Loser: Chapters 12–21

The night before, Donald went to bed fervently wishing for a blizzard the next day.

Donald is intrigued. “Is he waiting for the mail?”

His white hair is thick around his ears and wispy on top.

Reluctantly Donald drags the bag to the car.

But it happens a lot during his three weeks of convalescing.

He lowers himself another step...and thinks he glimpses the furry edge of a flank pulling itself out of sight.

He clambers up the stairs.

At last he pushes himself up from the chair and, like a condemned man, takes the long, doomed walk to the cellar door.

He lowers himself one more step, seven to go...one more step, six to go...one more...one more...his silent scream probes for a weakness in the sock...one more...one more...and the Monster is out from behind the furnace now, he knows it, he feels it.

They don’t know if it’s being one more grade up, or if it’s this man teacher with his gruff man way of talking, but they’re liking it and starting to feel pretty puffy about themselves.

He is forever making pronouncements that give Zinkoff new views of himself.

By placing Zinkoff up front, by spotlighting Zinkoff with clever remarks, Mr. Yalowitz unwittingly hastens the others’ discovery of him.

Still he often veers off course, a wanderer among the clarinets and violins.

It is in the first week of June of that year that Zinkoff is most profoundly discovered.

The sight of Zinkoff tilting, tottering, lurching, falling, brings howls of laughter and mock cheers from the sidelines.

His face is a pinched, grimacing lemon of effort.

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.

Twice, in fact, he dreams that a soldier toting a rifle on his shoulder is walking toward him.

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!”

Binns goes at his ear with a gusto that Zinkoff has never noticed before.

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’s around that time that he discovers in one of his pockets a clump of petrified bubblegum.

Zinkoff gets an ovation, his first ever.

Like gaudy birds, his name flies in new forms across the schoolyard: “The Zink!”

Spotting him, boys jerk to a halt, plant their legs as if straddling a motorcycle, thrust a pair of finger-pistols at him and bellow: “There he is!”

Meanwhile in school, Gary Hobin is rising to prominence, as he does every year around Field Day time.

The back legs of the walker land first with a rubbery thud, then the front legs, then the catch-up shushing of her own slippers on the linoleum.

She is so slow, so deliberate in every movement that he sees things he has never seen before.

He must say something, quickly, create a diverting action.

“I can spell tintinnabulation,” he blurts.