Loser Read online

  On days when he doesn’t cruise nine hundred Willow he often rides to Halftank Hill. Halftank Hill is in the park and the best part of it is a grassy, evilly steep slope that commands: Come down me! And they do, kids from all over town, in all seasons of the year. They sled down, they run down, roll down, tumble down, bicycle down, tricycle down, Rollerblade down, skateboard down, trashcan-lid down.

  Early in his life, when Zinkoff raced cars along the sidewalk, he had believed himself to be the fastest kid in the world. Now that he knows this to be untrue, Halftank Hill has become all the more appealing to him.

  Sometimes he runs, because it is the only way he can experience, for just a moment, a particularly fascinating feeling. Halfway down the hill he can feel himself losing control, his legs cannot keep up with his speed. He feels as if he is coming apart, running out of himself, leaving himself behind.

  Sometimes he bikes it. He aims the front tire over the grassy crest and down he goes, and for those few seconds nothing can convince him that he is not the fastest thing in the universe, and even though he’s too big now to yell yahoo he yells it anyway: “Yahoo!” And rediscovers every time that no one is slow on Halftank Hill. And there are no clocks.

  Sometimes he doesn’t want to ride anywhere in particular. Sometimes he doesn’t want to ride fast. He just wants to ride. That’s when he aims Clinker One for the alleys, where cats and little kids roam but no cars, a bicycle’s boulevard, and he rides, just rides, and it’s good enough.

  And so Zinkoff’s life in fifth grade is filled with things new and interesting and good enough. And until the day of the test-that-is-not-a-test, it never occurs to him that something has been missing.

  18. Best Friend

  It isn’t a schoolwork test. There has been nothing to study for. There has been no warning. One day in fifth grade the teacher, Mrs. Shankfelder, simply passes out booklets with blue covers. Barry Peterson says, “Is this a test?” and she says no, she calls it some big word. But Zinkoff looks at it and sees that there are questions and there are little egg spaces to fill in for answers. It’s a test.

  Every other school test Zinkoff has ever taken has been about some classroom subject: arithmetic, geography, spelling. This test seems to be about himself. What does he think about this? Why does he do that? Which one of these does he prefer?

  Halfway through, Zinkoff has to admit this is the first test he has ever taken that is almost fun. It’s one more thing this year that makes him feel grown-up. Most of the answers come easily to him, until on the next-to-last page he arrives at a question that stumps him:

  Who is your best friend?

  Unlike most of the other questions, this one isn’t multiple choice. No little eggs to fill in, just a blank line that needs a name.

  If he had this test back in second grade, he would have filled in Andrew Orwell’s name. But Andrew, his neighbor, has long since moved, and no obvious replacement comes to mind.

  Oh sure, Zinkoff has friends. There’s Bucky Monastra, who he plays marbles with. And Peter Grilot, the second sloppiest kid in class. And Katie Snelsen, who smiles at him every time she sees him. Friends all, but not best friends.

  He knows what a best friend is. He sees them all over. Best friends are Burt O’Neill and George Undercoffler. Or Ellen Dabney and Ronni Jo Thomas. Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other’s house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other’s parents. You can’t pry them apart.

  Zinkoff doesn’t have anybody like that. Most of the time he doesn’t think about it. But now and then he does. He wonders what it would be like to be so stuck to another kid that you could walk into his kitchen and his mother wouldn’t even look up because she’s that used to you, and she would say, “Wash your hands and sit down, you’re late for dinner.” It seems kind of neat, thinking of it that way, and sometimes he regrets he doesn’t have a best friend. But then he usually thinks about his own mother and his father and Polly and he thinks about the nine hundred block of Willow and he figures he is doing okay.

  Until he comes to this question—Who is your best friend?—and that blank space seems to be saying to him: If you don’t have one, you’d better get one.

  He skips over the question to finish the rest of the test. He returns to it. Time is passing. Pretty soon Mrs. Shankfelder will say, “Pencils up.”

  Best friend…best friend…

  “One more minute,” says Mrs. Shankfelder, who does not usually give a warning.

  He panics. He looks around the classroom, too bad if the teacher thinks he’s cheating. His eye settles on Hector Binns, way up in the first row. Hector’s head is down, his shoulders hunched. He’s working away on the test.

  Hector Binns has been in Zinkoff’s class since first grade, so of course Zinkoff knows who he is. Over the years they have found themselves at the same water fountain or monkey bar rung. But Hector Binns, being a B, has always sat far from Zinkoff, and Zinkoff’s information about him is spotty at best. This is the sum of what he knows: Hector Binns wears glasses, he is about Zinkoff’s height, he loves black licorice and he’s always cleaning out his ear with a paper clip. And now that he thinks of it, there’s one more thing: As far as Zinkoff knows, Hector Binns is available. He has no best friend either.

  “Pencils up.”

  Quickly he fills in the blank, misspelling both first and last names: “Hecter Binz.”

  He can hardly wait for recess. He finds Hector Binns by the bicycle rack, working on his ear with a paper clip.

  “Hi, Hector,” he says. “What’s up?”

  “Huh?” replies Hector Binns. Zinkoff repeats, “What’s up?” but Hector doesn’t seem to hear. Maybe his hearing goes bad when the paper clip is in his ear. Otherwise, he doesn’t seem unfriendly, so Zinkoff just stands there.

  Binns goes at his ear with a gusto that Zinkoff has never noticed before. He digs and scrapes, wincing in pain or pleasure, Zinkoff can’t tell which. He pulls out the paper clip and examines it. To Zinkoff’s eye it’s clean. Binns plunges it into the other ear. Dig, scrape, wince. This time the clip comes out with a tiny waxy orangish crumb clinging to the end of it.

  Binns pulls from his pants pocket a small brown plastic bottle, the kind that pills come in. He brings the bottle to his mouth and for an instant Zinkoff thinks he’s going to eat it, but he simply pulls off the white flip-top cap with his teeth. He taps the paper clip on the rim of the bottle and in falls the waxy crumb. Zinkoff notices that the bottle is half full. Binns returns bottle and paper clip to his pocket. Only then does Binns seem to notice that he is not alone.

  The obvious question crawls to the front of Zinkoff’s tongue, but somehow he holds it back. “So,” he says, “who did you answer for best friend?”

  Binns pulls out a pack of black licorice sticks from another pocket. He rips off half a stick and begins to chew. “Nobody,” he says.

  “Really?” says Zinkoff. “You left it blank? Can you do that?”

  Binns shakes his head. Except for that first moment, his eyes never meet Zinkoff’s. He always seems to be looking into the Beyond. “I wrote Nobody. The word Nobody.”

  “Oh,” says Zinkoff, nodding, thinking he understands. “Nobody. Okay.”

  Binns stuffs the rest of the stick into his mouth and returns the pack to his pocket. “Nobody is my lizard.”

  Zinkoff stares at the eyes that stare at the Beyond. Suddenly he gets it. “Oh! You have a lizard named Nobody.”

  Binns blinks, which Zinkoff takes for a nod.

  “And you put him down as your best friend.” Another blink. “Okay, I got it.”

  Hector Binns collects earwax and has a lizard named Nobody, who he calls his best friend. Zinkoff figures his choice is looking better by the minute.

  “Know who I put down?” he says.

  “No,” says Binns.

  “You,” says Zinkoff.

  Binns blinks. His eyes disconnect from the Beyond
and slide over to Zinkoff’s face. “Huh?” he says.

  Zinkoff grins. “Yeah. I put your name down.”

  Binns’s eyelids flap as if they’re trying to take off. “Me? Why?”

  “Because I had to put somebody’s name down, and I thought of you.”

  “But I’m not your best friend.”

  “I know. And I’m not yours either. But I thought maybe we could be, I mean, since I wrote your name down and all.”

  Hector Binns isn’t answering. His eyes have gone back to the Beyond.

  Zinkoff doesn’t know the word negotiation, but that’s what this is. He tries to think of something he can offer, something to sweeten the pot. “I make a mean snickerdoodle cookie!” he blurts.

  Binns’s left cheek bulges out as he chews on his licorice wad. When his teeth appear, they’re outlined in black, as if cartoon-drawn. As a fifth-grader, Zinkoff knows cool when he sees it. He takes a stab at cool himself. He shuffles his feet. He hooks his thumbs into his waistband. He gazes off into a Beyond of his own. “So,” he says, tossing in a shrug, “what do you think?” Making it sound like, “Not that I care one way or the other.”

  Binns sniffs. He turns his head until he’s looking down over his right shoulder. His lips slide to the side of his face, the far corner of his mouth opens like a little eye and out comes a black dollop of licorice juice. It falls to the ground. At last he speaks, and answers Zinkoff’s held-back question. “What I think is, when I get enough wax I’m gonna make a candle.”

  Wow! An earwax candle! Zinkoff is willing to bet that Binns has not shared this blockbuster information with anyone else in class.

  The end-of-recess bell rings. The two of them trot side by side to the door. “See ya after school?” says Zinkoff.

  Binns says, “I guess.”

  19. The Candy in His Hand

  At dinner that day he says at the table, says it casually to show it’s an everyday thing, “I’ll be going over to my best friend’s house one of these days.” Hoping his parents will take the bait and ask him who his best friend is.

  They do. His mother’s eyebrows go up. “Oh?” she says, “And who would that be?”

  “Hector Binns,” he replies, tossing it out casually, being cool, liking the sound of it.

  “Isn’t he in your class?”

  “Yeah. He sits in the front row. He loves licorice.”

  “Loves it, huh?” says his father.

  “Yeah.”

  “I hate licorice,” says Polly. “Licorice smells.”

  “He’s making a candle,” he tells them.

  “That’s nice,” says his mother.

  “Out of earwax.”

  Everyone stops eating and stares at him.

  “Earwax?” says his mother.

  “Eewwwww!” goes Polly.

  “Is that possible?” says his father.

  Zinkoff feels a surge of associated pride. He looks his dad in the eye. “He’s doing it.”

  Several days later he visits Hector Binns’s house. He walks right in and plops himself down in a chair, because that’s how you do it with a best friend: You walk right in and plop yourself down. When Binns’s mother spots him her face goes all funny and she says, “Who are you?” But then Binns himself comes in and takes him off to his room.

  They spend some time looking at Binns’s stuff. He meets Nobody the lizard. Then Binns tells him to wait in the hallway and closes the bedroom door. When he opens it, he holds in his hand a brown pill bottle already filled with earwax. “This is the first one,” he says. “I keep it hid.”

  Zinkoff can’t believe he’s being allowed to see it. He feels truly honored.

  Riding home that day on his bicycle, Zinkoff notices the marks dotting the sidewalks. Black licorice spit marks. He smiles.

  Zinkoff is determined to be the best best friend he can be.

  One day Barry Peterson calls Binns “Heckie.” Zinkoff knows Binns hates being called that, so he says to Peterson, “Hey, that’s not his name, it’s Hector.” Because that’s what you do, you stand up for your best friend.

  And you eat lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he’s the first person you think of.

  Zinkoff does all of this, and more. He starts eating black licorice. He pretends it’s chewing tobacco. He walks around with a chaw bulging from his cheek. He tries spitting pretend tobacco juice, but his mother puts a quick stop to that.

  Binns is probably the most interesting person Zinkoff knows, with the possible exception of the Waiting Man, and Zinkoff soon decides he needs to be interesting too. It’s around that time that he discovers in one of his pockets a clump of petrified bubblegum. It’s a gift from Claudia, the little leash-and-harness girl. It looks like a pink stone. He appoints it his lucky piece, which he will carry with him always and rub when he needs some luck. He feels more interesting already.

  About a week into the best friendship, Zinkoff asks his mother if he can invite Binns to sleep over. She says sure. Excited, Zinkoff runs to the phone and calls Binns. Binns says, “I guess.” Binns never says “yes.” He always says “I guess.”

  But the sleepover has problems. Binns turns out to be a kicker and a roller. Actually, he’s a regular bulldozer in bed. Zinkoff wakes up to find himself thumping to the floor. He climbs back into bed, and as soon as he gets to sleep it happens again. After the third time he takes the extra blanket from the closet and makes himself a bed on the floor.

  Except for his bed, after that night, he shares everything he can with his best friend: the lunch in his paper bag (he has outgrown the lunch pail too), the allowance in his pocket, the candy in his hand, the joke in his giggle. He shares the nine hundred block of Willow with him. He introduces him to little Claudia on the leash. They walk their bikes past the Waiting Man. The lady with the walker isn’t on the front step that day, so for days afterward Zinkoff keeps asking Binns if he wants to go back, because he wants Binns to hear her say, “Oh, mailman!” But Binns keeps saying, “I guess not.”

  There is one thing more special than any other that Zinkoff intends to share with Binns. He saves it for weeks and weeks, and when he can no longer bear to wait, he gives it to Binns. He gives it to him after school one day in a brown paper lunch bag. Binns opens the bag. In it is a little tin that says “Altoids.” Zinkoff found the tin on the street. Binns opens the Altoids tin and stares.

  “What is it?” he says.

  Zinkoff beams. “Wax.”

  Binns stares, first at the contents of the tin, then at Zinkoff. That’s all he does, stare.

  “It’s mine,” says Zinkoff. “From my own ears. I’ve been saving it up. I know it’s not much, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I figured you could add it to yours and get enough for a candle faster.” He doesn’t tell him that he tried to get Polly to contribute, but she refused.

  Binns looks into the Beyond. He bends a licorice stick and stuffs it into his mouth. He slowly closes the lid of the Altoids tin and hands it back to Zinkoff. “I guess not,” he says.

  Zinkoff shrugs. “Okay.” He understands. When a kid is making an earwax candle, he wants everything to come from his own ears. Zinkoff figures maybe he’ll save up for a candle of his own. He wonders if that would count as a science project.

  And then it’s over.

  20. Nowhere

  When is it over?

  Zinkoff doesn’t know for weeks. He is only dimly aware of things, dimly aware that as time goes by he seems to be seeing less and less of Binns. He rides to Binns’s house and Binns isn’t there. He phones. Binns says he has homework to do. He asks Binns this, asks him that. Binns always seems to say, “I guess not.” Even Binns’s voice over the phone seems to shrug, seems to be looking into the Beyond.

  And then one spring day on the way to school Zinkoff sees a cluster of licorice spit marks on a sidewalk, and it makes him feel a little sad and remembery, and just like that he knows: It’s over.
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  And something new begins.

  On that same spring day something happens to Zinkoff. An A happens to him. A’s almost never happen to Zinkoff, absolutely never in major tests. But this was a major test in Geography, his favorite subject, and somehow he has aced it. In fact, his A is the only A in class—a fact which Mrs. Shankfelder announces while holding up his test paper for all the world to see.

  Zinkoff gets an ovation, his first ever. Several kids stand. Barry Haines even whistles, though probably more to show off his whistle than to honor Zinkoff. Congratulations continue to pour in all day. Pats on the back. Playful punches in the arm. Hair mussings. He wonders if it happened because he rubbed his lucky pink bubblegum stone before taking the test.

  In the playground people want to see it. They snatch it from Zinkoff’s hand and rub it over their faces and chests and under their arms like a washcloth, rubbing in the A juice, sighing, “Ahhh!” and everyone laughs, and Zinkoff laughs hardest of all.

  Like gaudy birds, his name flies in new forms across the schoolyard:

  “The Zink!”

  “The Z man!”

  “The genius!”

  “The Zinkster!”

  It never occurs to Zinkoff that all the fuss is more than a simple A can account for. It never occurs to him that the loudest and showiest of his congratulators are really not congratulating him at all, but mocking him for blundering into the only A he is ever likely to get.

  Zinkoff does not see this.