Adam Levin - The Instructions

A game, I said.

She said, “We went in this closet together and I had to tell him a secret, and I didn’t. I told him something that was a lie, and he told me something that was true. But it was about me. He told me something true about me that I’d never told anyone and it freaked me out that he knew it, and I said, ‘How did you know it?’ and he said, ‘I know you. I’ve always known you and I love you.’ And that is when we kissed. But it was gross, Gurion, because he was a liar and he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him and I never said I did.”

I said, Was it Berman?

“Of course it wasn’t Berman. I never kissed Berman. I told you that already.”

Tell me who it was then, I said.

“That’s dumb.”

I said, Right now I’m imagining you kissing every kid I know, and I’m going to keep imagining that. Every time I see someone, I’m going to picture you kissing him.

“So stop imagining things,” she said.

I can’t, I said.

“Come on,” she said.

I know you’re trying to protect me, I said, but it isn’t working. I said, Your protection is a form of torture. If you tell me who it was, I can figure out a way to make it alright. If you don’t tell me, I can’t make anything alright, and now that you know that you’re torturing me, you need to stop. If you don’t stop, then it’s like you’re doing it on purpose.

“I don’t like the way your voice sounds.”

Neither do I.

She mumbled something.

What?

“Boystar,” she said, pulling on grassblades.

I felt like the center of me was a vacuum and the vacuum sucked all of my bones and muscles into my chest cavity and the density of my chest cavity was so high that the center of me was being pulled into the center of the earth, into this tiny hole that had formed in the ground underneath me, and all the rest of me was attached to the center and was trying to follow it down into the hole but it couldn’t follow because the hole was too small and that is why I started breaking. And it wasn’t so much the kiss, either. That there had been a kiss — I didn’t like that at all, but that wasn’t really it.

June said, “Gurion.”

I said, He knew a secret about you? Do I know it?

She said, “I don’t know. Do I have to tell you that too? I didn’t want to tell you. I told you I didn’t want to tell you before and you said I didn’t have to, but you look like you are going to die. You were all red and now you’re all beige and I’ll tell you if it’ll make you red again. Will it make you red again?”

I don’t know, June, I said.

She said, “You have to become red again. It’s so pretty when you’re red, with your black hair and eyes. You’re the end of death.”

And then she told me the secret of her darkness.

I forgot about Boystar and grew red and cried and I asked her why she didn’t use her pengun and she said because she hadn’t invented it yet and that even if she had she probably wouldn’t have been able to use it and then she was crying too and she kissed me on the carotid and it was just like she described it and I forgot everything and so I kissed her on the carotid and she forgot everything, but while she was forgetting I couldn’t stop remembering.

When the one-minute warning honks sounded, we were still at each other’s throats. We raced over the crest of the high hill, shouting til the drivers saw us, then crossed the field and Rand Road slow, trying and failing to say goodbye right.

What can I do? I said.

“About what?” June said. She held my hand between us by the wrist and stared at it.

About what you just told me, I said. About—

She bent my fingers back so hard and sudden I knelt. “You can go ahead and fuck off if you ever bring it up again, Gurion. Especially in that whiney, desperate voice,” she said. “We cried and now it’s done so forget about it, or at least act like you have. I didn’t fall in love with you because you were cute. I didn’t fall in love with you because you were sensitive.”

My fingers, I said.

“You think I can break them?”

I said, I don’t know, Jellybean.

“Well so worry about that.”

At the front of my bus was too much heat. The bandkids were flushed and sleepy-eyed.

“We Damage We,” said a chunky trombonist behind the driver.

I told him, Next stop Frontier Motel.

He lowered his eyes.

Vincie was waiting in my wheel-well seat. He wanted to whisper.

“You look dead,” he said. “Are you worried about tomorrow?”

I said, What’s tomorrow?

“That’s exactly what I said to Eliyahu, which is the point of this whole story I want to tell you,” said Vincie.

Then he told me the story.

“I was in the cafeteria with everyone else, and I saw Co-Captain Baxter run down Main Hall, toward the front entrance, and then Eliyahu. There was about ten minutes to go before the end of detention, which meant Eliyahu was chasing him for, like, fifty minutes. You chase a kid for fifty minutes, it’s more like you’re hunting than chasing. It’s gonna end in some kind of fantastic fucken asskicking, and of a basketballer too, so I didn’t want to miss it. I was sitting right by the doorway, and there were so many kids in detention, I thought I had a chance of sneaking out and getting away with it. Ben-Wa said he’d hand in my detention assignment for me, so we’ll find out tomorrow.

“Anyway, I get out to the bus circle, and there’s a bunch of bandkids on the sidewalk part, watching Eliyahu. He’s kicking the shit out of this backpack that’s on the asphault. Bodyslamming it. Swinging it over his head and banging it on the curb. The backpack’s Co-Captain Baxter’s, who’s barracaded himself on the bus. The drivers have no idea what’s going on. They’re on that grassy island thing in the middle of the circle, talking shit about busdriving or whatever they talk about. They’ve got no idea.

“Soon Eliyahu starts swinging the backpack against the side of the bus, and Co-Captain Baxter sticks his head out the window over the rear wheel. He goes to Eliyahu: ‘Tonight I’m gonna rape your mom and your sister. Over and over,’ he says. ‘Until they start liking it,’ he says. ‘And then I’ll tie them to a rock,’ he says, ‘and cut off their clits so they bleed to death.’

“Some of the bandkids start laughing because dude said ‘clit.’ I twetch a goozy on one of their shirts and he hides behind the other ones. Eliyahu doesn’t notice any of it. He just keeps thumping The Co-Captain’s backpack like he’s gonna chop a hole in the flank of the bus, and the bus does dent a little and its paint gets scratched — there’s textbooks in the bag, all these zippers — but Eliyahu’s not looking satisfied. And then the main zipper opens, and the bag dumps its contents. Now Eliyahu drops the bag, plucks this little bottle out of the mess, unscrews the cap and starts flinging steroids through the air, right?

“So now the Co-Captain’s trickling all over the place. He goes, ‘You think I can’t get more of those? Not that I’ve ever seen ’em before or know what they are, but I’ll fucken chop those retarded fucken sideburn things off your mongoloid head because you think they’re mine.’ But all he’s doing is shouting through a window, you know? And I’m thinking: Eliyahu has beat this fucken kid, and that is truly fucken wonderful, but these drivers are gonna be done talking to each other soon, and he better calm down, right? And get away. But instead of calming down, he’s just getting madder and madder, Gurion. Like a fucken crazy madman. He’s walking in this tight little circle between the bus and the curb now, kicking all the junk he spilled out of the bag and staring at his feet and muttering to himself: ‘I want to kill him and it is wrong… I am Eliyahu of Brooklyn… that earring… to sever him from his jewelry…’ And the Co-Captain, he says to the bandkids: ‘Psycho’s mumbling prayers.’ And the bandkids laugh, and I twetch another one on the nose of the one I twetched one on the shirt of a minute ago, and he hides behind his friends again, and they laugh at that too.