The Instructions

  Miss Pinge said, “Performing today’s announcements will be Tanya Taylor.” Then she read the introduction: “‘Tanya is in the eighth grade, and has made honor roll every quarter since she’s been at Aptakisic. Last year she won bronze at the State Science Fair, and this year she aims to bring home the gold. And don’t worry, Girls’ Varsity Volleyball—Tanya isn’t talking just about science. As team captain, she’s going to apply herself on the court, too. She wants to give a shout-out to the team, and as for the rest of you Indians, she wants you to know that this year will be a great year for Aptakisic. And in case any of the rest of the junior highs in the conference are listening, she wants to tell them that they’re gonna get served, and when Tanya says served, she means on the court. So bring your A-games, Rand Middle and Twin Groves and Longfellow Middle, bring your A-games Sandberg and Frost—bring your A-games all you want, but understand the curve’s getting blown by Ms. Taylor and company. Understand how even though it’s your A-game you’re bringing, you’re a C-student anyway because you’re coming into the house of Tanya, and even a ten-ton semi looks small when it’s parked in front of the Sears Tower, unless it’s packed with explosives, and it’s not! Go Indians!’ And here she is: Tanya Taylor.”

  “Um, thank you, Miss Pinge,” said Tanya.

  I had no idea who she was, but she didn’t sound like the person who had written her introduction. She sounded scared, and she kept mumbling and screwing up the punctuation of the announcements.

  “Today’s big news. Is that tomorrow, at the pep-rally for the opening. Game of the basketball season Boystar and a special guest will. Perform a song off the new Boystar album Emotional Eyes and the performance will be filmed for use in the first Boystar video we’ll be dancing in our seats and—”

  “The special guest is me!” shouted Mookus.

  “Lies,” said the Flunky.

  “Foog,” said Nakamook.

  “Quoydanawnsinz!” snapped Botha.

  “Is it true, Scott?” said Eliyahu.

  “Yes!” said Mookus.

  “Quoydanawnsinz during nouncemints!” said Botha.

  “Congratulations,” said Eliyahu.

  I nearly said congratulations, too, but then I didn’t. Neither did Nakamook or anyone else. It was complicated. It was like my dad and the Drucker case. If the Side of Damage had been more like Flowers, we would have all said congratulations because Main Man was our friend and something good was going to happen for him. We weren’t more like Flowers, though. We were more like me.

  “…less happy note if anyone has any information on who has been destroying the school’s property which is a criminal offense then please let us know it will be confident… confidench—” said Tanya, who was interrupted by a scuffling noise, and then the sound of Brodsky clearing his throat and then the distant voice of Miss Pinge saying, “Sorry, Leonard, I must have spaced out when I was typing it up and put your part under—”

  “Thank you, Tanya,” Mr. Brodsky said into the microphone. “You have all seen the graffiti,” he said. “You have all seen the scoreboard. These are acts of vandalism. Vandalism is a criminal offense, and it will not be tolerated. It is our first priority to find out who has been vandalizing our school, and we will find out.

  “If anyone has any information regarding the identities of the vandals and would like to share that information, you will have my deepest respect, as well as my pledge to keep your name in the strictest confidence. And if any of those responsible come to my office and admit what they’ve done, provided they share me with the names of those with whom they share responsibility, they will be shown leniency.”

  The mike clicked off.

  “What’s leniency?” someone said.

  “Nothing worth dying for,” said Nakamook.

  During five-minute free-swim at the end of Gym, Isadore Momo got a nosebleed in the pool. He was doing the deadman’s float with his eyes closed.

  I one-hand hung beneath the springboard and shivered, watching the blood change shape. Gravity pulled threads from the black-red swirl under Momo’s face, and the chlorine thinned out and broke the threads to kill between the cellwalls. Ripples spread and stretched the mess wider.

  The first two times Momo turned his face for air, he kept his eyes closed, then put his head back onto the cloud he’d made and bled in it some more.

  The third time, he opened his eyes and said, “No!”

  His terror and his foreign accent made it sound like “Heneh!”and he swam away from the blood, fast, like he thought it was the blood of someone else. He kicked the water loudly and people turned to see, but the blood kept following him and he was too afraid to understand why.

  Someone said, “Hermaphrodite.”

  I saw it was Blonde Lonnie Boyd.

  Momo got out of the pool and Blonde Lonnie laughed and repeated it. “Hermaphrodite.”

  It was funny that Momo tried to escape his own blood and it was funny that Blonde Lonnie Boyd thought hermaphrodite meant bleeder, but Blonde Lonnie wasn’t laughing at either of those things, and I didn’t want to laugh with him, especially not against a chubby kid who could barely speak English and never showered til the locker-room was empty, so I didn’t laugh at all.

  Other kids did, though, many of them Shovers. Blonde Lonnie was the third highest scorer on the basketball team, right behind Bam and Co-Captain Baxter,******** and those who believed good basketballing was a tour de force would try to please Lonnie Boyd by laughing with him. It made him even less funny than how he started. He’d used to just be an unfunny guy who made mean, unfunny jokes sometimes, but after a lot of people had laughed along with him, he began to think he was hilarious and, on top of the mean, unfunny jokes, he started making this one same joke over and over again, a tagline-joke stolen from the comedian Damon Wayans, who used it on an old TV show called In Living Color.

  Lonnie’s favorite way to deliver the joke was to use it as an answer to a question Desormie would ask the class when he wanted to make someone feel worthless. A lot of times in Gym, when someone defied the Arrangement, Desormie would blow his whistle for attention and say something to the class, like, “People! When he misses the shuttlecock, Ronrico Asparagus whacks his racket against his knee in anger, like it’s the racket’s fault, or maybe even the shuttlecock’s fault, when really what it is is that it’s his fault for not having the skills that would prevent him from missing the perfectly good shuttlecock with the perfectly good racket that he’s ruining little by little, and one of you guys—or ladies—whoever it is of you who next time gets assigned that racket he’s damaging… When that racket breaks in your hands, it’s gonna be who’s holding that racket who’s gonna pay the fiddler for the cost of that racket, and not just the money fiddler who is our athletic supplies supplier, but the fiddler of point and serve, which is to say the rules of badminton, and possibly—as a result of the impending loss of the match that is the thing that would result from a racket that breaks in the middle of a point in what could very well turn out to be a tie-breaking situation—a third fiddler who is the fiddler of grades who is me the teacher who does not give A’s for effort but only victory and who’s the fiddler who’s gonna get paid by whoever next time gets assigned that racket when it breaks, even though it’s Ronrico’s fault for getting it in the kinda shape that makes you break it by accident. Is gonna get paid by you. In grades. So what do we think about the way Ronrico’s whacking his racket? Is the question. Except let me better yet put that important question another way that doesn’t individuate, since what I don’t mean to do is make it seem like Ronrico is bad because he is Ronrico, but instead that he’s bad because of how he keeps behaving like Ronrico. So the newer, better version of the question I’d like to ask you guys and ladies today is: What do we think about whacking rackets? In general.” And as soon as Desormie was finished talking, he would make the noise “Tch” = “The response is obvious,” and that is when Blonde Lonnie would answer Desormie’s question with the stolen joke:

/>   “Lonnie don’t play that.”

  And all his mooks and stooges would laugh. Sometimes, Lonnie thought it was even more hilarious to be around Lonnie than usual and, instead of saying, “Lonnie don’t play that,” he would say, “Funny Lonnie don’t play that,” or even “Funny Lonnie don’t play that, friend.” And that is why the people who would laugh began to call him Funny Lonnie and Funny Lonniefriend.

  None of them were willing to call a nipple a nipple, though, let alone Lonnie, who, if he were truly funny, would have made lots of jokes that had to do with nipples. He had an extra on the left he was always pinching, but he called it a mole and no one ever argued.

  “Hermaphrodite,” Lonnie said a third time, pointing at Momo, pinch-ing the extra.

  The laughers laughed louder. Their laughter echoed and Desormie came.

  “Everyone outta the pool,” he said. “We got blood. Class dismissed.”

  “Come on, girls,” Miss Kimble said. Miss Kimble was stacking kick-floats in the kick-float cage. She was one of the few robots in school who was dumber than Ron Desormie. She’d do whatever he wanted and wink at him while nodding her fluffy head, like there was a very deep understanding you could have of what Desormie meant when he said stuff like “Gather up the bats and the bases,” and she was the only one in sight who had that understanding. She led a bunch of the girls back to the locker-room.

  Desormie said, “I said outta the pool, Maccabee.”

  I stared at the blood while I counted to seven and got a little hypnotized thinking how the way the chlorine made the blood harmless to animals and useless to hemophiliacs was by over-cleansing it. Cleaning it to death.

  The water near the blood looked shinier than the other water, and by five-one-thousand my eyes were putting auras on the halogens and my forehead felt empty, but at seven-one-thousand, I snapped myself out of the trance. I reached overhead with my dangling hand and pull-upped into a backflip onto the springboard. Then I dove deep and swam across the bottom to the ladder.

  A crowd of laughers—mostly guys, but also some of the seventh-grade Jennys—stood together in the shape of an eyebrow over the pupil that was Isadore Momo. The laughers all pointed at him while he knelt on the tiles with his head back, pinching his nose. They wanted to see if they could get him to cry or change face-color. They wanted to make him embarrassed. Blonde Lonnie Boyd was the eyebrow’s apex. He had the longest finger of all the ones that pointed.

  Momo didn’t seem to care about any of them. Even though he’d let his own blood chase him in the water, he held his nose calmly now, and didn’t cry, and I wished he was on the Side of Damage.

  One of the laughers said, “Hermaphrodite.” Then another one. And then all of them.

  Desormie stood beside Momo and said, “That’s right, pinch that sucker good. Pinch it. Just like that. Right on the bridge, there. Pinch it.” But you could tell he thought the hermaphrodite joke was really hilarious because he kept looking over at Lonnie and the Jennys and rolling his eyes = “Can you believe how this kid keeps bleeding!”

  Then he touched Momo on the elbow for a second and said, “Okay? You’re okay. Good guy. Okay. Okay guys, nothing to see here,” and walked off to check the lock on the kickfloat cage.

  Benji and Leevon and Vincie were in the shadows of the doorway to the locker-room. Ronrico and the Janitor were just outside of it. I thought: They’re all waiting for me. I thought: I am the leader of the Side of Damage. And I decided: If Isadore Momo is not on the Side of Damage, he is at least on the same side as the Side of Damage.

  And I saw that it was good.

  I walked at the left wing of the eyebrow the long way, hoping to bump a couple laughers, but the laughers moved when they saw me coming and the eyebrow lost its curve. When I got to Lonnie Boyd, he was still pointing at Momo and saying, “Hermaphrodite.”

  So I pointed at Lonnie, and even though I thought I’d say something about his nipple, or Momo being on the Side of Damage, I changed my mind and said, Basketball.

  I said it loud. Then I said it again.

  Basketball, I said.

  The laughers stopped laughing and waited for someone to drown me. They were always waiting for someone to do something. I kept my finger pointed at Lonnie and said it again:

  Basketball.

  Then I stepped forward until the nail of my finger was close enough to Lonnie’s extra nipple for Lonnie to reach out and break my finger off and I said, Basketball.

  “Psycho,” Lonnie said.

  I pressed my finger on the nipple. Not hard or anything, but it was my finger and it was his nipple. Extra or not, he should have hit me. I would’ve hit me. He didn’t hit me.

  Basketball, I said.

  Desormie said, “Class dismissed, guys.”

  No one moved. The snat dripped down Lonnie’s chin and I took my finger off his nipple because I didn’t like touching it, but I continued pointing to it.

  That’s when Nakamook said, “Basketball.” By then, him and the others had already come over and started a second eyebrow over the pupil that was Lonnie and I.

  The original eyebrow fell back into the new one.

  And Ronrico said, “Basketball.”

  And the Janitor said, “Basketball.”

  Vincie said, “Fucken basketball.”

  “Hey!” said Desormie.

  And Leevon pulled his cheek down to show Lonnie the red part of his eyeball.

  Isadore Momo, still holding his nose, came up next to me, and to Lonnie Boyd, Momo said, “Nipple.” It sounded like “Neepo.”

  Someone said, “The chubby bleederkid says that Lonnie’s a nipple!”

  “A nipple!” said someone.

  Lonnie said, “It’s a mole!”

  “What’s a mole, Lonnie?”

  “My mole,” said Lonnie, “is a mole.”

  “Nipple!” said someone.

  “Enough!” said Desormie.

  “Nipple!”

  “Nipple!”

  “Nipple!”

  “Hey Lonnie?” said a Jenny.

  “What?” said Lonnie.

  “Your mole?” said another Jenny.

  “What about my mole?”

  “Oh my God is it a nipple!”

  Lonnie’s body jerked, but instead of attacking anyone, he revolved and went to the locker-room. He had to walk around to the end of the new eyebrow to get there since who would step aside for a trickling wonder like that?

  “You’re really cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” Desormie said to me.

  “You make the rhyme,” Momo said to Desormie.

  Laughter boomed from the eyebrow.

  Momo bowed.

  “That’s it!” Desormie said, looking around.

  “That’s what?” said Ronrico.

  “Did you just look at Jenny’s nipples?” said Nakamook.

  “Hey!” Desormie said.

  “Jenny, did Mr. Desormie just look at your nipples?” said Vincie.

  “Probably,” said the seventh-grade Jennys. Then they all giggled.

  “I thought I was just imagining it?” said Jenny April.

  “Sometimes he looks at my cha-cha,” said Jenny Khouri.

  “Always the nipples during swimming, though,” Jenny Flagg said.

  “Why you always lookin’ at the Jennys on the chest?” said Ronrico.

  “I wanna know that, too,” said the Janitor. “Isn’t it illegal? What do you guys think?”

  “It’s definitely ickish,” April said. “I agree with Jenny that it’s gross,” said Flagg. Khouri said, “I don’t like the faces he makes at me.”

  “Ladies,” said Desormie.

  “And he calls us ‘ladies’ which is creepy.” “We’re girls.” “Will you stop looking at us the way Ronrico said?”

  “Now, I don’t know what you’re all talking about,” said Desormie. “But,” he said, “all you gotta do if something bothers you? Is tell me. Tell me while it’s bothering you. If you tell me while it’s bothering you, then maybe I
’ll know what you mean, cause right now? I just don’t know what you mean.”

  “Stop looking at us like that.”

  “Like what?” said Desormie.

  “Like that,” said Jenny April.

  “You ladies are crazy and I’d go back to the locker-rooms if I was you because I for one am not writing hall-passes for this nonsense so if you’re late, tough luck, it’s your fault.”

  While I was getting dressed, kids I never spoke to chinned air at me and showed me power-fists. President Blake Acer wasn’t among those kids, but he wasn’t showing Lonnie any mooky solidarity, either. Nor were his two or three Shover underlings; they all just kept their eyes at ichthi-level.

  Then, out in B-hall, by the locker-room entrance, Ronrico and the Janitor were waiting for me beside Nakamook and Leevon and Vincie Portite, all together, like it was the most normal thing to do in the world.

  And we all walked back to the Cage together.

  At the gate, instead of ringing the doorbell, I pulled the hall-pass pad from my pocket.

  I asked them: You guys got Darkers?

  “WE DAMAGE WE is tired,” whispered Nakamook.

  It was ten minutes after the beginning-of-class tone, and Benji and I were on opposite sides of the teachers lounge doorway’s light rhombus. The Chewer was checking his image in the glass of the C-Hall firehose case. He’d locked up the side entrance in order to rove. According to Ronrico, the roving had started at lunch on Wednesday.

  “You might think it was because of the scoreboard getting killed,” Ronrico’d explained when we first noticed Floyd wasn’t at his post, “but don’t blame it on Ben-Wa. Floyd was roving even before that—because of how I tagged up Main Hall. It’s my fault and I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up about it already,” Nakamook had said.

  “Sorry, Benji.”

  “Stop saying sorry. If you want to brag about tagging up Main Hall, brag about it, but don’t pretend you’re reluctantly confessing for the good of Ben-Wa.”

  We’d decided to work in pairs so one guy could always be on lookout for Floyd. It would have been more economical in terms of passes and defacement-per-minute rates if we worked as a single group with one guy on lookout and five bombing, but we decided on pairs because two’s the most guys that could hope to hide safely in a doorway. I wrote out one pass for each pair and designated different times to return to the Cage since if we trickled in separate it would look less suspicious.