J e r r y s p I n e L l I
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Loser
132
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 133 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!” 134 “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. 135 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 136 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: Download 0.63 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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