The Instructions by Adam Levin
On the stoop the night was quiet.
And in the quiet on the stoop they did a box-step.
And while they box-stepped in the night, they told stories.
In fifty-three weeks and a day they would marry.
5
THE ARRANGEMENT
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Lunch–Last Period
D
uring Lunch-Recess, I sat at the teacher cluster with My Main Man Scott Mookus, Benji Nakamook, Leevon Ray, and Jelly Rothstein. Vincie Portite would have normally been there too, but he had a long-time secret crush on a girl in normal classes—he wouldn’t tell us who—and once or twice a week he’d leave the Cage for Lunch-Recess in order to look at her. No one who was there with me that day had to be except for Jelly. She was on two weeks cafeteria- and recess-suspension for telling the hot-lunch ladies there was a corn on her wiener and it hurt. After she said it, her milk carton dumped out on Angie Destra’s shoes and Angie cried onto the sneezeguard over the pudding. People started calling her “There’sNoUse Angie Destra,” but the name didn’t last because it took too much time to say it, and so it got shortened to “NoUse Angie” and “There’sNo Angie,” which became T.N.A., and that’s the name that stuck because it sounds like T’n’A, and Angie Destra didn’t have any. Sometimes milk just falls off the tray, and that kind of milk is spilled milk, not poured milk. Spilled milk’s the kind that got on Angie Destra, but people believed Jelly poured milk on Angie, and Jelly wanted for them to persist in that belief since she didn’t like to bite people, and wasn’t getting uglier—not even a little. Jelly Rothstein was a Sephardic beauty in the loudest, sharpest, meanest kind of way. She was dark-eyed and black-haired and wholly unadorned, but light found a way to reflect off her whitely, giving the impression she wore a diamond nosestud and glittery makeup, that silvery bangles clashed and clanged on her wrists, that silvery ear-hoops bounced next to her neck. Her shape was narrow, but she wasn’t skinny so much as she was taut—even in gym clothes, her body called out—and her skin was the brown of lead whitegirls in movies that take place at sleepaway camps in Wisconsin. Like her older sister Ruth, she was one of the sexiest girls at Aptakisic, and everyone knew it, though few would admit it because, unlike Ruth, most girls despised her, the Jennys and Ashleys especially. Why they despised her is hard to explain—it started with her face. It was not a cheery face. Jelly had a way of squinting at the person she was talking to, a way of sucking her teeth, of cocking her chin and twisting her lips, and whereas to me these actions of her face revealed the lithe intelligence at labor behind it, to some—to many—they looked like contempt. This isn’t to say she didn’t harbor contempt for most kids at school—she certainly did—but rather that even toward those she was friends with—me, for example—she made the same faces, and if I had to guess, she’d always made those faces, and by making those faces, she had, unknowingly, alienated herself, which eventually caused her to hold in real contempt the kids from whom she was alienated. After all, she must have thought, what had she ever done to deserve their mistreatment? whenever they spoke, she had paid attention, and she’d even thought hard about what they were saying.
What all of this meant was that guys at Aptakisic who weren’t in the Cage were not supposed to like Jelly, and so those who were drawn to her—most guys were—would be cruel from a distance, shouting out “bitch” or “prude” or “slut,” or, if they found themselves inside her orbit, would shove or molest her with bookrockets, ass-grabs, titfalls, or pinchings. That’s why she’d bite when people got close, especially guys. She’d found that when she hit or choked or kicked, it led to more touching as often as not, but biting through skin, drawing blood with her teeth—that never failed to back off her aggressors. She’d bitten enough people that it was mostly automatic; even her friends had to approach her pretty slowly. Yet she didn’t like to do it—she wasn’t crazy—and, as already stated, she wasn’t getting uglier; that’s why she wanted people to believe that she’d poured that milk. She figured they’d try harder not to get too close to her, and then she wouldn’t need to bite them as often.
But letting people believe that her spilling was a pouring was a bad idea, the oldest kind of bad idea in the world.
On the sixth day of Creation, right after Hashem made Adam from earth, He told him that if he ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, he would surely die. But later that day, when Hashem made Eve, He didn’t teach her the law; He told Adam to teach her.
According to mishnah, Adam told her, “If you eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, you will surely die. Even touching the tree will kill you.”
That same afternoon, Eve was standing by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, and the serpent, who was still an unscaly biped, came up to her, saying, “Why don’t you eat a fruit from this healthy-looking tree?” And Eve said, “If I eat from it, I’ll surely die.” The serpent said, “No. You’ll become like God.” And Eve said, “My husband told me what God told him. He told me that even if I touch it, I’ll die.” The serpent knew the Law, and so knew that wasn’t accurate, what Adam had told Eve about touching the tree. So the serpent plucked a fruit from the tree and held it out to her. He said, “I touched it. I’m not dead.” Eve said, “The Law is different for serpents.”
And the serpent shoved Eve and she fell on the tree. “See?” said the serpent. “You’re still alive.”
Then the serpent waved the fruit in the face of Eve.
“You’ll become like God,” the serpent said.
And Eve ate the fruit and she wasn’t dead.
She brought the fruit to Adam and Adam ate it. Not because Eve told him it was a regular fruit, though—she loved him and so wouldn’t lie to him. She told him the fruit was forbidden fruit and Adam ate the fruit anyway because he’d confused himself when he’d twisted the words of God to his wife. He’d confused himself into believing that words from God were the same as words from man. God had told Adam one thing, Adam changed it to another thing, and then Adam forgot what the original thing was; he forgot that the original thing was different from what he’d turned it into. So while Eve was pushing the bitten fruit in Adam’s face, Adam thought: Eve is not dead, I’ll become like God.
But just as God hadn’t told Adam that it was against the Law to touch the tree, He hadn’t said the fruit of the tree was fast-acting poison either. He’d said, “If you eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, you will surely die.” “You will surely die.” ≠ “You will instantly die.” Adam, however, had concluded it did, and since Eve hadn’t died instantly after eating the fruit, Adam assumed that God had either lied to him or been incorrect.
The point of the mishna is that it’s even worse to twist the wording of a Law than it is to break that Law, even if you twist it to protect someone you are in love with. If you twist the wording once, it becomes hard to stop twisting it. It’s because Adam twisted it that people die. And that’s why it’s banced to call Eve a temptress. Eve was reasonable, and when it came to Jelly calling spilling pouring, the problem was that she would not always have milk available to pour, and even if she happened to have milk to pour, she probably wouldn’t have it in her to pour it; that’s not the way she was. She’d never once poured milk on anyone; she’d only ever spilled it.
So even if people didn’t go near Jelly for a while because they were afraid of getting milk poured on them, all it would take was one person to accidentally get close to Jelly and not get milk poured on them. After that happened, she would have to bite people a lot more often than she would have had to bite them before people ever thought she was a milk-pourer, and I explained that to her the day after the incident with Angie Destra. I told Jelly that letting people believe she was a milk-pourer was like saying that touching the tree was suicide, since even after the next time she bit somebody, people who weren’t there to see the biting would think, “It was said of her that she poured milk on shoes and it was not true that she poured milk on shoes. Now i
Israelite, I’d said.
“I’ve been a bad Israelite?”
No. Of course not. Where’d you get that? You didn’t lie. I’m just saying that—
“So what can I do, then? What should I do? ‘There’s no killing lies,’ right? It’s too late to fix it. What can I do, Gurion?”
Nothing. You’re right. It’s too late to fix it. Don’t get upset. You’re not a bad Israelite. You’re good. You’re great. I think you’re great. So does everyone else, I said.
“Right. Sure. Everyone. Great.”
Jelly had a soft thermal lunchbox with a shoulder strap. Inside it was lettuce in a tupperware cube, clingwrapped croutons, ziplocked chicken strips, oil-based dressing in a babyfood jar. Her lunch preparations were intricate as usual. She unwrapped the croutons, put some in her hand, and made a loose fist. Then she shook her fist around just above the salad and the croutons came out of the bottom fist-hole a couple at a time for a sprinkling effect. Once she was finished spreading all the croutons, she opened the chicken baggie and laid out the strips on the salad in a hexagon. Then she uncapped the babyfood jar and tipped it so a thin line of dressing came out. She guided the line over the salad so that each part of the salad got the same amount of dressing on it.
Nakamook told her, “You pay so much attention.”
Jelly screwed the cap back onto the jar. She said, “I think I will be a chef.” She had a real fork, a full-sized metal one, and she stabbed it into a wad of lettuce.
I never wanted to bring lunch-things to school that I would have to bring back home. That was why I didn’t carry a lunchbox. Plus you couldn’t pop a lunchbox. In my brown paper bag was a peanut-butter sandwich on raisin-bread toast. It was wrapped in aluminum foil instead of a baggy because toast got damp in a baggy and I liked it to crunch. I also had baby carrots and cheesepuffs and a box of BerryBerryGood–flavored FruitoDrinko.
Nakamook didn’t have any lunch. I didn’t ask him why because I knew he’d say his mom forgot to pack it for him again and also forgot to give him hotlunch money. I handed him half my sandwich and carrots, but it didn’t make me any less sad until I got angry that I felt sad because I should have just felt angry because Nakamook’s mom hadn’t forgotten to do anything: she was punishing him.
Starvation was a cruel punishment to inflict on any son, but to inflict starvation on Benji Nakamook was not only cruel—it was snakey. If his mom knew him at all, she knew her cruelty would lead him to lie; that he would, out of loyalty to her, tell lies to keep her cruelty a secret. If she knew him at all, she knew Benji kept his secrets tighter than anyone. That was the Nakamookian way. It was a tragically ironic way. His secrets had made him into a person who was willing to hurt anyone and anything he was not close with that got in his path or in the path of the people he was close with, but he could not get too close to the people he was close with, because to get any closer would mean telling his secrets, and Benji was scared his secrets would hurt the people who he was close with, so he’d hurt himself by keeping the secrets, and that was a secret, too. That is how my mom explained it to me after we all had dinner together. Right after Benji told her he’d avenge any offense against my person, my mom said that she liked how he ate everything on his plate like he’d never been fed a hot dinner before, and Benji stopped talking and looked like he would cry.
My mom was pretty much always right about people, and yet, for some reason, I never believed her. At least not at first. What secrets? I’d said. He doesn’t have secrets. You’re being dramatic.
But then, a couple weeks after he’d come over for dinner (on the morning of my fourth Tuesday at Aptakisic Junior High, exactly five weeks before I fell in love with June), it came clear that Benji did have secrets. This was when he told me not to fight Bam Slokum, and I gave him my word that I wouldn’t. He was Darkering SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY on a wall while I stood watch, and I asked him if all such bombs were his—I’d seen more than a handful of SLOKUM DIES FRIDAYs throughout the school—and he told me they were, and in the same breath added, “Bam’s my arch-enemy. I don’t want you fighting him.” So I asked him why he wouldn’t want me to fight his arch-enemy, and this is what he told me: “Regarding vengeance and arch-enemies, one must not only be timely but prideful, and pride exacts propriety.”
Benji didn’t usually talk so kenobi. Whenever he did, I’d just back off. He had read a lot of Shakespeare and Homer and Euripides, and I didn’t understand those guys’ justice enough to know if he’d actually mastered it or not, so getting Halakhic with Nakamook about things like vengeance was rarely fruitful. It was usually better just to listen to him—he was, after all, the one who first taught me about snat and face—and I’d found that what he said was usually right, even if it didn’t seem to make sense sometimes. More important than any of that, though, was Benji was my best friend. By then I’d even given him a copy of Ulpan. It is true that the copy was specially doctored—I’d cut out all the Israelite and Adonai parts, changed the title to Instructions, and added a directive to burn the document as soon as he was through with it—but still he was the only non-Israelite kid who I’d ever given a copy to. If my best friend didn’t want to tell me his own backstory—whether because parts of it caused him pain, or just because he didn’t know how to tell it yet—I could understand that, and I didn’t want to attempt to pull it from him. Especially not if I could hear it from someone else.
I decided to ask Vincie Portite about it.
We were dressing in the locker-room, and Nakamook was showering—we’d raced from the gym; Vincie had tripped him; Benji was the last kid to get through the door—but Vincie, nonetheless, had whispered, “Keep it fucken down. I’ll call you tonight and tell you, okay?”
And he’d called me that night and told me:
Two years earlier, when Bam was in the sixth grade, Nakamook—in fifth—had been his best friend. Bam wasn’t yet superhero-shaped back then, but his cousin Geoff Claymore, an eighth-grader and legendary shvontz, was gigantic. Claymore took steroids and sometimes kids’ lunch money. He’d vow silence to shy girls at parties in darkened basements, then leave hatermarks on their necks and spread sex stories about them. He subjected Bam Slokum to noogies and bookrockets and everyone in sight had to laugh, including Bam, who, if he didn’t, would find himself arm-locked or thrown.
Either despite or because of the humiliations Claymore inflicted on him, Slokum worshipped his cousin, hearing any insult to Claymore as an insult to himself. So Nakamook, who hated Claymore, no little bit on behalf of Bam, coiled his anger and kept his mouth shut about it—not because he was scared of Claymore, but because he was loyal to Slokum. A few times, Nakamook even found himself defending Claymore’s name by proxy: Someone in earshot of Bam would say something about Claymore’s shvontziness, Bam would start a fight, start losing the fight, and Nakamook would help him, siding against the guy who shared his hatred.
One day during the lunch-switch, though, when the fifth- and sixth-graders were going to the cafeteria from indoor recess in the gym, and the seventh- and eighth-graders were going to indoor recess from lunch in the cafeteria, Nakamook and Bam got ahead of everyone to race topspeed down B-Hall. Halfway through the race, Claymore—heading up the crowd that was coming from the opposite direction—tripped Bam
This went well beyond pink-bellies, past petty arm-bars; Bam lay prone, unconscious on the linoleum, blood in his hair oozing down along his cheek, and Benji, who knelt beside him, exploded. He rose and spun and swung on Claymore. Claymore ducked the punch and took half a step back, as if in retreat, but instead he went forward and dropped Benji hard with a kick to the stomach, then pinned him at the elbows and called his mom a wino and slapped him for a while as half the school watched.
Nakamook set fire to Claymore’s house that night. The Claymores were all out to dinner, but in court they claimed that Geoff’s bedroom light had been left on to scare burglars away. If what they said was true, then Benji was lucky the house burnt to the ground. Had the lightswitches withstood the fire, he might have been convicted of attempted murder as well as arson.
I thought Benji probably did try to murder Claymore, but I didn’t know for sure since the story came from Vincie—which isn’t to say that Vincie was a liar, just that he definitely wanted to believe that Nakamook had tried to do murder. Whatever he tried or didn’t try to do, Benji got sentenced to six months in juvie.
In juvie, his arms—the first things you noticed when you met him—grew long. Comicbook-villain long. But not all thick and knuckle-draggy-looking. Apart from the arms, Nakamook had a build like Tommy Hearns, which kept any thoughts of cavemen far away. Plus, the arms seemed to be set a little bit higher and more forward on his shoulders than most people’s arms. If he’d been an actual comicbook villain, he’d have definitely been called the Mantis, and if I was a Thai boxer and I saw a kid endowed with guns like Nakamook’s—a kid who could reach nearly as far with an elbow as others his height only could with a fist—I’d teach him to Thai box in a second, just for the potential advancement of the art. Which might be why the guy who taught Benji to Thai box in juvie did so.