Mr. Rossi teaches Regents Global History, and he is a loser. That sounds harsh and unfair, and it is, but it is also true.
If you see Mr. Rossi, you recognize in a few second, There stands a loser. There are no shortage of losers at my school, and in my more honest moments I count myself among their ranks. But kid losers can’t compare to grown-up losers. As a kid, you figure being grown up removes several layers of loserdom from your surface. Adults can drive, live in their own places, do what they want. Those adults who can’t shed this skin are especially deserving of our contempt and laughter, and none get more of both than Mr. Rossi.
All losers search for at least one person they can stand atop and say, “At least I’m not that guy.” Mr. Rossi is that guy.
Mr. Rossi is shorter than most of his students. He is pudgy, which is somehow worse than being straight-up fat, and he accentuates his pudginess by insisting on wearing horizontally striped polo shirts to school. His hairline is beginning to recede. Midyear, he attempts to grow a mustache, and the thing comes in patchy and sad. He looks like a far less adventurous Mario.
Mr. Rossi still lives with his mom. Someone with more self awareness would have made sure the teenagers under his watch never found this out, but Mr. Rossi just told us, like the fact wasn’t a cudgel kids would use against him. He lives with his mom in a crappy part of Newburgh, a rough town. Once, a stray bullet whisked through his living room and missed hitting him by inches. He told us this too. Had this happened to someone else, it would have been terrifying, or bestowed upon him some stripe of badass-ery. But since it happened to Mr. Rossi, it’s hilarious.