Losers, Inc. Read online

  “So your question is…”

  “Where the voice comes from.”

  “That’s a very interesting question,” Ms. Gunderson said slowly. She sounded a bit bewildered. People often became bewildered when they were around Lizzie. “Some people might not think of this as a scientific question, but I think a true scientist is someone who is interested in all questions about the physical world. Do any of you have any idea how she might proceed?”

  “She could go see Mr. Jonas,” Alex Ryan said snidely.

  Everybody laughed, except for Ms. Gunderson and Lizzie.

  “Mr. Jonas?”

  “He’s the school shrink,” Alex explained with a mean smirk. “People who hear voices in their heads should see a shrink.”

  The others laughed again, but this time Ethan didn’t. He didn’t want to laugh at anything Rapunzel didn’t laugh at. And Lizzie looked ready to cry.

  “Lizzie could write to other poets,” Ethan heard himself saying. “She could try to find out if they have the same experience. She could, you know, kind of do a survey or something.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea…” Ms. Gunderson paused for his name.

  “Ethan.”

  “That is a wonderful idea, Ethan.” When she said it, Ethan felt that she meant it, that he was the kind of person who had wonderful ideas all the time. The way Ms. Gunderson was smiling at him, Ethan felt smart and brave and strong and kind, as if he could climb to the top of the highest tower with no ladder other than her hair.

  If this was what love felt like, he was in love.

  * * *

  Ethan floated through science class and art. Then, in third-period math class, he came down to earth with a thud.

  Mr. Grotient was a short, roly-poly man who always wore a bow tie and suspenders. He looked a little bit like an inflatable toy, held down by beanbag weights stuffed into his small, shiny black shoes.

  “Boys and girls,” he began, rocking slightly on his toes, “today we are going to begin a new program called Peer-Assisted Learning.”

  Ethan looked over at Julius. He could tell that Julius didn’t know what Peer-Assisted Learning was, either.

  “In Peer-Assisted Learning, students work together in pairs as Peer Partners. Peer Partners study together during class several times each week.”

  Ethan met Julius’s eyes again. They never worried about having to choose partners. They always chose each other.

  “I worked out your Peer Partner assignments over the weekend,” Mr. Grotient went on. Ethan began to feel uneasy. He didn’t want Mr. Grotient picking his Peer Partner. He wanted to be Peer Partners with Julius.

  Mr. Grotient picked up a paper from his desk and began to read. “Your Peer Partner assignments are: Lizzie Archer, Ethan Winfield. David Barnett, Julius Zimmerman. Susan Butler, Marcia Faitak…”

  Ethan sat stunned. His Peer Partner was the Lizard. The teacher’s pet. The poet who heard voices in her head. Thumbelina.

  Ethan made himself look over at Lizzie. Lizzie’s face was red. Was she as mad at being stuck with him as he was at being stuck with her? But she didn’t really seem mad. She almost seemed to be blushing. Now that he thought of it, Lizzie had been giving him strange looks all morning, ever since he had stood up for her against Alex in science class.

  “All right, class,” Mr. Grotient said. “We’ll use the rest of the period to get started on Peer-Assisted Learning, PAL, for short. Move your desk next to your Peer Partner’s desk, and begin working together on the problems for chapter seven.”

  The others began shoving their desks around. Ethan watched numbly as Julius and David pushed their desks together. At that moment, Ethan was more of a loser than Julius: Julius hadn’t been assigned the Lizard as his Peer Partner.

  Marcia Faitak, who usually sat next to Lizzie, pulled her desk over to Ethan’s side of the room.

  “Ethan.” Marcia said his name in a conspiratorial whisper. She waved a sheet of lined notebook paper in Ethan’s face. “I found this on the floor last period by Lizzie’s desk.”

  Marcia handed the paper to Ethan. He didn’t want to read it, but Marcia plainly wasn’t going to budge until he did.

  He glanced down at the page and saw four lines of what had to be a poem. With Marcia’s eyes boring into him, Ethan began to read:

  For Ethan, My Hero

  Alas, the winter wind doth blow,

  But yet my love doth brightly bloom.

  However cold the driving snow,

  I shall love thee till my doom.

  Marcia snatched the paper away. “She’s coming!”

  Marcia returned to her seat just as Lizzie, still blushing, pushed her desk next to Ethan’s, so that their two chairs were almost touching.

  Ethan didn’t need to make any more entries in Life Isn’t Fair: A Proof. He had all the proof he needed. Nothing like this had ever happened to Peter, or ever could. It could happen only to the vice president of Losers, Inc.

  He was in love with Grace Gunderson, AKA Rapunzel.

  And Lizzie Archer, AKA the Lizard, was in love with him.

  Three

  Ethan stared down at his desk, unwilling to look at Lizzie. He knew that Lizzie was staring at her desk, too, unwilling to look at him. One of them had to break the silence. But Ethan felt as if he had lost the power of speech.

  “Ethan, Lizzie,” Mr. Grotient called over to them, “start working.”

  Ethan opened his book to the problem set at the end of chapter seven. Next to him, Lizzie opened her book, too. He read the first problem silently.

  “So…” His voice came out in a squeak. “So what do you think the answer is?”

  “Well, if y is 22 and z is 34, then x would be y over z, or 22 over 34, or you could reduce it to 11 over 17.”

  Ethan wrote it on his paper. At least the Lizard was good at math. He was relieved that she wasn’t talking about poetry, or voices inside her head, or loving people till her doom.

  “What about problem two?” he asked then.

  Lizzie told him the answer in her usual rapid-fire way.

  “You’re talking too fast,” Ethan said.

  Lizzie repeated her answer, more slowly.

  It seemed ridiculous to go on this way, but Ethan didn’t know what else to do. “What do you get for problem three?”

  “I did the first two,” Lizzie said. “You do problem three. Besides, we’re not supposed to just do the problems. We’re supposed to talk about them.”

  Ethan’s heart sank another notch downward. He didn’t want to have conversations about math problems with anyone, let alone with the Lizard.

  “What’s the answer to problem three?” Lizzie asked.

  Ethan took a wild guess. “Twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-five? How did you get 25?”

  Ethan shrugged. He had just made it up. “Well, if y is 17—wait a minute—which one is y?”

  Lizzie began to explain the problem to him. “See?” she said when she was done. “The answer is 7. I still don’t know how you could have gotten 25.”

  Ethan wrote down 7. Then his eyes wandered to the window. “It’s starting to snow,” he said before he could catch himself. He had actually said a sentence to the Lizard that he didn’t have to say.

  Lizzie looked toward the window, too. “Ohhh!” she breathed, as if she had never seen snow before. “The flakes look like feathers. But everyone always compares them to feathers. Maybe thistledown? Or wisps of cotton? But everyone always compares snow to cotton, too. Wisps is a good word, though. ‘Wisps of cotton, floating down.’”

  Lizzie scribbled the line right on her math paper.

  “‘Falling gently o’er the town.’” She turned to Ethan. “O’er is a poetic way of saying over.”

  Ethan squirmed. “Maybe we should get on to problem four?” he asked. With all his heart, he wished that third period were o’er.

  * * *

  At lunch, Julius could talk of nothing but Grace Gunderson.

  “Rapunzel
, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” he moaned piteously. “I thought I was in love those other times, but they were nothing compared with this.”

  Ethan didn’t want to talk about Ms. Gunderson with Julius. He wished Julius hadn’t seen her first. He wished Julius hadn’t said that he was in love with her first.

  “What do you want to do after school?” Ethan asked, to change the subject.

  “Nothing,” Julius said in the same lovesick voice that was beginning to get on Ethan’s nerves.

  “We have to do something,” Ethan said.

  “I guess we could mess around with our science fair project,” Julius said. “For some reason, I’m suddenly interested in anything to do with science.”

  Ethan noticed that Julius had said “our science fair project,” not “our science fair projects.” Julius was naturally counting on doing his project with Ethan, since he and Ethan always did their projects together, except when Mr. Grotient came up with some horrible surprise of his own. Why do twice as much work when you could do half as much work, and do it with your best friend, too? But for the first time ever, Ethan didn’t want to do a project with Julius. Not the science fair project.

  Everything Ethan and Julius worked on together turned out to be a disaster. Ethan didn’t want his science fair project for Ms. Gunderson to be a disaster. He wanted it to be something that would make her look at him again the way she had looked at him in class that morning. It was probably useless to dream of doing a project that would win the West Creek science fair and be chosen for the regional science fair, but there was no law against dreaming. Something about Ms. Gunderson made him want to dream.

  “Um—what kind of project do you have in mind?” Ethan asked. He didn’t know how to tell Julius that he didn’t want to work together this time.

  “Something easy,” Julius said. “And something that involves food.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, we could take turns blindfolding each other and doing taste tests on different brands of potato chips or ice cream. Like, we could see if low-fat potato chips tasted any different from regular potato chips. Or if ice milk tasted any different from ice cream.”

  “That doesn’t sound very scientific,” Ethan said.

  “Sure it does. Besides, when Ms. Gunderson was in our group, she said that any real question about the physical world was a scientific question.”

  She had said the same thing to Ethan’s group, regarding Lizzie’s question. Ethan didn’t like the idea of Ms. Gunderson repeating herself to anybody else’s group.

  “Look,” Julius went on, “it’s not like we’re going to win, anyway. We want a project worthy of Losers, Inc. And one we can eat. Right, Veep?”

  “Right, Prez,” Ethan said. He forced himself to return Julius’s grin. But he couldn’t help noticing that Losers, Inc., wasn’t even twenty-four hours old, and already one of its two officers was trying to figure out how to break a rule.

  * * *

  After lunch, Ethan and Julius sat together in study hall, in the West Creek Middle School library. But they didn’t study. Only the Lizard studied in study hall.

  Julius drew pictures of Grace Gunderson in his notebook. They made her look like a long-haired Barbie doll, Ethan thought. He doodled pictures of basketball players in his own notebook. But he felt too restless to draw. Maybe he ought to pretend to be doing some library research, so he could have an excuse to get up and walk around. “Hey,” he whispered to Julius. “Let’s pick out the books for our next book reports, okay?”

  Julius put down his pen. “Ms. Leeds said they had to be at least one hundred pages. I’m going to find one that’s exactly a hundred pages.”

  Actually, Ms. Leeds had said more than that. Ethan still remembered the scathing tone of voice in which she had remarked, after their last book reports, “I have to say that it is very disturbing to find sixth-grade students still choosing books on a third-grade reading level.” The words had stung. Ethan didn’t read on a third-grade level. He just happened to like short books. But Ms. Leeds had implied that he was some kind of slow learner.

  Ethan and Julius walked over to the fiction shelves. Julius started with the A’s, taking down every skinny book and turning to the end to check the number on the last page.

  “Ninety-five. Too short. One hundred fifteen. Too long. One hundred five. Getting warmer. One hundred nine. Colder. Okay, here it is. A Boy and a Dog. One hundred pages.”

  Ethan walked up and down the shelves, half looking at the titles, half looking at nothing.

  “Here’s another one,” Julius called over to him in a loud whisper. “A Horse of Her Own. Exactly one hundred pages. Do you want it?”

  Ethan shook his head. “It looks like a girl’s book.”

  “It looks like a short book. Okay, here’s another one. One hundred three pages. There’s a dog on the cover, too.”

  Ethan felt a strange idea forming in his brain. “It might be kind of funny, one time, to read a really long book.” He silenced the thought that now he was suggesting breaking a second Losers, Inc., rule.

  Julius stared at him.

  “It would just be a joke,” Ethan said quickly.

  “You mean you wouldn’t really read it?”

  “No, I’d read it, but it’s like, Ms. Leeds said our other books were too short, so I’d be showing her. ‘You want a long book? Okay, here’s a long book.’ How long was the Lizard’s book last time?”

  “I don’t know. Two hundred something.”

  “Well, I’ll find a book with three hundred pages. Or four hundred. I’ll be showing Ms. Leeds and the Lizard, too. Lizzie won’t be able to stand it that I read a longer book than she did.”

  Ethan was standing next to the D’s. “Here’s one. Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities. Four hundred twenty-two pages.”

  Julius put the dog book back on the shelf. Ethan wondered if Julius would tell him that he couldn’t be vice president of Losers, Inc., if he read A Tale of Two Cities for his next book report. But Julius didn’t say anything.

  Back at their table, Ethan opened A Tale of Two Cities to see how bad it was going to be. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” read the opening line. Charles Dickens could have been talking about Ethan’s own life.

  * * *

  By the end of the day, Ethan had made three new entries for Life Isn’t Fair: A Proof. In a black-bordered box on its own special page, he wrote:

  Monday, January 27. Ethan Winfield was assigned the Lizard as his partner in Peer-Assisted Learning.

  From gym class he had:

  Monday, January 27. Ethan Winfield missed more baskets than anyone in the class except Julius Zimmerman. Coach Stevens said, “Sometimes I find it hard to believe that you and Peter Winfield are really brothers.”

  As soon as Coach Stevens had said it, Ethan could tell that the coach felt sorry for letting the words slip out. “Just kidding, Winfield,” the coach said. “Come on now, concentrate! Just concentrate on the ball!”

  This was not the first incredibly stupid thing that a grownup had said, comparing Ethan to Peter. One of these days Ethan was going to get a T-shirt printed that said, “Yes, I am Peter Winfield’s brother. No, I am not like him in any way.”

  From English class, Ethan had:

  Monday, January 27. Marcia Faitak came up to Ethan Winfield and said, “Lizzie wrote poems about you all through social studies. Did you know that your name rhymes with heathen?”

  After school, Ethan and Julius rode their bikes through the snow to Julius’s house. Ethan ate one large bowl of chocolate ice cream and then dished himself out another. It had been a two-bowl kind of day.

  “Our hypothesis could be that fat-free ice cream tastes the same as regular ice cream,” Julius said. “Or that it tastes different. Which do you think it is?”

  “I think it tastes different,” Ethan said.

  “We should probably test other people, too,” Julius went on. “In case our tastes are strange or somet
hing. We could test Peter and your folks and my folks and some of the guys at school. That’d run up our ice cream bill a bit, but our parents’d probably pay if it’s for school. If it’s for the sake of science.”

  “Listen,” Ethan said. If he was going to have a chance at doing a special, award-winning science fair project for Ms. Gunderson, he had to speak up now. “I was thinking—”

  “Don’t think!” Julius said.

  “No, honestly, I was thinking that maybe—I mean, the ice cream idea sounds like a lot of fun, but…”

  “You want to do it on something else?”

  Ethan nodded miserably. He wanted to do it on something else. He wanted to do it with someone else. He didn’t want to be a loser this time—like Julius. The thought was so disloyal that he felt terrible for even thinking it.

  “That’s okay,” Julius said. “It doesn’t have to be ice cream. It could be potato chips—or anything. I made up that idea in two minutes. I don’t care what we do. What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. But…” Just say it. “We could still help each other with our projects. We could still help each other a lot. But maybe this time—it might be a good idea, just this once, to do our own projects.”

  There. He had said it. Maybe Julius would understand. Maybe Julius wouldn’t stare at him with a hurt look in his eyes.

  Ethan made himself look at Julius. Julius was staring at him with a hurt look in his eyes.

  “Like I said, we could still help each other with our projects. Like, I’ll still eat all the ice cream you want.” Ethan tried to make it sound like a joke, but Julius didn’t laugh.