The Instructions (67 page)

THE INSTRUCTIONS

Cage and Aptakisic. I am an enemy of the whole Arrangement and I want to join the Side of Damage. They said they’d tell you what I did with your gift. If what I did was not enough then tell me what to do and I will do it. I am sick of fuct rules and fuct tears and fuct tapelines. Let me be a soldier.

WE DAMAGE WE

I thought: This note is not a love letter from June.

And then I thought:
Your gift
?

“Give me the note, Gurion,” Miss Pinge said.

I ripped the writing from the note and handed her the blank part.

Fuct tears
? I thought. What was torn? And who did I give a gift to?

“The whole note, Gurion,” Miss Pinge said.

“Bet what would didn’t,” Leevon didn’t mouth but seemed to, while doing the countdown with his hand.

I crumpled the note’s remnant.

Maybe the “ea” was hard and the
fuct tears
the wet kind? Did
gift
mean “talent”?

“Gurion,” Miss Pinge said.

I thought: The countdown = “The scoreboard.”

I tossed the remnant to Leevon.

“Leevon,” Miss Pinge said.

Bet what would didn’t—the scoreboard. Wet tears and talent.

Leevon popped the remnant in his mouth.

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“Leee eee von,” Miss Pinge said.

I saw I was right the first time:
Gift
meant “present,” not

“talent.” Whatever the note’s writer had done, he could not have done it with any
talent of
mine
.

Bet what would didn’t—the scoreboard.

So wet tears and a present. Or ripped tears and a present. What present had I given?

Brodsky’s door opened.

“Don’t be sad, Miss Pinge,” said Benji. “We like you.”

“Well just speak of the ding-dang devil!” Desormie said from Brodsky’s doorway. Then he made the noise “Tch” at us = “You are immature non-basketballers without intestinal fortitude.”

What I thought had been a “You know” from Leevon had actually been a “You don’t.”

“Bet what would did
n’t
?” Or “Bet what would did
it
?”

They said they’d tell you what I did with your gift.

“Ronny D,” said Benji.

“Ronny D,” said Floyd, “I caught that one at the scene, just like our prediction forecasted we would.”

“Wasn’t him, Floydinator—it was them. Or one of them. Or two of them.”

Bet what would
did it
. And the scoreboard.

“Who’s up first?” said Brodsky, flipping through CASS’s.

“Benji,” Miss Pinge said.

“
What’s
on first,” said Benji. “Who’s the one on second.”

Bet what would did it—the scoreboard.

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“Floydinator is a suck nickname,” said Vincie.

“I’m not the one came up with it,” said Floyd.

“Heck is wrong with you?” said Desormie.

Wet tears from eyes, the Boy Who Cried Wa-Wa.

I’d had Vincie give the kid three blank passes.

Ben-Wa Wolf did it. The scoreboard.

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Some minutes later, the pencil-cup jumped as Benji, returning from Brodsky’s office, smacked Miss Pinge’s desk. The jetflame lighter was under her hand before the cup’s contents finished rattling. Pinge was stealth.

Brodsky had startled at the sound of the smack, but instead of looking at the desk, he took a fast breath and said, “Inappropriate, Benji. That’s what we mean by
acting out
. I asked you if you could live with the way our conversation concluded, and you told me you could and I believed you. Do we need to go back inside and talk some more?”

“No,” said Benji, chewing a half-born smile to death. “I’m content with our mutual decision that I continue serving detention indefinitely. I was just feeling a little hyperactive for a second. It happens. I was acting out, like you said.”

“Get a pass and go back to the Cage,” said Brodsky.

As soon as Brodsky had closed his door for his meeting with Leevon, Miss Pinge pushed the lighter in Benji’s face and told him, “That wasn’t a very smart thing to do.”

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“It worked out fine,” Benji said.

“Take it,” she said, waving the lighter, blinkering it.

“It’s yours,” said Benji. “It always has been.”

“And how did you know I’d cover it up when you put it on my desk like that? How do you know I won’t tell Mr. Brodsky that you’ve been carrying a lighter around?”

“You would never do that, Miss Pinge, because then Benji would get in trouble,” said Vincie.

“I’m throwing it away,” she said.

“Whatever you want to do with it, it’s yours,” said Benji. “Just try it out once before you junk it so you can see how cool it is.”

She put the lighter in her purse, saying, “I’m throwing it away as soon as I get home.” She scribbled on a hall-pass and handed it over.

“See you after school,” Benji said to me. “Bus circle, yeah?”

I said, I’m not going there today. I’m meeting June in the cafeteria.

“Nice!” he said. “I’ll walk you.”

Miss Pinge threw her arms up and shook her head side to side = “It will be more aggravating to enforce the no-talking-to-students-in-ISS rule than to just let them say goodbye.”

“I’ll come too,” Vincie said.

No, I said. I said, It’s gonna take too long for you guys to get out of the Cage. By the time we get there, I’ll only have twelve minutes before detention. I want fifteen. I can have fifteen if I go straight there and June also goes straight there.

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“You don’t know if she’s going straight there?” said Vincie.

She said she’d meet me in detention today, but we weren’t clear on the time, I said.

“It’s better if she gets there first,” Benji said. “You don’t want to be the one waiting.”

“You don’t want to sit there and get all worked up and nervous and then screw up the big first kiss,” said Vincie.

“That’s got nothing to do with anything,” said Nakamook.

“Vincie doesn’t know anything,” he said. “If you’re waiting for her, you’ll look anxious. You don’t want to look anxious.”

I am anxious, I said.

“You don’t want to
look
anxious,” said Benji. “You want to kiss her, and if you want to kiss her, it’s better you don’t look anxious, right Miss Pinge?”

“I don’t know about any of it,” Miss Pinge said, “but anxious isn’t usually an attractive quality.”

“That’s what I was saying,” Vincie said.

“No it’s not,” Nakamook said, “and you know it’s not, so you should watch out for that. What are you gonna tell Brodsky when he starts asking you things? Because when I was in there, he started asking me things, Vincie, not just about the wrestling but about the scoreboard which of course I have no idea about and I’m sure you have no idea about it either, but the way you’re pretending to know things that you don’t—worries me a little.

What’re you gonna tell him?”

“Nothing!” Vincie said.

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“You sure?” said Nakamook. “Because it seems like you can’t stop talking today.”

“Whatever, Nakamook,” said Vincie. “I hardly said anything that whole time the Chewer was in here and it was cause I was practicing for silent-mode, which you’re screwing up right now by accusing me of things and I have to defend myself. And don’t say that’s exactly what Brodsky is gonna do is accuse me and so then I’ll think I’ll have to defend myself by talking because I know that’s why you’re making that fucking face at me you fuckface I’m not stupid. Maybe it’s you who’s stupid for saying everything you’re saying in front of Mr. Brodsky’s secretary, because maybe she doesn’t like you as much as you think she likes you.

For all you know, she thinks you’re doing that thing you’re always quoting about in weird old English about exclaiming too loud of a doth protest or whatever and how it makes you look suspicious and maybe she’ll say so to Brodsky. I at least know the difference between my friends and the Arrangement so don’t start up with me, just don’t start up with me.”

“Wait for us,” Nakamook said to me.

Vincie ripped a sleeve off his T-shirt. He could get very explosive when anyone ignored him, but especially Nakamook.

I said, It’s like a lie to pretend I’m not anxious when I’m anxious.

Benji said, “No one’s saying you should pretend anything.

I’m just saying you should wait for us, and we’ll walk you. If you agree to wait for us, it’s true you’ll be a little late to your meeting 624

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with June and that’ll make you look less anxious than if you were early or on time, but that doesn’t mean you’re lying. All it means is you told us you’d wait for us and you didn’t want to break your word to your friends.”

But if I agree to do it now, I said, after you just said all of that, it’s fakey even if it isn’t a lie.

“Fakey shmakey,” Nakamook said. “If she asks you if you’re anxious, you’ll tell her the truth. There’s no reason to telegraph that you’re anxious if she doesn’t ask, though.”

I said, But if I
hide
it in advance—

“Gurion, say that detention comes around and you’re in the bathroom and it makes you late for your meeting with June, okay? When you finally get there, to detention, are you gonna say, ‘Hey June, the reason I’m late is I was playing Victor Dumpenstein to this brown monster I was sadly compelled to bring into the world?’”

Miss Pinge, who’d leaned in about nine times with the intention of telling Vincie to stop cursing and Benji to stop talking to me, made a grossout face and sat back in her chair.

I said, Of course I wouldn’t tell her that.

“Right,” said Benji. “Of course,” said Benji. “You wouldn’t tell her,” he said, “but wouldn’t not telling be fakey? I mean, if you were, in fact, a young Dumpenstein?”

No, I said.

“So why would it be fakey to not let her know that you’re anxious?”

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I don’t know, I said.

I really couldn’t think of why right then.

“So I win the argument. Agree to wait for us,” he said.

I agreed to wait.

The whole rest of the schoolday, no one said anything to me except for Vincie, who mouthed “Ben-Wa Wolf” as he came out of Brodsky’s while shrugging his shoulders = “Can Ben-Wa Wolf be on the Side of Damage or not?”

I shrugged back with squinted eyes = Ask me later.

I still wasn’t sure what the Side of Damage was exactly, let alone how to make decisions about who was a part of it; I didn’t even know if I was the one who should make those decisions. I was too distracted by my anxious thoughts about June and my anxiousness itself and how to make it stop to consider the possibilities with any rigor.

Plus I still had to write my ISS assignment, or else I’d have to be in ISS again the next day. And so what I did was, I wrote about distraction, and once I was finished, I was no longer distracted, I was no longer anxious, I was ready to think about Ben-Wa Wolf or the Side of Damage or anything else I might’ve wanted to think about, but no sooner had I handed the assignment to Pinge than Boystar’s mom came in for an appointment, ushering a skinny, raccoon-eyed blond guy, a guy she bragged was “the best acoustics man in the business,” and this guy was wearing a company trucker cap embroidered with 626

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the words
Sound by Highway 61
and a t-shirt for a metal band I’d never heard of—But the Angel Was Tardy—on which, in cartoon, Avraham opened up Isaac’s carotid while a drunken-looking seraph who’d tripped on a vine lay on his back just inches away beneath a big speech bubble reading “Oh shit!”

Which of course got me anxious about June again.

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Name:
Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee

Grade:
5 6 7 8

Homeroom:
The Cage

Date:
11/15/2006

Complaint Against Student (from Complaint Against Student Sheet) Fistfight with Ronrico Asparagus and on on top of that assaulting Michael Bregman by spitting on the guy. Gym locker-room. 2nd Period. 11/14/06. Mr. Desormie.

Step 5 Assignment: Write a letter to yourself in which you explain 1) why you are at step 5 (in-school suspension); 2) what you could do in order to avoid step 5 (receivingin-school suspension) in the future; 3) what you have learned from being at step 5 (in in-

-school suspension); 4) what you have learned from writing this letter to yourself. Include a Title, an Introduction, a Body, and a Conclusion. This letter will be collected at the end of in-school supension. This letter will be stored in your permanent file.

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Title

Kinetic Principles of Your A and H

Introduction

1. Attention (A) must fix itself on something. Once a thing is fixed on, that thing demands concentration.

2. If we measure A in units, and we assert that 100 units of A =

the amount of A it takes to concentrate on one typical task (one fullthing), then most people in the world have exactly 100 units.

3. Some people, like me and Benji Nakamook, have more units of A than are needed to concentrate on a fullthing. People like us have 175 units of A. These people will henceforth be known as You.

Body

Hardly anything in the world demands exactly 75 A-units for concentration, let alone 175.

Normal Places

In normal places, ones that are filled with brief actions and randomness, there are, in addition to some fullthings, thousands of things for A to fix on that are not full. Therefore, if You are in one of these normal places, it is not unlikely that Your A will fix on a set of things that, together, demand exactly 175 units = It is likely, in a normal place, that You will be able to concentrate on whatever things You’re doing = Your A probably won’t get D’d.