The Instructions

  “None of you’s—” said Botha. The end-of-class tone sounded. “None of you’s going to the pap relly tomarra.”

  “That’s a good one,” said Ronrico. “If by good you mean great,” said Ben-Wa Wolf, “and great means an ingenius way to punish us without all the paperwork.”

  Making their way to the gate, Lang and Wadrow shook their heads at Botha = “You are a fuckup.” He let them out, keeping his eyes on the pass he was writing for me, pretending to ignore all of us. There was little else he could do. It was a passing-period and no one was hitting anyone. No one was even cursing.

  “Forty’d be a lot of CASS’s to write,” said the Janitor. “A lotta testimony against us.” “A lotta hard evidence that you’ve lost control of your students and Brodsky should replace you.” “So let it be unwritten that it may remain undone.” “All that pep will be wasted on the already peppy while we sit in the Cage, lamenting our lack of pep.” “We need that pep.” “We need a rally to inspire it.”

  “Make-bee,” said Botha, waving the pass at me. “Go. To. The. Owfice.”

  Why? I said.

  “I already told you.”

  So tell me again.

  “Note your frand brought,” Botha said to me, “says you’re wanted in the owfice.”

  What’s a frand? I said.

  Botha chewed his face.

  “We don’t get to see enough serious high-fiving between basketballers, Mr. Botha.” “We don’t get to see enough Jennys stacked in pyramids.” “Or hear enough words get spelled out with clapping.” “The special way the words sometimes sound like swears but aren’t, even though they really are.” “Double-entendres.” “Homonyms.” “Spelled-out homonyms cleverly masking double-entendres.” “With clapping.”

  “Make-bee!” said Botha. “Go to the owfice!”

  “We don’t get to see enough Desormie in a tight suit, either.” “His love of cheerleading.” “His gameday tent of finest gabardine.” “And don’t forget about the music!” “You’re gonna make us miss the Boystar.”

  The air vibrated on my right: Mookus was crying.

  I flashed my palm at the Side of Damage.

  Some of them didn’t see.

  “We won’t get to be in his video now!” “Shucks! Aw shucks!” “And he’ll probably win a Grammy.” “Word on the street’s he’s next year’s favorite for best female vocal—”

  Hey! I said.

  The Cage went quiet.

  To Main Man I said, You’ll be fine.

  “Okay,” he said. He kept crying.

  “Go to the Owfice, Make-bee.”

  “You’ll be fine, Main Man,” said Vincie.

  “Go to the—” said Botha, cut off by the beginning-of-class tone.

  I decided to give him a chance to be decent. I got up from my carrel and went to the gate—I didn’t even do a three-count—and when I stepped into C-Hall, I said, Tell Main Man he can go to the pep rally.

  I said it quiet so that no one could hear, so Botha wouldn’t lose any face for acting decent, so being decent wouldn’t feel like a defeat.

  “No,” he said.

  As I approached the mouth of 2-Hall, spacing out on dead-end thoughts about who’d ratted me to Brodsky, Call-Me-Sandy turned the corner into C. She had to pull her fingers from her cardigan’s buttonholes to wave hello.

  “I’m sorry, Gurion,” she said.

  Why? I said.

  “You must have been waving at me forever.”

  You waved at me first, I said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Don’t be, I said.

  “I’m—I guess I’m just feeling a little jumpy,” she said. “Distracted. That false alarm. Rattled my bag of caramels, right? Or so you might say… because of how you put it when last we—”

  Sure, I said.

  “Right,” she said. “And now I tell myself I’m going for a drink of water, but in fact the destination’s arbitrary. I’m on a disguised amble. I tell myself, ‘Sandy, you’re taking a walk to get a drink of water,’ but the truth is I’m not even thirsty. It’s just the water fountain’s the first destination that came to mind.”

  Why can’t you just take a walk? I said.

  “Because that would be a blatant, undisguised amble and it would defeat it’s own purpose: I’d know I was taking a walk because I was jumpy, and so I’d be thinking about my jumpiness, which would only make me jumpier.”

  But you do know you’re taking a walk because you’re jumpy, I said. You just told me that.

  Her fingers slid back into her buttonholes. “It’s not kind, what you’re doing. Undermining my healing strategy.”

  I wasn’t trying to undermine your healing strategy, I said.

  “Well, that’s what you were doing.”

  There was nothing worth saying in response, so I made her high-five me, and then I made her high-five me again, and she laughed a syllable and I got away fast, thinking: Rat. Thinking: Deadkid. If Brodsky had seen me in the fight himself, I’d’ve been brought to the Office with the others.

  I took a left at Main Hall, which was mostly empty—just a couple or three late kids speedwalking. Jerry in his booth to pass-flash at. WE DAMAGE WE bombs were everywhere: scraped, Darkered, pencilled, lipsticked. Too many of them to count accurately while walking at a leisurely pace, too many for the Side of Damage to have written all of them. I wasn’t sure what to think of that. At first it seemed completely good. The bombs weren’t just enacting damage—which, dayenu—they were actually inciting it.

  But then I had to wonder what the taggers who weren’t on the Side of Damage believed their WE DAMAGE WEs signified. I had to wonder how many of them, if any, had even heard of the Side of Damage, and whether that mattered.

  If the taggers hadn’t heard of the Side of Damage, and enough of them got in the habit of bombing WE DAMAGE WE, then soon—in the way of the Indian swastika, say—the bomb could stop signifying the Side of Damage. It could end up signifying whatever those who planted it decided it signified.

  If the taggers had heard of the Side of Damage, and thought they knew what it was, and intended the tags to signify the Side of Damage, then that meant the taggers considered themselves members—or at the very least allies—of the Side of Damage. Which might or might not be good: it depended who the taggers were. If, for example, they were part of Momo and Beauregard’s Big Ending, that would be fine, but if they were Main Hall Shovers or basketballers or singers of the rhyme of my bus-stop, that might not be fine. It was hard to decide.

  Yes, a WE DAMAGE WE tagged by a Main Hall Shover would, for now at least, damage the Arrangement exactly as well as a WE DAMAGE WE tagged by anyone who was actually on the Side of Damage, but if Main Hall Shovers went around signifying the Side of Damage, others would come to think the Side of Damage was made up partially of Main Hall Shovers, which it wasn’t. No Main Hall Shover was one of us, and no Main Hall Shover would ever be one of us. If I let Main Hall Shovers join the Side of Damage, it wouldn’t be the Side of Damage anymore. We’d just be another part of the Arrangement.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t so bad if people who weren’t on our side—even, and maybe especially, our enemies—thought they were. At the rate the bombs were spreading, I’d have to decide soon.

  I passed a pink nail-polished *EMOTIONALIZE* under the instructions on the glass of a firehose case, and though I knew I didn’t write it, I wasn’t sure Benji hadn’t. He could have done it on his way from the Cage to see me in Nurse Clyde’s, just before we stopped being friends. Though the color of the nail-polish made the *EMOTIONALIZE* seem devotional, it could have been a Nakamookian joke for my benefit. He could have been feeling arch. Maybe he’d planned to tell me he’d written it only after I told him I’d seen it; or maybe he’d planned to never admit to it, like with his authorship of the “pee so pungent” saying. Then again, it might not have been a joke at all. Maybe he’d wanted to inspire Jennys to vandalism and figured it would seem more heartfelt if he spoke to them in gl
ossy pink.

  Although this pink *EMOTIONALIZE* would have marked a kind of victory for the Side of Damage if it had been written by a Jenny—and it probably had been—the thought of Nakamook being clever enough to urge Jennys on with pink nail polish was far more thrilling. But why should I have been thrilled at all about Nakamook’s cleverness if he was no longer my friend? I shouldn’t have been. And I definitely shouldn’t have been more thrilled about it than about a Jenny’s transformation into a vandal, yet still I was more thrilled, out of habit—the habit of admiring Nakamook. It was poison to think of him, and thinking it was poison didn’t make it any less poison.

  Rat, I thought. Deadkid. Think about that. Someone got Brodsky to call you to the Office. Someone was a rat. Someone was dead.

  Through the sound-resistant glass, I saw Brodsky was standing in front of Pinge’s desk. I entered the Office.

  “Gurion,” Miss Pinge said.

  “Gurion indeed.” Brodsky revolved and set his hand on my shoulder. “Gurion Maccabee,” he said. He was smiling.

  Then we were sitting across his desk from each other, the wingnut I’d given him centered on his blotter. It didn’t seem like I was in trouble, but I hadn’t forgotten Tuesday afternoon—the way he’d outgamed me—and so I stayed cautious.

  “Why do you like wingnuts?” Brodsky said.

  I said, They hold as well as hexnuts, but you don’t need a tool to fasten them; just your fingers.

  “Fasten them?” he said. “Or unfasten them?” he said. He winked for some reason. He said, “Either way.” Then he rested his pointers on the wingnut’s wings, pressed, spun it. “I believe that you are partially responsible for this sudden rash of vandalism,” he said. Just like that. “However, I know you aren’t entirely responsible—you couldn’t be. There are hundreds of instances by now, and a large portion of them occurred while you were in ISS yesterday. I’m not going to ask you who else was responsible because I know you won’t answer me.”

  You’re just expelling me, I said.

  “No,” he said. He said, “I don’t believe that’ll solve anything. Why must everything be so extreme with you, Gurion? You’re not in any trouble and I am not threatening you with any trouble. I want to have a conversation with you. Can we have a conversation?”

  I won’t tell on anybody, I said.

  “I won’t ask you to.”

  We can try to have a conversation then, I said.

  “You have a very powerful influence over some of your fellow students,” he said, “particularly the ones who are vandalizing our school, pulling fire alarms, getting into fights. Deny it to me all you want, I believe you know it’s true.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I want all this trouble to stop. I suspect that you want that as well. At least some of it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Those five boys who fought with Eliyahu and Shlomo told me that you tried to break up the fight. I am proud of you for doing that.”

  Be proud of Eliyahu, too, then, I said. I said, Revoke his ISS.

  “Eliyahu,” said Brodsky, “was not trying to break up that fight. He was trying to harm those five boys. They said something he objected to, something he wouldn’t repeat, and he tried to harm them—he told me that himself. The other two—Bryan Maholtz and Billy Baxter—they were the only ones who claimed to have been doing anything noble, but looking at the bruises on Eliyahu’s face, anyone could have seen they were lying. All eight of them will be in ISS tomorrow, and Shlomo Cohen as well, if he recovers enough to return to school.”

  I said, If you were Eliyahu, and you’d believed what he believed, you would have done the same thing he did. You would have had to.

  “I am glad you are a friend to Eliyahu,” said Brodsky. “He is in a very sensitive place right now. He will be for quite a while. And I urge you to continue to be a friend to him. I also urge you to consider the influence you have on him, to take into account that his mistakes, as those of so many others in the past few days, are at least partially being made to impress you. You have sway, Gurion. You have power that teachers and principals don’t have, power that teachers and principals can’t have. I want you to use that power to better ends. I believe you broke up that fight because you want the same thing. That’s why you’re not in trouble right now. I want to give you a clean slate. I want to offer you the opportunity to be good.”

  I am good, I said.

  “I want to offer you the opportunity to act like you are good.”

  You want me to make your job easier, I said.

  “When you put it that way, you make it sound conniving. If you do what I’m asking, my job will become easier, but that’s not why I’m asking you to do it. I want you to improve yourself and I want you to see that improving yourself will improve those around you. You will find it satisfying, Gurion. You have my word. And yes, I will find it satisfying too, but not because it makes my job easier. I took this job because I care about the world and I believe that the better children are educated, the better the world becomes. Children cannot be well-educated in an unsafe environment. I want you to help me make Aptakisic safer because I want the world to be better. Don’t you want a better world?”

  Get rid of the Cage, I said. I said, If you get rid of the Cage, a lot less kids will act like they spend their days in a cage.

  “That’s Jerusalem you’re asking for. The district requires we have a lockdown program.”

  So have a lockdown program, but don’t put anyone in it, I said.

  “That wouldn’t fly.”

  Fire Botha, I said. I said, Hire a monitor who isn’t a schmuck.

  “Mr. Botha can be a hard man to deal with, I know, but we’ve had worse in the past. I’ll tell you the truth: his job’s not a terribly desirable one. Those who want it… It takes a certain kind of personality.”

  I said, So you won’t do anything. I said, You want me to act different, but you won’t do anything different.

  “I am reaching out to you, Gurion. I’m not bargaining.”

  I said, Botha banned us from the pep rally, the whole Side—the whole Cage.

  Brodsky said, “Why?”

  It wasn’t to make the school safer for the benefit of better education, I said.

  “I can’t undermine his authority, Gurion. If he’s suspended your pep rally privileges… that’s within his power.”

  What about Scott Mookus?

  “What about him?”

  I said, He’s supposed to sing with Boystar at the pep rally.

  “And he will.”

  Won’t that undermine Botha’s authority?

  “Mr. Botha said Scott Mookus couldn’t go to the pep rally?” said Brodsky.

  Everyone, I said.

  He spun the wingnut a couple times. He wanted to let Main Man sing, but something was making him hesitate, and I realized it was exactly what he’d claimed. He really didn’t want to undermine Botha’s authority. He believed in Botha’s authority. Believed it was good that Botha had authority. As wrong and arranged as he was, Brodsky was trying to be ethical. The choice to override Botha and let Main Man sing was actually the easier choice, here; Brodsky was Botha’s boss and Botha was as much Brodsky’s sycophant as any of the other robots. Whatever Brodsky would do, Botha would not complain. The Boystar people, though—the parents and the Chaz and the shotframer; all of them but for Boystar himself… If Mookus wasn’t allowed to be in the video after all the preparations those sleazebombs had made, after all the money they’d already invested (“the best acoustics man in the business,” etc.), they would complain. Loudly. Yet Brodsky was willing to suffer them, if that was the ethical choice…

  Not that it impressed me so very much. It is not impressive when people try to do what they believe is right. It is only right. Yet I was a little surprised.

  Still, what Brodsky suspected was right wasn’t right. Main Man did not deserve the brunt of Botha’s collective punishment. He didn’t deserve anyone’s punishment. Anyon
e who punished him deserved punishment. The severest.

  One time I asked my father what he looked for in potential jurors during the selection process. He told me, “Ethics,” a much simpler answer than I had expected. I’d thought that he would’ve laid out a matrix: X-type juror for Y-type client in Z-type dispute, B-type juror for C-type client in D-type dispute. And so on. But he said, “Ethics,” and for a second I thought he was making a reference to that movie Miller’s Crossing that he loves, and I chuckled, and he told me, “Ethical people—even those whose systems of ethics may appear hideous—can, by their very nature, be reasoned with. And I, boychical, am a very, very reasonable man.” And then he chuckled. I still don’t know what that chuckle was about. Maybe he’d just caught himself being cocky, or maybe he hadn’t meant what he’d said at all and thought it was funny that I seemed to believe him. Maybe he really did want me to believe the world was a place where there were enough ethical men to fill juryboxes, but knew I doubted it. It was a back-of-the-throat, possibly arch, likely uncomfortable, nearly atypical Father-type chuckle, but whatever it indicated, the idea that ethical people were inherently reasonable seemed like it made sense.

  And so to Brodsky I said, I bet Maholtz and the Co-Captain and Shlomo get to go to the pep rally, even though they’ve got ISS.

  “Everyone in ISS tomorrow will go to the pep rally,” said Brodsky, “but that decision belongs to me, not Mr. Botha—I’m the one who gave them their ISS’s.”

  He was certainly using reason.

  Fair enough, I said, but where are Maholtz and the Co-Captain gonna sit? Are they gonna sit with Eliyahu and the other five?

  “I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose, though, that they’ll sit with their teammates.”

  They’ll get special treatment, I said.

  “Well—”

  Not because they deserve it, though, I said, but because the school deserves it, right? The school deserves to have a look at every one of their basketballers at the pep rally. The school deserves to have a proper pep rally. Especially after all the panic from that false alarm. The school needs to heal.

  “Something like that,” he said, leaning over his desk a little = “Go on.”