Botha started taking attendance.
“Haspaygus!” he said.
My eyes opened at the sound of it. I hadn’t known they’d been closed.
“Yeah,” said Ronrico Asparagus.
Looking on the Side of Damage, now, I thought of Nakamook’s judgment in the teachers lounge doorway: that they were only loyal because they wanted protection.
“What’s the proper response, Mister Haspaygus?”
The moment I was unable to protect them, they cowered, abandoned me.
“‘Here’ or ‘prasent’ is the proper response, Mister Haspaygus.”
Except so had I. I had cowered, was cowering.
“Yeah,” said Ronrico.
“That’s a detantion, Haspaygus. Bashker!”
They had cowered before the same false god that had humbled me, their protector.
“Tut,” said Anna Boshka.
And to see your protector being humbled—what can you do? Can you step in to protect him? Yes, you can. But do you think to? Do you ever think to protect your protector? You should, but you probably don’t. You probably take for granted that what overpowers him will overpower you. And you cower.
“Moykil Braigmin?”
So was that the end of their loyalty, then?
“Yeah,” said the Janitor.
Is loyalty measured by the ends to which you’d go to protect the object of your loyalty, or is it measured by the ends to which you’d hope you’d go to protect him?
“What’s that?” said Botha. “What’s that?”
Maybe, I thought, there is actual loyalty, and that is measured by the ends to which you’d go; and maybe then there is also potential loyalty—measured by the ends to which you’d hope you’d go. Surely the second kind is not as important as the first, but that wouldn’t make it unimportant; all things potential can be made actual—that is what it means to be potential. And apart from Adonai, what in all the universe was actual that wasn’t once potential?
“I said, ‘Yeah,’” said the Janitor.
“That’s so romentic,” said Botha, “to side with your baddy Hespaygus.” Then he fake-coughed. “Lotsa jairms out here,” he said. He fake-coughed again, said, “All that blad from Aye-lie and that Shy-lomo boy on the ground that you’re stendin’ on.”
The Janitor knew he was yards away from where Shlomo and Eliyahu had bled into the grass, but still you could almost see the germs he imagined floating up from near his shoes, their cellwalls slimily marbled hot pink and piss-colored, little barbs protruding from their goozy-shaped bodies, trying to cling to his skin, to crawl into his openings. Though he hesitated, the Janitor was only able to hold his ground for a three-count before succumbing to Botha’s power of suggestion and moving a couple steps back.
Botha, still trickling—doomed, as all caulkers, to trickle forever—said, “It’s in the air by now I’d think, the jairms. Enexcapable, I’d suppose.”
“Leave my brother alone,” said the Flunky.
The Janitor tightened his lips, hoisted the collar of his t-shirt over his nose.
“Your dumb behavior is the dumb behavior of a foog who’s like a fool except I don’t like him,” the Flunky said to Botha.
The sound of more than four consecutive words from the Flunky—let alone words acknowledging his genetic ties to the Janitor—startled all of us, but no one as much as Botha, whose claw, with a click, pinched so hard and suddenly on the drizzle-slick wood of his clipboard that the clipboard shot from his grasp. Reflexively, as if a champion of that shvontzy sport hackeysack, Botha extended a leg and kicked the clipboard, which bounced once then twice off his inner-arch before it hit the ground. He was bent over to retrieve it when he said, “I guess that mains Rachid Braigmin’s present,” but by the time he said, “and I guess Rachid Braigmin wants to serve a detantion with his little brother and his little brother’s little frand Haspaygus—I’ll oblige you that, Rachid Braigmin, I’ll oblige you that,” he was standing up even straighter than before, shoulders thrust back proudly. “Cattis!” he said.
“What did you just say to the Flunky, Mr. Botha? I couldn’t under-stand,” said Salvador Curtis.
“Jest mind yourself, Cattis, and kape your nose to the tesk at hand. Deerfailed!”
I thought: Maybe it’s the duty of loyalty’s object to transform the potential into the actual. Maybe it’s my fault they didn’t protect me. Maybe when they saw me being humiliated, they didn’t believe what they were seeing.
“Present,” said Rick Deerfield.
“Dangow,” said Botha.
“Present,” said Mark Dingle.
Maybe they didn’t believe I could be humiliated.
“Hentsary!” said Botha.
“Present,” said Ansul Entsry.
“Failedburns,” said Botha.
“Here,” said Renee Feldbons.
Maybe they thought, moment to moment, that I would break free of Slokum in the next moment. That was definitely what I thought when it started happening, and by the time I knew otherwise, I didn’t have enough air in my lungs to call for help—but they didn’t know that. My lungs were not their lungs.
“Freudy!”
“Present,” said Jackie Friday.
My lungs were not their lungs, and my humiliation wasn’t their humiliation. It didn’t have to be, at least.
“Glanncow!”
“Here,” said Janie Glencoe.
They didn’t have to be humiliated by my defeat.
“Hyeney!”
“I’m here,” said Chunkstyle.
And they didn’t have to be ashamed for letting me be defeated.
“Kannilwath!”
“Present,” said Forrest Kenilworth.
Yet they were humiliated. And ashamed. I could see it in their faces.
“Layp!” said Botha.
Stevie Loop said, “Here.”
Their faces were blank; I saw shame in their faces, shame in their blankness. And maybe I just wanted to. Maybe I needed to—maybe I wanted, that much, to forgive them; maybe to forgive them I had to see shame that wasn’t really there—but shame’s what I saw.
“Lant!” said Botha.
They wished they’d done more for me, regretted they hadn’t.
“Right here,” said Casper Lunt.
They wanted to do more.
“Make-bee!” said Botha.
They wanted to atone.
“Make-bee!” said Botha.
They wanted to be loyal.
“Make-bee?” said Botha. “Where’s Make-bee?” said Botha.
Someone cleared his throat—Leevon Ray. “Here,” Leevon said.
“Nice to finely hear from you, Layven,” Botha said, “but don’t eff around with me. Where’s Garrion Make-bee?”
“Here!” the Side shouted.
And Leevon Ray spoke: “Word is bond, you prison-colony trick. Outback gimp-ass vegemitebrain. Coyotebugger. Stingraybait. Wallabee-eating marsupialsack. Crocodile ugly walkabout cripple. Bent Australian clawfisted lame inbred Foster’s-pounding bowie knife…”
I came down the hill, damaged and relieved and forgiving as the rest of them.
Mounted behind glass in a wallcase outside the art room was Miss Gleem’s Quarterly Student Themeshow. The theme for the quarter was “Exploring Black & White.” In the center of the display, amid would-be photoreal ink-drawings (moons, penguins, busts of tuxedoed Bruce Wayne types) and construction-paper cameos (all 19th-century-looking except Leevon’s: a spear-cleft Centurion’s helmet), hung the only unsigned piece. According to the little card Miss Gleem had pasted above the upper margin, it was made by June, and titled “Visual Thinker.”
This is exactly what it looked like:
Though the themeshow went up in mid-October, I didn’t get the whole joke til early November, when, returning to ISS after going to the bathroom, I happened to see the piece from thirty paces off.
I pointed as we approached it on our way to the Cage. The Side of Damage looked, and I told them to go closer. All o
f them did so—and fast—except Benji.
He’d stayed out of speaking range since I’d come down the hill. I’d been telling myself he was waiting for privacy, but now that I was alone—the others half a hallway off, either puzzled or giggling in front of June’s artwork—I saw how stupid that thought had been. If Benji’d wanted to speak to me alone, he would have scattered the lot of them and spoken. And had he done that, even if all he’d said was, “Hey” I think I would have forgiven him on the spot. I think I would have assumed I’d missed something obvious; that there’d been a solid reason for him not to help me in the field; that despite, if not because of, my efforts to forgive the others, this reason eluded me like a deer a duckhunter. Indeed, the very fact he couldn’t be forgiven on the same grounds as the rest of them—while always his friend, I’d never been his protector—might not have occurred to me at all. Had he only said “Hey.”
But he hadn’t. He didn’t. He kept on not. He wouldn’t even look at me.
What I decided was he’d write me a note.
And after we’d been in the Cage for ten minutes, I decided the note he was writing was long, more like a letter than a note, and I decided the letter would right everything between us.
The anticipation got me H with vigilance. It was the last letter in the world I’d want Botha to intercept. In the meantime, though, just about everyone except Benji was tossing me notes—“We Revenge We” “The Side of Damage is the End of Basketball” “You got snuck up on!” “Slokum dies Friday!” “I am a defiance!” “Death to the Arrangement!” “*EMOTIONALIZE*” “Robots will melt!” “Tomorrow I’m singing at th p p rally with Boystar! Can you wait? I can’t wait! Lov , My Main Man Scott Mookus”—and because Benji was on the opposite side of the Cage, his hypothetical letter would have to pass through the hands of at least three intermediaries before it could get to me, and I didn’t know who would toss it, or which direction it would come from, and soon I did a very unstealth thing: reaching for a ricochet, I scooted my chair.
The Side of Damage believed I wanted a hyperscoot.
And so there was a hyperscoot.
Botha beat his fist on his desk and we couldn’t hear it over our noise. But the teachers, Miss Lang and Mr. Wadrow, though they covered their ears, looked on in simple amazement, even smiling a little: it was the first hyperscoot they’d witnessed, and they didn’t know to be terrorized—they thought it was just random weirdness. Clearly they hadn’t spoken to Miss Mingle or Miss Plotkin since before fourth period, and Botha must not have told them about hyperscoot, either. That surprised me for a second, but it shouldn’t have: it was, above all, his authority that hyperscoot damaged, and a trickler like him would want that information to remain hidden for as long as possible.
Though I was glad the Side of Damage was so battle-ready, the teachers needed to understand hyperscoot was a tactical weapon, and because the current hyperscoot wasn’t in response to any obvious offense the Arrangement had provided us, they couldn’t have understood, so I stopped it. I waited til all robot eyes were directed elsewhere—there was nothing to be gained by letting them know there was a leader, let alone who that leader was—and then I showed the Side of Damage my palm. They stilled their chairs.
“Tomorra you’re eating lunch in here,” Botha said.
It was a show of weakness and he knew it. We would have all stayed in the Cage for lunch on Friday anyway: I was banned from the cafeteria, and the rest of them would have wanted to eat with me. So then what was the point of his sentencing us to lunch in the Cage? This was the point: He knew we would think of the punishment as our having gotten away with something—and we did think of it that way; half the hands in the room were hiding sly smiles—and that therefore we wouldn’t respond with another hyperscoot.
And if we didn’t respond with another hyperscoot, Lang and Wadrow, who Botha was so concerned with impressing, and who had no clue that we’d want to eat lunch in the Cage, would believe that Botha’s power was intact.
So we should have hyperscooted in response to the sentencing. If we had, Botha still would have known that he’d shown us weakness, but he’d also have looked weak in front of the teachers. It took me a minute to think of that, though—for those first sixty seconds after the sentencing, I was, like the others, too busy being impressed with our small victory to imagine a larger one—and after that it was too late. A delayed response would not look like a response. Just more randomness.
As the minutes after the hyperscoot quietly passed, I became less and less convinced that Benji was writing me a letter, more and more convinced that he’d been too afraid of Bam to help me, that he’d been just as afraid as the rest of them and was ashamed. That kenobi line of his about timeliness and vengeance and pride and propriety—maybe it was, after all, just impressive-sounding babbling, a clever-phrased reason to explain away the fact that after two years of arch-enmity he’d never once stepped to Slokum; to make it sound to others, maybe also to himself, like he wasn’t plain scared. If there is such a thing as a disloyal thought—and I’m not sure there is—that would be an exemplary one. But my options were narrow. Either I could (disloyally?) believe that Benji was ashamed for having been afraid to fight the one guy he swore up and down was his enemy—and in the perfect storybook situation no less, a situation in which the fight would rescue his best friend—or I could believe that Benji wasn’t loyal to me.
But why would he be disloyal? Because despite all his naysaying about the Side of Damage, he actually wanted to lead it and he thought my defeat would put him in that position? Or maybe his naysaying was understatement; maybe he hated the Side of Damage, and he thought my defeat would break it apart? Maybe he wanted the Side of Damage to break apart because he thought that would mean that we’d go back to how it used to be, just me and him and Vincie and Mookus and Leevon and Jelly and sometimes Mangey against everyone? When he seemed to come around to the idea of being friends with the Janitor and Ronrico and Eliyahu and Ben-Wa, could he have just been faking it? Was it the earlier two-hill field thing? that I hadn’t invited him to meet the scholars, who didn’t, in the end, show anyway? Was he jealous of June for being invited? All of these things, though possible, didn’t ring even slightly true, and, more to the point, they were too abstract: They didn’t supply motive enough for anyone capable of preventing it to stand by and watch his closest friend get humiliated. So either he’d been too afraid to fight Slokum or… what? Or he had quit our friendship.
And what reason could he have had for quitting our friendship? The only one I could think of didn’t seem good enough at all. Maybe finding out that you’ve been given an inferior version of Ulpan justifies smashing exit plaques and pulling alarms—I was certainly pissed enough to do something like that by the time Nakamook had exited the Nurse’s—but it doesn’t justify abandoning your best friend. Benji wasn’t an Israelite, and I would not act as if he were. To do so would be to pretend. To do so would be unfaithful of me and condescending to him. To do so would be chomsky. And Benji was the most anti-pretend person I’d ever met. He wouldn’t have wanted me to merely act like he was an Israelite; he’d have wanted me to believe he was an Israelite, or that Israelites weren’t Israelites. And I didn’t believe those things. And I couldn’t believe those things. And it is no easier to change what you believe than it is to change what you want, and my beliefs were far older than Benji’s desire—if my changing my beliefs even was Benji’s desire—so if either of us needed to bend, it was him.
And when did it ever really come up, anyway? When was the fact that he wasn’t an Israelite ever a practical consideration? Only with Ulpan. Only in that one instance. And he could so easily make of that the opposite of what he’d made of it in Nurse Clyde’s office. It was the easiest thing in the world to flip: Nakamook could just as easily decide to believe that my giving him a doctored copy of Ulpan—a copy I’d made specifically for him—signified my loyalty to him, my friendship, my trust. And it did. And, in so many words, I’d explained tha
t. I had taught him to build a weapon intended for Israelites. I had trusted him enough to share with him the means of protection I’d given my first brothers. I had, in all but name, made of him a brother. Could the name really be that important to him?
He’d either been afraid, or he was no longer my friend. Both options were suck, but I definitely preferred the former. If he had been too afraid to fight Bam, I would have a sad and ashamed best friend who wasn’t as brave as he or I had imagined. If he had quit being my friend, though, I would have no best friend at all.
I looked over my shoulder and saw, by the way Benji was bent, that he was writing.
Good, I thought.
For a while I wrote potential responses to the forthcoming letter to see which one might be the most comforting:
I probably would have been too frozen with fear to help you, too, Benji.
Because I’ve never seen you helpless, I bet I wouldn’t think it possible that you ever could be, even if your feet were alternately kicking at and dangling in the air while some giant’s arms were wrapped crushingly around your chest right before my eyes, so don’t sweat it; I understand.
Bam’s too big for any one kid, and although the Side of Damage would have surely helped you take him down if only you’d led them in his direction, if I was you I probably wouldn’t have realized I had an army either, so stunned would I be at the sight of my best friend’s humiliation.
Botha’s voice suddenly gloated from the opposite side of the Cage. “Something to share with the cless, Miss Rotstain?” he said.
I revolved. So did everyone else.
Jelly threw a folded note into Mangey’s lap and Mangey tried to swallow the note, but Botha snapped it from between her teeth with his claw before she could get it all the way in her mouth.
“Let’s see,” Botha said to the class, once he’d wiped the note’s saliva on the wall of Mangey’s carrel and read it through to himself. He said, “Says here, in the handwriting of Mister Nackamake, ‘Bibey, will you be my bibey?’ And then, beneath it, in the handwriting of Miss Rotstain, ‘Mate with me after school boy the bus circle? Yours, Jaily.’ Seems there’s a badding rowmentz happening in this clessroom of ours. Well, whuddya think Nackamake? You gonna mate with Jaily boy the bus circle?”