Adam Levin - The Instructions

I remembered that in movies there was sometimes some touching of hair. Almost always, actually. There was almost always hair-touching in movies, before the kiss. Or the ear. Was it the ear or the hair? It was the hair. The ear was something else. The ear was how you pick a fight in Fiji. My mother told me and I told Nakamook. A Fijian UN soldier once taught my mother you start a fight in Fiji by touching a guy’s ear. If you touch his ear and he doesn’t fight you, his snat trickles for the rest of his life because how could you let some guy touch your ear like that, like you were his to be touched on the ear by? You have to save face if your ear is touched by some guy. I told Nakamook once and he thought it was funny is why he’d sometimes go for my ear when we’d fakefight. And that was one way I knew we were best friends. Because my ear was a part of my head and I didn’t explode when he’d touch it.

So I thought the way to start would be to touch June’s hair. If I touched her hair and she let me, then I could bend my head sideways. If she bent her head sideways, then I could lean forward. And if she leaned forward, then I could press my lips against her lips, and then we would be kissing. The only way I’d lose face would be if she did everything but kiss me at the last step; if I pressed my lips against her lips and she didn’t press back. She could say, “You tried to kiss me,” and it would be obvious that it was true to any third person who might be looking, and there I’d be, a very trickling bancer.

If she didn’t let me touch her hair, though, or if she didn’t bend her head, or didn’t lean forward, then I could stop touching or trying to touch her hair and sit back like normal, and my face would be safe because a third person could think that maybe I wasn’t trying to kiss her, that maybe I was only touching her hair and bending my head and leaning forward. I thought: That is why this is a good plan.

But then I saw it was also a real dickhead way for me to scheme about someone I was in love with, and for a second I thought I was going to stand on top of a table and dive into the floor to flatten my neck discs because my plan was like Desormie making the girls sit in front for stretches. If a girl told someone, “Desormie makes me sit in front during stretches so that he can look at the contours of my vagina through the spandex,” it would be impossible to prove. Desormie could say that the girl was a lazy stretcher and that he put her in front so that he could make sure she stretched the right way. He could say that she talked to her best friend too much during class and that he put her in front to separate them. Whatever he said, he would make the girl sound crazy, and she would look like a wolf-cryer, and people would want to know what was wrong with her and was her father touching her, and so her father would look bad, her whole family would, and her people. All of them would look bad because Desormie desormiated and the girl tried to stop him. Everything in the lunchroom looked like a weapon or a piece of a weapon.

The acids of my stomach stabbed me in the lining. The props on the stage would have been good to look at if one of them had a screwdriver in its forehead or the claw-part of a hammer. The claw-part of a Maccabee, I thought. Gurion Maccabee, I thought. Lioncub Hammer. Like the name of a secret war. Operation Lioncub Hammer. Like the end of the world. Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee. Lioncub, son of Judah the Hammer, I thought, but it didn’t really help.

There was a fire-extinguisher mounted on the wall.

A weapon, I thought. There are so many weapons. Few people know it; you’re one of the few.

That didn’t help either.

I thought how if I tried to kiss June, I might find out that I was like Desormie.

I thought I could take the fire extinguisher off the wall and throw it high in the air and stand under where it was going to land so my skull would get bent and my brains would get softened.

If I touched June’s hair and she let me and I bent my head and she bent her head and I leaned in and she leaned back and so then I leaned back, we would both know that I tried to kiss her, but if she said, “You tried to kiss me,” I would say, “You’re crazy.” And that was a wrong thing to do. And what’s worse is she would never say it. She wouldn’t say, “You tried to kiss me,” because she would know that Gurion would say, “You’re crazy.” It was cheap of me.

There were ovens in the kitchen behind the cafeteria counter. I could turn them on and put my hand in. I could burn my hand so bad that it would always look bloody and June would never let me touch her hair with it, even if she liked the rest of me.

There were thousands of millions of ways to be a coward, I decided, billions and trillions of googols of ways, and no less than half of the ways were ways to save face or ways to act so you could save face later.

My stomach hurt so bad, though. If I didn’t try to kiss her I could get ulcers and become a tyrant. If I did try to kiss her, I could end up desormiating. I had my left fist up in front of my face to see which side of it would do the most damage to my nose if I punched my face and I was turning the fist when I saw the makeup flaking on the thumb-knuckle and I remembered the marks: that I was going to show my two יs to June. The יs reminded me of the Law. And there are no Laws about thinking. Not one out of 613. There are only laws about doing. And then I thought about Maimonedes again, who said that there is a right order that all things you can do should get done in. Maimonedes said it’s just as important to do things in the right order as it is to do the right things. You don’t build a house to live with your wife in until you’re married. You don’t make cribs for babies who aren’t born yet. I decided that I could try to kiss June in the exact way I thought to try to kiss her, with the hair-touch and the head-bend and the forwardness first. I decided that it was the only right way to try to firstkiss someone. It was the best order because at each step she would have the chance to stop me, and I decided that was why I thought of it originally. It would be a cinch to stop me. She wouldn’t even have to say anything to stop me is why it was the best order. All I had to do was pay attention. And then if she didn’t want to kiss me, I would stop and I would not pretend I hadn’t tried. Pretending was the only thing that would make it like desormiating, the saving face. Trying to kiss June was nothing like Desormie staring at vagina contours unless after failing I acted like I’d never tried.

Walking toward her, I felt clumsy, like the only thing bracing my bones at the joints was some old, shot elastic. If I didn’t concentrate, my forearms would fall off my elbows. If I didn’t lay my weight down in just the right way, then when I took my next step I’d leave a foot on the floor, and then the other foot so I’d be walking on my ankles, and then my shins would get left behind and I’d be on my knees, and next my thighs and I’d be on my waist, and then I would be bouncing, destroying my sack, and I wouldn’t even notice any of what happened until my shoulder-socket dropped my last piece of arm and I couldn’t put my body back together again. All I would have to defend myself would be the teeth in my head.

June touched her hair to push it behind her ears and it changed in darkness. Her hair had at least seventeen shades of red in it. The coat she was wearing to detention showed many of them off. She wore it over my hoodie. It was a long red overcoat made of wool. It had a hood of its own and five wooden pegs on leather strings that shoved through the buttonholes to close it for protection. The red of the wool was the same red as rich blonde women’s lipstick in old movies. There was nothing on June’s head that was the same color as the coat.