The Instructions by Adam Levin
So then how do I decide, right? How do I decide, if a friend of mine gets into a fight with someone who has my loyalty but not my friendship—how do I decide who to side with? I can answer just as quickly and easily as you. I decide by duration—by the loyalties’ ages. That’s the only way. It’s a heartless way, but that’s why it’s reliable; that’s why it’s consistent. I solved the whole problem when I was nine years old and I had to choose who to live with. I liked my father better. He was a sober marine who taught me to curse and to swim, but I chose my mom, who was always screaming and falling down. I didn’t want to choose, because to choose was to betray one of them, but I had to choose so I chose her because she’d carried me, and that’s what I told the both of them. I’d been with her longer and that was that. This solution’s a good one, because it’s so simple. You can’t really fuck with it. You side with the one you’ve been loyal to longer because time is an absolute. Time isn’t subject to the whims of your heart. It can’t be interpreted, and therefore it can’t be misinterpreted, willfully or un-. Can you see where this is going yet? Probably you can, so before I get there, I need to go somewhere else.
What happened in Nurse Clyde’s during Lunch today had no part in the choice I made once we were in the two-hill field, but I know you’ve got your hypotheses, Gurion, you always have your hypotheses, and I don’t want you to think I was in possession of motives unknown to me, so here:
Yes, Slokum and I were best friends until he betrayed me for a blood loyalty—everyone knows that. And yes, lately you’ve been my best friend, and—in Nurse Clyde’s office—I found out you’d betrayed me for a tribal loyalty. And yes, despite your betrayal being far smaller than Slokum’s, it gave me flashes of Slokum’s, and I thought of Jelly, and I thought of what you’d said to me in the library on Tuesday about conversion and Israelites, and I worried you and I would soon become enemies. But no, that was not a lasting worry at all. I pulled the fire alarm, the moments proceeded slowly, as my most anguished moments always do, and by the time everyone got outside, I was over it. “Gurion’s not Slokum,” I thought. I thought: “His Israelites aren’t Geoff Claymore… He isn’t ditching me… He just has to get his loyalties straight…” Etcetera. I saw I didn’t have to get fucked up just because you were. I’m not the one in love with a girl his own people won’t accept—you are. I’m not the one whose own people fear and shun him. That guy is you. And I don’t see why anyone—let alone anyone you’ve never actually met—should have your loyalty just because they share some distant ancestry with you. Maybe that’s because I don’t really have people, just a couple friends and a mom, but either way, when it comes to Jelly: I love her, and I don’t care so much what you or anyone else think about that, as long as you don’t try to interfere. And you hadn’t and haven’t tried to interfere, and you haven’t given any sign that you would. And by the time we were out in the field, I was all sorted out.
By the time we were out in the field, I was ready to laugh with you about pulling the alarm, how I knew I’d get away with it (I went straight to Miss Pinge and said “Is this a drill?” and Pinge said it wasn’t, and I said, “Miss Pinge. I don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna!”). But then you were in the air, in the hands of my arch-enemy. And I did nothing to help you. And in a certain light—certainly a very certain light (I’m not trying to get off the hook on a technicality)—I betrayed you.
I need to explain about Bam now, my original best friend Bam, my first friend ever, the one who claims, though never out loud, my third-oldest loyalty (apart from my parents, I can’t remember anyone before kindergarten, which is when Bam and I became friends), the one who held you helpless in the air.
I am loyal to Bam Slokum because at the age of five I claimed to be, and if I were to now side against him with anyone other than my own parents, it seems to me that all other loyalties I have ever claimed would become dubious. Dubious in FACT, even if not in my heart. I would be no better than that kid who says he’s fallen out of love. And I would be the snake variety of that kid, because I would know what I was doing. To side with anyone other than my parents against Bam Slokum would make me a worthless snake, Gurion.
And let me be clear on this: I’m not scared of Bam. He knows it, too. SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY—on his locker, on the walls, the floor, desks. I write it and everyone sees it, and they know it’s me who wrote it because Bam tells them. But THEY don’t matter to me. What matters to me is that BAM sees it, SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY, and when he sees it, he knows how I despise him, but he also knows that I’m loyal despite his betrayal, that his betrayal lost him the friendship of a truly loyal human being; a guy whose loyalty is able to tolerate his own hatred of its very object. Or maybe not. Maybe he doesn’t see that. I don’t know. That all seems a little crazy when I see it written down, but that’s what I hope, or at least what I’ve hoped.
In either case, SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY is both a provocation to fight and an expression of loyalty. If I weren’t loyal to him, I would write something other than SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY. And he knows exactly what I would write—how easy it would be for me to just add the one word—and he doesn’t want it written, and that is the provocation, that is the threat: that I could write that word if I wanted to. But still I don’t write that word. I don’t write it for the same reason I don’t disclose it here and for the same reason I don’t swing on him when we pass in the hall: because as long as I am not being assaulted by him, I have to protect him—loyalty demands it. I think he knows that, too, although, again, writing it down makes it seem a little crazy———
But that’s not as important, whether he knows I’m loyal. What’s important is I know. What’s important is you know.
And he’s not scared of fighting me, either, Gurion. He should be. I’d tear him down if he attacked me, but he’s not scared of fighting me, I’m not saying he is. And whether or not he’s aware of my loyalty’s resilience, it’s definitely not regret for having betrayed me, much less any feeling of guilt, that keeps him from attacking me. The reason he doesn’t attack me is the same reason he tells everyone it’s me who writes SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY: my public displays of enmity serve him.
He knows I’m a villain in the eyes of all those kids he wants to worship him (there is no denying it; neither of us can deny how little I’m liked, how many kids would love to see me ended), and he knows that if their villain is Bam’s enemy, and Bam’s enemy appears afraid to fight Bam, that makes Bam their hero. Crazy as THAT might look written down, I’m positive I’m right. And he’s right, too—I make him their hero. Or at least I help to. And a hero under threat, Gurion, always appears more heroic than a hero victorious. If he were to beat my ass—and he does believe that would be the outcome (another thing I’m sure of—I know this kid)—they would worship him less, because what enemy of Slokum could take my place? Who do they fear more than Benji Nakamook? Who do they hate more than me? No one. So my hatred of him—no matter its forthright nature, its snow-white purity—it doesn’t hurt his standing; it’s all to his benefit. And so I get to have my cake and eat it too. I get to hate him out loud and protect him all at once. I go forth without compromise, integrity intact, the unbetraying villain.
At least until this afternoon, when I betrayed you, letting him hold you in the air like that. Out of loyalty to my own code of loyalties, I maintained the older of two loyalties. I preserved my own integrity. But it wasn’t pleasant. I didn’t enjoy it. My heart was bucking.
And now you say, “Who cares? Who cares, though?” right? This is the part where you say, “Who cares what your heart did? How about your legs? How about what they DIDN’T? How about your fists? You sound like a bancer, talking fancy betrayal and loyalty bullshit, principled bullshit, self-dramatizing bullshit. You sound like a trailer for an action movie. You should have HIT that kid. You should have HELPED me.”
And you’re right. But so was I, Gurion. And what I’m trying to tell you is I did the harder thing. I didn’t do what I wanted—that would’ve been the easy thing. I hat
If what I’ve always believed is true—that without our loyalties we’re nothing—then our worth is determined by nothing other than the strength of our loyalties. And if I conclude that what I’ve always believed is false—that our worth is determined by something other or more than the strength of our loyalties—I would, according to my current code of loyalty, be doing so out of worthlessness, or snakiness. So what should I trust? The code I’ve always trusted that now rings false, or the urge to abandon that code, which is an urge I’ve always defied with contempt, but which screamed true in the two-hill field, and has continued its screaming ever since? I have to decide. I’m not saying I don’t. If I don’t, I’m a pussy. And I’m not going to get all purple and sobby about it, but except for in those moments prior to choosing between my parents, I have not felt worse than this. I want you to know that. Juvie was cake compared to this, and Slokum’s betrayal an ice-cream sandwich. I’m all backward, Gurion. Most people, they get fucked up the worst when someone else fucks them up. Not me. The only thing that really fucks me up is when I fuck up. I don’t understand any of us.
And I don’t expect you to understand why I betrayed you, but I’m hoping you won’t MISunderstand. I’m telling you I’m your friend, and if you want to hate me for what I failed to do, okay, I get that. I accept it, even. If you hate me, though, Gurion, you’ll be hating a friend—a lousy friend who betrayed you, that is true, but not an enemy, not by a longshot. I don’t want your hatred. An enemy would. An enemy would court it. What I want is your forgiveness. And I guess that’s how I should have started. That would have been the most honest way, to ask you to forgive me for the way that I am—if not for the way I’ve made myself, then for the way I was made. Whichever way you see it. Any way you can forgive me. I’ve been trying to give you one without telling lies.
I know, at least, that I’ve told you no lies.
Your loyal blowhard friend who betrayed you,
Benji Nakamook
The tower of my Tower of Restraint dream explicated, I returned the letter to its envelope. Then I climbed off the hood of the car I’d been sitting on—a maroon Ford Escort I was pretty sure was Botha’s—and made my way out of the parking lot.
Ten steps along, a limo crept past me, a stretched SUV with a jacked rear axel. Its wheels were chrome-spinnered, and its plates read NEWTHING, its custom-made hood-ornament a gold-plated microphone. The men in the back hung cigar smoke out the windows, and when it parked beside the dumpster Blake Acer had bombed—his blood clung like rust to the second WE—I saw they were Boystar’s dad and Chaz.
Chaz waved a hand to beckon to a woman who was chanting, “Unaccept-able,” into her celly. She stepped out of her heels and ran tiptoed to the limo. She leaned through the smoke and kissed Chaz on the cheek, and it was boring so I looked away.
The lot had gotten busier. More roadies hauled more implements down the semi’s tongue-like ramp: speakers, footlights, a soundboard. Techs inside newsvans keyed at rugged-looking laptops; dish antennas rotated and bowed. A curious bandkid leaked gooze out both nostrils while a high-haired Ashley did a curtsy at a cameraman. Some Highway 61 guys fought about a chapstick and three talking heads traded sugar-free chiclets, smiling like it hurt when smitten Jennys turned to gape. Two of these Jennys manned a table at the curb. Across their foreheads, in lipstick, was INDIANS. In front of their table, girls stood ten-deep, waiting in line to get their own foreheads INDIANS’d.
As I approached the front entrance, June leapt from the shrubs. She bit my shoulder, and I called her Jellybean and pinched her hip til she wiggled. The smell of her hair got me warm and relaxed, and we bumped each other sideways as we staggered at the building like our legs were manacled.
I think I’m friends with Benji again, I told her.
“You never weren’t,” she said.
I said, How long do pep rallies last here?
“A period.”
Good, I said. Can you get sent to Nurse Clyde a few minutes after third starts? I’ll do the same thing and we’ll meet up like yesterday.
June said she’d do it and we entered the school. The Sentinel halted us just past his booth. No surprise there—we’d both ditched detention. “Two of you: Office,” the Sentinal said.
June said, “You office.”
Jerry didn’t hear. He asked me, “How’s your mom?”
I flashed him the Look of The End.
He pretended confusion, and we followed him through Main Hall.
Boystar flyers were all over the place, taped to anything flat and stationary. Support pillars were plastered with red and white construction paper. Matching streamers hung in clusters from the ceiling like curtains. Jerry before us, we tore as we went. Helium balloons nodded and swayed, the taut lengths of ribbon that anchored them to locker-vents angling sharp in our wake. June freed a balloon and pulled out its plug. She aimed at my face, let fly, and I ducked it. It spiraled six feet and fizzled on an Ashley. She glowered at June, and June flicked the plug at her. The Ashley’s INDIANS went crumply.
Just outside the Office, sitting on a dolly, was the spotlight I’d seen in the parking lot. Inside, Brodsky’s door was closed. Empty ISS desks crowded the floor, and Pinge was smiling at a notepad. She wrote something down for a big, blushing roadie, who was leaning one-handed on the border of her blotter.
We sat in the waiting chairs we’d fallen in love in. June put my hand on the weapon in her pocket. She narrowed her eyes and bit on her lip, digging her nails in my wrist.
Miss Pinge slid the notepad across her desk.
The roadie pushed his bangs back and asked of her softly, “This your home or your celly, ladyfriend?”
“Shh,” she said, seeing us.
The roadie said, “What?”
Pinge chinned air in her own direction and the roadie leaned way over the desk. This blocked Pinge’s sightline, I saw my moment, and I kissed June’s neck and the kiss made her gasp.
I’d started by her ear and was going toward her shoulder, about to, with my free hand, squeeze her thigh so she’d gasp more, but a guy with a soulpatch was standing in the doorway.
He lifted one lip-corner and gave me the cockeye = “I can see what you’re doing, there, but I won’t tell.”
I liked him.
“The hell, Raymond,” he said to the one who loved Pinge called Raymond. “We’re chewed we don’t get a move on already.”
“Just a minute,” said Raymond.
“Are you the lighting guys?” June asked the soulpatch.
“We’re the lighting grunts, cutiepie.”
“Installation experts,” said Raymond.
“We push the lights on dollies, hoist the lights on guywires, secure the lights to their end-locales, and finally we plug them in. After that we go smoke in the truck.”
“We also gotta calibrate—”
“We don’t gotta calibrate nothing. The only other thing we do is what I already told you, but backward to the truck. That’s why you stay in school there, cutie. So’s when you meet someone you want to date with, you don’t feel pressured to prevaricate about calibrating when in fact there’s no calibrating you do.”
“Jeez, Tony,” said Raymond.
“Hey,” said the soulpatched Tony, chinning the air at Miss Pinge. “She cares about you don’t calibrate? Then pretty or no, she’s the wrong girl for you. Let me tell you, Miss: Raymond here is a progressive rock and roll musician of the temporarily defunct funk-metal genre. His talent is genius-par. World was fair, he’d be rich and famous already. We both would cause he’s my cousin and we got a band together, Blaine the Minority, and I’m not so bad at bass he’d ditch me once he made it, but even if I was that bad at bass, he wouldn’t ditch me, because he??
“Excuse me, sir,” said someone behind him. Tony moved and I saw it was Shpritzy.
Miss Pinge sent Raymond away with a hand-pat. Tony followed at his heels and made wet kissing sounds.
The Five had entered the Office with Berman.
The Levinson told me, “A friend of ours: Berman.”
Berman chinned air at June and gave her a wink. June chinned air back and did not give a wink, and that might have reassured me, but for all I knew June couldn’t wink—I knew I couldn’t wink—so for all I knew, she’d have winked were she able. It happened, however, that she was holding my hand, and she certainly could’ve given it a reassuring squeeze, but no squeeze came, and I wasn’t reassured. Reassured of what, though? That she didn’t still like him? Well… yes. Except why should I want reassurance of that? They’d broken up. They’d never kissed. They didn’t speak. Above all, June and I were in love. I wanted reassurance because she’d gotten winked at, but it wasn’t her fault that she’d gotten winked at. It was Berman’s fault. He shouldn’t have winked. He shouldn’t have gotten me wanting reassurance. Especially because there could be no reassurance. That’s what was chomsky. To think that a hand-squeeze would reassure was chomsky. Had June squeezed my hand, I wouldn’t feel reassured; I’d only wonder why she thought I wanted reassurance. I’d worry that she thought I wanted reassurance because Berman’s wink was, in fact, worth worrying about. = If June had squeezed my hand, I’d want more reassurance. And I saw it was good that she hadn’t squeezed my hand. Which isn’t to say I stopped wanting reassurance, but that all at once I saw what needed doing, not to me or for me, but by me: I had to tell Berman not to wink at my girlfriend. Had he not been an Israelite, I’d’ve thought of that sooner, gone straight to confrontation. Instead of burning sweaty seconds lamely sorting useless feelings, I’d have risen to my feet and said, Don’t you fucken wink at her.