Free Loser by Jerry Spinelli

than fifth grade, so fifth-graders rule the school. When other students look at you, most of what they see is bigger and better. You know more. You eat more. You draw better. You sing better. You throw farther and run faster. You go to the head of the line. You drink longest at the water fountains. You even talk louder and laugh harder.
    If you have made it through the first four grades, fifth grade is your reward. The payoff. And it comes in ways that aren’t even visible. It comes as a feeling whenever you are in the presence of kids from the lower grades, a feeling, even though nobody says it, that you are the most important. Fifth grade is a great time to be alive.
    All of this greets Zinkoff when he returns toschool, and he loves it. He loves being a fifth-grader.
    Something else is there too. It has been growing through the summer after taking root in the yellow dust of the playground. It has invaded the school building and multiplied abundantly. As Zinkoff’s classmates return in September, many of them pick it up along with their new pencils and other school supplies.
    It is the word. It is Zinkoff’s new name. It is not in the roll book.
    Rarely does anyone say his new name to his face, but it is often said behind a giggle or a cough. It comes from here, from there. Zinkoff sometimes senses someone being called, but the sound of it is not the sound of his name as he knows it, so he does not turn.
    And then one day, for no good reason, hearing the name, he does turn. But no one is looking at him, so he thinks he must be mistaken. And the voices continue, and again he turns, and again. But no one is ever looking, no one ever seems to have spoken. It is as if the voices arecoming from the walls and the clocks and the lights in the ceiling.
    Loser.
    The discovery and renaming of Zinkoff is a great convenience to the student body. Zinkoff has been tagged and bagged, and now virtually everything he does can be dumped into the same sack. His sloppy handwriting and artwork, his hapless fluting, his mediocre grades, his clumsiness, his birthmark—everything is seen as an extension of his performance on Field Day, everything is seen as a matter of losing. It is as if he loses a hundred races every day.
    But except for the voices of the clocks, Zinkoff is unaware of all this. He is too busy thinking about himself to notice what others are thinking. He is busy growing up. He is busy growing out.
    By the start of fifth grade Zinkoff has grown out of a whole flock of beliefs: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, rabbits’ feet, talking dinosaurs, the Man in the Moon, unicorns, gremlins, dragons, sidewalk cracks. Though he isstill scared stiff of the dark in the cellar, he no longer believes in the Furnace Monster. Beliefs are just flying off him. Thus unweighted, he can feel himself growing taller.
    He no longer wears paper stars on his shirts, though he does continue to accept congratulations. He replaces his little-kid giggle with a big-kid laugh, which he works on in his bedroom—to the annoyance of Polly, who thinks she is always missing something funny. He no longer yells “Yahoo!” (But he still wants to be a mailman, and he still says his prayers at night.) He admits to sleeping.
    He tries to outgrow being clumsy, but it doesn’t work. His handwriting is still atrocious, but only to others, not to himself, so he doesn’t worry about it.
    One Saturday his mother has a yard sale. She asks him if he minds her selling some of his old toys, the ones Polly has no use for. “No problem,” he says. Then she brings out his old giraffe hat. Would he mind her selling this? He looks at it. Faded, fuzzworn. Hasn’t seen it in years.Whatever once possessed him to put that silly thing on his head? “No problem,” he says, and feels himself pop up another half inch.
    He loves growing up, loves feeling himself take up more space in this world.
    He is allowed to go farther