The Instructions

  Whoever that guy was, he taught him well. Within a week of his return to Aptakisic, Nakamook was sitting wherever he wanted in the Cage. There weren’t that many kids in there yet, but the kids who were there weren’t just slow or hyper or overtalkative—in the early days of the Cage, you had to be violent to get locked in, and those were some of the earliest days. The Cage program had only been adopted a couple months after Nakamook burned Claymore’s house down. It might have even got adopted because Nakamook burned Claymore’s house down. I asked Vincie and he said he didn’t know. He said that one day there was no Cage, and then the next day he was in it.

  What Vincie did know was that by the time Benji came back to Aptakisic, Bam wasn’t only huge, but pals with Claymore. According to Vincie, the pal part surprised Benji, but I don’t think it should have. Bam and Claymore were cousins after all, and even if Nakamook hadn’t tried to kill one of them, he’d burned down one of their houses. So Bam’s only options were extreme: either forsake his best friend or forsake his family. That the best friend in question was Nakamook must have made the decision pretty easy. Some best friends who your people hate, you might stay friends with on the sly and they’ll understand; Benji Nakamook was not one of those, and Bam, of all people, would have known that. I’d never met Claymore—he was a sophomore in high school by the time I arrived at Aptakisic—but no matter how much of a shvontz he was, he couldn’t have entirely missed the fact that picking on his cousin had set events into motion that led to the burning down of his own parents’ house, and so he had to have wanted to right things. Slokum’s having grown too large to continue to abuse probably didn’t do much in the way of impeding Claymore’s decision to befriend him, either.

  After Vincie told me Nakamook and Bam had been arch-enemies for two years without ever having fought each other, I still didn’t doubt Nakamook’s line about the importance of being timely when revenging on arch-enemies. If he were anyone else, I would have. If he were anyone else, I would have thought he was just scared of Bam.

  Nakamook fought all the time, though. A lot of people would say he was a bully, but really he was just sensitive. And it is true that he might have beaten you up if you looked at him in a way that he believed was offensive but, unlike a bully, he wouldn’t have ever faked being offended just to have occasion to beat you up. He didn’t care to damage anyone who hadn’t damaged him first. And plus he was like me: fighting was fun for him. The act of it, not just the outcome. It’s not the same for a bully. They’re not scared of fighting, bullies—that lie only seems true because it describes an irony—but they don’t enjoy it much, either. What bullies enjoy is being recognized as dominant. They’d much rather have just won a fight than be fighting one. And though he never fought anyone as big as Bam—no one else at Aptakisic was anywhere near as big as Bam—Nakamook fought some seriously big kids. Like the Flunky. It was hard to imagine him being scared of anyone.

  Even if I was wrong, though, and timeliness was just an excuse for Nakamook to avoid stepping up to Bam, I couldn’t see how Bam would have any better an excuse for not stepping up to Nakamook. Bam didn’t fight as often as Benji (or as often as me for that matter), but he had been in enough fights to be as generally feared as Benji, so I knew the excuse couldn’t be that he was a pacifist. It wasn’t possible that Bam didn’t know he was Nakamook’s arch-enemy—not with all those SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY bombs everywhere—but maybe he needed some more immediate kind of provocation to fight. Some people were like that—they possessed mellow snat and resilient facial masonry. My dad was like that. Had I been Bam, though, the bombs would have provided me more than enough reason to step up to Nakamook.

  I remembered bumping into Bam in Main Hall that morning. I remembered all that brotherly chinning of air and got pissed at myself all over again. Here was Benji, loyal, lunchless Benji, my best friend Nakamook, starved by his mother and yet uncomplaining. How could I act brotherly toward his arch-enemy? How could I give my best friend half my sandwich and carrots, then stiff him on the cheesepuffs? I couldn’t, unless I was a dickhead—I wasn’t.

  I flattened my brown paper bag to make a plate and dropped half a handful of cheesepuffs on it. When I delivered to Benji what remained in the baggie, I had snap-style energy from getting angry, and instead of just pushing it across the table, I flung it at his chest, and without even looking up, he caught it.

  Botha, eating hotlunch left-handed at his desk said, “Mind the cheese doodles, Maccabee.” It sounded like, “Moinda chase daddles, Makebee.” He said it to remind me he was watching. The Cage was set up so we could be watched with great ease by the monitor and the teachers. Everyone in the Cage knew it, always. Except for how they locked you in, that was the main thing that made it the Cage. There was no reason to remind anyone, especially not at Lunch.

  I said to Botha, The mind Maccabee, cheese doodles.

  I liked that joke. I used the exact same words that Botha had used but the words meant nothing the way I put them in order, and they sounded like they meant something since I said the sentences in the same way as he’d said the originals, and with the same rhythm, and that demonstrated that English words were meaningless by themselves, that they were just lung- and mouth-sounds unless they were in the correct order, which was a paradox because the correctness of the order of a string of words depended on what the words meant, but if correct order was what gave words their meanings, then how could their meanings determine the correctness of the order? No one knew, and no one else thought the joke was funny, either.

  Except for Scott Mookus, who told us all, “Ha! Haha! Ha!” That’s how he laughed. It was because of the Cocktail Party Syndrome that he didn’t have a real laugh. You could get him to do it forever, though, just by doing it back to him.

  Nakamook said, “Scott ha ha. Ha ha ha.”

  Mookus said, “Ha! Haha! Ha!”

  Botha said, “Quiet the nonsense.” Quoydanawnsinz.

  I said, Australia used to be a prison.

  “Main Man haha!”

  “Haha! Haha!”

  Jelly said, “Georgia was a prison.”

  “Australia’s a country,” Botha said. “Australia’s a contnent.”

  We didn’t respond.

  He said, “A whole contnent.”

  I smelled nasty hotlunch.

  Main Man and Leevon had it. I didn’t look at what it was. If I looked at their trays and I saw something that I usually liked, I would like whatever it was less the next time I had it because I would think of how bad the smell of the cafeteria version was. If I found out what they were eating and it was something that was one of my favorites, it would be like falling in love with the wrong person; how if you fall in love with the wrong person, then when you fall in love with the right person later on, you will remember the smelly version of being in love and it could threaten to make the good version less good.

  When I was wrongly in love with Rabbi Salt’s daughter, Esther, I told her I loved her and she said she loved me, too, but after I got kicked out of Schechter we hardly ever saw each other, so I wrote her a poem without a title, which at the time didn’t seem half as hammy as it was. I thought it was funny.

  I got my dad

  to get Caller ID

  so I would know when you called.

  They gave us a box.

  It costs five bucks a month

  but it doesn’t work—

  your number and your name

  disappear from the window

  the second right before I check it.

  On the Shabbos after I got officially kicked out of Martin Luther King Middle School, my family had dinner at the house of the Salts. I passed my poem to Esther under the table during the chicken. She read it through the glass of the tabletop. Then she told me that my poem made her sad and that since I wrote it, it was me who made her sad, and that sadness of the girl was a sure sign of a bad match. Then she broke up with me, but I didn’t believe it at first. I thought she was just upset, just talking. She said, “A
ny bond between two people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it the least.” We were in the Salts’ backyard by then, and a rabbit was watching us. I said tsst to the rabbit and the rabbit took off. I repeated what Esther said to me and I noticed that it was not officially correct English because it was only two people. It should have been, “Any bond between two people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it less.” I told Esther about the grammatical problem because I wanted to change the subject because I still didn’t think she was serious about breaking up. And then she started crying and, for a second, I thought maybe she was serious about breaking up, but then I thought: No way. We’re in love with each other, and people in love with each other might argue, but they don’t break up with each other, not when they’re in love. And I decided she was crying because it was Rabbi Salt who’d spoken the relationship wisdom to her, and no one likes to think their father is mistaken.

  Esther sniffled in a way that I thought was cute because it wasn’t gross at all, even though it meant wet snot was moving around inside of her face. The sniffling made me want to touch her sleeve, but I did not touch her sleeve. She was Hasidic, and the sleeve was too close to the hand for them.

  So I said, It doesn’t matter, Esther, because it sounds better with ‘the least.’ It’s really impossible to know which is the right way to say it, because the problem might not be ‘less’ and ‘the least’ but ‘any two people.’ If you said, ‘Any bond between three, four, or five people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it the least,’ that would have been correct English, but correct English is not usually the strongest kind of English, anyway.

  She was wearing a brown scarf that had fringes and she wiped the tears on her cheeks with the fringes mashed together. The rabbit came back and it was staring at her. I threw a woodchip at its head and it ran. I didn’t like rabbits at all. They’d stare off like thinkers, but I knew they weren’t thinking.

  I love you, I told Esther. I said, I don’t want to make you cry.

  She said, “I don’t feel like you love me. Why are you always correcting people? If you didn’t correct people so much, we would still be in Schecter together and you never would have written the poem and made me sad with it and then we could still be together.”

  She wanted me to cry and I was failing. I didn’t want to fail. I wanted to cry for her, but I couldn’t.

  I told her, I’ll cry soon.

  Esther said, “No you won’t. I’ve seen you cry.” She said, “You only cry about crazy things like the Intifadas, and Jonathan getting passed over for David, and Moshe getting banned from Eretz Yisroel. You don’t cry about the things you are supposed to cry about.” She stopped crying then. It was my turn more than ever. I thought: Esther is being mean to you so that you will cry because it is your turn to cry and you’re late.

  I said to her, I cry when I’m angry and my dad says something nice in Yiddish.

  She said, “That’s a crazy thing to cry about, Gurion. It makes no sense.”

  By then I knew she’d really broken up with me, or that at least she thought she had. Because it wasn’t like we stopped being love with each other, I thought, and Esther wasn’t even saying we stopped. And if we were still in love, that meant we’d get back together eventually, because that’s what you did when you were in love, was be together.

  I said, I’m sorry, Esther Salt. I said, I hope we can get back together soon.

  “There is nothing to be sorry about. You can’t help it,” she said. “You just make me sad and it means we are a bad match. I wish we never fell in love with each other.”

  Rabbi Salt came out on the patio and told us it was time for honeycake. He waited at the sliding glass door for us, and Esther stared at me for an extra second to see if I would cry and I couldn’t cry and she went inside ahead of me. When I passed her dad, he put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed a couple times. It was a warm, rough hand. “My favorite student,” he said. “I hear you’ve been expelled from King. For a fight.”

  I said, A seventh-grader attacked me and I beat him into submission, then his friends came, seven of them, and I picked up a brick, and right then is when the recess lady came, and everyone said I used the brick on the first kid.

  Rabbi Salt said, “You didn’t use the brick?”

  I said, I don’t need a brick for one kid.

  “I know,” he said. “Relax.”

  Let me back into Schecter, I said.

  “I can’t,” he said. “It’s not up to me.”

  I said, I want to study Torah with peers.

  Rabbi Salt said, “Go to Hebrew School.”

  I said, Hebrew School is not for scholars.

  He said, “Gurion, you need to be realistic. You threw a stapler at Rabbi Unger and everyone knows it. And that email from Kalisch—it’s too late now for damage control… Maybe in high school, if you act like a mensch in the meantime, people will forget, but please don’t waste your energy on false hope. It will warp you. You’ll be lucky if I can get you into this Aptakisic.”

  I said, What’s Aptakisic?

  The Rabbi said, “I’m going to speak to your father about it after cake, but my friend Leonard Brodsky—the father of Ben, may Hashem bless his soul—is the principal there. I called him up and he’s considering you. The school’s in Deerbrook Park is the only problem—we’ll have to figure out a way to get you there, or at least to one of the bus stops. But we’d likely have to do this for any school, so—”

  I said, I want to be a scholar.

  He said, “Think about the future. You act well at this Aptakisic and who knows? Maybe Ida Crown Academy lets you in for high school.” He squeezed my neck again. Then he went into his dining room to eat cake and I stayed by the glass door and watched the rabbit while I cried. Its haunches kept twitching. I thought: This is not a crazy thing to cry about. And it turned out not to be. Aptakisic was twenty-five miles from our house, so I couldn’t have friends outside of school, and there was no other choice except Catholic school, with all its miniature false messiahs hanging from miniature torture instruments hanging from the walls, or boarding or military school, which my mom would never allow. And then I get there and Brodsky puts me in the Cage and calls me B.D.

  It was hard to find the justice.

  I thumb-drummed the teacher cluster’s fakewood surface, chewed cheekfuls of cheesepuffs, made a decision: I was never in love with Esther Salt to begin with. If we’d been in love, she wouldn’t have told me it was crazy to cry about the stuff I cried about. I decided that the only reason it ever seemed like I was in love with her was because I said it a few times. And when I said it, it was true, but when I stopped saying it, it stopped being true. When I stopped saying it, it made me a liar. It made it so I was lying those times when I said it. So maybe I was a liar, but I’d never been in love before June. So there was no danger of the smelly version affecting the good version: there never really was a smelly version—it was something else completely. The thought cheered me up a little, and I ate a couple bites of my sandwich, but then I thought: How do I know I’m in love with June? I thought: If all it ever was with Esther was that I kept saying I was in love, then later on, if I ever stop saying it to June, I’ll just be a liar again.

  So I wrote it down, because when something is written it has a better chance of being permanent. I wrote it down with a Darker on the brown paper bag.

  I wrote:

  I AM IN LOVE

  Jelly saw. She said, “With Jenny Mangey? I knew it. You should be in love with me!”

  I finished writing what I was writing:

  WITH ELIZA JUNE WATERMARK.

  Jelly said, “That girl June? I know that girl! I had Art with her in fourth! She painted violent things!”

  I looked at what I wrote and I saw there was a problem—No one who saw it would know who loved June. So I signed it and it looked like:

  I AM IN LOVE WITH ELIZA JUNE WATERMARK.

  TRULY,


  GURION BEN-JUDAH MACCABEE

  But then the “truly” part made it sound like I doubted it. If I saw it, I would think: The person who wrote this is unsure of himself. I would think: Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee must have written “truly” because sometimes what he says isn’t true, which means he is a liar. And if he is a liar, I’d be a shvontz to believe him just because he says he’s telling the truth.

  So I scratched out “truly” so that it looked like:

  I AM IN LOVE WITH ELIZA JUNE WATERMARK.

  TRULY,

  GURION BEN-JUDAH MACCABEE

  Except now it looked like Gurion was even more unsure of himself.

  I blacked out all of what I’d written entirely.

  And Jelly said, “Thank God! I knew it wasn’t true.”

  I flipped the bag-plate over. This is what I wrote:

  GURION BEN-JUDAH MACCABEE IS IN LOVE

  WITH ELIZA JUNE WATERMARK

  That was the most concise sentence I’d ever written, so I left it.

  Jelly said, “But you can’t be, Gurion! She paints so many violent things! She painted a comicstrip one time of a pink monkey telling a man about the ass of another man who was fat and then the first man goes and cuts the ass of the fat one off and brings it to the monkey and the monkey pays him money and takes the ass of the fat man and puts it on a plate. A silver one.”

  I said, Did the monkey chew the ass?

  “It was implied,” said Jelly.

  How? I said.

  She said, “The monkey had a bib on.”

  That’s subtle and hilarious, I said.

  “Hahalarious!” said Mookus.

  Yes haha, I said.

  “Yes haha!” Scott said. “The mastication of the ass is made possible by the people who brought you I-teeth. Let Us make man! And in the image! The crown and the wisdom and the understanding. The judgment and the love, the beauty and the splendor. Let us not forget the victory. Let us not forget the kingdom and the foundation. The kingdom is the mouth! In the mouth, there are teeth! The foundation is the penis of Us!”