Adam Levin - The Instructions

All at once I was getting tackled sideways, kissing, wrestling a little. June did things to my neck with her mouth that felt so different from any feeling I’d ever had in my neck I panicked my deepest nerves were exposed, that she’d opened my flesh so gently I hadn’t noticed and now the wind was going into my throat, and pints of blood, warm as summer, were flowing out of me and Adonai was merciful — not just kind enough to numb my pain as I expired, but to mask it with the most gushing rushes of pleasure, as if, in the last seconds of my life, the thing He most wanted was to secure my high opinion of Him — and I thrust my whole torso away from her and saw no blood. How could I have been upset? How could I be upset about what either of them put me through if it lead to this?

“You taste like cig—” June said, and I did to her what she’d been doing to me, and soon it made her make sounds like I was killing her, which panicked me again, and I stopped for a second to look, and I saw she wasn’t bleeding any more than I’d been.

The way I understood it, now: she wanted me to withhold a little. That’s why she kept doing it to me, making me wait, making me chase her, calling the gift of my hoodie a theft. So I decided I wouldn’t kiss her neck again until she opened her eyes. But then when she opened her eyes, she saw something.

“Hello, deadly weapon,” she whispered.

That June, having seen what at first I thought to be my pennygun — fallen, I imagined, from the spy pocket of my IDF jacket, which she had layered between my stolen hoodie and her coat — would know, by sight, that it was a weapon… surprised me. But something else was off, too.

You’ve seen one before? I said.

“I invented it.”

I invented it, I told her.

“Then how did I get it?”

You got it from inside my jacket, I said.

She reached into my spy-pocket and took out another pennygun: mine. I knew it was mine because the firing pouch was a black balloon. Rather, I realized the one on the ground beside us wasn’t mine, because its firing pouch was an orange balloon.

“You ripped me off,” she said.

You ripped me off, I said.

She said, “When did you invent it?”

Last spring, I said.

“So did I,” June said. “Why did you invent it?”

To protect Israelites, I said.

“I invented mine for extra credit,” she said. “I had Mr. Klapper for Social Studies and I wasn’t doing that well because all his tests were fill-in-the-blanks that you had to memorize all these dates and locations for, and I’m much better at essays. Everyone thinks Klapper’s crazy because he makes uncomfortable-looking neck movements and says ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ a lot, but he also looks like Mark Twain and I told him so, and he took it like a compliment, so I always liked him, and near the end of the semester I told him his tests were too hard, and that he should give us essay tests, and he said he thought essay tests in junior high school were overrated and that they undermined something — what was it? He said that, ‘Owing to their emphasis on rhetorical skills, essay tests undermine the importance of scholarly exactitude in the arena of historical facthood, and thereby serve to strengthen the reliance of our youth on their ability to sell hopeful-sounding horsepucky like “the pen is mightier than the sword,” an assertion that will keep down and dumb the lot of you as you age,’ and I said, ‘But the pen is mightier than the sword, Mr. Klapper,’ and he told me that he’d forget all my grades so far and give me an A for the class if I could show him evidence that the pen was mightier than the sword. So I invented the pengun and got an A.”

The pennygun, I said.

“The pen gun,” said June. If you don’t believe me, ask Vincie Portite. I used Vincie’s pens to demonstrate — not the whole pens, but the nibs. He has all those fountain pens.”

I use pennies, I said. They’re cheaper, I said.

“You can’t kill with a penny,” June said.

I said, You can debilitate with a penny, and then kill the enemy you debilitated with your hands.

“But a penny isn’t mightier than a sword if you can’t kill anyone with it,” June said. “A pen is mightier, though, if it’s a fountain pen, or the nib of one, and you project it into that neck artery, the one you were just kissing on — the carotid artery. If you project a nib into the carotid, you can kill a swordsman who can’t reach you because you fired from a distance greater than his arm plus his sword. And don’t try to argue with me by saying that the swordsman can use his sword as a projectile because even if he can, its accuracy and range don’t match the pengun’s. Not to mention its speed. Which is why Mr. Klapper gave me an A.”

I—, I said.

“And I’ll bet if you’re close enough,” June said, “you can shoot the nib into his eyeball — the swordsman’s eyeball — and it might go deep enough to enter his frontal lobe and kill him that way, or at least cause braindeath. It would be hard to get that close, though, and take aim, I think, if the man still had his sword. So in that situation, maybe the pen is only as mighty as the sword. I got an A, though. You can ask Mr. Klapper.”

I love you so much, I said.

“Good,” June said. “If you didn’t still love me, I would feel really tricked. I want you to kiss my neck again in the same exact spot. You kissed it right on the carotid artery and I tingled in so many places I almost had a grand mal seizure. It made me so warm, Gurion, and then cool and then warm again and then cool and it started switching so fast, warmandcool and warmandcool, that I couldn’t tell the difference and my jaw was grinding and then yawning, and my eyebrow muscles were very concerned and then very surprised, all of it switch-switching and your tongue doesn’t gross me out. I was worried that your tongue would gross me out. Right before I kissed you yesterday, I thought your tongue would be thick inside of my mouth, that it would taste like cardboard and be dry like other tongues, and then your tongue wasn’t like that at all, but it was strange inside of my mouth and I couldn’t make a decision about it and I worried til now that it was because it was just about to gross me out, that you stopped only a second before my grossout would’ve started, and that the next time you put your tongue in my mouth it would gross me out, but this was the next time and it wasn’t gross at all. I like it so much that when you were kissing my neck, I almost made you stop just so I could suck on your tongue, but I didn’t do it because I wanted to have a grand mal seizure first, and I was almost there until you started talking about penguns.” She grabbed my hands and said, “Will you do it again til my hemispheres crossfire? You’re blushing. Good. I like when you blush. It’s because you want me to do it to you again, don’t you? I will. I’ll do it to you until you seize, but you have to do it to me again, after.”

A hot red face does not always = blushing. A hot red face only means blood has risen. I said, What tongue was thick in your mouth?

She said, “What?”

I said, You said that other tongues were thick in your mouth. Whose?

“I said other tongues are thick and like cardboard,” she said. “And dry.”

But how do you know that?

June said, “Come on.”

Come on ? I said.

She said, “I kissed this other boy, once, but it was nothing.”

How could that be nothing ?

“How? Because it was. It was at a party at the beginning of the school-year that it happened. We were playing this stupid game that was like a combination of Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle.”