The Instructions by Adam Levin
I love you so much, I said.
“Good,” June said. “If you didn’t still love me, I would feel really tricked. I want you to kiss my neck again in the same exact spot. You kissed it right on the carotid artery and I tingled in so many places I almost had a grand mal seizure. It made me so warm, Gurion, and then cool and then warm again and then cool and it started switching so fast, warmandcool and warmandcool, that I couldn’t tell the difference and my jaw was grinding and then yawning, and my eyebrow muscles were very concerned and then very surprised, all of it switch-switching and your tongue doesn’t gross me out. I was worried that your tongue would gross me out. Right before I kissed you yesterday, I thought your tongue would be thick inside of my mouth, that it would taste like cardboard and be dry like other tongues, and then your tongue wasn’t like that at all, but it was strange inside of my mouth and I couldn’t make a decision about it and I worried til now that it was because it was just about to gross me out, that you stopped only a second before my grossout would’ve started, and that the next time you put your tongue in my mouth it would gross me out, but this was the next time and it wasn’t gross at all. I like it so much that when you were kissing my neck, I almost made you stop just so I could suck on your tongue, but I didn’t do it because I wanted to have a grand mal seizure first, and I was almost there until you started talking about penguns.” She grabbed my hands and said, “Will you do it again til my hemispheres crossfire? You’re blushing. Good. I like when you blush. It’s because you want me to do it to you again, don’t you? I will. I’ll do it to you until you seize, but you have to do it to me again, after.”
A hot red face does not always = blushing. A hot red face only means blood has risen. I said, What tongue was thick in your mouth?
She said, “What?”
I said, You said that other tongues were thick in your mouth. Whose?
“I said other tongues are thick and like cardboard,” she said. “And dry.”
But how do you know that?
June said, “Come on.”
Come on? I said.
She said, “I kissed this other boy, once, but it was nothing.”
How could that be nothing?
“How? Because it was. It was at a party at the beginning of the school-year that it happened. We were playing this stupid game that was like a combination of Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle.”
A game, I said.
She said, “We went in this closet together and I had to tell him a secret, and I didn’t. I told him something that was a lie, and he told me something that was true. But it was about me. He told me something true about me that I’d never told anyone and it freaked me out that he knew it, and I said, ‘How did you know it?’ and he said, ‘I know you. I’ve always known you and I love you.’ And that is when we kissed. But it was gross, Gurion, because he was a liar and he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him and I never said I did.”
I said, Was it Berman?
“Of course it wasn’t Berman. I never kissed Berman. I told you that already.”
Tell me who it was then, I said.
“That’s dumb.”
I said, Right now I’m imagining you kissing every kid I know, and I’m going to keep imagining that. Every time I see someone, I’m going to picture you kissing him.
“So stop imagining things,” she said.
I can’t, I said.
“Come on,” she said.
I know you’re trying to protect me, I said, but it isn’t working. I said, Your protection is a form of torture. If you tell me who it was, I can figure out a way to make it alright. If you don’t tell me, I can’t make anything alright, and now that you know that you’re torturing me, you need to stop. If you don’t stop, then it’s like you’re doing it on purpose.
“I don’t like the way your voice sounds.”
Neither do I.
She mumbled something.
What?
“Boystar,” she said, pulling on grassblades.
I felt like the center of me was a vacuum and the vacuum sucked all of my bones and muscles into my chest cavity and the density of my chest cavity was so high that the center of me was being pulled into the center of the earth, into this tiny hole that had formed in the ground underneath me, and all the rest of me was attached to the center and was trying to follow it down into the hole but it couldn’t follow because the hole was too small and that is why I started breaking. And it wasn’t so much the kiss, either. That there had been a kiss—I didn’t like that at all, but that wasn’t really it.
June said, “Gurion.”
I said, He knew a secret about you? Do I know it?
She said, “I don’t know. Do I have to tell you that too? I didn’t want to tell you. I told you I didn’t want to tell you before and you said I didn’t have to, but you look like you are going to die. You were all red and now you’re all beige and I’ll tell you if it’ll make you red again. Will it make you red again?”
I don’t know, June, I said.
She said, “You have to become red again. It’s so pretty when you’re red, with your black hair and eyes. You’re the end of death.”
And then she told me the secret of her darkness.
I forgot about Boystar and grew red and cried and I asked her why she didn’t use her pengun and she said because she hadn’t invented it yet and that even if she had she probably wouldn’t have been able to use it and then she was crying too and she kissed me on the carotid and it was just like she described it and I forgot everything and so I kissed her on the carotid and she forgot everything, but while she was forgetting I couldn’t stop remembering.
When the one-minute warning honks sounded, we were still at each other’s throats. We raced over the crest of the high hill, shouting til the drivers saw us, then crossed the field and Rand Road slow, trying and failing to say goodbye right.
What can I do? I said.
“About what?” June said. She held my hand between us by the wrist and stared at it.
About what you just told me, I said. About—
She bent my fingers back so hard and sudden I knelt. “You can go ahead and fuck off if you ever bring it up again, Gurion. Especially in that whiney, desperate voice,” she said. “We cried and now it’s done so forget about it, or at least act like you have. I didn’t fall in love with you because you were cute. I didn’t fall in love with you because you were sensitive.”
My fingers, I said.
“You think I can break them?”
I said, I don’t know, Jellybean.
“Well so worry about that.”
At the front of my bus was too much heat. The bandkids were flushed and sleepy-eyed.
“We Damage We,” said a chunky trombonist behind the driver.
I told him, Next stop Frontier Motel.
He lowered his eyes.
Vincie was waiting in my wheel-well seat. He wanted to whisper.
“You look dead,” he said. “Are you worried about tomorrow?”
I said, What’s tomorrow?
“That’s exactly what I said to Eliyahu, which is the point of this whole story I want to tell you,” said Vincie.
Then he told me the story.
“I was in the cafeteria with everyone else, and I saw Co-Captain Baxter run down Main Hall, toward the front entrance, and then Eliyahu. There was about ten minutes to go before the end of detention, which meant Eliyahu was chasing him for, like, fifty minutes. You chase a kid for fifty minutes, it’s more like you’re hunting than chasing. It’s gonna end in some kind of fantastic fucken asskicking, and of a basketballer too, so I didn’t want to miss it. I was sitting right by the doorway, and there were so many kids in detention, I thought I had a chance of sneaking out and getting away with it. Ben-Wa said he’d hand in my detention assignment for me, so we’ll find out tomorrow.
“Anyway, I get out to the bus circle, and there’s a bunch of bandkids on the sidewalk part, watching Eliyahu. He’s kicking the shit out of
“Soon Eliyahu starts swinging the backpack against the side of the bus, and Co-Captain Baxter sticks his head out the window over the rear wheel. He goes to Eliyahu: ‘Tonight I’m gonna rape your mom and your sister. Over and over,’ he says. ‘Until they start liking it,’ he says. ‘And then I’ll tie them to a rock,’ he says, ‘and cut off their clits so they bleed to death.’
“Some of the bandkids start laughing because dude said ‘clit.’ I twetch a goozy on one of their shirts and he hides behind the other ones. Eliyahu doesn’t notice any of it. He just keeps thumping The Co-Captain’s backpack like he’s gonna chop a hole in the flank of the bus, and the bus does dent a little and its paint gets scratched—there’s textbooks in the bag, all these zippers—but Eliyahu’s not looking satisfied. And then the main zipper opens, and the bag dumps its contents. Now Eliyahu drops the bag, plucks this little bottle out of the mess, unscrews the cap and starts flinging steroids through the air, right?
“So now the Co-Captain’s trickling all over the place. He goes, ‘You think I can’t get more of those? Not that I’ve ever seen ’em before or know what they are, but I’ll fucken chop those retarded fucken sideburn things off your mongoloid head because you think they’re mine.’ But all he’s doing is shouting through a window, you know? And I’m thinking: Eliyahu has beat this fucken kid, and that is truly fucken wonderful, but these drivers are gonna be done talking to each other soon, and he better calm down, right? And get away. But instead of calming down, he’s just getting madder and madder, Gurion. Like a fucken crazy madman. He’s walking in this tight little circle between the bus and the curb now, kicking all the junk he spilled out of the bag and staring at his feet and muttering to himself: ‘I want to kill him and it is wrong… I am Eliyahu of Brooklyn… that earring… to sever him from his jewelry…’ And the Co-Captain, he says to the bandkids: ‘Psycho’s mumbling prayers.’ And the bandkids laugh, and I twetch another one on the nose of the one I twetched one on the shirt of a minute ago, and he hides behind his friends again, and they laugh at that too.
“And Eliyahu’s still, like, muttering. And he’s throwing Yiddish into the mix, now. Stuff I never heard you say before, like cappy and—
Keppy, I said—it means head.
“And what else? This really great sounding one that goes, like, a-fat-stink-on-her or fuckatitioner.”
Farshtinkener.
“Definitely! Yes. What’s it mean?”
Pretty much what it sounds like, I said, but what happened already?
“Oh, so Eliyahu’s muttering all this stuff, like, ‘…knock the hat from my keppy?… the uncircumcised dog… to push his filthy Canaanite teeth back so his farshtinkiner mouth may accommodate this… I will… I will force this thermos down his throat with my fists,’ and he pulls The Co-Captain’s thermos from the pile of bagjunk, and it’s right about then that I see through the gaps between the buses how the drivers in the circle are shaking hands and banging fists or whatever, and I figure I’ve gotta get Eliyahu outta there, so I touch his elbow, and he swings on me, man!”
Did you—
“No no, it’s okay—I ducked it, and he saw I was me, and I told him, ‘We gotta go now, the drivers are coming.’ And Eliyahu says, ‘Tell me I will damage him tomorrow, Vincie, or I will never be able to stop pacing this facocta circle.’ I love facocta by the way, it’s my favorite of all of them I think, but I know Eliyahu’s got ISS tomorrow, and so I tell him, ‘If not tomorrow, then Monday.’ And then he goes, ‘Am I a child? You would talk to me about Monday? There will be no Monday.’ And then the Co-Captain, through the window, he says, ‘Am I-uh the child? You woulda to talka to me about on Monday?’ like trying to mimic Eliyahu, but it sounds way more like Chico Marx than like Larry David’s dad—not his dad-dad, but his show-dad—what’s his name?”
Shelley Berman, I said.
“That’s it. The impression sounded nothing like Shelley Berman, which is pretty much what you’d go for if you wanted to make fun of how Eliyahu sounds, right? But Eliyahu whipped the thermos at his face anyway, and the Co-Captain pulled his head inside the bus and the thermos tonked off the windowframe and I caught it, which was really smooth of Vincie, I think.
Stealth, I said.
“Thank you. Because Eliyahu didn’t fucken appreciate it at all. He just tried to grab it from me, the thermos, and I didn’t let him because we had to get outta there because like I said: those facocta drivers.
“But so Eliyahu goes, ‘Give me the thermos and don’t give me nazarite about Monday, Vincie.’
Narishkeit, I said.
“That’s the one. And I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean about Monday, but please don’t be upset like this—we fucken have to fucken go.’
“And Eliyahu says some Hebrew stuff I can’t even begin to imitate, but The Co-Captain could. And he did. He did it pretty good, like, ‘Chuh chuchaluh shicha hucha lachama.’ And then Eliyahu swiped the thermos out of my hand and let fly at the Co-Captain’s grill again. This time he got chin: cronk! And the Co-Captain yelped, ducked under the windowframe. And I said to Eliyahu, ‘Feel better?’ and he goes, ‘Only a little. I want his earring,’ but he lets me kinda lead him away from the buses, and what’s funny is this: The Co-Captain’s on Eliyahu’s intramural bus, which is Bus One, but the one he’s barracaded himself on is Two, and there’s no way he’s gonna ride on the same bus as Eliyahu now, so he’s stuck on the wrong bus! And not only that, but he was supposed to go home on the regular bus like those other fuckers because he’s got his big game tomorrow. And plus, even though we got away from the bus circle a little so the drivers wouldn’t bust Eliyahu, Eliyahu made us stay in seeing distance so the Co-Captain was too scared to even get off Bus Two to gather up all the junk that fell out of his bag, which was strewn everywhere! I had no idea Eliyahu was like that, man. That he was the kinda guy to think of that—sticking around like that. He’s so fucken angry. Who knew? I mean, yeah, when he came into the Cage he did that thing where he held out his hat and said he was from Brooklyn, but then—I mean he asks me if you’re dead, like, five, six fucken times a day, and, every time, he looks ready to cry. The whole point of me telling you this is this, though: While we’re standing there watching over the bus circle, I’m going over it in my head, everything that just happened, and I ask Eliyahu, I say: ‘What was that shit you were saying before about no Monday?’ Because remember, he said, ‘There will be no Monday.’ So I ask what he meant, and he goes, ‘Are you kidding with me?’ Real snotty, he said it, like he was offended or something. So I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ and he goes, ‘Tomorrow we destroy the Arrangement.’ He said it like I was a dumbass not to know that, and I thought: Maybe I am. But what’s weird is, it didn’t feel like I was a dumbass. It felt more like what I was saying yesterday on this very bus; it felt like I was just playing the dumbass. It felt like that because when Eliyahu said we’d destroy the Arrangement tomorrow, it sounded true, like we’d all agreed on it, but I couldn’t remember doing that. I couldn’t remember agreeing on it, and it seems like the kind of thing I would have remembered, right? So I said, ‘There’s a plan to destroy the Arrangement?’ And Eliyahu said, ‘A plan I don’t know—an understanding, though? Surely there’s an understanding.’ ‘Well who says?’ I said. And Eliyahu said, ‘Everyone says.’ And I said, ‘Like who, though?’ And he said, ‘Like your friend the Main Man Scott Mookus.’ And I said, ‘Main Man says a lot of crazy stuff.’ And Eliyahu said, ‘Our friend Gurion says.’ And I said, ‘No way. I’d remember if Gurion said that.’ And Eliyahu said, ‘If hyperscoot was the beginning, and hyperscoot began third period, and by seventh period we’re already in
“So is it true, Gurion?”
I didn’t know if it was true. It was just like Vincie said.
I said, It’s just like you said—it sounds true, but I hadn’t thought of it til you said it. I mean…
“Well, I just play the dumb one, man, but I’ll tell you: This morning, right after that first hyperscoot? I would’ve said fuck yeah for sure we’re doing it and we fucken well should do it: destroy. But today was long and full of weird fucken shit. Like what happened with Nakamook? That’s the thing I wanted to talk to you about before. That was fucked up, right? And it was the same kind of fucked up as this kind of fucked up that we’re already talking about. We should have all rushed Slokum in the two-hill field—we were all there, and I don’t care who he is, he can’t take thirty-odd kids out, especially not while holding onto you—but at the same time, we were waiting for Nakamook to do something first. Actually, first we were waiting for you to kick Slokum’s ass, we figured you’d get it under control. But then there was like a solid half a minute where we all knew you weren’t gonna get it under control and what we did was look to Nakamook, and he wasn’t doing anything, and by the time we gave up on him—at least by the time I did—Bam had already set you down. That was some weird shit. No one ever said Nakamook would be the leader of us if you were in trouble, but we all acted like he was—there was an understanding. And that first hyperscoot, too—no one decided to do it, right? Not out loud. And then suddenly we were doing it. And it was great. But that other shit with Slokum? I feel really bad about that other shit. And I’m sorry about that fucken shit. And I feel like I gotta prove myself to you now. Or get Leevon and Ronrico and Ben-Wa and probably a fifth guy together and try to kick Benji’s ass or something, which is really the most fucken upsetting part, because he’s been my fucken friend for two years, which is more than one-sixth of my life, and since I can’t really remember shit from before kindergarten, it’s like more than that—it’s like one third of my life. Or two-fifths even, I don’t fucken know. But you’re the only guy besides Mookus and Leevon who never once made fun of me during that horrible flinching phase I was going through, and not only that but you healed it, and so what am I supposed to do?”