpy face and pajamas in the middle of the day.

  “Hi,” Zinkoff says. “My name is Donald Zinkoff. I’m your neighbor. I made you a welcome cookie. It’s a snickerdoodle.”

  Andrew’s face perks up. He leans in to smell the cookie. He is hooked.

  Zinkoff reaches for the spatula his mother told him to bring along. A cookie is not really a cookie until it’s out of the pan and into the hand. He lays the pan on the floor. He pries the giant snickerdoodle from the sides and bottom of the pan. He lifts out the warm, soft, heavenly smelling welcome. He lifts it with both hands and holds it out to Andrew. As Andrew reaches for it, the panless, unsupported cookie collapses of its own weight and falls to the floor. Zinkoff is left with a bite-size scrap in each hand.

  Andrew Orwell stares in horror at the floor. He screams, “My cookie!” He screams at Zinkoff. “You dropped it!” He runs screaming up the stairs. “I hate this place!”

  Zinkoff stuffs one scrap into his mouth, then the other. He gathers up the collapsed pieces from the floor and carries them home in the pan. He sits on the front step. Everybody who passes by that afternoon is offered a piece of cookie. In between, Zinkoff helps himself.

  By the time Clunker Four rattles up to the curb, the cookie is gone. As his father gets out of the car, Zinkoff runs to him, plunges his head into his father’s mailbag and throws up.

  Zinkoff was born with an upside-down valve in his stomach. This causes him to throw up several times a week. To Zinkoff, throwing up is almost as normal as breathing.