The Instructions by Adam Levin

  Arrows made of cardboard were taped to the floor to form a path. They led from the locker-room to centercourt. In the tipoff circle, just a couple yards north of the chair-row, two cardboard squares were taped to the floor on either side of the halfcourt line. The locker-room-side one had a star of Boystar on it. The side-exit-side one said MOKUS. I didn’t see Scott anywhere and I thought that was suck. He could memorize a song after hearing it once, and I was pretty sure that they wouldn’t have him dance, so they probably didn’t need him to rehearse, but still: if the basketballers got to skip first period, they were bancers for not letting Scott skip too. And they should have got his name right, the dentists. It was probably Boystar who gave them the spelling.

  And there he was. He kept bursting from the locker-room to pose before the bleachers. Each time, he stopped at a different arrow on the path. Cameramen milled, coordinating angles. Chaz Black clapped and Boystar’s parents made suggestions about his posture. I thought about shooting him, decided against it. Decided against it because now I could do it later, better, more repeatedly. I would not be short of chances now. Kiss my girlfriend? Murmur in her ear? Even stepped regular and busted every time, I could give him six beatings before getting expelled. Every day we’d have Lunch together, Recess too.

  Lunch-Recess, I thought. That was another thing. I’d no longer be in the same room as my friends for class, but there was always Lunch-Recess. Rather, there wasn’t always Lunch-Recess. Now there was Lunch-Recess; now I would have irrevocable cafeteria privilege. Now, whenever my friends in the Cage were also granted cafeteria privilege, we could eat together, speak outdoors in the schoolyard together, plot without whispering, no Botha down our necks. Maybe I could lead from exile. To do so would be hard, but to believe it was impossible was way too dramatic.

  And I saw it wasn’t yet time to smash the gym clock, either. It was not yet time to get caught. I had often told myself there would be a time to get caught, and I had always been certain that the time wasn’t yet, but then last night I’d decided the time for stealth was over; if the time for stealth was over, though, why shouldn’t I get caught? Because the end of the time for stealth was only over when it came to the scholars? Why should that be? Why should it be different with me and them than with me and the rest of the world? Why shouldn’t I just rush in there and smash the clock and smash the Boystar, smash everything I could til the Arrangement put a stop to me?

  Because, I thought, they’d put a stop to you, dramaface; they’d put a stop to you before you could finish.

  That was one potentially good answer—good if a time was to come when the Arrangement wouldn’t put a stop to me.

  But what made me so sure that time would come? What made me so sure Adonai was ultimately with me? Why was it that when something horrible happened, I read it as encouragement from Adonai to do more of whatever I’d been doing before the horrible thing happened? Why was it that instead of thinking I was being punished for what I’d done, I thought I was being punished for what I hadn’t done? for where I’d fallen short? When I got kicked out of Schechter and Northside and MLK and when those Canaanites stoned the rabbi at the Fairfield Street Synagogue and when I got banned from the homes of all the scholars and when Slokum humiliated me and when I saw my father get trampled, why was my first thought You need to bring the messiah faster? Why wasn’t it You need to stop trying to bring the messiah so fast? or even You need to stop trying to bring the messiah? let alone This has nothing to do with Adonai, for there is no Adonai?

  And was I even truly wondering about this stuff, there in the doorway? I was asking myself the questions, yes, and I had asked them before, thousands of times, and supplied the arguments against the beliefs toward which I tended as best as I could, but before, as now, the questions seemed merely ponderous, the arguments no better or worse than the ones opposing them, the ones I held.

  Can arguments against tenets of faith do anything other than exalt faith among the faithful? Did the faithful ever say anything to the purveyors of such arguments other than, “Yes, maybe what you say makes sense, but I disagree nonetheless. That is how strong my faith is. Thank you for testing it. Now I know better where I stand”? If they ever said different, I’d never heard it. It wasn’t so much different from when Jelly told me I shouldn’t love June because she made violent drawings, or Slokum said it was impossible to love her. I loved her. I just did. Despite, regardless, or otherwise.

  Your defiances showed you where you truly stood, but they didn’t tell you if you should stand there. Yet they seemed to. They seemed to tell you you should stand there. Why else would you be standing there, despite?

  My head was spinning so hard. My chemicals didn’t know what to do with me.

  I ducked back into B-Hall and headed for the Cage, still glad, still attempting to resist it, and my thoughts spun back to where they’d left off before I’d decided it was time to finally smash the gym clock:

  Even if it was logically possible to fake yourself out while suspecting you were doing it, and even if I was doing exactly that, could I be sure about which part I might be faking? Could I be sure I was faking my resistance to the gladness? Maybe the fake part was the gladness itself. Maybe neither were fake, and I was as torn as I felt, and a scar would form, and the scar, though unpretty, would do what scars do in weak stories of coming of age: protect the torn part from getting torn again so easy. I never liked those stories, the coming-of-age ones with scars. I liked to read them fine, but they were tricks. They were tricks to make adults feel like their sellouts were wise compromises, or at least unavoidable. As if you would go to Hell for helping Nigger Jims. As if Goliaths weren’t slayable.

  But again, though, I really had no choice. Rather, I only had two. Get expelled or be in class with June. In either case, this was my last day in the Cage. There was nothing I could do about it. It wasn’t up to me.

  And I started to feel relieved. I started to feel like I’d felt just the morning before, when the scholars failed to show and I thought they’d betrayed me. It was a relief to decide you didn’t have to decide. It was a relief to have faith in immutability, a relief to lose faith in your ability to change something, even when it was something you’d wished you could change. It was a relief to be imposed on intractably. Acceptance, if not brave, was at least a relief. That was the trick of it. This was the trick of it: If Brodsky had offered me the chance to get out of the Cage, I would have refused. I would not have abandoned my friends, yet despite and because of that I was glad he hadn’t offered. And despite and because of that I wasn’t glad that I was glad. In the end, though, I was more glad than I wasn’t, and that wasn’t up to me either.

  I’d deliver a farewell speech to the Side during lunch. I’d tell them I was being removed from the Cage because Botha feared me. I’d tell them that Botha was mistaken to believe my removal a solution to the problems of the Arrangement; that soon, just as long as the Side stayed the Side, he and they would both understand that. I’d tell them I was with them all the way, but all the way for me was not good enough for them, because what they needed was a leader in the Cage. And then I would have to put someone in charge. The Side would forgive Benji for the two-hill field—I’d make sure of that—but forgiving wasn’t the same thing as trusting, which was suck because he’d otherwise have been the best one to take over. So Vincie or Brooklyn. Brooklyn would shortly get out of the Cage—he had less business being there than anyone else and, once I was gone, he’d stay quiet til the end of his two-week observation period, and Brodsky would gladly put him back in normal classes—so the leader’d be Vincie. Vincie’d be the new leader, and Vincie’d be good, and if Vincie got booted before Botha got crushed, Ben-Wa would take over—Leevon was definitely more charismatic, and Jelly was smarter, but Leevon wouldn’t speak and Jelly probably wouldn’t risk being cleaved from Benji—and Ben-Wa would be good, he would, he’d be good, they all looked at him different now, they’d seen him reborn. If Ben-Wa got booted, though… Then I didn’t
know. Hopefully by that time, the choice would be obvious, at least to the Side (I imagined other kids would step up by then), so I’d make it clear that if Vincie got booted, Ben-Wa’s first task would be to choose two successors. And I’d finish by telling them… telling them what? I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to tell them that it might not work. I didn’t want to tell them that I had my doubts about where they’d be without me—that Vincie might prove too explosive and reactionary, and Ben-Wa, despite having demonstrated all kinds of strength still seemed pretty likely to break down and cry at crucial junctures, and if those two were the best I could leave in charge, then… No. Who was to say where the Side would be without me? For all I knew, they’d be better off without me. For all I knew, they’d do better with a leader who was quicker to explode or break down, right? That is what I told myself, and I’d tell them none of it. I’d just tell them I’d miss them. That’s how I’d close. If nothing else, it was true. It was true I would miss them. Even if a loud part of me was looking forward to missing them, that didn’t make it untrue; that didn’t diminish what it would mean for me to miss them, did it? Maybe, actually… But it was still first period. Lunch wasn’t for hours. I had hours to determine the right way to close this lunchtime farewell speech, and after lunch I’d still be in the Cage—I’d be there until the end of the schoolday. So if my close at lunch was suck, I’d figure out another one, deliver it in C-hall, before detention started, and plus I was forgetting: there were good things to come between now and lunch. Before it came time to give that speech, we’d all hear Main Man sing. Who knows what that might do for us? And after that? After hearing Main Man sing? After hearing Main Man sing, I’d fake sick to Botha and get a pass to the Nurse. I’d take June to the two-hill field and meet the scholars. I’d deliver scripture, my father would be safe, everything would be fine. Everything was fine. Fine and fine and safe and fine.

  Someone behind me said my name and I spun. Isadore Momo. Across his forehead in Darker was DAMAGE.

  “For to payback,” he said, pointing at the word. “For your protection and Vincie’s. We wear it so the Big Ending has blame for your bombings. To protect you. We vow we wear it until we have destroyed the Blonde Lonnie and made of the BryGuy a puddle.”

  He pronounced the second “b” in bombings. I embraced him and went to the Cage.

  On the way, I saw the thing Maholtz must have been referring to—“I can’t waint til Bam seends what you did,” he’d said—burned into the face of the 2-Hall juice machine. It made me even gladder, even less glad to be so.

  BARNUM

  SLOKUM

  DIES

  FRIDAY

  Art was the one decent class in the Cage. No one had to sit at a carrel and, except for Botha, Miss Gleem was the only robot present. She’d lay tarps down before school started and bring a huge metal wheelycart with boxes of supplies. She’d let us make whatever we wanted, and since the Tape rule and the Face Forward rule couldn’t be enforced on students who weren’t confined to carrels, Botha had less to monitor, which got him disarranged. Half the time he didn’t even step us for talking. He’d mostly just sit with his feet up on his desk, polishing his claw with breath-steam and a shirttail. He’d even let Miss Gleem answer the doorbell.

  I handed her my pass and followed her to the cart. She said, “What kind of supplies would you like?” She was pissed at me.

  Nails and screws and wire, I told her.

  She’d have usually joked around with me after I said something like that, but she was pissed at me so she didn’t. I hadn’t even seen her since Wednesday detention. She’d probably decided I was a bad influence on June. I hoped so—a thought like that would mean June was out of her doghouse. Whatever she was thinking, though, it didn’t make her smile. She handed me charcoal sticks and cream-colored construction paper.

  I told her, Gold haircombs look tacky on women under forty.

  She snapped, “My combs aren’t gold, Gurion.”

  I know, I said. I said, They’re fake tortoiseshell, which is better than real tortoiseshell because no tortoise had to die to complement your natural coloring, which is exactly what your combs do.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you to—”

  You don’t need to be that sorry, I said.

  “Sorry,” she said. She handed me a box of crayons. I had spoken like a visual thinker, and all was forgiven. “Now go draw something amazing,” she said.

  I shook the crayon-box like a spaz, like I was excited by our prospects, me and all those colors and what we could accomplish together. I was suck at drawing, though. I was nearly the suckest in the Cage, and Miss Gleem knew it. She knew as well as I did that I couldn’t draw anything amazing, but she pretended to believe I could because she thought that having the ability to draw well was as important to her students as it was to her, and she wanted to protect me from the knowledge of my suckness. I pretended so I could protect her from the knowledge that she couldn’t protect me. The goodness of our intentions was in direct correlation to the heights from which we condescended to each other.

  I looked around for where to sit. Ben-Wa Wolf was shooting rubberbands at a line of origami swans on the radiator. Chunkstyle and Boshka bent pipecleaners into dolphins near the girls’ room. Next to the door to Call-Me-Sandy’s, the Janitor flashed homemade flashcards at the Flunky. GUM, read one of them. “Gun,” said the Flunky. RUN read another. “Gun,” said the Flunky.

  Nakamook was under a carrel with Jelly by the northeast corner. I went there.

  Kids stole glances and whispered to each other.

  Benji was dotting tastebuds on the tongue of a bull. The bull was eating a dying lamb. Off to the side, a ram scraped his hoof in the dirt, about to charge the bull.

  Benji was almost as good at drawing as Leevon, who was the best in the Cage.

  I tapped his shoulder, and when he held out his fist I banged it = Nakamook is my boy, do not talk of us.

  The Side of Damage stopped whispering.

  I said to Benji: Bulls are vegetarians.

  “So what?” said Jelly.

  I said, No bull would eat a lamb.

  “No real bull would,” Nakamook said.

  That’s what I’m saying.

  “Real bulls don’t wear watchcaps either, though,” he said.

  Watchcaps? I said.

  He drew the bull a watchcap.

  “Look at Botha,” said Jelly. “Pretending he doesn’t care we’re talking.”

  I looked. Botha winked at me, showed me his thumb.

  Let’s not get carried away here, I thought.

  “What’s he doing?” Benji said. “Why’d he do that?”

  He’s railroading me, I said, and he thinks I don’t know it. He thinks I think he likes me.

  “What do you mean railroading you?”

  I remembered he and Jelly hadn’t returned to the Cage after leaving for the nurse on Thursday, so I caught them up on what happened, then told them what Brodsky had said.

  So this is my last day in the Cage, I said.

  “What’s the rub, then?” said Benji. “Back to fifth grade?”

  The rub? I said. Fifth grade?

  “You said the Monitor was railroading you.”

  He’s kicking me out of the Cage, I said.

  “That’s not kicked out, what you just told me, Gurion. That’s getting freed.”

  “Congratulations,” said Jelly.

  We won’t be in class together anymore, I said.

  “We’re not in class together now,” said Benji. “We’re in the Cage together. And there’s always lunch, and Botha can’t keep you outta the cafeteria anymore.”

  I said, The Side of Damage—

  “If they’re worth your friendship, they’ll be happy for you. Stop making that crazy face and listen: don’t smart yourself out of joy. Whatever Botha’s trying to do, it doesn’t matter. This is great for you. I was thinking just yesterday morning how suck it is that you only got to see
June after school. I was on the bus, hating that I had to come here, and then I remembered I’d get to see Jelly, and that didn’t just make it okay, you know? I got psyched to come here. And I thought how I would tell you that, and then I decided not to, because of how it might sound like I was rubbing it in your face, that I got to see my girlfriend all day long, and you barely got to see yours. But now I can tell you, cause you’ll have the same thing. Think about how great that is.”

  Jelly touched his hand then, and I left them alone.

  Leevon Ray sat under the teacher cluster, colorworking a flipbook about him and a ninja taking a bike ride together. Balanced on the back pegs of Leevon’s BMX, the ninja threw Chinese stars at oncoming pedestrians. The starred pedestrians all fell backward, clutching their starred parts and filling dialogue bubbles with exclamation points and wingdings til Leevon bunny-hopped them. Each pedestrian was fatter than the last, and the bellies of the fallen bodies grew progressively higher and harder to jump. Finally there came a man so fat his herniated navel touched the upper border of the page when he fell. The ninja leapt from the pegs in the direction of the viewer and Leevon’s eyes popped out of his face and the flipbook ended.

  Next to the 3-D Leevon lay Vincie. He was the one kid in the Cage more suck at drawing than me. Neither of our circles were ever very round-looking, but mine, at least, didn’t have tails. Vincie’s resembled 6s or 9s and sometimes 6s on top of 9s. He was using a ruler-corner to carve STARLA from a sheet of brown clay. Beside him, Ronrico dumped sparkles from a jar on Mangey’s rubber-cement-slathered jeans. Mangey discreetly sucked glue off her fingertips. I got on the floor and asked them where Main Man was. Leevon snatched the second A off Vincie’s STARLA and started rolling it in his palms.

  “The fuck!?” shout-whispered Vincie.

  “Scott’s been in the bathroom since before the tone,” said Ronrico.