J e r r y s p I n e L l I

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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. 
And something new begins. 
On that same spring day something happens 
to Zinkoff. An A happens to him. A’s almost 
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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 hap-
pened because he rubbed his lucky pink bubble-
gum 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!” 
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“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. 
All he sees is that he seems to have acquired 
the power to make people happy. The very sight 
of him brings smiles and twinkly eyes to his 
schoolmates. 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!” 
Hands sprout like weeds to be high-fived. 
“Yo Zink!” 
As he comes to the dinner table one night, he 
stands for a moment at his chair. He thumps his 
chest with his fist, declares “Ahm da Zink!” and 
sits down. 
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His mother and father look at each other. 
His sister Polly says, “You da what?” 
And then this too is over, and like the best 
friendship, it’s over before he knows it. In fact, it 
has never been quite what he thought it was in 
the first place. 
One day Zinkoff notices that, except for Katie 
Snelsen and a few others, no one smiles at him 
anymore. No one is high-fiving him, no one yo-
Zinking him. He thinks about it, and he figures 
he knows why. Field Day is coming. And no one 
takes Field Day more seriously than fifth-
graders. And that’s what Zinkoff thinks it is, 
merely a turning of attention from himself to 
Field Day. He has heard his last “Yo,” seen his 
last smile. Okay, he thinks, no problem, and he 
puts on his own game face. 
He brings chairs from the kitchen to the back-
yard and practices the weave-around-the-chairs 
race and the one-foot hop and the hiney hop. He 
goes out onto the sidewalk, and just as he did 
when he was little, he races cars to the end of the 
block, and it surprises him that the cars seem so 
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much faster these days. He does jumping jacks. 
Meanwhile in school, Gary Hobin is rising to 
prominence, as he does every year around Field 
Day time. Field Day is still two weeks away when 
Hobin goes to Mrs. Shankfelder and asks her to 
pick the four teams now. “We want to have time 
to practice together,” he says. 
So Mrs. Shankfelder writes across the top of 
the greenboard: