The Instructions (113 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

about nothing? And why so dramatic? I thought. Why so desperate? Why so whiney? Why so all-or-nothing? Why so meow-or-meowmeow? Why be such a baby? Because you’re in love? That’s exactly the reason you
shouldn’t
weak out, you whiney, meowing baby, get angry or something, get any way other than—

All at once I was getting tackled sideways, kissing, wrestling a little. June did things to my neck with her mouth that felt so different from any feeling I’d ever had in my neck I panicked my deepest nerves were exposed, that she’d opened my flesh so gently I hadn’t noticed and now the wind was going into my throat, and pints of blood, warm as summer, were flowing out of me and Adonai was merciful—not just kind enough to numb my pain as I expired, but to mask it with the most gushing rushes of pleasure, as if, in the last seconds of my life, the thing He most wanted was to secure my high opinion of Him—and I thrust my whole torso away from her and saw no blood. How could I have been upset? How could I be upset about what either of them put me through if it lead to this?

“You taste like cig—” June said, and I did to her what she’d been doing to me, and soon it made her make sounds like I was killing her, which panicked me again, and I stopped for a second to look, and I saw she wasn’t bleeding any more than I’d been.

The way I understood it, now: she wanted me to withhold a little. That’s why she kept doing it to me, making me wait, making me chase her, calling the gift of my hoodie a theft. So I decided I wouldn’t kiss her neck again until she opened her 1063

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eyes. But then when she opened her eyes, she saw something.

“Hello, deadly weapon,” she whispered.

That June, having seen what at first I thought to be my pennygun—fallen, I imagined, from the spy pocket of my IDF jacket, which she had layered between my stolen hoodie and her coat—

would know, by sight, that it was a weapon… surprised me. But something else was off, too.

You’ve seen one before? I said.

“I invented it.”

I
invented it, I told her.

“Then how did
I
get it?”

You got it from inside my jacket, I said.

She reached into my spy-pocket and took out another pennygun: mine. I knew it was mine because the firing pouch was a black balloon. Rather, I realized the one on the ground beside us
wasn’t
mine, because its firing pouch was an orange balloon.

“You ripped me off,” she said.

You ripped
me
off, I said.

She said, “When did you invent it?”

Last spring, I said.

“So did I,” June said. “Why did you invent it?”

To protect Israelites, I said.

“I invented mine for extra credit,” she said. “I had Mr. Klapper for Social Studies and I wasn’t doing that well because all his tests were fill-in-the-blanks that you had to memorize all these dates and locations for, and I’m much better at essays. Everyone thinks 1064

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Klapper’s crazy because he makes uncomfortable-looking neck movements and says ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ a lot, but he also looks like Mark Twain and I told him so, and he took it like a compliment, so I always liked him, and near the end of the semester I told him his tests were too hard, and that he should give us essay tests, and he said he thought essay tests in junior high school were overrated and that they undermined something—what was it? He said that, ‘Owing to their emphasis on rhetorical skills, essay tests undermine the importance of scholarly exactitude in the arena of historical facthood, and thereby serve to strengthen the reliance of our youth on their ability to sell hopeful-sounding horsepucky like “the pen is mightier than the sword,” an assertion that will keep down and dumb the lot of you as you age,’ and I said, ‘But the pen
is
mightier than the sword, Mr. Klapper,’ and he told me that he’d forget all my grades so far and give me an A for the class if I could show him evidence that the pen was mightier than the sword. So I invented the pengun and got an A.”

The pennygun, I said.

“The
pen
gun,” said June. If you don’t believe me, ask Vincie Portite. I used Vincie’s pens to demonstrate—not the whole pens, but the nibs. He has all those fountain pens.”

I use pennies, I said. They’re cheaper, I said.

“You can’t kill with a penny,” June said.

I said, You can debilitate with a penny, and then kill the enemy you debilitated with your hands.

“But a penny isn’t mightier than a sword if you can’t kill 1065

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anyone with it,” June said. “A pen is mightier, though, if it’s a fountain pen, or the nib of one, and you project it into that neck artery, the one you were just kissing on—the carotid artery. If you project a nib into the carotid, you can kill a swordsman who can’t reach you because you fired from a distance greater than his arm plus his sword. And don’t try to argue with me by saying that the swordsman can use his sword as a projectile because even if he can, its accuracy and range don’t match the pengun’s. Not to mention its speed. Which is why Mr. Klapper gave me an A.”

I—, I said.

“And I’ll bet if you’re close enough,” June said, “you can shoot the nib into his eyeball—the swordsman’s eyeball—and it might go deep enough to enter his frontal lobe and kill him that way, or at least cause braindeath. It would be hard to get that close, though, and take aim, I think, if the man still had his sword. So in that situation, maybe the pen is only
as
mighty as the sword.

I got an A, though. You can ask Mr. Klapper.”

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, 1066

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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 hemi-spheres 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.”

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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.

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“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?

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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“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 this backpack that’s on the asphault. Bodyslamming it. Swinging it over his head and banging it on the curb. The backpack’s Co-Captain Baxter’s, who’s barracaded himself on the bus. The drivers have no idea what’s going on. They’re on that grassy island thing in the middle of the circle, talking shit about busdriving or whatever they talk about. They’ve got no idea.