Adam Levin - The Instructions

Botha, eating hotlunch left-handed at his desk said, “Mind the cheese doodles, Maccabee.” It sounded like, “Moinda chase daddles, Makebee.” He said it to remind me he was watching. The Cage was set up so we could be watched with great ease by the monitor and the teachers. Everyone in the Cage knew it, always. Except for how they locked you in, that was the main thing that made it the Cage. There was no reason to remind anyone, especially not at Lunch.

I said to Botha, The mind Maccabee, cheese doodles.

I liked that joke. I used the exact same words that Botha had used but the words meant nothing the way I put them in order, and they sounded like they meant something since I said the sentences in the same way as he’d said the originals, and with the same rhythm, and that demonstrated that English words were meaningless by themselves, that they were just lung- and mouth-sounds unless they were in the correct order, which was a paradox because the correctness of the order of a string of words depended on what the words meant, but if correct order was what gave words their meanings, then how could their meanings determine the correctness of the order? No one knew, and no one else thought the joke was funny, either.

Except for Scott Mookus, who told us all, “Ha! Haha! Ha!” That’s how he laughed. It was because of the Cocktail Party Syndrome that he didn’t have a real laugh. You could get him to do it forever, though, just by doing it back to him.

Nakamook said, “Scott ha ha. Ha ha ha.”

Mookus said, “Ha! Haha! Ha!”

Botha said, “Quiet the nonsense.” Quoydanawnsinz.

I said, Australia used to be a prison.

“Main Man haha!”

“Haha! Haha!”

Jelly said, “Georgia was a prison.”

“Australia’s a country,” Botha said. “Australia’s a contnent.”

We didn’t respond.

He said, “A whole contnent.”

I smelled nasty hotlunch.

Main Man and Leevon had it. I didn’t look at what it was. If I looked at their trays and I saw something that I usually liked, I would like whatever it was less the next time I had it because I would think of how bad the smell of the cafeteria version was. If I found out what they were eating and it was something that was one of my favorites, it would be like falling in love with the wrong person; how if you fall in love with the wrong person, then when you fall in love with the right person later on, you will remember the smelly version of being in love and it could threaten to make the good version less good.

When I was wrongly in love with Rabbi Salt’s daughter, Esther, I told her I loved her and she said she loved me, too, but after I got kicked out of Schechter we hardly ever saw each other, so I wrote her a poem without a title, which at the time didn’t seem half as hammy as it was. I thought it was funny.

I got my dad

to get Caller ID

so I would know when you called.

They gave us a box.

It costs five bucks a month

but it doesn’t work—

your number and your name

disappear from the window

the second right before I check it.

On the Shabbos after I got officially kicked out of Martin Luther King Middle School, my family had dinner at the house of the Salts. I passed my poem to Esther under the table during the chicken. She read it through the glass of the tabletop. Then she told me that my poem made her sad and that since I wrote it, it was me who made her sad, and that sadness of the girl was a sure sign of a bad match. Then she broke up with me, but I didn’t believe it at first. I thought she was just upset, just talking. She said, “Any bond between two people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it the least.” We were in the Salts’ backyard by then, and a rabbit was watching us. I said tsst to the rabbit and the rabbit took off. I repeated what Esther said to me and I noticed that it was not officially correct English because it was only two people. It should have been, “Any bond between two people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it less .” I told Esther about the grammatical problem because I wanted to change the subject because I still didn’t think she was serious about breaking up. And then she started crying and, for a second, I thought maybe she was serious about breaking up, but then I thought: No way. We’re in love with each other, and people in love with each other might argue, but they don’t break up with each other, not when they’re in love. And I decided she was crying because it was Rabbi Salt who’d spoken the relationship wisdom to her, and no one likes to think their father is mistaken.

Esther sniffled in a way that I thought was cute because it wasn’t gross at all, even though it meant wet snot was moving around inside of her face. The sniffling made me want to touch her sleeve, but I did not touch her sleeve. She was Hasidic, and the sleeve was too close to the hand for them.

So I said, It doesn’t matter, Esther, because it sounds better with ‘the least.’ It’s really impossible to know which is the right way to say it, because the problem might not be ‘less’ and ‘the least’ but ‘any two people.’ If you said, ‘Any bond between three, four, or five people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it the least,’ that would have been correct English, but correct English is not usually the strongest kind of English, anyway.

She was wearing a brown scarf that had fringes and she wiped the tears on her cheeks with the fringes mashed together. The rabbit came back and it was staring at her. I threw a woodchip at its head and it ran. I didn’t like rabbits at all. They’d stare off like thinkers, but I knew they weren’t thinking.

I love you, I told Esther. I said, I don’t want to make you cry.

She said, “I don’t feel like you love me. Why are you always correcting people? If you didn’t correct people so much, we would still be in Schecter together and you never would have written the poem and made me sad with it and then we could still be together.”

She wanted me to cry and I was failing. I didn’t want to fail. I wanted to cry for her, but I couldn’t.

I told her, I’ll cry soon.

Esther said, “No you won’t. I’ve seen you cry.” She said, “You only cry about crazy things like the Intifadas, and Jonathan getting passed over for David, and Moshe getting banned from Eretz Yisroel. You don’t cry about the things you are supposed to cry about.” She stopped crying then. It was my turn more than ever. I thought: Esther is being mean to you so that you will cry because it is your turn to cry and you’re late.

I said to her, I cry when I’m angry and my dad says something nice in Yiddish.

She said, “That’s a crazy thing to cry about, Gurion. It makes no sense.”

By then I knew she’d really broken up with me, or that at least she thought she had. Because it wasn’t like we stopped being love with each other, I thought, and Esther wasn’t even saying we stopped. And if we were still in love, that meant we’d get back together eventually, because that’s what you did when you were in love, was be together.

I said, I’m sorry, Esther Salt. I said, I hope we can get back together soon.

“There is nothing to be sorry about. You can’t help it,” she said. “You just make me sad and it means we are a bad match. I wish we never fell in love with each other.”

Rabbi Salt came out on the patio and told us it was time for honeycake. He waited at the sliding glass door for us, and Esther stared at me for an extra second to see if I would cry and I couldn’t cry and she went inside ahead of me. When I passed her dad, he put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed a couple times. It was a warm, rough hand. “My favorite student,” he said. “I hear you’ve been expelled from King. For a fight.”