Zero

The abandoned street child

Zero is one of the main characters in Louis Sachar’s novel Holes. He is an inmate at Camp Green Lake. His real name is Hector Zeroni. He is a member of Group D, just like the main character, Stanley Yelnats IV. He is the smallest there and the last in the ranking order before Stanley's arrival at the camp. Just like X-Ray and Armpit, he is dark-skinned. But the color of his skin is irrelevant to the social structure in the camp. In the group, Zero represents the outsider.

Zero grew up together with his mother in extremely poor circumstances. When Zero was a toddler, they could still afford to rent a small apartment. Shortly after, however, his mother became homeless and from then on had to live on the streets with her boy. The two had to steal to survive(Part 2, 55%).

Zero's mother, who Stanley later notes looks like a woman who "had seen too many things in her life that she didn’t want to see" (Part 3, 100%), had to leave her son alone on the street several times. Once she told Zero to wait for her in a park, she never returned to him (Part 2, 69%).

After waiting in the park for over a month, Zero realized that his mother had disappeared. From that point on, Zero was completely on his own. But he was too independent and...