The Instructions

  When he was finished giving his speech, Desormie chinned the air at Miss Pinge = “My interrogation method, though unconventional—some might even call it ‘controversial’—is pretty impressive, if I don’t chin so myself.”

  Miss Pinge looked at her lap.

  You’re tall, I said to Desormie. How tall are you?

  “Tall enough,” Desormie said. “Don’t try to change the subject with non-sectarians.”

  But how tall are you exactly? I said.

  “Quid pro quo,” Desormie said. “Quid. Pro. Quo… Means you answer my question, and only then I answer yours.”

  You didn’t ask a question, I said.

  “You know what I mean by a question, Maccabee.”

  A question? I said.

  “Stop playing the fool.”

  Maybe I’m playing the foog, I said.

  “What the heck is a foog?” he said.

  I said, Quid pro quo, Clarice.

  “You said I’m a Clarice?” he shouted.

  “Stop shouting,” Miss Pinge said.

  “Yes, Ron,” said Mr. Brodsky from his doorway. “Please stop shouting.”

  “The scoreboard is destroyed!” he shouted.

  Brodsky said, “I’ve already discussed the matter with Gurion, and further-more, the scoreboard is not destroyed. Two letters are missing from the—”

  “I’m trying to tell you it’s destroyed, Mr. Brodsky. It’s no two letters. The whole reason I came in here is to deliver the information that at nine this morning it was two letters, which is the last I checked was nine this morning—the last I checked until ten minutes ago, that is—and some time between nine this morning and ten minutes ago, while I was at the pool or in my office, him or his so-called ‘friends-of-him’ went into the gym and threw so many rocks at the scoreboard that almost all the letters are broken and almost all the bulbs, and those bulbs that are left won’t even light up anymore because those thrown rocks those kids threw blew the fuses or something. Scoreboard. Is. Destroyed!”

  I wondered about the clock—if Nakamook or Vincie or whoever hit the scoreboard also got the clock. I was so excited I even started asking before I caught myself. I said, What about the—

  “What about the what?” Desormie said.

  I recovered, saying, Does smoke purl from the sockets when you give the thing juice?

  “Look at him smiling about it!” Desormie said. Forgetting again to use my swear-finger, I touched my mouth-corners with my thumb and pointer, and this triggered Desormie to touch his own mouth-corners, which smeared the paste onto his cheek a little.

  “Let’s talk about this in my office,” Brodsky said to him.

  “Good,” said Desormie. “Let’s go,” he said to me.

  I have to use the bathroom, I said.

  I really did have to.

  “Go ahead, Ginnie,” said Brodsky, “give him the pass.”

  “But we have to discuss the—” Desormie protested.

  “Gurion was with his mother this morning, and he’s been in the Office since noon,” said Brodsky.

  “That wasn’t the case yesterday,” Desormie said. “It wasn’t the case when the E and the V got busted out. He’s unaccounted for for yesterday.”

  “You think that he damaged the scoreboard yesterday, but someone else did it today?” Brodsky said. He said it like it was the dumbest thing anyone could possibly suggest.

  And I thought: Why not think that?

  And then I thought: Brodsky wants for you to be innocent. He wants to keep you from being bullied.

  I thought: Count your blessings, you’re off the hook.

  “But why not think that?” Desormie said. “They’re all copycats. And/or they’re organized.”

  Brodsky set his hand on the back of Desormie’s elbow and pushed on it, just barely. He pushed Desormie’s elbow gently in the direction of his office, and took a step toward the Office, and said, “Who’s they?”

  And Desormie, who only a split second earlier was dying to break my nose and yell about me, followed Brodsky’s cue—took a step in the direction of Brodsky’s office without hesitation—and when he said, “I don’t know who they are, but I know there’s a group of them, Mr. Brodsky,” his voice was all but entirely drained of anger.

  Miss Pinge handed me the bathroom pass, and I didn’t have to piss as bad.

  I wanted to do something nice for Brodsky.

  I said, “Gym teacher.”

  And Desormie revolved. He said, “My name is Mr. Desormie to you.”

  And I said, You are suggestible, Mr. Desormie.

  And Desormie said, “What the heck are you talking about?”

  And I dragged the back of my hand back and forth across my mouth twice.

  And Desormie dragged the back of his hand back and forth across his mouth twice. And Brodsky coughed fakely to mask his laughter. And there was no more paste in the mouth-corners of Desormie. And Brodsky would not have to stare at paste while they talked in his office. That was nice of me.

  I went to the gym.

  The clock was intact. Floyd the Chewer knelt beneath it, examining the shards of plastic letters and scoreboard bulbs the gym floor was strewn with. Hector the Janitor, on standby beside him, gripped a pushbroom with one hand and a dustpan with the other. I watched them from the doorway. The Chewer held a shard up to the light, made a face like he was deciding something important, then dropped the shard and buzzed a go-ahead through his cheering cone. Seizing his pushbroom just above the brush and using only the bristles along the edge of its short side to avoid accidental contact with shards Floyd hadn’t yet approved for disposal, Hector crouched to sweep the rejected one into his dustpan, then stepped back into position. Floyd picked up another shard and the whole thing began again: examine, reject, command, sweep. After the fourth or fifth cycle, I remembered I had to piss.

  And then I remembered I had the bathroom pass.

  I headed for the locker-room.

  “Evidence?” the Chewer was complaining to Hector. “More like garbage for the garbage dump. Sweep! —Oh well, oh hey, just look at who it is.” Who it was was me. “Halt it,” Floyd said. So I halted at center-court, my heels on the gnarled and overwrought nose of the floor’s red, murder-eyed Chief Aptakisic. Floyd came out of his crouch and approached, stumbling on his way on a pile of rocks that was stacked at the top of the key—the rocks scattered—and, once he’d recovered his footing, said to Hector, “Re-organize the admissable evidence and secure it somewheres safe, preferently outside the scene here so no one has to break his neck on the way to apprehend suspects is a lesson we’d do better to learn fast rather than later, Hec.”

  Hector hopped to action without a word. He was as quiet as Leevon. I’d never heard him speak, but usually he smiled. And he always walked on his toes. He wasn’t smiling when he pushed the rock-pile to the corner with the pushbroom, but he did walk on his toes, and I looked away feeling like a shmuck for noticing because “Does Floyd the Chewer really believe the Deerbrook Park Police Force, who probably doesn’t even have a crimelab, will run fingerprints on all of those rocks?” is what Hector must have been wondering. It is what anyone but Floyd—who not only seemed to believe the scoreboard’s damager might have touched the shards as well as the rocks, but that he could see, with his naked eye, whether the damager had done so—would have been wondering, but no one so much as Hector, who, if he didn’t wonder about the fingerprints, would have surely had to wonder why he was taking orders from a man like Floyd.

  “They always return to the scene of the crime, Hec,” Floyd said. “You hear what I just said, Gurion?”

  I didn’t, I said.

  “Didn’t what? I didn’t ask you about doing anything. You hear that, Hec? I ask him if he heard what I said to you and he starts in about how he’s innocent. Innocent of what is my question. Far’s I can tell, we’ve got a guilty conscience on our hands. What didn’t you do, Gurion?”

  I didn’t hear what you said to Hector, I said.

>   “Just now, you mean? Or originally?”

  I said, Originally.

  “Right, right. You didn’t hear. Says he didn’t hear, Hec. Well, I’ll tell you what, then, Gurion: I was just telling Hector over there about how they always return to the scene. Of the crime. Now, let’s talk, you and I, man to man. Off the record. You won’t see me taking notes. I don’t even have a pencil to take notes with. You want a pencil, you see Jerry over by the front entrance. He’s got a pencil. Keeps it in his cap. I’m the one’s got the cone. So where were you this morning at such-and-such a time?”

  With my mom, I said. I said, I really have to pee.

  The bladder is a mystery. I’d had to piss bad in the Office, and then I didn’t, and then it was stabbing me again.

  “Tie it in a knot there, kid, because my next question’s a zinger,” said Floyd. “My next question is how come when I ask you about where were you at such-and-such a time this morning, you’re so quick with an alibi that’s your mom when I didn’t even specificate the exact time? Are you trying to tell me that you, who we were put on alert for by Brodsky himself because he was ditching the ISS, were with your mom all morning?”

  All morning, I said, and I’ve been in the Office since noon and I have a pass, and I need to piss.

  “Let’s have a look-see,” Floyd said. “Let’s. Have. A look. See.”

  I flashed the pass, and Floyd looked dizzy. The two conflicting protocols—ALLOW STUDENTS WITH PASSES TO PASS vs. OBEY ALL ORDERS GIVEN BY BRODSKY UNTIL OTHERWISE ADVISED—were melting his circuits. He was mumbling to himself. “Looksy. Look see? Look see. Looksy?”

  My wang ached hotly and my thigh-muscles were jumping. I thought: Ten times a day. The bladder is a mystery and Maimonedes was smart.

  I said, Floyd, you can take me to the Office after I go to the bathroom, or you can take me to the Office after I piss on your shoes. I said, In ten seconds, I will pull out my wang and piss on your shoes.

  Floyd tilted his head and made a mock-curious face he scratched the cheek of with his swearfinger and said, “Fine then. But only because maybe I have to use the facilities myself, and so I’m going with you so don’t even think about escape.”

  I walked fast into the locker-room with Floyd at my heels. I would have run, but I thought running would cause piss to leak. Floyd overtook me by the window of Desormie’s office. I saw purple spit-droplets jumping out from the bell of his cheering cone, which flailed at the end of its wrist-string, and I had to slow up so I wouldn’t get spattered.

  Floyd went to the urinal farthest from the door, and six seconds later, while I planted myself before the middle one, I heard the sound of his zipping. By the time I was unzipped, he was already headed for a stall, grumbling into his cone about what a creep I was.

  I pissed so hard the soap flipped twice, and when I was done I said, Floyd, back in the nineties, did anyone ever call you a Two-Point-Five?

  And Floyd said, “What?”

  I said, I saw this movie once called Boyz in Da Hood, which was about gangsters in Compton in the nineties, and all the gangsters in the movie called the cops ‘Five-Oh’ and I asked Benji Nakamook why they called them that and he asked his cousin, and his cousin told him it was because cops in LA drove Mustang 5.0s, which were really fast.

  “So what?” Floyd said, not pissing anymore, not flushing, just waiting behind the stall door, trying to save face.

  So they were called ‘Five-Oh,’ I said.

  “So you’re asking did anyone call me ‘Five-Oh’ in the nineties?”

  No, I said, they called real cops ‘Five-Oh’ in the nineties. I’m asking if anyone ever called you ‘Two-Point-Five.’

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I can’t remember anyone ever calling me that.”

  I washed my hands. Floyd fake-moved his bowels for another minute. The metal rectangle on the door between the bathroom and the locker-room read WE DAMAGE in drippy Wite-Out.

  Benji Nakamook, Leevon Ray, and Vincie Portite were waiting in the waiting chairs when we got to the Office. Just past the threshold, Floyd went hipshot like an R&B diva on a magazine cover or an infantry general getting sculpted by a master. Hands on his waist, he raised his chin high.

  Vincie sat in the chair that was closest to the door, and as I passed him on the way to the ISS desk, he put up his hand and I punched his palm. The punch was automatic—we’d quit high-fiving a couple weeks earlier in favor of pounding fists.

  Vincie grabbed my fist with the hand I’d punched, and slapped the side of it with his other hand. Then he did a kind of grinding of the slapping hand’s palm against my fist-side, which was also unusual and confused me.

  A folded square of paper fell to the floor when I retracted my fist.

  I thought: A note from June.

  Vincie stepped on the note so Miss Pinge wouldn’t see.

  Miss Pinge was distracted by Floyd the Chewer. She had failed to congratulate him for having brought Gurion in, and during the few seconds it took me to klutz Vincie’s note-passing plan, Floyd had begun nodding slowly, knowingly, and making the noise, “Eh? Eh?”

  I sat at the ISS desk, hoping the note said June loved me.

  “Eh?” Floyd said.

  Miss Pinge said, “Can I help you, Floyd?”

  Vincie pulled his foot toward his body, but the friction of the carpet fuzz gripped the paper more powerfully than Vincie’s sole, and the note got exposed, and again he had to step on it.

  Breaking his victory pose to point at me with one hand and hold cone to mouth with the other, Floyd said, “That one over there returned to the scene of the crime that was perpetuated on the scoreboard in the gym.” Then he put his pointing hand back on his waist and added, “Just like Ronny D and myself predicted.”

  Vincie tried dragging his foot really slowly but the carpet wouldn’t let the note go.

  “So where is Ronny D, anyway?” said Floyd. “He said he’d be in here if he wasn’t in his office, and he wasn’t in his office, so…”

  Leevon elbowed Vincie and Vincie took his foot off the note.

  “Ron’s talking to Mr. Brodsky,” Miss Pinge said to Floyd.

  Leevon is stealth, but even when you’re stealth, you can blur a periphery. Leevon made a blur when he bent to grab the note.

  “What’s that?” Miss Pinge said.

  Leevon shrugged.

  “Leevon,” she said.

  Leevon chewed thumbskin.

  Benji ran distraction. “So,” he said, “did you kiss June Watermark?”

  “No talking to students in ISS,” said Miss Pinge. “You know that, Benji.”

  Leevon flipped the note into Vincie’s lap.

  “You know you want to know the answer,” said Benji. “Just let him say yes or no.”

  “I want to know,” Pinge said, “what Leevon just did.”

  “But not as much as you want to know about Gurion and June.”

  “You’ve got the dimples of a con-man.” Benji was her favorite.

  “When’s the chief gonna be done with Ronny D?” said Floyd.

  “So?” Benji said.

  I haven’t kissed her, I said.

  “Better hurry,” Benji told me, “or she might start to hate you. I was thinking about that all last night—how I forgot to tell you about the way she might hate you if you wait too long to kiss her. It’s almost always better to jump the gun than latestart off the line.” He twitched his head sideways = “Pay attention to Vincie and Leevon.” (I waited, so Miss Pinge wouldn’t follow my eyes.) “Do you know why we’re here?” Benji asked.

  Miss Pinge said, “Benji, what did I just tell you?”

  How long is too long? I said.

  Benji never used sports metaphors, so I thought at first that he wasn’t serious about jumping the gun’s superiority to a latestart off the line—I thought it was just banter to throw Pinge off of Leevon. But then I thought how it was sound advice for a fight: It is surely better to strike before you’re sure you’re in a fight than
to not strike til after the fight is on its way. Maybe kissing was like fighting. Lots of things were like fighting. Benji didn’t answer me.

  “I wasn’t asking Gurion,” Benji said to Pinge. He jerked his head sideways again for my benefit. “I was asking you, Miss Pinge: Do you know why we’re here? Because those CASS’s say one thing, but why we’re here is another thing.”

  I looked at Leevon, who showed me his palm ≠ “Stop,” but seemed to.

  I squinted.

  Leevon showed me his pointer ≠ “One,” but seemed to.

  Stop one? I mouthed.