Loser by Jerry Spinelli

Author:Jerry Spinelli
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

On days when he doesn’t cruise nine hundred Willow he often rides to Halftank Hill. Halftank Hill is in the park and the best part of it is a grassy, evilly steep slope that commands: Come down me! And they do, kids from all over town, in all seasons of the year. They sled down, they run down, roll down, tumble down, bicycle down, tricycle down, Rollerblade down, skateboard down, trashcan-lid down.

Early in his life, when Zinkoff raced cars along the sidewalk, he had believed himself to be the fastest kid in the world. Now that he knows this to be untrue, Halftank Hill has become all the more appealing to him.

Sometimes he runs, because it is the only way he can experience, for just a moment, a particularly fascinating feeling. Halfway down the hill he can feel himself losing control, his legs cannot keep up with his speed. He feels as if he is coming apart, running out of himself, leaving himself behind.

Sometimes he bikes it. He aims the front tire over the grassy crest and down he goes, and for those few seconds nothing can convince him that he is not the fastest thing in the universe, and even though he’s too big now to yell yahoo he yells it anyway: “Yahoo!” And rediscovers every time that no one is slow on Halftank Hill. And there are no clocks.

Sometimes he doesn’t want to ride anywhere in particular. Sometimes he doesn’t want to ride fast. He just wants to ride. That’s when he aims Clinker One for the alleys, where cats and little kids roam but no cars, a bicycle’s boulevard, and he rides, just rides, and it’s good enough.

And so Zinkoff’s life in fifth grade is filled with things new and interesting and good enough. And until the day of the test-that-is-not-a-test, it never occurs to him that something has been missing.

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