Losers by Matthue Roth Page A

parents’ usual ritual when they were too mad at me to talk. Since I’d already told them they weren’t allowed to speak to me in Russian, letter writing was the most obvious and expected tactic that they had left. I braced myself for their shaky, uneven handwriting on dollar-store Post-it notes.
    Instead there was a letter, typed on an official-looking letterhead, stuck to the rusty nail that protruded from the door.
    I ripped it off my door and, holding it in both hands, scanned it for meat—cutting through the big vocabulary, looking forthe words that mattered. The letter was addressed to my parents, from the management company that owned our factory. It was written in thick English, in the impenetrable language of tax forms and immigrant registration documents. But it was still understandable. It said that—good news!—the market for our product was expanding and, hence, the needs of production for our factory was expected to double. They needed to install an additional assembly line, and thus, due to the increased need for space, the family currently residing there, the Glazers, might be asked to vacate their private quarters, and, just in case, they should take an inventory of all personal belongings, gather them together, and start packing up.
    The trouble with being idealistic was that everything that didn’t fulfill my ideals felt like a compromise. Wanting to be a downtown, bohemian, intellectual non-Yards resident was one thing, but once I got there, once I freed myself of the Yards, what was I going to do? I sat for hours in cafés with all these amazing people—I was sure they were amazing—but, beyond knowing there was a bigger destiny out there for me, what was I doing? Being a musical connoisseur and talking about indie punk band concerts was great, but with no money, there was no way I could actually get into a concert. And I kept waiting for that girl to talk to me, that unspeakably cool girl with cellophane eyes, cream-soda skin, and a native fluency in the love clichés of rock song lyrics, but she was really taking her time showing up.
    In the meantime, North Shore was doing its best to keep me distracted.
    Breasts. I was surrounded by breasts.
    Indian summer hit that weekend, and on Monday, girls’ clothes were coming off like old dead skin. Tank tops. Spaghetti straps. Short shorts, bodysuits, tube tops, capris. In town, girls wore all different kinds of clothes. The coffee-shop girls still weren’t talking to me, but each time I walked in, I got more approving nods in my direction. Each shy smile that I flashed at a girl, I got closer and closer to becoming convinced that not only did she see it and understand its meaning, but she was one step away from coming over to talk to me, swap iPod playlists, and take me to the always-deserted downstairs seating section for a heavy, sweaty, full-on make-out session. After all, if high school girls made out all the time at school and parties, then why wouldn’t college girls (at least I assumed they were in college) be into making out at coffeehouses? They dressed differently—less obviously sexily, in washed-out fall colors and loosely hanging T-shirts and cardigans—but wasn’t that just because they were more slyly sexy, because they already knew what they wanted and they knew how to get it? North Shore girls were less experimental, more obvious in their intentions. The other day, Devin said hi to me and I turned in her direction and she was wearing this shirt that was basically a sports bra—you could totally see her belly button, a stomach as tight and taut as a movie screen—and I couldn’t even muster the tongueular skills to say hello back.
    All of this seemed to come at a fast, clashing redirection to the phantoms of intellectuality and artisticness I’d been chasing around. The other day I had spent two hours in a downtown artgallery doing not much but staring at the