The Instructions by Adam Levin

  Tired how? I whispered across the rhombus.

  “Everyone’s writing it,” Nakamook said.

  I said, Some people are still writing DAMAGE WE and WE DAMAGE—I’ve seen probably ten of those.

  “Yeah,” said Benji, “but those just seem like screw-ups. The one kind looks like the tagger was dyslexic, and the other like he got caught before he could finish. That’s not the point, anyway, how many people do one or the other. I don’t like writing what anyone else writes. It’s team-spirity.”

  I said, If the tags all say the same thing, they’ll be more powerful. They’ll look more like a message.

  “What’s the message?” said Benji.

  It’s what it says, I said. WE DAMAGE WE. It is that it is.

  “What does that mean, though?”

  I said, Every time someone reads or writes Damage now, the Arrangement gets damaged and the Side of Damage gets stronger.

  “Maybe that’s what the message does,” Benji said. “Maybe. But what I’m asking you is what it means.”

  It means what it does, I said. Beyond that, it doesn’t matter. At least not yet. What matters is the Side of Damage has the power to send messages—that we can send messages the Arrangement doesn’t want sent.

  Benji said, “Even if that does make sense, someone’s gonna get—”

  Here he comes, I said, and became the wall.

  Benji did, too.

  Floyd paced past the doorway.

  When he was out of range, I whispered, Maybe someone’ll get caught, but that’s not so bad. If they rat—and I don’t think they will, but even if they do—we’ll continue. Everyone’ll know we’re unstoppable.

  “Not if they kick us out.”

  They can’t kick us all out, I said.

  “Why not?” he said.

  So fine, I said, so say they kick us out—maybe we’re still victorious.

  “How’s that?” Benji said, then became his wall.

  I became my wall, waited.

  Floyd passed by again, hands crossed at the wrists at the small of his back, cheering cone bopping the backs of his thighs. I snuck to the edge of the doorway. The way I cocked my head, I could see C-Hall to 2-Hall before my line of sight got obscured. If Floyd took a right into 2-Hall, we’d wait because there wasn’t much 2-Hall to the right of C-Hall—the side entrance was just three classrooms from the junction, and it wouldn’t give us enough time to deface anything well. If he took a left, though…

  I said, If we get kicked out, we’ll get sent to other schools and maybe we’ll do the same thing there with other kids. The Side of Damage could spread out from Aptakisic like—

  “First of all, that’s crazy—the only reason all those kids even joined the Side of Damage is because it means that we’ll protect them. If they go to a new school, we won’t be there to do that. Secondly, what do I care anyway? They’re not my friends. Any loyalty they have to me comes out of fear. And any loyalty I have to them is only by proxy; it’s only cause I know they’re on your side.”

  I said, That’s good enough, Benji.

  “Loyalty without friendship creates hypocrisy.”

  That’s just a whiny word, I said.

  Benji said, “There’s only so much loyalty to go around, Gurion. And there’s even less friendship. If you’re loyal to someone who isn’t your friend, and they come into conflict with someone who is, then what are you supposed to do?”

  I said, Be loyal to the friend.

  He said, “But you still end up being disloyal to someone who you were supposed to be loyal to, and that’s hypocritical.”

  I said, It’s not hypocritical—it’s just how it is. Friendship creates—Floyd’s gone, I said.

  We stealthed into C-Hall. It was my turn to play lookout. Benji led me to the water fountain.

  Friendship creates loyalty, I told him, but loyalty doesn’t necessarily lead to friendship. So friendship and loyalty are separate, and it’s better to have both than just one, but it’s better to have one than neither.

  “Whatever,” Benji said, gesturing at the water fountain.

  He’d written I EXPLODE in the basin, just above the drain.

  “You got a problem with that?” he said.

  I said, The marker’s gonna wash away if someone takes a drink before it sets.

  “No one’s gonna take a drink,” said Benji. He pressed the button and nothing came out of the arcing hole, and I remembered: it was the water fountain Eliyahu had punched. “I was asking about what I wrote—you got a problem with it?”

  I said, You’re Benji Nakamook.

  “What’s that mean?” he said.

  I said, You’re my best friend.

  He said, “You sure about that?” = “I saw you talking to Bam by the bus circle yesterday.”

  I said, Don’t get subtle on me, Nakamook. You asked me not to fight him.

  “That doesn’t mean you’ve gotta be his buddy,” Benji said.

  I’m not his buddy, I said.

  “You looked pretty friendly.”

  We’re not, I said. I said, He thinks we are, but we’re not.

  “But you do like him,” said Benji. “Everyone does.”

  That’s what he keeps saying, I said, but that doesn’t make it so.

  “Let’s drop it. Pride and propriety.”

  You’re the one who started talking about him, I said.

  “I didn’t start shit. You think I should do more I EXPLODEs or what?”

  I said, Write what you want. I said, It’s probably better to change it up, anyway—it’ll confuse the robots.

  And when I said that I got an idea.

  I said, I just got an idea.

  On the wall across from the Cage, I wrote *EMOTIONALIZE*, hugely, using an entire cinderblock for each letter.

  “That is just smart as hell, man,” said Benji. He liked it so much.

  We admired what I did for a few seconds, then heard human noise and ducked back into a doorway. It turned out to be Ronrico and The Janitor, returning to the Cage, right at the time I’d told them to.

  The Janitor rang the doorbell and Ronrico noticed the *EMOTION-ALIZE*.

  “‘Boystar Emotionalize Boystar’?” said Ronrico. “He’s biting my fucken steez, Mikey.”

  “Gurion’s steez,” said the Janitor.

  “Whoever’s steez it is, that kid’s biting it. Hard.”

  Nakamook bit into his fist and barely stifled nose-noise.

  “Come lunch, I will blot that bullshit out,” Ronrico said.

  “Don’t get so emotional,” said the Janitor, “because then you’re just doing what he tells you to do.”

  Botha came to the gate then, but Ronrico was still staring at the wall.

  “That kid can’t tell me to do anything,” Ronrico said. “I bet he didn’t write it anyway. It was probably one of those Jennys.”

  “A Jinny wrote what?” said Botha.

  “Leave me alone,” said Ronrico.

  “A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid,” the Janitor said.

  “Tails about what?”

  “We’re not rats,” Ronrico said.

  Botha said, “Rets about what? Jinnies?” He saw the wall then. He rushed Ronrico and the Janitor into the Cage, but didn’t lock the gate behind him. Half a minute later, he came back out. He was heading toward Main Hall, the Office.

  It was ten to eleven when I finished the twelfth *EMOTIONALIZE*, a block-lettered one that spanned three floor-tiles. Benji’s last bomb was a SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY, the words stacked vertically on the face of the 2-Hall juice machine. He used his cracktorch to burn the characters into the plastic. They looked like they’d been scooped with an action figure’s snow-shovel. We briefly deliberated the fate of the residue that had gathered in some of the letters’ corners. I argued for wiping it since its blackness testified to burntness, and Miss Pinge knew Benji had a cracktorch. Benji said owning a cracktorch was circumstantial evidence and the residue looked badass. I allowed that badassness was
manifest in the residue, and that, in itself, was a good thing, but noted that circumstantial evidence was usually enough for Brodsky to nail you. Benji stated that clearly wasn’t the case when it came to expellable offenses such as vandalism—that if it were, the whole Cage would by now have been expelled—and added that Pinge would never fink him anyway, and it was Benji’s risk, so the residue remained. I handed him a pass and he asked where I was going.

  I’m meeting June, I said.

  He tilted his chin up and grasped it. In a low, slow, Jedi-council voice, he told me, “Always respect her in the Vaunted Hutch of Hector.”

  The Vaunted Hutch of Hector was the janitor’s closet in 2-Hall. It was said kids snuck in there to sex down, but I don’t think that was true. I’d never met anyone who’d actually done it. It was just something fun to say.

  “Be certain to protect her in the Vaunted Hutch of Hector.”

  We’re not going there.

  “If by chance you reject her, or even just neglect her, never again shall you enter the Vaunted Hutch of Hector. Not if she can prevent her—”

  We’re not going there, I said.

  “To play the gentleman is correcter, so I won’t play inspector, or pressure you to conjecture like some kiss-and-tell…uh…”

  Yeah? I said.

  “Director? Director of something something love’s sweet nectar in the Vaunted?—no, that’s suck, I’m tapped. You’re really not going there? Where you going?”

  Two-hill field, I said. We’re meeting some people.

  “Some people,” he said.

  Old friends, I said. Guys I used to go to school with.

  “Like in Chicago?” he said.

  Yeah.

  “They happen to be passing through Deerbrook Park this morning or…?”

  No, I said. I said, I wanted them to meet June, because—it’s a long story.

  He said, “From Jewish school, these guys.”

  Right.

  Benji didn’t say “Aha!” or anything, but the way his eyebrows jumped—

  “You know,” he said, “I still have a bunch of those passes you gave me, so if I dumped this one, it wouldn’t be a major loss or anything.”

  That’s not, I said, necessary.

  “So June’s not, after all… You’re gonna do that thing you told me about the other day, right? The thing that’s like conversion, but isn’t conversion? I kinda want to see that,” he said. “I mean, I’m really kinda interested in that. Since you mentioned it the other day.”

  I said, It’s probably better if it’s just June and—

  “Oh. Okay. No. That’s fine.”

  Why would you even want—I mean, the other day you said… What did you say?

  “No, I know. Seriously. No. It was just curiosity. I was curious how it works. I understand if you can’t have, you know, guests or whatever. But good luck, though. To June, I mean. Or you. Good luck to whoever needs it. Mazel tov, right? All the nachos in the world.”

  We didn’t bang fists so much as press knuckles.

  While I waited for June in the locker-room doorway, I pictured us outside. The way the scholars in the valley would murmur and then quiet when we appeared atop the high hill. From the pocket of my hoodie, I’d produce the scripture. I knew it by heart, like everything I’d written, but failing to show the page would be as chomsky as pretending to read it—it might make it seem like I was speaking off the cuff. So I’d hold out the scripture like the head of a prized enemy, the side with the words on it facing the scholars as would that enemy’s lightless eyes, and with my own eyes on theirs, I’d speak.

  I was trying to imagine the booming “Amen” when the door behind me half-opened. Though surprised, I wasn’t startled—June snuck with finesse. She whispered, “All clear,” and led me back through the locker-room.

  Crossing the gym, we didn’t squeak the floor once. To jam the backdoor’s autolock, I slid My Life as a Man between the bolt and the strikeplate while June waited outside to test it—all of this without either of us speaking. I wanted to tell her I was thrilled by her stealth, but I thought my surprise might come through my voice, and she’d hear it and be disappointed.

  June tried the door and it worked. I caught the book before it landed, then performed the re-jam from the outside.

  All along the asphalt trail, we swung our arms like bancers in musicals. When we got to the sidewalk, June said I was a dentist, so I pratfell on a hydrant, and she mock-stomped my head.

  “By a blow to the brain dies Jellybean,” she said. “I am the one who killed Jellybean.”

  Who?

  “Jellybean,” she said. “It doesn’t fit you at all, and I didn’t think it would, but during second I decided it might fit me, and I was hoping you’d take the hint. Since you haven’t, I’ve resorted to an explicit request, which is suck because now you’ll have to wait awhile.”

  I’ll have to wait to call you Jellybean.

  “Yes. Til such a time when it’ll sound inspired.”

  What if I never get inspired?

  “You only have to sound inspired.”

  So force it, you’re saying.

  “Wait awhile first, then force it if you need to, but don’t sound like you’re forcing it.”

  Practice the art of artlessness.

  “Whatever, Zenpoetface, it’s cold out here.”

  We crossed Rand Road and climbed the western slope of the high hill. I kept my eyes on the ground as we climbed. I didn’t want to see the scholars til my scripture was in hand. I didn’t want to smile before the recitation. I heard the expected murmur as we ascended, but it wasn’t theirs—just the throb and swish of my brainblood.

  At the crest, I took the page from my pocket and saw that the valley was empty. I looked up the road and no one was coming. All the joy in my chest zoomed out like ghosts.

  “Your friends are late.”

  They’re not, I said.

  There was no way they were late. Not all of them.

  I pulled my hood on and sat. The valley stayed empty. June swiped the scripture from my hand and read it.

  “Adonai is God?”

  Yeah, I said.

  Though my pennygun was in my pocket, and the gym as empty as we’d left it, it didn’t occur to me to smash the clock. I wrote June a pass, then snuck to the library. The computer room was empty.

  So was my Yahoo inbox. Not one scholar had emailed to tell me he wasn’t coming. And after all that Emmanuel had said on the el on Tuesday… It was hard enough to believe he could have been so mistaken about where they stood—Say that you’ll lead us; I’d give my life to save yours, Rabbi—but for him not to email: it stunk like a plot.

  What else could explain their inaction’s uniformity? Simple apathy was not sufficient. Even if all two-hundred-plus kids I’d invited didn’t care enough to show, a few of them—or at least one of them—would have cared enough to RSVP. I knew them that well at least. They may have, every one of them, fallen away from me on their own, but they would not have done so identically.

  My chemicals fired at this thought, dutifully catalyzed the simplifying process. They had to have been kept away or led away. From me, away. And as for Emmanuel… Whether he was keeping or kept, led or leading… That he’d manipulated me—using praise and flattery and false beholdenness, every single Roman trick he was able to muster, to fuel what now seemed the basest, dumbest kind of hubris, the Gurionic hubris—appeared undeniable.

  And that Emmanuel would be able to manipulate me was no revelation—he’d always been the brightest of my fellow scholars—but that he would manipulate me… That is the thought that boggled me. Had I ever wronged him? No. Had I wronged my Israelite brothers? Never.

  And so maybe my father had the right idea. Maybe all the scholars, despite their scholarship, were as blind and simple and reactionary as he claimed their parents were. Maybe they hated those they thought better than them, and maybe they thought I was better than them. That notion in itself was hubristic, true, yet it
seemed so obvious—that they thought me better than them had always seemed obvious, and that was why I’d always rejected the suggestion. But what was it to deny the obvious if not to act from hubris? And yet and yet and meow and meow. What thought could I think that wasn’t hubristic? What concern that lacked hubris could be called responsible? I couldn’t imagine one. And since when did I care about hubris, anyway? The voice I was thinking in wasn’t mine—it was Nakamook’s. By the measure of Shakespeare and Euripides and any number of Benji’s other favorite wisemen, every Israelite scholar in the world was hubristic; to believe you are chosen by Adonai to bring justice, the messiah—what is that if not hubristic? And I never cared if I was hubristic before, so why should this—this betrayal, this harm done to me—why should this cause me to care? I was not the one who ditched his friend; I was the friend who got ditched. Yet I did care. Obviously.

  Unless maybe not. Maybe it was the other thing, the thing that haunted my house. That type of needless complication of which my mom accused men and claimed boys innocent. Maybe I kept seeing hubris so as not to have to see my enemies. Maybe I was protecting my enemies. Fighting with myself to avoid fighting them. What, scholars (and this is not a real question), could be more Yiddishe?

  It would not be true to say that while sitting in the library, before my Yahoo inbox, I decided the scholars of Schechter and Northside were my enemies. That was too much. Their offense, if it could be called that, was passive. They had not attacked me—not to my knowledge, at least—they had simply failed to help me.

  After sneaking back out of the library, however, while making my way past hallway walls now dense as scripture with WE DAMAGE WE bombs, I did decide that the aforementioned scholars were not my friends. And what was peculiar, or rather not so peculiar—for I wasn’t obliged to suffer any longer, to expend half my energy awaiting permission, convincing myself that simple acts of malevolence on the part of my elders were complicated acts of misdirected loyalty, piously and reverently abiding the malice of their cowardly parents for the sake of their souls, their Israelite souls, the Israelite souls of my Israelite friends (we were no longer friends!), so they wouldn’t transgress the fifth commandment, just in case I’d been wrong, just in case I’d been bad for them in ways I couldn’t see, and because I felt beholden, all because I was their friend (we were no longer friends!)—but what struck me as peculiar at the time was this: I felt relieved. And relieved, I remembered all the kids in the Cage. I thought: I’m the leader of the Side of Damage; at least I’m the leader of the Side of Damage. And at last I’m the leader of no one else.