Losers by Matthue Roth Page B

L.A.—all that impressive stuff. But the other kids there had all grown up downtown. They could spot my phoniness three lanes away. So I listened to the way I was speaking, and then I listened to the way they were speaking, and I just dropped it.”
    â€œYou just dropped it? How?”
    â€œOkay, let me try. Um. Did you hear how you said dropped? You swallow up the o , you roll the r , and you squish the p and d together at the end. Listen to the way I said it, just from what you remember.”
    â€œDropped.”
    â€œClose. Dropped .”
    â€œDropped.”
    â€œNow try it slower.” She said dropped again, in slow motion. I repeated her. She shook her head no . Then she reached over and took my hands in hers.
    She lifted them to her face. I could feel my entire body heating up, the knuckles between my fingers stiffening. She placed them gently on her cheeks and throat.
    â€œFeel the way I say it.”
    â€œSay it.”
    â€œDropped.”
    â€œ Draah-ppeht ,” I echoed her. I felt ludicrous saying it, being made to say that same word again and again. I felt like a domesticated parakeet. I cleared my head. I couldn’t second-guess myself now. I felt like I was on the brink of learning some forbidden knowledge, standing on the precipice of this giant mountain that was going to be the rest of my life.
    â€œOnce more,” Devin said, smiling at me. “Say it.”
    â€œAgain?” I asked.
    Devin nodded.
    â€œWhen I move, you move,” she said. My hand tensed into her cheek. She squeezed my fingers, enthusiastically, supportively. Her mouth convulsed, danced through the word like a ballerina in slow motion, voguing and pirouetting each step in one one-hundredth of normal speed, slowed down beyond the range of any normal household DVD player, moving and reacting to every microsyllable in the word.
    I said it again. The moment felt like hours in my head, every part of every sound. My mouth imitated hers. For the merestfraction of a second, my mouth became hers, more vivid than a 3-D movie, more intimate than making out. And it sounded, it felt , absolutely perfect.
    â€œJust like that?” I asked her.
    She smiled. “Just like that.”
    The moment felt perfect, the stars and planets and even passing meteors in total alignment. It was so intimate that I wondered whether we were supposed to make out. The whole idea of making out was still a foreign notion to me, and I was still unclear on the details of its choreography—was it a single moment when both involved parties felt a sudden, unavoidable rush of hormones at the same time? Was it something that both of you had to have in the back of your minds the whole time, darkly hinted at through the course of your conversation, and as soon as one person was too overt and crossed the line, you both erupted into passionate kisses and feeling-upness? Or did it just happen when we ran out of things to talk about?
    I wondered if I was supposed to make the first move.
    Devin reached out and grabbed hold of a guy’s shoulder. A tall, well-built, muscular guy who, at rough approximation, was twice my size. He was one of the jocks who had been roughhousing around the keg, trying to out-stupid a bunch of other, identical jocks in front of the soccer girls. For a second, I thought Devin was going to tell him that I wasn’t allowed to be here and ask him to take me out back and beat me up. Then I reconsidered, and decided that she was about to introduce him as her boyfriend, which might produce the same result.
    â€œHey, Reggie, this is Jupiter Glazer,” she said, hugging his arm in a way I found both off-putting and nervousness-inducing. “Reg, Jupiter came here with Crash Goldberg and that circus,and, in his short residency at the party, he’s already outgrown them. Feel like showing him around?”
    â€œSure, babe,” he said, kissing her on the cheek in that noncommittal, mixed-sex way that