Adam Levin - The Instructions

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Beginning with a chance encounter with the beautiful Eliza June Watermark and ending, four days and 900 pages later, with the Events of November 17, this is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age ten: a lover, a fighter, a scholar, and a truly spectacular talker. Expelled from three Jewish day-schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.
The Instructions

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Botha assented.

I went to the sharpener, and just as I’d started to turn the handcrank, he yelled out, “Wait! Wait, Mr. Makebee! No need to waste your affort. I think I’ve found a writing implement here — yes. Look. Right here in this nest!” And he made as if to pull a pen that he’d hidden inside of his sleeve from out of Egon’s hair. He waved the pen around.

A lot of kids laughed. The teachers tried not to. And Botha was laughing. He was looking at me, trying to get me to laugh, and I was looking at Egon, whose lips pursed and slacked as he tried to force a smile that just wouldn’t take. I didn’t know what to do.

Nakamook did. He stood at his carrel. “Combover,” he said.

The volume of the laughter instantly doubled.

And this was the beginning of the epic progression.

Botha stepped Benji once for not facing forward, and a second time for speaking without having been called on.

Benji said, “Combover.”

The laughter got louder, and continued getting louder each of the six times the word was repeated, and the volume, I’m sure, would have gotten higher yet, but before he could name the hairstyle a seventh time, Benji got an ISS and was sent to Brodsky.

When he came back from Brodsky the following period, he wrote the word COMBOVER on three sheets of paper and taped them to the walls of his carrel. We cracked up even harder than we had before, and Botha tore the three COMBOVERs down. Again Benji got an ISS; again he got sent to Brodsky.

When he returned from Brodsky’s that second time, he drew an anterior, a posterior, a sinistral, a dextral, and a bird’s-eye view of Botha’s head, and then he taped each to the walls of his carrel. After we fell from our chairs with laughter, and Botha tore all of the drawings down, Benji left the Cage with an OSS, and Brodsky sent him to Bonnie Wilkes, PsyD, to cool his heels for the rest of the day.

Wednesday, Benji served his second ISS. ****

Wednesday also happened to be the last anyone at Aptakisic saw of the Marshes; that night, their suicidal mother was arrested for colluding with their father, the child pornographer, and Egon and Mia were taken into foster care nowhere nearby.

Thursday, Benji served OSS.

Thursday evening, Vincie Portite got hold of his dad’s electric clippers, and Friday morning Benji returned to the Cage with an actual combover, greased-down strands and everything. This time, there wasn’t just laughter. No one could take their eyes off Benji. Half the Cage got detentions for breaking the Face Forward rule, and Botha finally sent Nakamook to Brodsky, who called on Bonnie Wilkes again. They decided they couldn’t step kids for haircuts, no matter how ridiculous, but they did get hold of Nakamook’s mom, who left her job and picked him up.

On Monday he had a scrape on his chin, a yellow swelling along the orbit of his bloodshot right eye, and his head was shaved completely bald. I saw him in the hallway before first period.

“Newkid,” he said, “I forgot my Darker — left it in yesterday’s jeans.” It was the first time he’d ever spoken to me.

In the bathroom, I drew, with my 12-guage RoughWriter DarkerWider Permanent, a U-shaped sequence of Charlie-Brownish black W’s around Benji’s scalp, then four squiggled lines across the crown. When Botha sent Benji to the Office this time, Brodsky threw his arms up, called Benji’s mom, and sent him straight back to the Cage.

Tuesday morning Benji was limping. When I asked about it, he said the same thing he’d said about his damaged face the day before — that he kept wiping out on his skateboard — and then he told me his mom found all his Darkers and threw them away. He called me his “secret weapon” and “last best hope,” and I remained his combover artist — his combover re-toucher , really; Darker ink takes multiple showers to scrub clean.

By Lunch on Tuesday, the Cage students were no longer laughing at Benji’s progression so much as getting really uncomfortable about it. By Wednesday, even the discomfort had worn off. I asked Vincie Portite why Benji kept going, and I asked him if he agreed with me that Egon, wherever he was, would, by now, feel properly avenged, and want, if he were a real friend to Benji, for Benji to relent. Vincie said, “Tch. Benji’s not Egon’s friend. He stepped up for him, sure, but that was last week. What this is now has fuck-all to do with Egon Marsh. This is just Nakamook, Gurion.” Botha, for his part, continued to trickle, stepping Benji for every minor infraction he was able to spot. Nakamook’s stories about the streak of terrible skateboarding luck responsible for his body’s increasing state of battery kept getting wilder.

Re-touching the combover Thursday morning, seconds after having just watched him puke a color that was way too pink to blame on bad eggs, I understood that Benji, wrong or right, saw no way to end the progression any time soon without losing face. His commitment to defiance increased in proportion to the amount of punishment he suffered; he’d keep getting stepped by Monitor Botha and claiming to streak unluckily on a skateboard he didn’t possess until… what? Until some outside, benign force that had nothing to do with anyone else’s authority — particulary not Botha’s or Aptakisic’s — ended the progression is what. The end had to come organically, or at least it had to seem to.

And the only benign force I could think of that might fit the bill was the force of his own follicles: he would quit the progression only when his hair had grown in too thick for his scalp to show ink. I thought.

I was too scared to ask him if I was right, though. Not scared of him, but for him.

This was because of something that happened on the second morning that I drew on his head. I hadn’t thought twice about it at the time, but after telling me his mother took all his Darkers and I was his secret weapon, Benji’d said, “She didn’t get this, though,” and he’d pulled a black crayon from his jacket pocket. I should have just taken the black crayon and used it, because you can wash black crayon from your skin with a little soap and water, so if you don’t want your mom to know that you’ve been drawing on your head all you have to do is spend a couple minutes inside the boys bathroom before you go home. If what you drew on your head with was black crayon. When Nakamook had shown me the black crayon, though, I didn’t think about that. All I thought was how black crayon would show duller than Darker ink, and that after showers in Gym, a crayoned combover would need to be re-applied.

It’ll wash off, I’d told him, and plus it won’t look as good. I’d said, I’ve got my Darker right here anyway.

And then I’d brandished it.

He could not admit that he’d prefer the combover to wash off; not when the less-wash-offable version of it would serve the progression better; to do so would be to openly allow that his defiance was — at least to some degree — subject to the will of someone other than himself, and he wasn’t built to do that, not even when doing it would prevent him from being injured. And he was no liar, Benji — except when he lied to protect those he was loyal to — so he could not insist on using the crayon for untrue reasons, either. If I had known, on Tuesday morning, the way Benji was about snat and face, I would have understood that the crayon was a way out for him; I’d’ve kept my mouth shut about its washability and used it gladly. He would then have been spared at least a couple of the uglier imaginary falls off his phantom skateboard. But I hadn’t considered that til Wednesday evening, after he’d called me on the telephone — a unique phenomenon (Benji hated the telephone) — and, without solicitation, taught me the principles of snat and face. And by Thursday morning I knew that asking him if he’d end the progression when his hair grew back would only make it impossible for him to allow his hair to grow back. If I asked him, then any future ink-blocking hair-growth might seem intentional, a long-term plan. And because any plan — let alone a long-term one — was not organic, he would feel obligated to keep his head shaved. So I didn’t ask.

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