I lay on the grass and watched my cross sail toward their goal. Rob jumped for it, but it went two feet over his head. Pierre might have gotten to it if he was just a little faster. I thought for sure Dylan would head it in and turn out to be the team hero who had gotten his wrist broken and came back to score the wonder goal. But he mistimed his header and the ball flew by him. It finally came down right in front of the smart Lynton sweeper who did exactly what he was supposed to do—he booted it as hard as he could upfield.
His attempted clearance traveled about five feet on a line drive, smacked into the side of Shimsky’s head, and rebounded toward the Lynton goal. Their goalie dove at it and managed to push it with his fingertips. The ball rolled sideways along the goal line, hit the side of the post, and rebounded slowly back. It crossed the goal line by a quarter of an inch before their goalie frantically grabbed it.
The ref blew his whistle several times and I wasn’t sure if he was announcing the goal or the end of the game. It turned out to be both. “Four–four tie,” he shouted. “Game over. Well played, both teams.”
The Lynton players protested that the goal shouldn’t count. They were still undefeated but the last-minute tie had destroyed their perfect season. They surrounded the ref, who shouted for them to back off.
The ball to the head had knocked Shimsky to the turf. I reached him first, and he looked up at me, a little confused. “What just happened?”
“You won it for us,” I told him.
“But I wanted to lose,” he said.
The rest of the team arrived, and we picked Shimsky off the grass and hoisted him to our shoulders. I saw Becca standing next to me helping to hold him up and we shared a smile. “I didn’t want to score,” he protested loudly. “It shouldn’t count. It was an accident. Put me down! I want to go out a Loser!” But he was high up on Pierre and Frank’s shoulders, and we carried him around the field in a wild team victory lap as our fans cheered. Somewhere along the way Shimsky stopped fighting us and just went along with it. I’m not positive, but I might have even seen him smile.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Klass is the author of many young adult novels, including You Don’t Know Me, Losers Take All, and Grandmaster. He is also a Hollywood screenwriter, having written more than twenty-five action screenplays, including Kiss the Girls, starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd, Walking Tall, starring The Rock, and Desperate Measures, starring Michael Keaton and Andy Garcia. Klass grew up in a family that loved literature and theater-his parents were both college professors and writers-but he was a reluctant reader, preferring sports to books. But he started loving the adventure stories his parents would bring home from the library-particularly Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas. After his sister twice won a story contest in Seventeen magazine, Klass decided he would win it too, and when he was a senior in high school, he did, publishing his first story, "Ringtoss," in the magazine. He studied at Yale University, where he won the Veech Award for Best Imaginative Writing. He taught English in Japan, and wrote his first novel, The Atami Dragons, about that experience. He now lives in New York with his wife and two children. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY DAVID KLASS
California Blue
Danger Zone
Screen Test
You Don’t Know Me
Home of the Braves
Dark Angel
The Caretaker Trilogy
Firestorm
Whirlwind
Timelock
Stuck on Earth
Second Impact (with Perri Klass)
Grandmaster
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
18
19
20
21
22
23
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25
26
27
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40
About the Author
Also by David Klass
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
175 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010
Text copyright © 2015 by David Klass
All rights reserved
First hardcover edition, 2015
eBook edition, September 2015
macteenbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Klass, David.
Losers take all / David Klass. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “At a sports-crazy NJ high school where all kids must play on a team, a group of rebels start a soccer team designed to undermine the jock-culture of the school”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-374-30136-1 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-374-30137-8 (e-book)
[1. Sports—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Individuality—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K67813Los 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2015006009
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eISBN 9780374301378