Loser

In sixth grade, I was tracked into Mr. Schroeder's class along all the problemed kids. The A-D-D dysfunctionals, the slow learners, the poor kids, the losers.

For such a short man, Mr. Schroeder managed to generate a lot of rumors. But he was the angry type. So it's possible that he stirred up people's imaginations whenever he got yelling. Several years later, when I was in that far-removed place called high school, it was rumored he was dying from AIDS. But that year, we heard he was having an affair with my teacher from the year before. We liked to call her "Mrs. Furrybutt." So I reasoned that's why I was in his class. Mrs. Furrybutt had specially placed me with him.

I had always been a smart kid. I got to go to advanced reading class and was in with the gifted and talented crowd. But I don't remember much about Mrs. Furrybutt's fifth grade classroom, except for getting into lots of fights. And she was supposed to teach me about fractions. I should have known how to add, subtract, multiply and divide 3/4 and 1/8. But I ignored most of those lessons and never really caught up.

So it was really my fifth grade failure that earned me classmates like rowdy boys Bobby Sparks, and Jim McCartney, and girls like Sara Sporol and Lynne Hazard who were already sneaking into their parents' liquor cabinets. Sara's fate was to become a deadhead. In high school, she dropped a lot of acid, and eventually dropped out, but not before coming to class once wrapped in a bed sheet and nothing else. Her sixth-grade self was wacky and creative. Too smart for her own good. She was there probably because her parents were alcoholics and didn't pay any attention to her or her grades.

I could have been her. Or Lynne, who got pregnant when she was 15. Or any one of those kids. My newly divorced mom and federal-assistance school lunch program scrawled "bad seed" on my destiny file. I couldn't do math, and I was in the habit of coming to school an hour early every day. I tucked myself into a secret spot next to the lockers so no teachers would see me because I didn't want to be home alone after my mom left for work. Another year of that and instead of coming straight to school, I might have been meeting another latch-key kid to smoke cigarettes or have sex before class.

But there were two new kids in school that year. Mike and Heather. And I think it was my destiny to know them. Their parents were friends and had moved to Aurora at the same time. As the new kids, they both got dumped into the same classroom. To the teachers, they were neither smart or stupid. They were complete unknowns, like two unshaped lumps of clay.

So they weren't related, but Heather knew everything about Mike, and made fun of him a lot. I think she was embarrassed to know him. Once, she whispered that Mike's older sister had made her and Mike pretend to get married. She made them walk down the isle and even kiss. Heather beat herself up over that.

But it wasn't hard to see why Heather said she hated Mike. He was a chunky, dim-witted kid. He'd do anything the other rowdy boys asked him to do, just so they'd be his friend. They would make him do weird things in the locker room after gym class. They would laugh about making Mike give himself a swirly in a dirty toilet. I don't know what else they made him do. Mr. Schroeder yelled at him a lot, not understanding that he was being bad because the other boys were egging him on.

Heather liked horses, a lot. She had a paper route and bought her own horse and paid for its board all by herself. She was the shortest kid in the class, and I don't think she ever made it past 5 foot, even by the end of high school. She was never popular but she was mouthy and unafraid and I liked that. She brought an element into to school that hadn't been there before. She introduced competition, and I latched right onto it.

We'd call each other to complain about how much we'd been studying for the science test the next day and then we would compare grades. We'd talk about our social studies essays. She was writing about the Romans. So I had to write about something harder. I picked Charlemagne. No one else in the class could even pronounce "Charlemagne."

We became Mr. Schroeder's math nerds. He was obsessed with computers, and made us learn to write in BASIC to create simple scripts that would determine the area of a triangle or the circumference of a circle. We were partners, and did the best. We were so good that while the other kids were crashing their Apple IIEs, Mr. Schroeder taught us how to create a picture on the computer screen, by assigning a color to each and every pixel.

Heather became my best friend. We fought hard against each other all through high school AP history and advanced science classes. I usually won. Except she was better when we went on a weekend trip to Cornell University for Model Congress. I just sat there and didn't know what to save. She won an award. I don't know where she is today. But I think she saved me.

Mike became my step-brother.