Adam Levin - The Instructions

You don’t, I said, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t need to fess up to anything to protect you. There’s seventy-nine of you and one of me. What’s anyone’s word against ten contradictions, let alone nearly eighty? This school is dead, I said, and we’re the ones who deaded it. Now we just have to hold it til the scholars arrive. Do what I say, and that won’t be a problem, but we have to move fast, and we can’t fight each other. We are, every one of us, brothers.

No one disagreed, at least not aloud, and Josh Berman said, “So what should we do?”

First of all, I said, you should give me some room here. I’m breathing more brotherly breath than I’d like to.

Laughing much harder than the comment warranted, the soldiers all back-stepped and opened up the huddle. They stretched and they yawned and they cracked their knuckles.

I asked which ones had their cellies on them. Seven Israelites raised their hands. I told six of them to call their mothers and repeat the following: “Mom, this is [insert soldier’s name]. I’m calling to tell you two things. First of all, I’m safe. Secondly, Gurion ben-Judah says to tell you we’ll all be safe as long as the authorities stay fifty yards back. I have to go now.” I programmed Botha’s number into the seventh soldier’s phone and handed the phone to Eliyahu.

That’s the only number you answer, I told him. And that’s the only number you call, okay?

“Okay,” he said. “Look.” He pointed over my shoulder.

Boshka and Chunkstyle were entering the gym, pushing television carts.

“Where’s the outlets?” said Chunkstyle.

Find them, I said.

Once the callers finished calling, I had them turn off their phones. I gave the phones to June and she put them in her bag.

“Hi,” June said.

Hi, June, I said.

She leaned in close. “I’m worried,” she whispered.

We’ll be fine now, I said.

She squeezed my hand.

A phone started ringing.

“That’s mine,” said an Israelite. “The power button’s jiggly.”

I took out its battery.

“But what if that was my mom calling back?”

“What if ?” said Eliyahu.

“She’s worried,” said the kid.

And the rest of the callers said the same of their own moms, and many of the non-callers asked why they couldn’t call their moms.

I said, There’s no way to make it so your mothers don’t worry. All of your mothers. We’ll be on TV soon if we aren’t already. Word will spread. They’ll be worried either way.

“That is suck.”

Less suck, I said, than if the cops come in here. You’ve called your moms, you haven’t told them any lies: you’re safe and you’ll stay safe as long as the cops stay back. Your moms will make it known to the cops that you’re safe. Your moms will make it known that your safety’s conditional, and your moms and the cops will think you’re hostages. With me so far?

They all seemed to be with me.

Soon, I told them, the cops’ll get their numbers straight. They’ll figure out exactly how many people are in here. If I let everyone call and you all talk like hostages, the cops will come to suspect we have a lot fewer soldiers than we want them to think. They’ll be quicker to enter. That’s why the rest of you can’t call your moms.

“When do we get our phones back?” said the callers.

Later, I said.

“What if we promise—”

“Enough already!” Eliyahu shouted. “You believe in Gurion, or you—”

And Berman cut him off, shouting even louder, and although he spoke toward the same end as Eliyahu, Eliyahu’s eyes flashed, burning for a second. “Are you nice little Jewish boys missing your mothers, or soldiers of Israel!?” Berman yelled.

They said they were soldiers and stopped asking questions, and they even seemed to forget about the phones, but Chunkstyle and Boshka had turned on the news, and what passed for their forgetting was at least as much caused by that.

“All we get is NBC,” Anna Boshka announced. “Everything else is the snow of purest static.” No one seemed to mind. Each screen was split between footage of the battle, and a shot of the bus circle filled with flashing lights. Along the bottom, crawled STUDENT UPRISING CLAIMS AT LEAST ONE LIFE… HOSTAGE CRISIS OUTSIDE CHICAGO. Off screen, the studio anchor was saying, “…quasi-proto-terrorist youth group—”

I punched both MUTE buttons, and said to the soldiers: Watch TV all you want, but stay on your feet, keep an eye on the door, and always keep a soldier next to it, listening. I’m gonna go take Brodsky to the Cage and check on the soldiers at the other entrances. I’ll be back soon. In the meantime, if you hear anything funny coming from the other side of that door, tell Eliyahu immediately, and he’ll call me. I’ll come back fast and I’ll handle it.

“I wanna watch cable,” the Flunky said.

“Flunky,” said Vincie, “calm down and watch. You’re just about to clothesline a couple of Indians.”

“I seen that already,” the Flunky said.

Brodsky couldn’t walk. The foot on which Boystar’s mother had dropped the mikestand caused him too much pain to even take his shoe off. I decided to requisition some soldiers to carry him. Though my talk of the scholars had gone a long way toward quelling the fears of most Israelites, it hadn’t done nearly as much for the Side and Big Ending. Even as the television showed him shooting Indians, Vincie turned his head at every small noise — I’d thought I’d even seen his hand jump once — and Ronrico and Leevon and Jelly and Mangey all kept not one but two hands on their guns. I figured this had to do with the numbers: the 44 and 20 (now 50 and 20, or 44 and 26, depending who the Five and the Ashley counted for). Scholars coming or no, the Side/Big Ending was still well outnumbered, and I was about to take off with Benji. I didn’t believe they had anything to fear, but that didn’t matter: fear engendered more fear, and I wanted less fear. So the soldiers I picked to carry Brodsky to the Cage were Israelites, five of them, non-ex-Shovers: Israelites so as not to reduce the Side’s numbers further, non-ex-Shovers because the ex-Shovers were the ones who’d been rough with Brodsky earlier. When the five I picked lifted him, he started to argue and I told him I’d gag him and he ceased to argue.

Halfway up B-hall, they had to put him down.

I called Eliyahu, had him send five more Israelites, again non-ex-Shovers. The two crews of five carried Brodsky in shifts, fifteen to twenty-five feet at a time. I told Benji and June to keep them all moving, and I fell back behind them, just out of earshot — I needed some privacy.

It had been nineteen minutes since I’d said to have Roth on the line in thirty. If they couldn’t or didn’t have Roth on the line in thirty, I’d have to have Wolf brutalize Boystar, and/or the cops might feel compelled to rush the school in reaction to or in fear of my doing so. If they did have Roth on the line in thirty and the scholars weren’t there yet, I’d need to come up with another demand, or make some concession, probably both. I didn’t want any of that. I just wanted stasis til the scholars arrived. But what if it took them more than eleven minutes? The hail had stopped hailing, but it had hailed for a while and the el was moving slow. I needed to give the cops more time without seeming too reasonable. I called 911, hoping they hadn’t found Roth yet.

This is Gurion ben-Judah, connect me to Roth.

“Hold on, sir,” said a female dispatcher.

A click, then a man’s voice.

“How do we know that you’re Gurion ben-Judah?”