Adam Levin - The Instructions

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

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, 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.

Benji and Leevon and Vincie were in the shadows of the doorway to the locker-room. Ronrico and the Janitor were just outside of it. I thought: They’re all waiting for me. I thought: I am the leader of the Side of Damage. And I decided: If Isadore Momo is not on the Side of Damage, he is at least on the same side as the Side of Damage.

And I saw that it was good.

I walked at the left wing of the eyebrow the long way, hoping to bump a couple laughers, but the laughers moved when they saw me coming and the eyebrow lost its curve. When I got to Lonnie Boyd, he was still pointing at Momo and saying, “Hermaphrodite.”

So I pointed at Lonnie, and even though I thought I’d say something about his nipple, or Momo being on the Side of Damage, I changed my mind and said, Basketball.

I said it loud. Then I said it again.

Basketball, I said.

The laughers stopped laughing and waited for someone to drown me. They were always waiting for someone to do something. I kept my finger pointed at Lonnie and said it again:

Basketball.

Then I stepped forward until the nail of my finger was close enough to Lonnie’s extra nipple for Lonnie to reach out and break my finger off and I said, Basketball.

“Psycho,” Lonnie said.

I pressed my finger on the nipple. Not hard or anything, but it was my finger and it was his nipple. Extra or not, he should have hit me. I would’ve hit me. He didn’t hit me.

Basketball, I said.

Desormie said, “Class dismissed, guys.”

No one moved. The snat dripped down Lonnie’s chin and I took my finger off his nipple because I didn’t like touching it, but I continued pointing to it.

That’s when Nakamook said, “Basketball.” By then, him and the others had already come over and started a second eyebrow over the pupil that was Lonnie and I.

The original eyebrow fell back into the new one.

And Ronrico said, “Basketball.”

And the Janitor said, “Basketball.”

Vincie said, “Fucken basketball.”

“Hey!” said Desormie.

And Leevon pulled his cheek down to show Lonnie the red part of his eyeball.

Isadore Momo, still holding his nose, came up next to me, and to Lonnie Boyd, Momo said, “Nipple.” It sounded like “Neepo.”

Someone said, “The chubby bleederkid says that Lonnie’s a nipple!”

“A nipple!” said someone.

Lonnie said, “It’s a mole!”

“ What’s a mole, Lonnie?”

“My mole,” said Lonnie, “is a mole.”

“Nipple!” said someone.

“Enough!” said Desormie.

“Nipple!”

“Nipple!”

“Nipple!”

“Hey Lonnie?” said a Jenny.

“What?” said Lonnie.

“Your mole?” said another Jenny.

“What about my mole?”

“Oh my God is it a nipple!”

Lonnie’s body jerked, but instead of attacking anyone, he revolved and went to the locker-room. He had to walk around to the end of the new eyebrow to get there since who would step aside for a trickling wonder like that?

“You’re really cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” Desormie said to me.

“You make the rhyme,” Momo said to Desormie.

Laughter boomed from the eyebrow.

Momo bowed.

“That’s it!” Desormie said, looking around.

“That’s what?” said Ronrico.

“Did you just look at Jenny’s nipples?” said Nakamook.

“Hey!” Desormie said.

“Jenny, did Mr. Desormie just look at your nipples?” said Vincie.

“Probably,” said the seventh-grade Jennys. Then they all giggled.

“I thought I was just imagining it?” said Jenny April.

“Sometimes he looks at my cha-cha,” said Jenny Khouri.

“Always the nipples during swimming, though,” Jenny Flagg said.

“Why you always lookin’ at the Jennys on the chest?” said Ronrico.

“I wanna know that, too,” said the Janitor. “Isn’t it illegal? What do you guys think?”

“It’s definitely ickish,” April said. “I agree with Jenny that it’s gross,” said Flagg. Khouri said, “I don’t like the faces he makes at me.”

“Ladies,” said Desormie.

“And he calls us ‘ladies’ which is creepy.” “We’re girls.” “Will you stop looking at us the way Ronrico said?”

“Now, I don’t know what you’re all talking about,” said Desormie. “But,” he said, “all you gotta do if something bothers you? Is tell me. Tell me while it’s bothering you. If you tell me while it’s bothering you, then maybe I’ll know what you mean, cause right now? I just don’t know what you mean.”

“Stop looking at us like that.”

“Like what?” said Desormie.

“Like that,” said Jenny April.

“You ladies are crazy and I’d go back to the locker-rooms if I was you because I for one am not writing hall-passes for this nonsense so if you’re late, tough luck, it’s your fault.”

While I was getting dressed, kids I never spoke to chinned air at me and showed me power-fists. President Blake Acer wasn’t among those kids, but he wasn’t showing Lonnie any mooky solidarity, either. Nor were his two or three Shover underlings; they all just kept their eyes at ichthi-level.

Then, out in B-hall, by the locker-room entrance, Ronrico and the Janitor were waiting for me beside Nakamook and Leevon and Vincie Portite, all together, like it was the most normal thing to do in the world.

And we all walked back to the Cage together.

At the gate, instead of ringing the doorbell, I pulled the hall-pass pad from my pocket.

I asked them: You guys got Darkers?

“WE DAMAGE WE is tired,” whispered Nakamook.

It was ten minutes after the beginning-of-class tone, and Benji and I were on opposite sides of the teachers lounge doorway’s light rhombus. The Chewer was checking his image in the glass of the C-Hall firehose case. He’d locked up the side entrance in order to rove. According to Ronrico, the roving had started at lunch on Wednesday.