The Instructions (131 page)

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 char-coal 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 comple-ment 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.

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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 suck-est 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.

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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.”

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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 1237

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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.

Leevon held out a log-shape.

I looked at the clock. 9:32. Art had started twenty-seven minutes before that. I thought of Main Man’s shrunken cham-1238

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bers. He’d been so nervous by the bus circle, maybe his pump couldn’t take it. If he’d had a heart attack in the bathroom, no one would know.

I knocked on the boys’ room door. Nothing. I tried the knob—it was unlocked.

Main Man knelt beside the toilet, spitting. He said, “I think I’ll be okay, Gurion. I have to sing.”

I said, You don’t sound like yourself.

“All the guns are ripe for the plucking,” he said. “Twice smitten, one dies but once, yet still we burn the ashes and annihilate all wreckage. Wherever we go we bring the monkey with us.”

Okay, I said.

He wretched and I kneeled next to him. “I need to do this for a little while,” he said. “These webs everywhere, green and then purple, but then they go away. The spiders aren’t real because I am real but I wish they were real so I could squash them. Once I get the second one down, I can sing til everything disappears, so just please don’t look at me while I do this.”

I’ll stay til you feel better, I said.

“It gets me all ambulance, spiders out the eyeballs.”

You’re gonna sing great, I said. I said, You’re the best singer in school and you have the best voice.

Mookus puked, said, “Boystar.” His puke didn’t smell normal. It smelled like a bakery on Christmas.

Your voice
kills
Boystar’s, I said.

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“Soon,” he said. “Please go,” he said. “Spiders dance meanly and there’s no place like home.”

I lingered by the sink, washing my hands so I could watch over him, but he asked me to leave again, so I left.

“You need to shave yourself,” said Mangey when I sat down next to her.

“You do got some hairs there,” Ronrico said. “I think they’re good, though. Maybe a little long. You probably shouldn’t grow

’em out til you have some more of them.”

“Like a thousand more of them,” said Mangey.

“Okay everyone,” Miss Gleem said. “Roll up.” She meant the tarps.

The first time we had Art, me and Benji held the rolled-up tarps in our pits and jousted. Shouting “Charge!” and running across a room to knock someone down with a lance made of canvas looked like so much fun that, even after Botha stepped us for it, other kids picked up other tarps and did it. Vincie and Leevon.

Mangey and Jesse Ritter. Even Ronrico and the Janitor, who’d been our enemies at the time. And so I’d thought we’d all joust every time we had Art, but stuff that fun rarely happens more than once.

The Side of Damage returned art supplies to the wheely-cart and rolled the tarps without incident.

While that was happening, the doorbell rang. Botha, forgetting Miss Gleem had his keyring, went to answer it. At the 1240

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door, he patted himself down until Miss Gleem said his name, his first name. “Victor,” she said. And then he performed this stream of completely unBothalike actions. He spun on his heel, smiled, pointed at the keyring, and beckoned with his poin-terfinger = “Toss the keyring, sexy.” Then, when Miss Gleem tossed the keys underhanded, Botha used his claw to hook the ring overhanded and finished with a bow, flourishing an invisible feathered cap.

He was flirting.

Main Man was hallucinating. He had come out of the bathroom and was standing beside me, eyes shut tight, pressing a powdery orange ball against his lips. The ball was no larger than a shooter marble, but Scott’s mouth wouldn’t open to let it in.

Benji walked over, saying, “What is that?”

“It’s the second one,” Scott said.

The second one what? I said.

“The second medicine to make me sing perfectly.”

“You look like shit, Scott,” said Vincie, approaching us.

“What’s the medicine called?” Benji said.

“I can’t remember,” Scott said. “Boystar eats four before every perform-ance. I’ll eat this one when the ghosts stop stapling my lips.”

“Boystar gave you that?” Benji said.

“Yes. And it was nice of him. It’s the secret of all his success at singing good and he let me have the secret. It’s the whole key 1241

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to the castle of girls peeing on themselves because that is the purpose of singing. You have to eat four of them if you’re the Boystar because he’s not as good as me at singing, he said, and also because he’s taller. All I need to eat is three for the girls to bathroom because I’m already as good as if I just ate one, just by being me, not just because I’m short. I’m trying.”

I swiped the ball from his hand.

“He said it was for me,” Scott said, reaching for it.

I sniffed it. It smelled Christmasy like his puke had. I touched it with my tongue-tip. Bitter. It was nutmeg. And then it was powder, falling out the hole at the bottom of my fist.

This is amateur poison, I said. It’s what’s making you sick.

Nakamook bit a thumb-knuckle til it bled.

“That fuck,” said Vincie.

Scott knelt before the powder at our feet.

“Fucken fuck!” said Vincie.

“It was mine,” Scott whispered down at the powder.

I tapped his shoulder. When he looked up, I placed a ball of nothing in his palm. He popped the ball of nothing in his mouth, smiling, and swallowed.

He gave me the third one and I put it in my pocket, replaced it in his palm with another ball of nothing. Again he popped nothing in his mouth and swallowed.

“All done,” he said. “You fix everything.”

I heard gratitude, Nakamook an imperative.

“We will,” he told Main Man.

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“That too,” Main Man said, but a tear bubbled over the scoop of his lashes. “Will I get to sing first?” he asked me.

You’ll get to sing last, I told him, and wiped the tear with my sleeve.

The woman who’d rung the doorbell was a Boystar staffer with a headset. She led Scott out the door by the hand. “Alert makeup,”

she said into her celly. “The talent’s a little bit monochrome.

Over.” Miss Gleem followed them, pushing her wheely-cart.

Botha locked the Cage down behind her. I know the announcements had started by then, but I don’t know what they said. I couldn’t hear a word of them. I couldn’t hear anything.

Then I heard the end-of-class tone.

I went to the door to wait for Botha to open it. Vincie and Nakamook and Jelly followed me. Botha had returned to his desk.

He was sitting on it. I looked his way and, again, he winked at me.

“Why are we standing here?” Vincie said.

What do you mean? I said.

“We’re going to the pep rally,” Benji said.

“Since when?”

“I don’t know—Brodsky told Gurion this morning, though.”

Wait, I said. I said, Botha didn’t tell you guys?

“No,” they said.

Come on, I said to the Side of Damage. Line up, I said.

They got behind us.

“Where we going?” someone said.

We’re going to hear Main Man sing, I said.

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To Botha, I said: We’re gonna be late.