Adam Levin - The Instructions

“The fuck!?” shout-whispered Vincie.

“Scott’s been in the bathroom since before the tone,” said Ronrico.

Leevon held out a log-shape.

I looked at the clock. 9:32. Art had started twenty-seven minutes before that. I thought of Main Man’s shrunken chambers. He’d been so nervous by the bus circle, maybe his pump couldn’t take it. If he’d had a heart attack in the bathroom, no one would know.

I knocked on the boys’ room door. Nothing. I tried the knob — it was unlocked.

Main Man knelt beside the toilet, spitting. He said, “I think I’ll be okay, Gurion. I have to sing.”

I said, You don’t sound like yourself.

“All the guns are ripe for the plucking,” he said. “Twice smitten, one dies but once, yet still we burn the ashes and annihilate all wreckage. Wherever we go we bring the monkey with us.”

Okay, I said.

He wretched and I kneeled next to him. “I need to do this for a little while,” he said. “These webs everywhere, green and then purple, but then they go away. The spiders aren’t real because I am real but I wish they were real so I could squash them. Once I get the second one down, I can sing til everything disappears, so just please don’t look at me while I do this.”

I’ll stay til you feel better, I said.

“It gets me all ambulance, spiders out the eyeballs.”

You’re gonna sing great, I said. I said, You’re the best singer in school and you have the best voice.

Mookus puked, said, “Boystar.” His puke didn’t smell normal. It smelled like a bakery on Christmas.

Your voice kills Boystar’s, I said.

“Soon,” he said. “Please go,” he said. “Spiders dance meanly and there’s no place like home.”

I lingered by the sink, washing my hands so I could watch over him, but he asked me to leave again, so I left.

“You need to shave yourself,” said Mangey when I sat down next to her.

“You do got some hairs there,” Ronrico said. “I think they’re good, though. Maybe a little long. You probably shouldn’t grow ’em out til you have some more of them.”

“Like a thousand more of them,” said Mangey.

“Okay everyone,” Miss Gleem said. “Roll up.” She meant the tarps.

The first time we had Art, me and Benji held the rolled-up tarps in our pits and jousted. Shouting “Charge!” and running across a room to knock someone down with a lance made of canvas looked like so much fun that, even after Botha stepped us for it, other kids picked up other tarps and did it. Vincie and Leevon. Mangey and Jesse Ritter. Even Ronrico and the Janitor, who’d been our enemies at the time. And so I’d thought we’d all joust every time we had Art, but stuff that fun rarely happens more than once.

The Side of Damage returned art supplies to the wheely-cart and rolled the tarps without incident.

While that was happening, the doorbell rang. Botha, forgetting Miss Gleem had his keyring, went to answer it. At the door, he patted himself down until Miss Gleem said his name, his first name. “Victor,” she said. And then he performed this stream of completely unBothalike actions. He spun on his heel, smiled, pointed at the keyring, and beckoned with his pointerfinger = “Toss the keyring, sexy.” Then, when Miss Gleem tossed the keys underhanded, Botha used his claw to hook the ring overhanded and finished with a bow, flourishing an invisible feathered cap.

He was flirting.

Main Man was hallucinating. He had come out of the bathroom and was standing beside me, eyes shut tight, pressing a powdery orange ball against his lips. The ball was no larger than a shooter marble, but Scott’s mouth wouldn’t open to let it in.

Benji walked over, saying, “What is that?”

“It’s the second one,” Scott said.

The second one what? I said.

“The second medicine to make me sing perfectly.”

“You look like shit, Scott,” said Vincie, approaching us.

“What’s the medicine called?” Benji said.

“I can’t remember,” Scott said. “Boystar eats four before every perform-ance. I’ll eat this one when the ghosts stop stapling my lips.”

“Boystar gave you that?” Benji said.

“Yes. And it was nice of him. It’s the secret of all his success at singing good and he let me have the secret. It’s the whole key to the castle of girls peeing on themselves because that is the purpose of singing. You have to eat four of them if you’re the Boystar because he’s not as good as me at singing, he said, and also because he’s taller. All I need to eat is three for the girls to bathroom because I’m already as good as if I just ate one, just by being me, not just because I’m short. I’m trying.”

I swiped the ball from his hand.

“He said it was for me,” Scott said, reaching for it.

I sniffed it. It smelled Christmasy like his puke had. I touched it with my tongue-tip. Bitter. It was nutmeg. And then it was powder, falling out the hole at the bottom of my fist.

This is amateur poison, I said. It’s what’s making you sick.

Nakamook bit a thumb-knuckle til it bled.

“That fuck,” said Vincie.

Scott knelt before the powder at our feet.

“Fucken fuck!” said Vincie.

“It was mine,” Scott whispered down at the powder.

I tapped his shoulder. When he looked up, I placed a ball of nothing in his palm. He popped the ball of nothing in his mouth, smiling, and swallowed.

He gave me the third one and I put it in my pocket, replaced it in his palm with another ball of nothing. Again he popped nothing in his mouth and swallowed.

“All done,” he said. “You fix everything.”

I heard gratitude, Nakamook an imperative.

“We will,” he told Main Man.

“That too,” Main Man said, but a tear bubbled over the scoop of his lashes. “Will I get to sing first?” he asked me.

You’ll get to sing last, I told him, and wiped the tear with my sleeve.

The woman who’d rung the doorbell was a Boystar staffer with a headset. She led Scott out the door by the hand. “Alert makeup,” she said into her celly. “The talent’s a little bit monochrome. Over.” Miss Gleem followed them, pushing her wheely-cart. Botha locked the Cage down behind her. I know the announcements had started by then, but I don’t know what they said. I couldn’t hear a word of them. I couldn’t hear anything.

Then I heard the end-of-class tone.

I went to the door to wait for Botha to open it. Vincie and Nakamook and Jelly followed me. Botha had returned to his desk. He was sitting on it. I looked his way and, again, he winked at me.

“Why are we standing here?” Vincie said.

What do you mean? I said.

“We’re going to the pep rally,” Benji said.

“Since when?”

“I don’t know — Brodsky told Gurion this morning, though.”

Wait, I said. I said, Botha didn’t tell you guys?

“No,” they said.

Come on, I said to the Side of Damage. Line up, I said.

They got behind us.

“Where we going?” someone said.

We’re going to hear Main Man sing, I said.

To Botha, I said: We’re gonna be late.

“No one’s going innywhere,” he said. He stood up to say it, winked at me for the third time. “You had your chence,” he said. “But you spant all first period talking. Talking’s against the rules.”

What? Wait. We always talk during Art, I said. I said, There’s a tacit understanding that—

Then he winked again, and I saw he was joking.

“Every one of you talked,” he said.

It isn’t usually against the rules to talk during Art, I said, playing along with his unfunny deadpan. I said, Not during Art.

“You and Nakamake more than anyone, Make-bee.”

Stop joking now, Mr. Botha, come on. We’re gonna be late.