Adam Levin - The Instructions

Someone behind me said my name and I spun. Isadore Momo. Across his forehead in Darker was DAMAGE.

“For to payback,” he said, pointing at the word. “For your protection and Vincie’s. We wear it so the Big Ending has blame for your bombings. To protect you. We vow we wear it until we have destroyed the Blonde Lonnie and made of the BryGuy a puddle.”

He pronounced the second “b” in bombings. I embraced him and went to the Cage.

On the way, I saw the thing Maholtz must have been referring to—“I can’t waint til Bam seends what you did,” he’d said — burned into the face of the 2-Hall juice machine. It made me even gladder, even less glad to be so.

BARNUM

SLOKUM

DIES

FRIDAY

Art was the one decent class in the Cage. No one had to sit at a carrel and, except for Botha, Miss Gleem was the only robot present. She’d lay tarps down before school started and bring a huge metal wheelycart with boxes of supplies. She’d let us make whatever we wanted, and since the Tape rule and the Face Forward rule couldn’t be enforced on students who weren’t confined to carrels, Botha had less to monitor, which got him disarranged. Half the time he didn’t even step us for talking. He’d mostly just sit with his feet up on his desk, polishing his claw with breath-steam and a shirttail. He’d even let Miss Gleem answer the doorbell.

I handed her my pass and followed her to the cart. She said, “What kind of supplies would you like?” She was pissed at me.

Nails and screws and wire, I told her.

She’d have usually joked around with me after I said something like that, but she was pissed at me so she didn’t. I hadn’t even seen her since Wednesday detention. She’d probably decided I was a bad influence on June. I hoped so — a thought like that would mean June was out of her doghouse. Whatever she was thinking, though, it didn’t make her smile. She handed me charcoal sticks and cream-colored construction paper.

I told her, Gold haircombs look tacky on women under forty.

She snapped, “My combs aren’t gold, Gurion.”

I know, I said. I said, They’re fake tortoiseshell, which is better than real tortoiseshell because no tortoise had to die to complement your natural coloring, which is exactly what your combs do.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you to—”

You don’t need to be that sorry, I said.

“Sorry,” she said. She handed me a box of crayons. I had spoken like a visual thinker, and all was forgiven. “Now go draw something amazing,” she said.

I shook the crayon-box like a spaz, like I was excited by our prospects, me and all those colors and what we could accomplish together. I was suck at drawing, though. I was nearly the suckest in the Cage, and Miss Gleem knew it. She knew as well as I did that I couldn’t draw anything amazing, but she pretended to believe I could because she thought that having the ability to draw well was as important to her students as it was to her, and she wanted to protect me from the knowledge of my suckness. I pretended so I could protect her from the knowledge that she couldn’t protect me. The goodness of our intentions was in direct correlation to the heights from which we condescended to each other.

I looked around for where to sit. Ben-Wa Wolf was shooting rubberbands at a line of origami swans on the radiator. Chunkstyle and Boshka bent pipecleaners into dolphins near the girls’ room. Next to the door to Call-Me-Sandy’s, the Janitor flashed homemade flashcards at the Flunky. GUM, read one of them. “Gun,” said the Flunky. RUN read another. “Gun,” said the Flunky.

Nakamook was under a carrel with Jelly by the northeast corner. I went there.

Kids stole glances and whispered to each other.

Benji was dotting tastebuds on the tongue of a bull. The bull was eating a dying lamb. Off to the side, a ram scraped his hoof in the dirt, about to charge the bull.

Benji was almost as good at drawing as Leevon, who was the best in the Cage.

I tapped his shoulder, and when he held out his fist I banged it = Nakamook is my boy, do not talk of us.

The Side of Damage stopped whispering.

I said to Benji: Bulls are vegetarians.

“So what?” said Jelly.

I said, No bull would eat a lamb.

“No real bull would,” Nakamook said.

That’s what I’m saying.

“Real bulls don’t wear watchcaps either, though,” he said.

Watchcaps? I said.

He drew the bull a watchcap.

“Look at Botha,” said Jelly. “Pretending he doesn’t care we’re talking.”

I looked. Botha winked at me, showed me his thumb.

Let’s not get carried away here, I thought.

“What’s he doing?” Benji said. “Why’d he do that?”

He’s railroading me, I said, and he thinks I don’t know it. He thinks I think he likes me.

“What do you mean railroading you?”

I remembered he and Jelly hadn’t returned to the Cage after leaving for the nurse on Thursday, so I caught them up on what happened, then told them what Brodsky had said.

So this is my last day in the Cage, I said.

“What’s the rub, then?” said Benji. “Back to fifth grade?”

The rub? I said. Fifth grade?

“You said the Monitor was railroading you.”

He’s kicking me out of the Cage, I said.

“That’s not kicked out, what you just told me, Gurion. That’s getting freed.”

“Congratulations,” said Jelly.

We won’t be in class together anymore, I said.

“We’re not in class together now,” said Benji. “We’re in the Cage together. And there’s always lunch, and Botha can’t keep you outta the cafeteria anymore.”

I said, The Side of Damage—

“If they’re worth your friendship, they’ll be happy for you. Stop making that crazy face and listen: don’t smart yourself out of joy. Whatever Botha’s trying to do, it doesn’t matter. This is great for you. I was thinking just yesterday morning how suck it is that you only got to see June after school. I was on the bus, hating that I had to come here, and then I remembered I’d get to see Jelly, and that didn’t just make it okay, you know? I got psyched to come here. And I thought how I would tell you that, and then I decided not to, because of how it might sound like I was rubbing it in your face, that I got to see my girlfriend all day long, and you barely got to see yours. But now I can tell you, cause you’ll have the same thing. Think about how great that is.”

Jelly touched his hand then, and I left them alone.

Leevon Ray sat under the teacher cluster, colorworking a flipbook about him and a ninja taking a bike ride together. Balanced on the back pegs of Leevon’s BMX, the ninja threw Chinese stars at oncoming pedestrians. The starred pedestrians all fell backward, clutching their starred parts and filling dialogue bubbles with exclamation points and wingdings til Leevon bunny-hopped them. Each pedestrian was fatter than the last, and the bellies of the fallen bodies grew progressively higher and harder to jump. Finally there came a man so fat his herniated navel touched the upper border of the page when he fell. The ninja leapt from the pegs in the direction of the viewer and Leevon’s eyes popped out of his face and the flipbook ended.

Next to the 3-D Leevon lay Vincie. He was the one kid in the Cage more suck at drawing than me. Neither of our circles were ever very round-looking, but mine, at least, didn’t have tails. Vincie’s resembled 6s or 9s and sometimes 6s on top of 9s. He was using a ruler-corner to carve STARLA from a sheet of brown clay. Beside him, Ronrico dumped sparkles from a jar on Mangey’s rubber-cement-slathered jeans. Mangey discreetly sucked glue off her fingertips. I got on the floor and asked them where Main Man was. Leevon snatched the second A off Vincie’s STARLA and started rolling it in his palms.