Adam Levin - The Instructions

Either despite or because of the humiliations Claymore inflicted on him, Slokum worshipped his cousin, hearing any insult to Claymore as an insult to himself. So Nakamook, who hated Claymore, no little bit on behalf of Bam, coiled his anger and kept his mouth shut about it — not because he was scared of Claymore, but because he was loyal to Slokum. A few times, Nakamook even found himself defending Claymore’s name by proxy: Someone in earshot of Bam would say something about Claymore’s shvontziness, Bam would start a fight, start losing the fight, and Nakamook would help him, siding against the guy who shared his hatred.

One day during the lunch-switch, though, when the fifth- and sixth-graders were going to the cafeteria from indoor recess in the gym, and the seventh- and eighth-graders were going to indoor recess from lunch in the cafeteria, Nakamook and Bam got ahead of everyone to race topspeed down B-Hall. Halfway through the race, Claymore — heading up the crowd that was coming from the opposite direction — tripped Bam, who flew through the air until he got concussed against the corner of a water fountain.

This went well beyond pink-bellies, past petty arm-bars; Bam lay prone, unconscious on the linoleum, blood in his hair oozing down along his cheek, and Benji, who knelt beside him, exploded. He rose and spun and swung on Claymore. Claymore ducked the punch and took half a step back, as if in retreat, but instead he went forward and dropped Benji hard with a kick to the stomach, then pinned him at the elbows and called his mom a wino and slapped him for a while as half the school watched.

Nakamook set fire to Claymore’s house that night. The Claymores were all out to dinner, but in court they claimed that Geoff’s bedroom light had been left on to scare burglars away. If what they said was true, then Benji was lucky the house burnt to the ground. Had the lightswitches withstood the fire, he might have been convicted of attempted murder as well as arson.

I thought Benji probably did try to murder Claymore, but I didn’t know for sure since the story came from Vincie — which isn’t to say that Vincie was a liar, just that he definitely wanted to believe that Nakamook had tried to do murder. Whatever he tried or didn’t try to do, Benji got sentenced to six months in juvie.

In juvie, his arms — the first things you noticed when you met him — grew long. Comicbook-villain long. But not all thick and knuckle-draggy-looking. Apart from the arms, Nakamook had a build like Tommy Hearns, which kept any thoughts of cavemen far away. Plus, the arms seemed to be set a little bit higher and more forward on his shoulders than most people’s arms. If he’d been an actual comicbook villain, he’d have definitely been called the Mantis, and if I was a Thai boxer and I saw a kid endowed with guns like Nakamook’s — a kid who could reach nearly as far with an elbow as others his height only could with a fist — I’d teach him to Thai box in a second, just for the potential advancement of the art. Which might be why the guy who taught Benji to Thai box in juvie did so.

Whoever that guy was, he taught him well. Within a week of his return to Aptakisic, Nakamook was sitting wherever he wanted in the Cage. There weren’t that many kids in there yet, but the kids who were there weren’t just slow or hyper or overtalkative — in the early days of the Cage, you had to be violent to get locked in, and those were some of the earliest days. The Cage program had only been adopted a couple months after Nakamook burned Claymore’s house down. It might have even got adopted because Nakamook burned Claymore’s house down. I asked Vincie and he said he didn’t know. He said that one day there was no Cage, and then the next day he was in it.

What Vincie did know was that by the time Benji came back to Aptakisic, Bam wasn’t only huge, but pals with Claymore. According to Vincie, the pal part surprised Benji, but I don’t think it should have. Bam and Claymore were cousins after all, and even if Nakamook hadn’t tried to kill one of them, he’d burned down one of their houses. So Bam’s only options were extreme: either forsake his best friend or forsake his family. That the best friend in question was Nakamook must have made the decision pretty easy. Some best friends who your people hate, you might stay friends with on the sly and they’ll understand; Benji Nakamook was not one of those, and Bam, of all people, would have known that. I’d never met Claymore — he was a sophomore in high school by the time I arrived at Aptakisic — but no matter how much of a shvontz he was, he couldn’t have entirely missed the fact that picking on his cousin had set events into motion that led to the burning down of his own parents’ house, and so he had to have wanted to right things. Slokum’s having grown too large to continue to abuse probably didn’t do much in the way of impeding Claymore’s decision to befriend him, either.

After Vincie told me Nakamook and Bam had been arch-enemies for two years without ever having fought each other, I still didn’t doubt Nakamook’s line about the importance of being timely when revenging on arch-enemies. If he were anyone else, I would have. If he were anyone else, I would have thought he was just scared of Bam.

Nakamook fought all the time, though. A lot of people would say he was a bully, but really he was just sensitive. And it is true that he might have beaten you up if you looked at him in a way that he believed was offensive but, unlike a bully, he wouldn’t have ever faked being offended just to have occasion to beat you up. He didn’t care to damage anyone who hadn’t damaged him first. And plus he was like me: fighting was fun for him. The act of it, not just the outcome. It’s not the same for a bully. They’re not scared of fighting, bullies — that lie only seems true because it describes an irony — but they don’t enjoy it much, either. What bullies enjoy is being recognized as dominant. They’d much rather have just won a fight than be fighting one. And though he never fought anyone as big as Bam — no one else at Aptakisic was anywhere near as big as Bam — Nakamook fought some seriously big kids. Like the Flunky. It was hard to imagine him being scared of anyone.

Even if I was wrong, though, and timeliness was just an excuse for Nakamook to avoid stepping up to Bam, I couldn’t see how Bam would have any better an excuse for not stepping up to Nakamook. Bam didn’t fight as often as Benji (or as often as me for that matter), but he had been in enough fights to be as generally feared as Benji, so I knew the excuse couldn’t be that he was a pacifist. It wasn’t possible that Bam didn’t know he was Nakamook’s arch-enemy — not with all those SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY bombs everywhere — but maybe he needed some more immediate kind of provocation to fight. Some people were like that — they possessed mellow snat and resilient facial masonry. My dad was like that. Had I been Bam, though, the bombs would have provided me more than enough reason to step up to Nakamook.

I remembered bumping into Bam in Main Hall that morning. I remembered all that brotherly chinning of air and got pissed at myself all over again. Here was Benji, loyal, lunchless Benji, my best friend Nakamook, starved by his mother and yet uncomplaining. How could I act brotherly toward his arch-enemy? How could I give my best friend half my sandwich and carrots, then stiff him on the cheesepuffs? I couldn’t, unless I was a dickhead — I wasn’t.

I flattened my brown paper bag to make a plate and dropped half a handful of cheesepuffs on it. When I delivered to Benji what remained in the baggie, I had snap-style energy from getting angry, and instead of just pushing it across the table, I flung it at his chest, and without even looking up, he caught it.