Adam Levin - The Instructions

Teacher #7 came out of the lounge.

I was worried the hydraulics would only squeak twice before the door shut, like with the third teacher, so I revolved after the first squeak in order to get the pen in place before the second, but the teacher paused at the outer-edge of the doorway, then turned her head to sneeze right when I was about to activate the pen-block, and I had to keep still and shut my eyes so they wouldn’t betray me, flashing. The second squeak came and I opened my eyes, tossed the pen down. It landed well, right against the jamb. Another sneeze from the teacher. I closed my eyes again. There was a third squeak after all, and a third sneeze. Then the teacher’s departing footsteps.

Nothing clicked.

I was in.

I plugged what remained of the change Pinge had made for me into the Coke machine, added a dime from out of my watch pocket. None of it caught funny or got rejected and, wide-mouth in hand, I was headed for the door, when I realized that the Coke would be warm by the time detention came around and so there was no way June would know, unless I told her, that I’d gotten the Coke in the teachers lounge. I didn’t want to tell her because even though I knew she’d believe me if I did, I couldn’t think of any words to make it sound pretty. I needed a site-specific souvenir to do the bragging for me. The bragging of a site-specific souvenir would be more elegant. Elegant could be pretty. I couldn’t see anything worth taking, though. Just chairs around a long wood-colored table with a tray full of rubberbands and binderclips in the middle of it.

I pocketed the binder clips, seven in all, and saw in the gaps between the piled rubberbands a bright white something too unlikely to believe in. I picked up the rubberbands. I saw and believed. A pad of hall-passes. A thick, tall pad. I flipped through the pad. Every single one blank. A pile of freedom. I stuffed it in my bag beside the Coke. The pad wouldn’t brag that I got the Coke from the teachers lounge, but gotten Coke cotton shmoke — I’d give June the pad. No one had ever gotten a pad of blank hall-passes, let alone made a gift of one. It was almost as good as smashing the gym clock.

I’d tear one pass off and write the penumbra poem on the back of it, then binderclip the poem to the lip beneath the cap of the Coke and, in detention, when June took the Coke from my hands, I’d drop the pad on the table in front of her and say, Want a coaster?

She would laugh at the coaster joke til her face hurt, and she would tell me her face hurt and I would say it was killing me, but I wouldn’t mean it meanly and she’d know that.

It was time to exit.

I came to the hall-edge of the teachers lounge doorway and threw fast glances in both directions. The hall was filled with students and teachers. I ducked back and became the wall again. This time I wasn’t edgy, though. I felt very good. I was stealth and loved June and broke rules.

The beginning-of-class tone came over the intercom and the footsteps stopped in the hallways and all of the teachers who would go to the lounge for fourth period — five of them — had already passed me without seeing me and I knew I was safe. I thought: As long as no one sees you, you’re safe. But right when I was stepping out of the doorway, Eliyahu came around the corner, and the timing was so strange that I thought Hashem was trying to remind me that He saw me. Except that couldn’t be it: if He could somehow tell what I was thinking well enough to answer what I was thinking, He’d know I didn’t need reminding. So it had to be something else — like an argument. I didn’t know if His argument was “I see you, yet still you are safe,” or “I see you, and so you are safe,” but the difference was potentially huge. Flowers might have said I was “facing a monster of ambiguity” in the hallway. It was good to face a monster of ambiguity, but sometimes what you thought to be a monster of ambiguity was just a lack of clarity, and a lack of clarity wasn’t good at all. It was unclear to me if I was facing a monster of ambiguity or a lack of clarity, so that was definitely not good, but I couldn’t sort it out right then. My new friend was coming toward me. From the right.

The top half of Eliyahu’s body leaned forward like he was running but the bottom half walked and he was chewing his thumb. He had a pass in his hand.

He said, “I’m lost. I need to get to Science. I need to get to A-Hall.”

I said, A-Hall’s for A-holes.

Eliyahu said, “It may be so. Let me ask you, Gurion: are you a big macher? I have the sense that you’re some kind of a big macher around here and I want for you to protect me. And to tell me how to get to A-Hall.”

“Big macher” cracked me up.

Eliyahu said, “Already a boy yanked on my tzitzit and knocked the hat from my keppy. I’m late,” he said.

For a very important date? I said.

“You’ll quote cartoons to me in a singsong voice?” he said. “You’re late, too.”

I said, If you have a pass, it’s a different kind of late.

“What kind of different late? Late is late.”

I said, You won’t get in trouble. Who knocked your hat off?

“I don’t know his name. He was a tall boy in a basketball jersey. Taller than me, even, and also not so thin. Muscular. Two small diamonds in his ear. I was lost, trying to find this A-Hall, and then bip : a pulling of the tzitzit. And bop : there’s my hat on the floor. This tall boy with the diamonds, he says, ‘Nice hat, bancer’? I don’t know from bancer , but I bend to pick my hat up, and I see there’s another boy present, another tall muscular one — call him Aleph to avoid confusion — standing back by the lockers, and by the way this Aleph turns his eyes to the floor when he sees me seeing him, I know he has witnessed this whole humiliating incident, and by the rapid, unprotesting way he leaves the scene as soon as the boy with the diamonds — who has been cued by the direction of my gaze to look at him — says to him, ‘What? You have a problem with this?’ I see that I should be even more afraid of the one with the diamonds than I already am. And so I’m right. No sooner do I stand up than the boy with the diamonds knocks the hat from my keppy a second time, and says, ‘That’s a really nice hat, bancer,’ And so what’s this bancer ? This is school-specific vernacular? Why laugh? Why laugh when I’m asking for protection? Why laugh?”

Eliyahu was hilarious. He talked like he was singing. A zadie in a movie.

I said, The kid who knocked your hat off is Co-Captain Baxter. He’s in eighth grade. We can damage him easy, but I can’t really protect you from anything. I’m in the Cage. They don’t even let me go to lunch.

He said, “So you’re saying if you weren’t in this Cage, you’d be willing and able to protect me?”

I said, We’re friends. I’d definitely try to protect you, but I don’t know how able I’d be, even if I wasn’t in the Cage. I can avenge you whenever, though. I could do that whenever. We could find Co-Captain Baxter at his locker, either right before or right after detention today, and I could put the cripple-grip on his clavicle, and then hold his arm so that his hand is partway inside the locker, and you could slam the door on his fingers as many times as you’d want, and he wouldn’t be able to shoot free-throws anymore — but protection’s different from vengeance.

Eliyahu showed me both his palms = “Please hold on a second.” Then he turned very suddenly and took a drink from the water fountain. The water fountain made the low whistling water fountain sound and Eliyahu’s curved back looked delicate, foldable like cardboard, like if I punched him between the shoulderblades, his spine would collapse. When he was done drinking, he unpressed the button and the whistling sound became a humming sound. Then Eliyahu lifted his head. Most people lift their head before unpressing the button. That way wastes water. And when Eliyahu turned back around, he did not wipe his mouth on his sleeve like most people, but skipped the water droplets from his lips and his chin with his thumb and his pointer. These were gentle things to do. They were very controlled. I noticed he was still bent forward on top. He still looked afraid of something. I thought: Maybe he always looks afraid of something.