Adam Levin - The Instructions

I stopped switching nose-sides to make the slapslap proposition, but when I opened my eyes and saw her, the way her freckle-sprays were triangular and the colors of her eyelashes not black but one of the browner reds of her hair, I didn’t want to play slapslap, I wanted to kiss her, which didn’t make much sense, but we kissed some more, and it was more of the same tick-tocking, and I stopped again to look at her. The gaps in her top row winked, and we tick-tocked, and I stopped to look, and the lighter color of the hair above her ears that wasn’t long enough to be ponytailed, and tick-tock and stop, the one-stitch scar that notched her cheek beside the left mouthcorner, a permanent dimple…

It was impossible to not want to kiss her while I looked at her, but no matter how bad I wanted that, once I was kissing her the kissing wasn’t satisfying and I’d start thinking: slapslap. Slapslap’s no fun with your eyes closed, though, and looking at her made slapslap impossible to concentrate on because of how badly it made me want to kiss her. Looking at her, I couldn’t concentrate enough to even talk about slapslap. I was getting H.

There were freckles on her eyelids so I kissed the freckles on her eyelids, and while kissing on her eyelids I pushed her hood back and smelled her hair. It did smell sweet, though not as brightly as strawberries, not as red-and-greenly. It was a better, lazier kind of sweet than strawberries and it seemed to be made of smoke. If a hammock swaying in slomo between telephone poles in the poppyfield from The Wizard of Oz was a smell, that would be the smell of June’s hair.

With my thumbs and pointers I worked her hair-tie back until the ponytail was gone. Her hair curtained down and I slipped my fingers into it, deep, the topjoints touching her scalp. Her hair was as thick as its smell, and I was glad to have my hands in it. I became more satisfied than when I was only looking, but still not really satisfied. I didn’t know what to do.

“Keep your hands there,” June whispered. Her eyes were still closed. She told me, “Close your eyes again.” I did. She pushed my hood back and her palms on the sides of my neck felt fresh and this time our mouths weren’t puckered when we kissed. And we didn’t tick-tock. There weren’t smacking sounds. June’s lips parted to surround my bottom one, to press down on it a little, warm and slippery here, cool and steady there; she did these small pullings on my bottom lip and soon I did the same to her top one at the same time and something splashed bluely across my lobe, left-to-right, and I saw it on my eyelids like a waveform with tracers and these muscles in my temples slackened. I thought: Who knew the muscles in my temples had always been flexed? Who knew I even had muscles in my temples?

I thought: This is exactly what we should be doing right now. This is exactly what needs to be done.

June turned her head then, like she was arguing with my thoughts, saying, “No not that, but this ,” and her tongue brushed mine, and it was such a good thing, my hands fell from her hair. She squeezed my neck and our tongues brushed again and that is when the kiss became perfect. I couldn’t tell my face from her face. I couldn’t tell the difference between the movements of her mouth and the movements of mine. I couldn’t separate June from Gurion. It was like being in the first and third person at the same time, the kiss not just something we were doing, but something that was happening to us.

I thought: This is not us kissing; this kiss is ussing.

Ussing? I thought.

Like hyperventilators getting breathed, I thought.

And then I heard this violent chucketa-cracketa noise like a helicopter crashing.

And Nakamook was shouting, “Goddamn!”

That was the end of the kiss.

The monitor, I said.

Across the cafeteria, pennygun in hand, Nakamook was racing to the bathroom. Right next to me rocked the rockinghorse he’d shot. It was not the same one that I’d dropkicked. Half this one’s face was gone, and inside its hollow, busted head lay a black wingnut I reached in and snatched.

“That was a serious,” June gasped, “kiss.”

Pink ghost-shapes spreading all over her neck.

I pulled her into the doorway at the side of the stage.

Become the wall, I told her.

“Our stuff,” she said. She kissed my chin and pulled me back out.

Miss Gleem entered the cafeteria, came fast in our direction when she noticed the props.

“Can you believe this?” June said to her. She smacked the wingnut-shot rocking horse on the back of his head. He bounced. Then rocked. June laughed. Nakamook sprinted from the bathroom to Main Hall.

“Who would do this?” Miss Gleem said.

“Some genius,” said June.

“Junie!” Miss Gleem said. “Someone destroyed art.”

“It wasn’t art,” June said, “until it was destroyed. It was a very badly executed set for a play, and someone made an installation piece out of it. I was just about to draw it. You see where my sketchbook is?” She pointed at the table by the stage where her sketchbook lay — covering, I noticed, the half-pad of hall-passes, baruch Hashem. She said, “I think that’s the perfect angle to draw it from. But I want to draw it with this rocking horse rocking — that way it’ll look like it’s just been struck by whatever genius struck it with whatever it was he used to take its face off. That’s good, right?”

“It’s not good at all, Junie,” Miss Gleem said.

I was thinking: Here we are, redhanded, and instead of being stealth about it, instead of hiding, June has shoved our redhands so close to the face of the art teacher that they don’t look red anymore because they don’t look like anything anymore, because they are covering the art teacher’s eyes.

“You’re right,” June said, “it’s not good. I can get it to rock the way I want it to by smacking its head, but the rocking will stop before I can get back to my sketchbook. That’s why I’m showing Gurion how to smack the head. That way I can sit by my sketchbook, and Gurion can smack it, and I can get a sense of how the rocking horse’s motion relates to its surroundings, which is, I’d think, one of the keys to understanding the installation artist’s intentions. So give it a shot, Gurion. Let’s see what you can do for me. Smack the horse.”

“I don’t think this is very nice,” said Miss Gleem.

I was thinking: June is doing something new. She is doing a new kind of blinker action.

“Who cares if it’s nice?” said June. “It’s art.”

I thought: GURION AND JUNE DESTROYED THE PROPS = the construction; GURION AND JUNE ARE STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO THE DESTROYED PROPS = the construction horse that draws attention to the construction; and JUNE HAS OPEN CONTEMPT FOR THE PROPS = the blinker on the construction horse that draws attention to the construction horse that draws attention to the construction…

I thought: The new thing is how THE WAY JUNE KEEPS GOING ON AND ON ABOUT HER OPEN CONTEMPT = a surge of electricity so huge that the blinker pops its bulb, and the flash of the pop is temporarily blinding, temporarily disorienting, and by the time Gleem’s eyes adjust, she will be more concerned about the surge and the blinker than the presence of the construction; the more she worries about the surge and the blinker, the less the construction horse will seem to her to signify the presence of the construction.

“Smack the horse,” June said to me.

I love you, I said.

“Smack the horse,” she said. “Smack it on the head.”

I smacked the horse on the head. The horse hopped, then rocked.

“Why’d you smack it like a sister?” June said. “Smack it harder, like this.” June smacked the horse on the head. The horse hopped, then rocked.