The Instructions by Adam Levin
I said, Wait. I said, Stand American-style.
He dropped his fists to chin-level.
I waited a couple seconds, then I said, Flinch!
His right fist opened, revolved, and covered his eye.
“Fuck!” Vincie shouted, and his hand repeated itself.
“Vincie!” said Marnie.
“Marnie!” said Vincie.
“Okay!” Marnie said.
“Okay, Marnie!” said Vincie.
The hand had repeated itself four more times. Then the sky got white outside the window and thunder struck and the hand repeated itself.
I said, You’re not cured, but you can fight Thai-style no problem.
Vincie slumped when he sat. He said, “I’m suck at Thai-style. Benji throws his elbow at my chin and lands it every time. I can’t see to side-step. Also when he does the knee-to-kidney thing, too—and it hurts.”
I said, But that’s Benji, so it doesn’t matter.
Some bandkids got on the bus and I waved hello to them. They sat down fast, clanking instrument cases.
“Why do you wave to them?” said Vincie. “They never wave back. They’re scared of you.”
I said, But they shouldn’t be scared of me, and I’ve always waved to them, since before I knew they were scared of me. If I stop waving to them now, they’ll get even more scared of me because they’ll wonder, “Why doesn’t Gurion wave anymore?”
Vincie said, “Maybe I should wave to them, then.”
I said, But they’re scared of you, too, and you never wave to them. I said, If you wave to them now, it’ll be like if I stopped waving to them.
He said, “That’s what I’m saying. You stop waving and I’ll start—it’ll be funny.”
We aren’t Shovers, I said.
“You don’t have to be a Shover to enjoy a scared bandkid.” He held his hands above his head and told me, “Watch this.” Then he yelled to the bandkids, “Hello! Hello!”
They ducked their heads.
“Sorry!” said one of them.
“We’re sorry!” said another one.
Vincie said to me, “I think that’s pretty funny.”
It was pretty funny, but laughing felt cruel. We weren’t Shovers.
We aren’t Shovers, I said to Vincie.
Don’t worry about Vincie! I said to the bandkids. He isn’t a Shover! Neither am I!
“We’re really really sorry!” they said, all of them still ducking.
“Really!” they said.
“Sorry!” they said.
And I stopped feeling cruel because why did they keep apologizing? Maybe they did something to me that I didn’t know about and they were scared that I found out about it, but probably they did nothing to me and so their apology was a kind of lie. And I’d told them not to worry—but it was like they couldn’t hear the words I said, just my voice that scared them.
Why are you apologizing? I said.
“We’re sorry!” they said. “Please.”
Please what? I said.
“We didn’t mean to offend you.”
I said, How did you offend me?
“We don’t know.”
So what good’s apologizing? I said.
“We’re sorry.”
Soon more bandkids got on the bus, and then some Indians in their school-colored windbreakers: Maholtz, Shlomo Cohen, and Bam Slokum himself. They went to the seats in back. Marnie drove us out of there and I cracked my window to smell the storm. The plastic latches you shove into the frame were tight and my thumb-flesh got dented. I shook out my hands like thermometers, like the flesh-dents were mercury.
Vincie said, “That makes you look gay. Why’s Slokum on our bus? He’s not supposed to be on our bus.”
I said, Why don’t you ask him?
Vincie made the noise “Tch” = You trickle my snat, friend.
I let it go. It was mean to challenge Vincie about Slokum, but I didn’t like it when people used gay like a swear. There was a gay kid who used to go to Schechter with me who I won’t name because it’s a secret. He was in eighth grade when he told me, and I was seven. I was the first one he told. We were close and stayed that way until after I delivered Ulpan and his parents banned me from talking to him. I wished he wasn’t gay because it made him sad to be gay, and it would’ve made his parents sad if they knew, so he had to hide it, and Adonai didn’t like it either, there was really no getting around that—I tried hard to find a way the day this friend of mine told me, because that’s what he’d wanted, that’s why he’d told me; he wanted me to tell him that it was okay. But it’s clear Adonai doesn’t want Israelite guys to be gay. It’s exactly as clear as His not wanting us to use condoms, get blowjobs, play with ourselves, tell lies, speak ill of others, mix linen with wool, mix dairy with flesh, eat pork, eat shellfish, or shave, I’d explained, and so my friend was cheered after all—but when someone said gay like an insult, or fag, or homo, it was like they were saying something bad about my friend, which is like saying something bad about me for being a friend to my friend. And plus my friend was an Israelite, and Vincie wasn’t. Since it was Vincie saying gay, I knew he didn’t mean anything bad about me or my people, since if he did he’d also be saying something bad about himself since he was friends with me too, but still I didn’t like him saying gay that way because what he meant didn’t matter that much—he was saying something bad about us whether he wanted to or not.
The bus stopped at a red and Shlomo Cohen started walking up from the back. Shlomo played second-string point-guard for the Indians and I’d never spoken to him before. Marnie shouted at him to sit, so he ran. He ran to the seat behind me, put his head in the aisle, and said, “Which one of you is Gurion?”
I said, I’m Gurion.
He said, “They want you to come back there and talk.”
“Who?” Vincie said.
“Bam and Maholtz.”
“What for?” Vincie said.
Shlomo shrugged.
All three of us got up. “They don’t want to talk to you,” Shlomo said to Vincie.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Vincie said.
I set my hand on Vincie’s shoulder = It’s fine.
Eighth-graders talked way more than they fought. And plus, if they tried to attack me, I knew I could handle them for at least as long as it would take Vincie to get there. I was good at bus-fighting. I knew how to use inertia and I could always tell when the driver would hit the brakes. That was the best time to throw a guy.
Marnie shouted some more and Shlomo shrugged some more and Vincie sat down a couple seats closer to the back. I decided I didn’t like Shlomo. He wasn’t friendly to me and I believed in his shrugging. I believed it was true that he didn’t know why Bam and Maholtz wanted to talk to me, but he came to get me anyway, and that was not very Israelite of him. Israelites who didn’t act like Israelites disappointed me the most.
Shlomo sat in the second-to-lastseat on the right and Bam stared out the window from the 2/3-size lastseat behind him. Maholtz was standing in the aisle, gesturing to the other lastseat with his right hand, which was his weak hand. He had his left hand in the pocket of his windbreaker, where he kept his weapon. It was a sap with a lead-ball head that was spring-loaded for more than the sake of concealment. Cocked, it was about five inches long. Sprung and straight, it was nine. You sprung it with your thumb—there was a button on the grip. The grip was black steel and the button was silver like a stilleto’s button. When it was cocked, the sap did not look like a weapon. It looked like the missing piece of something useful and electric, like a drill or motorcycle. The rod the lead-ball head was attached to was rubber, a very heavy kind of rubber, but because it was rubber, it was bendy, and that was good because of torque. If you flicked your wrist at the pinnacle of your swipe’s arc, the rod’s bendy action would create an extra swipe for the lead-ball head, and the impact would be exponentially greater than what it would have been if the rod wasn’t bendy, and the lead-ball head would, on contact,
Maholtz said, “Step ingto my office, Gooreeing.”
Bryan “Bry Guy” Maholtz was a high-stepping, button-nosed, prettyboy bully from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He suffered from a combination of a stupid accent and cloggy adenoids that added ng and nd sounds to the backs of certain vowels and gunged up some of his consonants, too. His smile was the kind that said, “Wait’ll this kid seends what I’ve got up my sleengve.” On top of the creepy speech d., Maholtz always kept his eyes slitted, like he was waiting to violate something quietly. And his jutting chin, his pushed-out lips—it was like he was rondesormiating the whole bus. He was not very good at basketball, either, but he sold steroids to the varsity starters so they’d be friends with him, which worked. Maholtz didn’t scare me, but I was not going to sit between him and the window.
“Have the window. Pleandse,” he said.
I said, I like the aisle.
He said, “Your pleandsure is my pleandsure.”
We sat.
He said to me, “Thing about Boystar: no one reandlly likes him much. I don’t reandlly like him. Bam over there doesn’t reandlly like him.” I looked at Bam Slokum. He leaned on the opposite window, his forehead on his arm. “You like him, Shlomo Coned?” said Maholtz.
“Not really,” said Shlomo Cohen, in a bored voice.
“See?” said Maholtz. “Not. Reandlly. Still though, the ladies like him. They like his musinc. It gets them horngy. He gets them pretty horngy, the girls, just by doing his little dances in the hallngway. It’s a very curious thing. But the poind is, there’s only one of him. And then therend’s us, his friends. Do the mangth—I will: Many girls mindus one for him > many of his friends mindus one of him = many more girls for his friends than friends for the girls and therefore don’t mess with our play, Goo-ree-ing. Right?”
As long as Boystar didn’t bother June again, I had no reason to go after him, but if I agreed with Maholtz, it would be like saying that I wouldn’t go after Boystar because Maholtz told me not to, and plus he was a disgusting person.
So I said to him, I’ll think about it.
Maholtz said, “Think abound what?”
I said, Your question.
He said, “You misunderstood. I didn’t angsk you a question. I told you that you will, from now on, leave Boystar aloned.”
Do people ever call you ‘Bry Guy’ to your face, Bry Guy? I said.
His pocket-hand flexed around the handle of his sap and the knuckles stretched windbreaker nylon, but I knew he wouldn’t pull the weapon. How I knew he wouldn’t pull the weapon was that I was watching his face, and all his face did was fold up into little sickly colored pouches of totally normal rage. If sapping Gurion was truly his plan, the face would’ve signalled Adonai to yell No! at Maholtz’s muscles and I was sure I would’ve seen it. But even if I was wrong about the existence of a pre-sin face signal, or about my ability to see one, I knew for sure that his weapon was useless in the face of my stealth. I’d have made claws of my fingers and palmstruck his windpipe into stickman dimensions before he had the chance to find the silver button with his gangly thumb, let alone to bring his arm back for the swipe. The second he pulled his weapon, I’d have made it mine. I liked his weapon. I wished he’d pull it.
All he did, though, was remove his empty hand from his pocket and cut it across the air slowly, left-to-right = “Luncky for you, Goo-ree-ing,” and when I didn’t do whatever it was that Maholtz was used to people doing when he offered them a very clear example of trying to save face, he did the same hand-cutting thing again while shaking his head left-to-right-to-left-to-right = “You don’t even know enough to know you’re luncky, much less how luncky, dumbass,” and when I still didn’t do whatever he wanted, he said “Tch” to me, and I said to him, Bry Guy, and he said, “You hearnd this kid, Bam? You hearnd this kid?”
Bam Slokum continued staring out the window and leaning on it with his forehead and one elbow. The hollow between his neck muscles where the top of the spine is housed was wide enough and deep enough to secure a superball, and he could actually do it, too—he could flex the back of his neck and hold things with it. I saw him do it in the hall once, to the thumb of a girl called Kylie Watson. He had to get on his knees so Kylie could reach, and then once she got the thumb in, Bam tightened his neck, bowed down like a Muslim on a prayer mat, and Kylie, following the pull on her thumb, fell on Bam’s back, giggling.
When Bam spoke, in the direction of the window, he moved his thick hand around above his head to emphasize certain words. His voice was yawny and quiet and weirdly punctuated. It surprised me, the way he talked. I’d only ever heard him speak in very short sentences. The waving hand was the only thing that showed his impatience, flicking at the wrist on words like “pick” and “most” and “sit” and “mewling.” He said, “Maholtz you’re a scumbomb, no one likes you, why you always gonna pick on people? Gurion I want you to leave Boystar alone. He told me all about what happened, and probably it was lies, I’m not saying you were wrong, you were probably right, and this isn’t about who did what to who but who’ll do what to who in the future, tomorrow, day after, whenever, first who being you, and the second one Boystar. You came out ahead, I hope you’ll leave it at that, I anticipate no objections on your end, you seem like a solid no-bullshit-type person, you don’t vibe me funny, I can tell that you listen and you want to understand, so I’m asking you to hear me, to listen, understand: Lana Mary Wilder is endlessly beautiful, the most gorgeous sophomore at Stevenson High, and for two years of Fridays she sat for the kid—pro-grade sitter, Lana, sat for me once, too, actually, we made these weird cookies, a whole nother story, it was years ago anyway—but she stays in touch with him, Boystar I mean, and she gets all upset if he calls her up crying, and he calls her a lot. Mewling and whining like a fraidycat crybaby famous little brat. He calls her up, worries her, and then she feels troubled, she gets all upset. I’m about to go see her is why I’m on your bus, I’m going to her house, and he’ll have already called, probably called her at lunch, so understand I want to tell her that it’s all taken care of. So she won’t be upset. You understand.”
“If Wilder’s all upsendt,” Maholtz explained, “she won’t be giving up the tints and sweet pussy.”
Bam reached across the aisle and the width of my body, and held Bryan Maholtz by the front of the hair. His arm was so long that he was able to do this without rising even a little from his seat. He said, “I’m really just super tired of hearing you, Bryan.”
Once his face was exposed, I could see that Bam’s jaw hardly moved when he spoke. His voice stayed yawny and even and, watching him close-up like that, I saw that I’d been right in the hallway that morning when I’d guessed his kingliness came from the faces he made—the face, actually: there was just one. It was as unchanging as his voice, the face, and describing it as a half-smile doesn’t explain much except for what it would look like on someone else in a photograph. A half-smile can mean almost anything, I think. It can fit almost any situation—it can mean whatever the person watching the half-smiler thinks is most appropriate at the time. Bam’s face was more intentional. It was set in a pre-smile. It was the face of someone who has just leaned in your direction to hear something important that you are about to say—maybe the punchline of a joke he is expecting to be entertained by, or the conclusion to an argument he thinks you’ll convince him with. When someone pre-smiles like that, it is impossible to read the stories in the person’s face—at least for me. It is also impossible to want to hurt the person. You want to perform for a person like that. You don’t want to disappoint him. Bam was impressive.
Vincie ran down to us. He must have seen a blurred version of the hair-pulling action and thought I was in trouble. I showed him my palm = Not yet, and he stopped short beside the seat of Shlomo Cohen.
Shlomo made the noise “Tch.”
&
Vincie said to Slokum: “Nakamook’ll fucken—”
Bam said, “I don’t stress Benji Nakamook and I wasn’t even talking to you Portite with your fists in the air like that like maybe you want to do something we all know you won’t do anyway so you might as well relax. I’m just asking your friend to leave someone else alone so my life can be a little easier, what do you say?”
I said, I’ll think about it.
Bam said, “Good,” to me. He said to Vincie, “You can tell Nakamook a lot of Fridays have passed and I don’t feel too dead.”
“I’m not your fucken messenger,” Vincie said.
“My messenger or Nakamook’s asskissy lackey, whatever you call yourself,” Bam said, “you’ll deliver my message.”
By the time Bam said “whatever,” Vincie had already spun and started back down the aisle, slapping his fingers along the tops of the seats on the way to his own. Right when Vincie spun, Bam’s pre-smile twitched away, like the stories in his face were fighting to get told, and if the twitch had lasted another billionth of a second, I could have read the stories, but it didn’t last another billionth, and Bam finished speaking his sentence. Then he started talking to me again. He said, “The thing about Nakamook—”
“Would you pleandse let go of me?” Maholtz said.
Bam said, “Only if you promise to quit talking about girls in front of me because when you talk about girls Maholtz it makes me want to hide every girl in the world in a castle you can’t get to and I don’t have a castle much less one you can’t get to and even if I did have a castle you couldn’t get to it wouldn’t be big enough for all those girls so promise?”
“Yes,” said Maholtz.
Bam twisted the forelock. “Promise,” he said.
“I promise!” said Maholtz. Bam let go and Maholtz hid his face.
Some kids I couldn’t see were singing, “Next stop, Frontier Motel/ the place where Gurion’s fat black dad who fell dwells.” Was it the bandkids? Is that why they’d apologized? The song was definitely coming from toward the front of the bus.