The Instructions (89 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

they weren’t so much fingers and robots of the Arrangement; maybe they were the Arrangement’s fiefs and draftees.

But then maybe they had nothing in their hearts. Or maybe their hearts were confused. I couldn’t see into their hearts with any more clarity than I could Slokum’s face.

Chunkstyle sent the note back over the wall.

Anna Boshka is ten times prettier, maybe even twelve times prettier, and I will try to fall in love with her eventually, but before I can move on I need Barbara Mingle to forgive me for my uncomely and inexplicable behavior that was untoward at her.

I can’t wait to tell everyone to be a defiance. Thank you for the privilege. Down with the Arrangement!

I decided it didn’t matter what was in the teachers’ hearts. At least not yet. Whatever was in their hearts, they never once protected us from Botha. And they could have. Or at least they could have tried to. Even if they were fiefs and draftees, their toil and their soldier-ing was good for the Arrangement. That was what mattered.

Soon the end-of-class tone complained and Miss Pinge’s voice came through the speaker to introduce the announcement-maker.

To be an announcement-maker, you had to have stayed below step 4 and gotten nothing lower than a C for the entire quarter prior to the one during which you’d do the announcement. Also, you had to write your own introduction.

Miss Pinge said, “Performing today’s announcements will be Tanya Taylor.” Then she read the introduction: “‘Tanya is in the 828

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eighth grade, and has made honor roll every quarter since she’s been at Aptakisic. Last year she won bronze at the State Science Fair, and this year she aims to bring home the gold. And don’t worry, Girls’ Varsity Volleyball—Tanya isn’t talking just about science. As team captain, she’s going to apply herself on the court, too. She wants to give a shout-out to the team, and as for the rest of you Indians, she wants you to know that this year will be a great year for Aptakisic. And in case any of the rest of the junior highs in the conference are listening, she wants to tell them that they’re gonna get served, and when Tanya says served, she means on the court. So bring your A-games, Rand Middle and Twin Groves and Longfellow Middle, bring your A-games Sandberg and Frost—bring your A-games all you want, but understand the curve’s getting blown by Ms. Taylor and company. Understand how even though it’s your A-game you’re bringing, you’re a C-student anyway because you’re coming into the house of Tanya, and even a ten-ton semi looks small when it’s parked in front of the Sears Tower, unless it’s packed with explosives, and it’s not! Go Indians!’ And here she is: Tanya Taylor.”

“Um, thank you, Miss Pinge,” said Tanya.

I had no idea who she was, but she didn’t sound like the person who had written her introduction. She sounded scared, and she kept mumbling and screwing up the punctuation of the announcements.

“Today’s big news. Is that tomorrow, at the pep-rally for the 829

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opening. Game of the basketball season Boystar and a special guest will. Perform a song off the new Boystar album
Emotional Eyes
and the performance will be filmed for use in the first Boystar video we’ll be dancing in our seats and—”

“The special guest is me!” shouted Mookus.

“Lies,” said the Flunky.

“Foog,” said Nakamook.

“Quoydanawnsinz!” snapped Botha.

“Is it true, Scott?” said Eliyahu.

“Yes!” said Mookus.

“Quoydanawnsinz during nouncemints!” said Botha.

“Congratulations,” said Eliyahu.

I nearly said congratulations, too, but then I didn’t. Neither did Nakamook or anyone else. It was complicated. It was like my dad and the Drucker case. If the Side of Damage had been more like Flowers, we would have all said congratulations because Main Man was our friend and something good was going to happen for him. We weren’t more like Flowers, though. We were more like me.

“…less happy note if anyone has any information on who has been destroying the school’s property which is a criminal offense then please let us know it will be confident… confidench—” said Tanya, who was interrupted by a scuffling noise, and then the sound of Brodsky clearing his throat and then the distant voice of Miss Pinge saying, “Sorry, Leonard, I must have spaced out when I was typing it up and put your part under—”

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“Thank you, Tanya,” Mr. Brodsky said into the microphone.

“You have all seen the graffiti,” he said. “You have all seen the scoreboard. These are acts of vandalism. Vandalism is a criminal offense, and it will not be tolerated. It is our first priority to find out who has been vandalizing our school, and we
will
find out.

“If anyone has any information regarding the identities of the vandals and would like to share that information, you will have my deepest respect, as well as my pledge to keep your name in the strictest confidence. And if any of those responsible come to my office and admit what they’ve done, provided they share me with the names of those with whom they share responsibility, they will be shown leniency.”

The mike clicked off.

“What’s leniency?” someone said.

“Nothing worth dying for,” said Nakamook.

BLB

A U G H E R

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M

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During five-minute free-swim at the end of Gym, Isadore Momo got a nosebleed in the pool. He was doing the deadman’s float with his eyes closed.

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I one-hand hung beneath the springboard and shivered, watching the blood change shape. Gravity pulled threads from the black-red swirl under Momo’s face, and the chlorine thinned out and broke the threads to kill between the cellwalls. Ripples spread and stretched the mess wider.

The first two times Momo turned his face for air, he kept his eyes closed, then put his head back onto the cloud he’d made and bled in it some more.

The third time, he opened his eyes and said, “No!”

His terror and his foreign accent made it sound like “Heneh!”and he swam away from the blood, fast, like he thought it was the blood of someone else. He kicked the water loudly and people turned to see, but the blood kept following him and he was too afraid to understand why.

Someone said, “Hermaphrodite.”

I saw it was Blonde Lonnie Boyd.

Momo got out of the pool and Blonde Lonnie laughed and repeated it. “Hermaphrodite.”

It was funny that Momo tried to escape his own blood and it was funny that Blonde Lonnie Boyd thought hermaphrodite meant bleeder, but Blonde Lonnie wasn’t laughing at either of those things, and I didn’t want to laugh with him, especially not against a chubby kid who could barely speak English and never showered til the locker-room was empty, so I didn’t laugh at all.

Other kids did, though, many of them Shovers. Blonde Lonnie was the third highest scorer on the basketball team, right behind 832

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Bam and Co-Captain Baxter,* and those who believed good basketballing was a tour de force would try to please Lonnie Boyd by laughing with him. It made him even less funny than how he started. He’d used to just be an unfunny guy who made mean, unfunny jokes sometimes, but after a lot of people had laughed along with him, he began to think he was hilarious and, on top of the mean, unfunny jokes, he started making this one same joke over and over again, a tagline-joke stolen from the comedian Damon Wayans, who used it on an old TV show called
In Living Color.

Lonnie’s favorite way to deliver the joke was to use it as an answer to a question Desormie would ask the class when he wanted to make someone feel worthless. A lot of times in Gym, when someone defied the Arrangement, Desormie would blow his whistle for attention and say something to the class, like, “People!

When he misses the shuttlecock, Ronrico Asparagus whacks his racket against his knee in anger, like it’s the racket’s fault, or maybe even the shuttlecock’s fault, when really what it is is that it’s his fault for not having the skills that would prevent him from missing the perfectly good shuttlecock with the perfectly good racket that he’s ruining little by little, and one of you guys—or ladies—whoever it is of you who next time gets assigned that

* For most intents and purposes, Blonde Lonnie might as well have been Co-Captain Baxter—both were blonde and both were tall, both were bullies and A-team starters, both of their mouths seemed to sneer in repose—which accounts for why Reuters would so often miscaption those stills from the videos of the Damage Proper in which both would shortly appear, but Blonde Lonnie hadn’t picked on Eliyahu of Brooklyn whereas Co-Captain Baxter had knocked off his hat, and so, for Eliyahu, to whom that meant a lot at the time, and thus for those scholars of coming generations whose commentaries’

focus will be Eliyhau, distinctions between the two blondes need be made.

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racket he’s damaging… When that racket breaks in your hands, it’s gonna be who’s holding that racket who’s gonna pay the fiddler for the cost of that racket, and not just the money fiddler who is our athletic supplies supplier, but the fiddler of point and serve, which is to say the rules of badminton, and possibly—as a result of the impending loss of the match that is the thing that would result from a racket that breaks in the middle of a point in what could very well turn out to be a tie-breaking situation—a third fiddler who is the fiddler of grades who is me the teacher who does not give A’s for effort but only victory and who’s the fiddler who’s gonna get paid by whoever next time gets assigned that racket when it breaks, even though it’s Ronrico’s fault for getting it in the kinda shape that makes you break it by accident.

Is gonna get paid by you. In grades. So what do we think about the way Ronrico’s whacking his racket? Is the question. Except let me better yet put that important question another way that doesn’t individuate, since what I don’t mean to do is make it seem like Ronrico is bad because he is Ronrico, but instead that he’s bad because of how he keeps
behaving
like Ronrico. So the newer, better version of the question I’d like to ask you guys and ladies today is: What do we think about whacking rackets?

In general.” And as soon as Desormie was finished talking, he would make the noise “Tch” = “The response is obvious,” and that is when Blonde Lonnie would answer Desormie’s question with the stolen joke:

“Lonnie don’t play that.”

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And all his mooks and stooges would laugh. Sometimes, Lonnie thought it was even more hilarious to be around Lonnie than usual and, instead of saying, “Lonnie don’t play that,” he would say, “
Funny
Lonnie don’t play that,” or even “Funny Lonnie don’t play that,
friend
.” And that is why the people who would laugh began to call him Funny Lonnie and Funny Lonniefriend.

None of them were willing to call a nipple a nipple, though, let alone Lonnie, who, if he were truly funny, would have made lots of jokes that had to do with nipples. He had an extra on the left he was always pinching, but he called it a mole and no one ever argued.

“Hermaphrodite,” Lonnie said a third time, pointing at Momo, pinch-ing the extra.

The laughers laughed louder. Their laughter echoed and Desormie came.

“Everyone outta the pool,” he said. “We got blood. Class dismissed.”

“Come on, girls,” Miss Kimble said. Miss Kimble was stack-ing kick-floats in the kick-float cage. She was one of the few robots in school who was dumber than Ron Desormie. She’d do whatever he wanted and wink at him while nodding her fluffy head, like there was a very deep understanding you could have of what Desormie meant when he said stuff like “Gather up the bats and the bases,” and she was the only one in sight who had that understanding. She led a bunch of the girls back to the locker-room.

Desormie said, “I said outta the pool, Maccabee.”

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I stared at the blood while I counted to seven and got a little hypnotized thinking how the way the chlorine made the blood harmless to animals and useless to hemophiliacs was by over-cleansing it. Cleaning it to death.

The water near the blood looked shinier than the other water, and by five-one-thousand my eyes were putting auras on the halogens and my forehead felt empty, but at seven-one-thousand, I snapped myself out of the trance. I reached overhead with my dangling hand and pull-upped into a backflip onto the springboard. Then I dove deep and swam across the bottom to the ladder.

A crowd of laughers—mostly guys, but also some of the seventh-grade Jennys—stood together in the shape of an eyebrow over the pupil that was Isadore Momo. The laughers all pointed at him while he knelt on the tiles with his head back, pinching his nose. They wanted to see if they could get him to cry or change face-color. They wanted to make him embarrassed. Blonde Lonnie Boyd was the eyebrow’s apex. He had the longest finger of all the ones that pointed.

Momo didn’t seem to care about any of them. Even though he’d let his own blood chase him in the water, he held his nose calmly now, and didn’t cry, and I wished he was on the Side of Damage.

One of the laughers said, “Hermaphrodite.” Then another one.

And then all of them.

Desormie stood beside Momo and said, “That’s right, pinch that sucker good. Pinch it. Just like that. Right on the bridge, 836

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there. Pinch it.” But you could tell he thought the hermaphrodite joke was really hilarious because he kept looking over at Lonnie and the Jennys and rolling his eyes = “Can you believe how this kid keeps bleeding!”

Then he touched Momo on the elbow for a second and said,

“Okay? You’re okay. Good guy. Okay. Okay guys, nothing to see here,” and walked off to check the lock on the kickfloat cage.