Loser: Chapters 22–30

The principal says things to get the program started. Then the superintendent of schools speaks.

Then Katie Snelsen receives a book for having the best grades. She stands at the podium and gives a speech.

There are medals and citations and checks and handshakes and gift certificates and trophies and, for Bruce DiMino (Principal’s Award), a glass apple.

Some cheers are modest: a little handclapping, a “Yea, Sarah!”, “Go get ’em, Nicky!”

Other families are more boisterous: leaping from their seats, arms waving, two-fingered whistles, moose calls, stomping the floor.

He jumps up, lurches for the principal, catches his foot in the chair of the clarinetist beside him and goes sprawling to the floor.

To Zinkoff and to all the kids in this brick-and-hoagie town, summer is like a great warm shallow lake. Some frolic and splash.

He tries to make it fun by trouncing her so badly that she’ll get mad and stomp off, maybe throw a tantrum, which is always entertaining.

Eighth-graders tower over him, knock him off balance barging through.

He pictures himself in a fancy uniform, golden braid, doodads, a plumed hat high as the old giraffe.

The flake rides in on the fringe of a northwest wind: sails high over Heatherwood before swinging toward the tarpaper roofs of the town, flies over Halftank Hill and Eva’s Hoagie Hut and the post office, makes a beeline down Willow Street and on to the grass and asphalt sprawl of Monroe Middle School, dances for a moment outside a second-story window, leaps the spouting and, as if finally tired of it all, falls upon the roof.

The flake rides in on the fringe of a northwest wind: sails high over Heatherwood before swinging toward the tarpaper roofs of the town, flies over Halftank Hill and Eva’s Hoagie Hut and the post office, makes a beeline down Willow Street and on to the grass and asphalt sprawl of Monroe Middle School, dances for a moment outside a second-story window, leaps the spouting and, as if finally tired of it all, falls upon the roof.

Snow fights continue, but they’re rolling skirmishes now, snow scooped on the run.

The snow is trampled on the sidewalks, rutted in the street.

Zinkoff ricochets like a pinball off milling bodies.

The black canyon of housefronts looms over him.

To his right there is light through an airshaft, glow silhouettes the rooftops.

He stumbles in hidden potholes, lurches against open gates and chain-link fences and who knows what all in the cold pillowy night.

When Polly got a notion, it was “Katie, bar the door,” as his mother used to say.

His father used to say, “Some day I’m going to call her bluff. I’m going to let her walk as far as she wants.”

He lets the warm water rise all the way to his belly button before he turns it off, then he slinks down into the steamy everlasting warmness, only his head above.

Maybe he figured he was the best one to go looking for his own brother, and maybe he went tramping up and down the jungle till his shoes wore out, and maybe he was on his second or third pair of shoes when they kicked him out because it was their jungle not his, and so that’s why he came back to the window, he had no choice.

The tiny grains of ice have turned to freezing rain that pelts his face and runs down his neck and onto his shoulders and wakes him up, which is quite a surprise since he didn’t know he had gone to sleep in the first place.

He knows himself only by the stone in his mouth, the last faintly glowing ember of what used to be Zinkoff.

He’s up and slogging onward, turned around now in the confusion and heading back the way he came.

He is speaking, but his mother overlays his voice with hers: “Donald, what were you doing out there?”

They’re squeezing him and mussing his hair, and Polly is shrieking, “You’re sitting on it!”

“Yeah, pal,” says Polly, shaking her finger in his face, looking stern.

She juts her face at him.

Kids are swarming: hockey on the parking lot, football and soccer on the fields, goofing off all over in the balmy weather.