Losers by Matthue Roth

races, but their skin glowed with the uniform mint green sheen of those people who derived most of their light from a computer screen, rather than from the sun. The four kids highest up the stairs were clustered around the new English edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, fighting over a mistake in translation. Two steps down from them, a girl of unspeakable beauty swept her fingers over her computer keyboard, a dirty red landscape on the screen, calculating the odds of recurring fractal patterns on the surface of Mars. At the bottom of the stairs, four people were actively engaged in a yelling match over what looked to Vadim like the most violent, heatedly intense, full-contact game of Scrabble he had ever seen. Dr. Mayhew didn’t even have to open his mouth; Vadim was already sold. At that moment, the principal could have told Vadim to jump off a bridge, and Vadim would only have asked at what trajectory he should hit the water.
    Dr. Mayhew, never one to linger in a moment, cleared his throat.
    The Scrabblers froze mid-spelling, looked up from the board, and rotated their heads north.
    â€œConsuela Cortez,” Dr. Mayhew said. Even in his regular speaking voice, everything sounded like an announcement. “Would you mind coming forward?”
    From the hazy heights of the top of the staircase, a heavy, suspicious-looking girl, her hair neatly swirled in the shape of a question mark from the back of her head all the way down to the small of her back, descended.
    â€œYeah?” she said, sounding bored. “What do you want, Mayhew?”
    â€œThis,” boomed Dr. Mayhew, ignoring the obvious besmirching of his title, “is Vadim. He’s a first-year student. I think he might be able to find his place among you. I’d appreciate it if you could take him under your wing, show him the ropes, mind that he doesn’t take off in the—” he cleared his throat “—in the wrong direction.”
    Consuela continued her slow, laborious descent until she was standing opposite Vadim. He was small by anyone’s standard, not making it up to most people’s line of sight, but to Consuela, he was barely a blip. His tiny head just barely reached the bottom curvature of her breasts. At that moment, his eyeballs were currently rotating upward, coming into an eventual contact with her downward-orbiting eyes. Through the double layers of glasses that shielded both their sets of eyes, they made slow contact.
    â€œVadim,” she grunted. “What’s your deal?”
    â€œHey,” Vadim said, speaking slowly and carefully. “I’m tryingto get out of this place. I got kicked out of Decanometry on the first day ‘cause our teacher said to graph a ten-dimensional plane, and I tried to launch a tesseract into the equation.”
    Consuela let out a low whistle.
    That was when Vadim noticed it. All the activity that had ceased when he’d first arrived hadn’t picked back up again. Everyone’s eyes were on him. Everyone was analyzing him, trying to see how he’d slip up.
    What he’d just said, that was what they were waiting for.
    â€œ Niiice ,” cooed a voice from the top of the stairs. “Factoring by way of tesseract. Most kids are into Deco, or they’re into A Wrinkle in Time , but the overlap is where it counts.”
    That came from the girl with the Martian surface on her laptop. Having made her opinion known, she lowered her eyes back to her laptop screen, adjusted the collar of her shirt, and continued working.
    That girl, Vadim would soon learn, was Cynthia Yu, an absolutely brilliant fourteen-year-old behavioral mathematician who passed her summers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Artificial Intelligence department.
    Right now, Vadim didn’t pay too much attention to the messenger. I knew that all he needed to hear was that he was approved of. Then his blood pressure would lower, and his heart would stop thudding against his