Adam Levin - The Instructions

I closed my gaping mouth and lowered my eyes, saw globs of saliva dripping from the bell of Floyd’s cone, pooling between the toes of our shoes. In case he’d start talking again, I took two steps back to get out of spraying range. Floyd understood it as a retreat, understood retreat as a show of weakness — maybe it was; I was rarely speechless — and liked it. It puffed him up, cued him to continue. The cone stayed down.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If I was in the junior-high school again, I’d do it better. All we ever did to guys like you was beat your asses til you hid in the corners, reading, jerking off, whatever you did. And you had years to tell yourselves that all it was was you were weaker, smaller, one against many. You made a hero-story out of it. You thought you were like Jesus. So many little Christs, suffering because you were the only good one in the world — thousands of you thinking that across the country. And my friends and me, while you were hiding in those corners, we had no idea — we thought you’d learned your lesson. Once in a while you’d come out and show yourself, and we’d beat your ass again, to teach you again, but we were decent, not like you, and innocent, not like you, and as soon as you hid again, we let you be. Every single time, we were sure we’d finally taught you. But you always came out of the corner eventually. You never learned your lesson, never learned to keep your head down or your mouth shut. We thought that while you hid you were getting decent, but all that time, all’s you were doing was rubbing your grimy palms together and plotting revenge. And eventually you grew up, all of us grew up, and you were out of our reach. You were safe. Protected. We were working, being productive Americans, we didn’t think about you, and if we did we still thought we’d crushed the evil right out of you, but then suddenly you’d pop up, you’d make even more wisecracks, you’d look at us even squintier than before. You would fuck with us, out of vengeance. Instead of learning the lesson we taught you and being grateful, you’d do vengeance from behind your desks, from behind your fucken glasses, behind your fucken telephones. And it’s our fault, partly. It’s our fault for being decent human beings, for believing in the good of man, believing a beating was all it would take to teach you humility. What we shoulda done is force-fed you shit. Pissed in your squinty little fucken eyes. God knows we wanted to. God knows the only thing kept us from it was respect for the idea of humanity and decency. Too much respect. We shoulda made you eat shit and pissed all over you. Dragged you out to the playground and did it, in the middle of recess, so everyone would see, so everyone would remember, so everyone would remind you what you are even when you forgot. You mighta learned something then. If I was in junior high school again, I swear to God, I’d save the world. And if I was in this junior high school? I’d start with you.”

Midway through Floyd’s monologue, the switch had come, and he’d lowered his voice accordingly. Seventh- and eighth-graders were shoving past us now, on their way from recess to the cafeteria while fifth- and sixth-graders headed in the opposite direction.

I was thinking: You can’t punish men for their potential wrongdoings, or else You would. You cannot fix Your own damage.

I thought: It is good I am not You.

“I’d start with you,” Floyd repeated, louder than the first time, in case I hadn’t heard him over the crowd noise. “You hear that, fuck?” he said. “I’d start with you.”

I said, You’re the one who’s like Jesus, Floyd.

“You don’t know anything about Jesus,” Floyd said.

I said, I know that by the time he’d gotten himself all covered in spit, he wasn’t able to do much more than talk.

Floyd shook like the Electric Chair, aching to hit me. Aching.

I held out my pass, said, This is my sheep’s blood.

I passed.

Stealth in a crowded hallway works the opposite of stealth in an empty one. You have to walk forward with your shoulders high and stare at the heads of the people you’re walking toward. They will sense you coming, even if their backs are turned to you, and they’ll move out of your way without ever looking at your face to see who you are. All you have to do is see them first. People feel when they’re being seen and it moves them.

I was not being stealth on the way to Nurse Clyde’s, and got bumped a few times. I was looking all around me, trying to spot June. The looking strained my neck and I got vertigo watching the faces turn.

At the junction with Main Hall, I stopped to close my eyes and breathe out the dizzy. When I opened them again, I saw Josh Berman’s sidekick — the kid from the Office, what was his name? Goldman, Cory Goldman — getting monkey-in-the-middled by a pair of icthiied Shovers. Bare-necked between them, turning 180s in rapid succession, Cory Goldman shouted, “Give it! Hey hey! Give it back!” as they arced his balled scarf back and forth above his head. I considered stepping in — I really didn’t like him, but yes, he was an Israelite, but — but before I could decide one way or the other, Berman himself emerged from somewhere behind me and barreled at the Shover who had Cory’s scarf. That Shover saw him coming, and before he got floored, tossed the scarf to the other one, who caught it and ran in the direction of B-Hall, Cory on his tail now, and Berman on Cory’s. Shovers they ran past joined in the chase — some of them Israelites, others of them not — and they grabbed at each other, attempting to capture each other’s scarves, and the Shover Berman’d floored got back on his feet, revolved to face B-Hall, as if to join the chase himself, but encountered a bandkid and stripped him of his flute. He twetched on the flute, told the bandkid, “Get gummed,” then touched the flute’s goozed part to the bandkid’s cheek, and the bandkid cried.

That was when someone yanked my hood and I spun. I grabbed his face by the chin. It was Isadore Momo.

“Aye-yay ah-yah!” he shouted. “I am Momo I am Momo!”

I said, Sorry, Momo, you surprised me.

Beside Momo, an even squattier kid, a kid so chubby his forehead had dimples, seemed to be floating above his own shoes.

“He is my friend Beauregard Pate,” Momo explained. “Beauregard Pate is a man of ideas, and when I tell to him the story of our Gym class and the nipple, he is wanting for to tell you something. Tell to Gurion what you tell to me, Beauregard.”

“You are nice!” shouted Beauregard Pate, nearly breathless. “That is first of all!” The Shover who’d performed the goozeflute on the bandkid popped out of the C-Hall crowd-stream then to accidentally-on-purpose elbow Beauregard sideways. I ankleswept him hard, he hit the floor one-kneed, crawled a couple yards fast, then got up and ran. Beauregard seemed to have noticed none of it. “You were nice to Isadore!” Beauregard continued. “And you have all my best wishes! So secondly, I would like to say, God bless you, Gurion Maccabee! All my best wishes are with you!”

Momo slapped Beauregard on the shoulder and Beauregard high-fived him. They tilted their heads in opposite directions and made meaningful-looking eye-contact, as if cuing one another to patter for the benefit of their Broadway audience, like, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Isadore?” “I’m thinking we should turn up the music, Beauregard.” “You mean turn up the music and do a little dancing, Isadore?” “I mean turn up the music and do a lot of dancing , Beauregard!”

The sight of the joy of the chubby always puzzled me. When the chubby had joy, I knew in my heart they were forgetting their chubbiness, but to my eyes it always looked like a celebration of their chubbiness, and I’d feel like an invader and have to go away.