Loser by Jerry Spinelli Read Free Book Online Page B

Stanley comes over, heproclaims at full voice: “Aha—there he is! The Sleepless Wonder!”
    Then there are the sitting things: watching movies and reading books and the hours in the classroom. Like sleeping, these too are non-movers—but not entirely. For as long as they keep his interest, as long as they make him think, Zinkoff is moving. Of course, you wouldn’t know it to look at him, since the moving part is out of sight, behind his unblinking eyes. His brain.
    This is how Zinkoff at the age of eight imagines the inside of his head: a moving part, like an elbow or knee. He imagines that when he’s interested, when he’s thinking, his brain is moving, stretching itself, leaning this way and that, flexing. When his brain stops moving—that is, when he’s bored—off goes the TV, closed goes the book, tuned out goes the teacher.
    Zinkoff’s blessing has been this: Boredom has not happened often.
    But it happens a lot during his three weeks of convalescing. Every day he looks out the front window at the kids going off to John W. SatterfieldElementary. Not only is he not allowed to go to school, he is forbidden to do anything more active than walk across a room. His world shrinks to the living-room sofa. He soon becomes fed up with TV and books. Fed up with jigsaw puzzles and watercolors. Fed up with feeling the stitches of his operation. Minute after minute, day after endless day he stares out the front window, and the elephant lowers itself onto his hands, and he comes to know the Long Wait of the Waiting Man.
    He comes to know how painful a minute can be, how unbearable an hour. Though he cannot put his understanding into words, he understands that time by itself is nothing, is emptiness, and that a person is not made for emptiness. One day he counts as thirty-two minutes go by on the clock, and he says to himself as he looks out the window, “Thirty-two years.” He tries to cast his brain, like a stone, that far, thirty-two years into the future, but all it falls into is an immense gray sadness. He knows it is not his own sadness but the sadness of the Waiting Man. It is everywhere, on the roof shingles and rainspouts and brickwalls and alleyways, and the sadness and the emptiness are the same thing and they will not end until a soldier comes walking down Willow Street.
    Zinkoff turns from the window. He feels an urgent need to play with his baby sister. He plays with her for an hour or two and makes her laugh, and then, because still he cannot go to school, he decides that school must come to him.
    He will give himself a test.

14. The Furnace Monster
    To Zinkoff there is not one darkness, but many. There is the dark in the closet and the dark under the bed and the dark he can never see: the dark inside a drawer. No matter how fast he opens a drawer, trying to catch the dark, the light pours in faster. There is the dark of outside and the dark of inside.
    Unlike most children, Zinkoff is not afraid of the dark. Outside darkness does not frighten him. His father has told him that the stars are faraway suns, and the thought of all those suns up there gives Zinkoff a warm and cozy feeling at night. Inside, he seems to carry his own sunshine with him—he’s a sunshine bottle—even into the closet, where sometimes he hides from Polly without a twinge of fear.
    In one respect, however, he is like almost allchildren: He fears the darkness of the cellar. And even then, it isn’t strictly the darkness that he fears. It’s what dwells in the darkness: the Furnace Monster.
    Like most furnace monsters, Zinkoff’s stays out of sight behind the furnace when people are around. It’s when the people leave, when the light goes off and the door at the top of the stairs closes, in that purest darkness—that’s when the monster comes out from behind the furnace.
    To be in the cellar then, this is the most terrifying thing Zinkoff can imagine. This will be