The Instructions

  I said, The other day you said you didn’t like Nakamook, though. You said you didn’t like him, and that you respected him.

  “The respect line was a flourish I picked up from the movies—there was an audience see, a bus full of everykid no-ones,” Bam said. “An occasional flourish is pleasing to an audience. You know that as well as anyone. As for liking or not liking Nakamook, I don’t like him. And I don’t like him because no one likes him. He’s a fucken bully. You and Portite and Leevon Ray and then Scott Mookus—you’re the only ones around who like him, and one of you is mentally retarded, another fakes muteness, the third one’s a less effective bully himself, and then there’s you with all your weird notions about snat and face and hypocrisy, and you’re standing here, a deadly weapon in your hand, having a relatively civilized conversation with your best friend’s—what’s his favorite term now?”

  Now I was laughing. Something about Bam’s rhythm. I hated that I was laughing, and how I wanted to get him to laugh in return. And though Nakamook wasn’t my friend anymore, I hated even worse that I was laughing at his expense.

  Arch-enemy, I said.

  “Like Lex Luthor,” said Bam. “The Joker. Fucken Magneto. It used to be ‘nemesis.’ So dramatic, that guy.”

  And after that bit of collusion I could no longer think of myself as a kid at a freakshow. I was pathetic without any prefix, feeding Bam cues to punchlines like a pagan offering tribute, a Phoenecian peasant before a dog-headed oracle.

  I said, Still, though, you’re wrong about who likes him. I said, Girls go crazy for Benji.

  Bam heard in my voice what I couldn’t quite hide with my words, despite how oblique to the request I’d arranged them: I was asking to be set straight.

  He said, “Girls go crazy for what’s dangerous, kid, at least most of them do, so girls are irrelevant here because as long as I’m more dangerous they prefer me, the girls. And apart from them, no one likes him. And why they don’t like him ain’t just cause he’s a bully, but cause he’s a psychopath. He comes to school and just fucks with anyone who’s near him. You’ve seen it happen. Everyone’s seen it happen. You heard the stories about my cousin Geoff and his house burning down, I’m sure—Geoff was also a bully. The difference between Geoff and Nakamook is Geoff was never a psychopath. He’s always been predictable. You knew what you had to do to stay on his good side. You just had to treat him like he was the dominant force in the room. If you didn’t treat him that way, then he’d hurt you. But otherwise you’d be just fine. I’m not saying everyone liked him either—a lot of people didn’t, but enough did. Nakamook alienates himself more than Geoff ever did because ever since he came back from juvie, being acknowledged as dominant and reaping the benefits of that acknowledgment—that ain’t been enough for him. He wants to actually dominate. Like in the moment. And at all moments. You can’t like a guy like that. You can like a guy like me, though. I’ve never acted like either of those two. People fear me, but I just keep the peace, so they like me, too. I don’t ask anyone to kiss my ass—just so long as they don’t fuck with me, see. So Bam walks quiet with his big stick, they think. He only fights kids we don’t like, they think. Anyone he fights must be unlikable, they think. And so to remain on Nakamook’s bad side makes me likable. He does me a favor, writing that SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY shit everywhere. Everyone knows it’s him, and it throws us into mutual relief. Look how likable is Bam when contrasted with that bully. Look how decent. That’s what they think. An elegant system, mine. I do what I want, everyone thinks I’m right, and I’m ascribed the best of intentions, the most noble motivations. You should adopt this system. You’re a very sharp kid and you’re rapidly becoming beloved. That damage nonsense everyone’s writing now. The bitch-making of my less amicable teammates. I’ve been hearing about you all day. You and Boystar. You should take a lesson from him. Primpy little poodle that he is, he knows what he’s got and who he’s got and where he stands, and he uses it all to maximum effect. And you’re smarter than that kid. It’s a shame to waste a brain like yours on scruples. I hope you’ll stop. It’s only confusing for you. I ask you to ask yourself: ‘Why like Bam despite my screwball loyalties when I can so easily ditch my screwball loyalties and just plain like Bam?’”

  Geoff Claymore’s Cherokee entered the lot and parked in a spot, honked. Without revolving to face the Jeep, Slokum signalled to his cousin with his palm = “When I’m ready.”

  “Now I have to get going,” he said to me. “There’s a girl, you know, who I really like to kiss on the neck. I won’t tell you who because that’s unseemly, but she makes these pretty sounds, this girl, and that’s what I need to hear right now, some pretty girlsounds to preserve me for the game tomorrow. It’s Desormie’s mistake not having practice the day before a game. The energy he thinks it saves us just gets spent on girls. Not that I’m complaining. So now I’m gonna walk away from you without offering my hand because you still have to think about some things before you can make peace with the fact that you and I have no quarrel. I’ll give you a little help, too, a little elder-brotherly push in the right direction. Here it is: It’s not your face that holds your snat back, but your snat that holds your face together. And your snat’s not what you think it is, either—it’s got nothing to do with truth and it’s got nothing to do with loyalty and it’s got nothing to do with love or toughness or any kind of interior nonsense. It’s just public opinion. You’re only what they say you are, and if you’re only what they say you are the only thing you gotta do is make sure they’re saying what you want them to. Look at Holden Caulfield—you don’t wanna wind up like him, do you? I don’t want you to. I like you. It preserves me. At least for now. So as-salamu alaykum, shalom, and om,” Bam said. And then he was walking away.

  I almost shouted after him: Wait! You’re right! We have no quarrel! We can shake hands.

  But guys like Bam—guys of the kind Adonai once made kings—they rule with their presence. With each step Bam took toward the yellow pickup, the spell he’d cast weakened. My urge to shout about alliances got flatter and flatter under the weight of something shakey and hideous I couldn’t name yet.

  I stayed quiet.

  With Bam out of the way, I could see the crowd gathering by the bus circle. So many of them wanted to be my friend now. Whatever it meant to them, they believed they were on the Side of Damage. Claymore, sunglasses on his forehead, shot me with his index finger and winked. And June, who was in love with me, slid through the crowd, bearing our books. In a couple minutes, I’d be making out with her. But even that was little consolation.

  It was only after they’d driven away, after Bam had reached over Claymore’s gearbox to beep the horn friendly—two times, then four—and after the pickup’s engine had gunned and its tires had screeched their long, cheesy peel-out—only after they were gone was I able to name it, the hideous thing that was making me shake: I had been arranged. Not with any Cage or Step System, though. Not by any sadistic and claw-handed monitor, nor by any pervy, tight-crotched gym teacher. Not by any closet racist headmaster, pogromfaced lowlife, or well-read vandal, let alone some well-meaning, sad sack principal. I’d been arranged, scholars, by Barnum “Bam” Slokum, whose face was unreadable; a pre-smiling king who pandered peace to the weak to keep them from bringing any manner of damage that might get them stronger, that might get them strong; a practical king who dealt power to the strong to keep them from breaching his peace; Barnum “Bam” Slokum, who claimed we were similar, and then convinced me—if only for a minute, still a minute too long—that I was actually glad about that.

  They rule with their presence, these king-types, I thought. They dissolve, with their immediacy, all of your enmity. The Law, like the rest, like everything else, gets blotted out white by their glowing charm. You want, when they’re near, to follow their rules, to please them, be like them; you want to be like them in order to please them. That’s how you get arranged. It’s how you go robot.

  I don’t know what it was that got me
more explosive: that I failed to be exceptional when faced with such charm, or that I didn’t possess that charm myself.

  One thing I did know, a thing I should have already known, a thing that I had, in fact, already known, until I had somehow let myself forget: To damage kings true, you had to strike from out of arm’s reach.

  I stepped out from behind the corner of the building, pulling my hoodstrings, and someone said, “Gurion.”

  The voice came out of Blake Acer, Shover president, who stood over by the dumpsters, ichthys near his heart, his face telling stories of proudly attended semi-annual dental appointments, baggie-gloved strolls beside a golden retriever, dipped cones of soft-serve after Little League victories.

  “Gurion,” he said. It was the first time he’d ever spoken my name to me. It was the first time any Main Hall Shover had spoken my name to me. “Check this out,” he said.

  He was scratching WE DAMAGE WE on a dumpster with a rock. I was beside him by the time he finished. He ta-da’d at the bomb with one hand and bright teeth. The rock in his other hand was fist-sized.

  Do not try to be us, I told him.

  “What?”

  I said, I’d hold onto that rock if I were you.

  He dropped it.

  I kicked him in the stomach. He showed me the top of his head and I turned him, pushed his face against the dumpster, raked it back and forth across the jagged letters until I felt human.

  Tell your friends, I said.

  The field was all empty. June should have been there. I knelt in the valley between the two hills and scraped my hands clean against stiff blades of grass, watched red globs of Acer dry brown on the tips. She said that she’d be there. Why did she test me? Along with perfect justice and the end of death, being near her was the simplest thing I’d ever wanted. Why did she have to act so complicated? Or maybe she’d only acted impatient. Maybe she’d shown, and then taken off. Maybe I’d taken too long to arrive. But that was the difference between us, I thought. That was the difference between me and everyone. It’s not that I wasn’t impatient—I was. I had as little patience as anyone else. I’d tap my foot at the slightest inconvenience. I’d claw at my clothes, suck air and flare nostrils, attack all manner of inanimate objects, but one thing I’d never do was ditch you. That was the difference. I’d show up and wait for however long it took you. If I told you I’d meet you, I’d meet you; I’d wait. I’d wait til I saw that I’d waited too long, and then I’d wait more; I’d wait for as long as it had taken me to see that I’d waited too long, I’d double it up, telling myself it was best to be patient, that if I wasn’t patient, I’d worry later on that you’d shown once I’d gone, that you’d think that I’d ditched you, and I’d think about patience and think about waiting, and how it always seemed like I was always waiting, and how it always seemed like other people weren’t, and how it probably seemed the same way to those others, that they were always waiting and other people weren’t, and I’d see it was true, that it seemed the same to everyone, and because it was true, a universal human truth, that everyone always thinks himself impatient and everyone thus tries to act more patient while telling themselves they’re always waiting for others who never seem to have to wait, I’d think that the thought should provide me some comfort, but the thought would never provide me comfort, and the failure of the thought to provide me any comfort would make my lack of comfort that much more salient, and I’d end up wishing I wasn’t so much like everyone, wishing that I wasn’t so much like anyone, particularly you, the person I was waiting for, which meant I didn’t like you, for how could I really be said to like you if my foremost wish, at least right then, was to be less like you, and why should I wait for someone I didn’t like? Why should I wait for you? I shouldn’t. I’d leave. I didn’t even really like you, and so I would leave. But I didn’t leave. I stayed where I was. I knelt in the valley of the two-hill field, a few yards away from where last I’d been left—by the Side, by Benji, by Benji, by Benji—in a spot where the scholars who’d ditched me that morning would’ve stood had they shown, and I waited for June because she was June and what was the point if June didn’t come through? What was the point of caring about anything? What was anything’s point if you cared about nothing? Was that even possible, to care about nothing? And why so dramatic? I thought. Why so desperate? Why so whiney? Why so all-or-nothing? Why so meow-or-meowmeow? Why be such a baby? Because you’re in love? That’s exactly the reason you shouldn’t weak out, you whiney, meowing baby, get angry or something, get any way other than—

  All at once I was getting tackled sideways, kissing, wrestling a little. June did things to my neck with her mouth that felt so different from any feeling I’d ever had in my neck I panicked my deepest nerves were exposed, that she’d opened my flesh so gently I hadn’t noticed and now the wind was going into my throat, and pints of blood, warm as summer, were flowing out of me and Adonai was merciful—not just kind enough to numb my pain as I expired, but to mask it with the most gushing rushes of pleasure, as if, in the last seconds of my life, the thing He most wanted was to secure my high opinion of Him—and I thrust my whole torso away from her and saw no blood. How could I have been upset? How could I be upset about what either of them put me through if it lead to this?

  “You taste like cig—” June said, and I did to her what she’d been doing to me, and soon it made her make sounds like I was killing her, which panicked me again, and I stopped for a second to look, and I saw she wasn’t bleeding any more than I’d been.

  The way I understood it, now: she wanted me to withhold a little. That’s why she kept doing it to me, making me wait, making me chase her, calling the gift of my hoodie a theft. So I decided I wouldn’t kiss her neck again until she opened her eyes. But then when she opened her eyes, she saw something.

  “Hello, deadly weapon,” she whispered.

  That June, having seen what at first I thought to be my pennygun—fallen, I imagined, from the spy pocket of my IDF jacket, which she had layered between my stolen hoodie and her coat—would know, by sight, that it was a weapon… surprised me. But something else was off, too.

  You’ve seen one before? I said.

  “I invented it.”

  I invented it, I told her.

  “Then how did I get it?”

  You got it from inside my jacket, I said.

  She reached into my spy-pocket and took out another pennygun: mine. I knew it was mine because the firing pouch was a black balloon. Rather, I realized the one on the ground beside us wasn’t mine, because its firing pouch was an orange balloon.

  “You ripped me off,” she said.

  You ripped me off, I said.

  She said, “When did you invent it?”

  Last spring, I said.

  “So did I,” June said. “Why did you invent it?”

  To protect Israelites, I said.

  “I invented mine for extra credit,” she said. “I had Mr. Klapper for Social Studies and I wasn’t doing that well because all his tests were fill-in-the-blanks that you had to memorize all these dates and locations for, and I’m much better at essays. Everyone thinks Klapper’s crazy because he makes uncomfortable-looking neck movements and says ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ a lot, but he also looks like Mark Twain and I told him so, and he took it like a compliment, so I always liked him, and near the end of the semester I told him his tests were too hard, and that he should give us essay tests, and he said he thought essay tests in junior high school were overrated and that they undermined something—what was it? He said that, ‘Owing to their emphasis on rhetorical skills, essay tests undermine the importance of scholarly exactitude in the arena of historical facthood, and thereby serve to strengthen the reliance of our youth on their ability to sell hopeful-sounding horsepucky like “the pen is mightier than the sword,” an assertion that will keep down and dumb the lot of you as you age,’ and I said, ‘But the pen is mightier than the sword, Mr. Klapper,’ and he told me that he’d forget all my grades so far and give me
an A for the class if I could show him evidence that the pen was mightier than the sword. So I invented the pengun and got an A.”

  The pennygun, I said.

  “The pengun,” said June. If you don’t believe me, ask Vincie Portite. I used Vincie’s pens to demonstrate—not the whole pens, but the nibs. He has all those fountain pens.”

  I use pennies, I said. They’re cheaper, I said.

  “You can’t kill with a penny,” June said.

  I said, You can debilitate with a penny, and then kill the enemy you debilitated with your hands.

  “But a penny isn’t mightier than a sword if you can’t kill anyone with it,” June said. “A pen is mightier, though, if it’s a fountain pen, or the nib of one, and you project it into that neck artery, the one you were just kissing on—the carotid artery. If you project a nib into the carotid, you can kill a swordsman who can’t reach you because you fired from a distance greater than his arm plus his sword. And don’t try to argue with me by saying that the swordsman can use his sword as a projectile because even if he can, its accuracy and range don’t match the pengun’s. Not to mention its speed. Which is why Mr. Klapper gave me an A.”

  I—, I said.

  “And I’ll bet if you’re close enough,” June said, “you can shoot the nib into his eyeball—the swordsman’s eyeball—and it might go deep enough to enter his frontal lobe and kill him that way, or at least cause braindeath. It would be hard to get that close, though, and take aim, I think, if the man still had his sword. So in that situation, maybe the pen is only as mighty as the sword. I got an A, though. You can ask Mr. Klapper.”