Adam Levin - The Instructions

What stopped us was the likelihood that we’d get caught eventually, that we’d have to last seven years on the run, til I was eighteen; once we got caught, there was no way my parents would let us near each other. Better to stay in the Cage, we’d decided; tossing notes, stealing glances, hanging out alone fifteen minutes a day between the end-of-school tone and start of detention. Plus there were weekends. Plus after school sometimes. My parents were nice, just loud and spastic and a little bit paranoid; they’d like Benji when they met him; I’d convince Ruth to tell them he shouldn’t be in the Cage; I’d tell them I was in the Cage, what was wrong with the Cage? did they think I was hateful for being in the Cage? And I’d stop with the biting and the mouthing off; they’d let us hang out. They would. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bad at all. Not only couldn’t we run away and make it, but there was no good reason to run away, it turned out. So we went to Nurse Clyde’s, he sprayed Benji’s wound, covered it in gauze, and gave me some orange juice. He sent us back to the Cage with a pass we didn’t need, and we went to the gym, out the pushbar door, and we killed what remained of the schoolday outside, walking to the beach and kissing in the sand, getting too cold and un-tarping a boat that was up on a trailer parked in the lot, crawling inside, kissing some more, smoking stolen cigarettes to catch our breaths, and a round or two of slapslap we each tried to lose.

That’s why Benji said he wished we could run, there in Nurse Clyde’s. Because none of that could ever happen again. Even if Aptakisic stayed open, we’d be expelled, sent to different schools, and nothing would be able to convince my parents that Benji was okay to hang out with after that. That’s what he was saying.

I told him that your plan might work, though. To be clear: I was sure that your plan would work. I completely believed in you, but I told Benji “might” instead of “would” because I didn’t want to argue; I felt too good. I said, “We’ll all just say that Gurion did it, and Gurion will say that Gurion did it, and we’ll all get a pass.”

“The ex-Shovers’ll ruin it,” Benji said.

“How?” I said.

“Like snakes,” said Benji.

“How like snakes?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“So how can you be sure?”

“They’re snakes,” he said, “and they’re following a snake. Can you hand me that postcard?”

I handed him the postcard. “They’re following Gurion.”

“No,” Benji said, cutting lines from the pile. “They’re just scared of Gurion. The second he can’t hurt them, they’ll fuck him over. Berman’ll find a way.”

“It’s better for them to do what Gurion says.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I doubt they’ll see that— Dollar?” he said. I gave him the dollar. His eyes were so shiny. “They’re too fucking stupid. It doesn’t matter anyway.” He snorted a line. “I don’t give a fuck anyway. Not about them. Not about Gurion. I’m not following him anywhere. I haven’t been following him. You want one?… You sure?” He snorted another. “Cause the thing is he didn’t ‘do it.’ All of us ‘did it.’ At least I did. And I won’t — glah! This tastes bad.” He showed me a finger, leaned to the side, spit into the wastebasket next to the desk. “I’m sorry. That was gross. Are you icked?”

“I’m not icked,” I said. “What were you just saying, though? All of us did it and you won’t what?”

“I won’t rat him out. That’s all I was saying. Not to save myself. I did what I did because I wanted to do it, and that’s what I’ll say to the cops.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I do,” Benji said. “Of course I do. If I don’t say anything, and everyone else says ‘Gurion did it,’ staying silent’s the same as backing their word, and I’ll profit like them. I’m not gonna owe Gurion anything.”

“You’re not gonna save him from anything, either.”

“I said, ‘Fuck him,’” he said. “I don’t care about him. I don’t, Jelly. Or at least I shouldn’t. I know that much.”

“You’ll hurt yourself for no good reason.”

“I’ll owe nothing to anyone. That’s a good reason. I’m done owing people for shit I didn’t ask for.”

“What about me?”

“I was just about to say—”

“You’re making me cry.”

He wasn’t exactly. I felt like I was crying, but I wasn’t really crying. I wasn’t gasping, there weren’t any tears, my nose didn’t run. Just this tension inside of my temples. A pressure. It hurt.

“I was just about to say that I’ve got an idea.”

His idea was that since we couldn’t run away, we should stay where we were for as long as we could. He said we should get in the Quiet Room and hide inside the big cabinet. He painted this whole fantasy about the school being shut down. He said that once you’d surrendered, the cops would sweep the school, and after that, the school would be shut down, at least for a little while. He said that if we could manage to stay hidden til the sweep was over, the school would be ours to roam around and make out in. There was food in the cafeteria, cigarettes on the desk, and surely more to be plundered in the desk of Pinge, in the lockers of skids whose combos we’d find — Benji’d seen the binder — in the vaunted hutch of Hector. He said that he thought we could last for weeks, unless they re-opened the school, in which case we could give running away a shot, since maybe — if we were lucky — we’d already be presumed dead, so no one would look for us, and staying on the run would be that much easier.

It sounded great. Not just great, but perfect, really. It sounded like a pipedream. I didn’t believe that Benji believed it was possible. I thought he was just trying to get me to stop non-crying, to press up against me inside of a cabinet, and maybe to work a hide-from-the-cops-type seduction. I saw nothing wrong with any of that. I wanted to feel better, wanted to be romanced into pressing against him, had wanted to press against him even without such romancing, and above all, I saw that it would buy us some time in which I could convince him not to incriminate himself. I was sure I could convince him.

Even better than that, when we finally came out, I’d tell my parents a story about Benji having protected me from all the craziness going down in the school. I’d tell them that as soon as Benji saw that things were getting dangerous, he brought me to the Nurse’s and put me in the cabinet, and got inside the cabinet and didn’t lay a hand on me, but stood at the ready to protect me from attackers. They’d know he was noble; they’d be endlessly grateful. We’d be allowed to see each other.

“I love your idea,” I told him. “Let’s go.”

He said, “Ladies first,” swept his arm at the Quiet Room.

I called him a dork, but stood up, started going.

That’s when Beauregard came in from Main Hall. “Gurion says to bring you,” Beauregard said.

“Where?” Benji said. He sat back down.

“Up by the entrance. The scholars are here.”

“So what?” Benji said.

“They’ll come through the barricade and we’ll join into them. Then we’re gonna walk to meet some other ones.”

“Who’s we?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is Berman going?”

“I don’t know,” Pate said. “He stayed in the gym with the other Shovers. He said they’ll join us once the scholars break the barricade, but they keep backing out of plans, so who knows?”

Benji said, “What do you think?” to me.

“I think I want to hide,” I said.

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t,” he said. “If it’s gonna work out, I mean.”