Adam Levin - The Instructions

Behind me, Scott did the Joy of Living Dance. To do the Joy of Living Dance, My Main Man would two-step and roll his shoulders like a warming-up boxer and clear all the gooze from his throat. It meant he was going to sing. His voice was beautiful and he could perfectly sing things he’d only heard once — mostly songs off the mixes Vincie burned for us weekly — and he did requests.

We took a left into the Office and I never found out what Scott sang that time. It was suck because one day soon My Main Man would never sing again. The Williams made his heart grow wrong: bubbles in his vessels and tears in his atria. These defects shrunk his chambers down. He would outgrow his pump until it would kill him, the sweetest person. He was proof of why it’s flawed to call good people big-hearted. Desormie was more proof — his heart was huge from athletics, probably the biggest heart in school.

I always thought Adonai should kill him instead of Mookus.

It wasn’t up to me, though. At least not the instead part.

In front of the desk of Miss Virginia Pinge, Desormie tried hooking his thick arm around me. The arm was hairless and tanning-bed orange. I almost hit my head on the elbow as I ducked it, but almost didn’t count, so I didn’t get dangerous — as a rule I’d get dangerous when my head got touched. *

Miss Pinge said to me, “What happened this time?”

Desormie told her, “Fighting.”

Miss Pinge said, “You were fighting again?”

“Socking it out with Ronrico Asparagus and spitting like an animal on the Janitor,” said Desormie. “Probably the Janitor said B.D. to him in a disparaging tone. That’s his new thing he calls people and to me it’s hilarious and ironic.”

“The janitor makes fun of your behavioral disorders?” Miss Pinge said. She should have put her hand on the back of her head, where the lizard brain sits and the alarms blasts out from, but she put it on her chest instead, and kept it there.

“Not Hector with the mop, Miss Pinge, ya big loony toon. That FOB can’t hardly speaky the English. You think he knows what B.D. is? I’m talking about the Flunky’s little brother Mikey Bregman. The neatfreak kid. The Janitor. It’s his nickname. Get it? That’s why it’s so ironic. Cause he’s got the B.D. himself. The Janitor. Tch.”

“That’s not very funny,” Miss Pinge said. “Where are—”

“Hey, now, it’s the kid’s nickname,” said Desormie, “and there’s a reason for that and sometimes you gotta do as the Romans and sometimes you gotta let ’em reap what they sow, cause if you’re B.D. and you start saying B.D. in the disparaging tones? Then it’s just like with the n-word. You’re gonna get treated like you’re the n-word because you’re acting like someone who’s the n-word. Law of the jungle. That’s all I’m saying. It’s the facts of life. These Cage students need to cultivate some intestinal fortitude and stop acting like they hate themselves because we know it’s not very mature and it’s probably why they got put in the Cage in the first place, which is also pretty ironic if you ask me, don’t you think?”

“Where are Mikey and Ronrico?” Miss Pinge asked him.

Not a bad question.

Desormie chinned the air at me. He said, “Brodsky’s last email said this one fights, we bring him in separate from who he fought with.”

It was the first I’d heard of that policy.

Same with Miss Pinge. “Really?” she said = “That doesn’t seem right.”

“I do what Brodsky says,” Desormie said.

Miss Pinge handed him a Complaint Against Students Sheet. Some people called it a CASS. It was the standard document for the STEP System. Cage students like me were outside the STEP system, even though everyone pretended we were in it. If I’d been in the STEP system, I’d have been expelled by then. So would at least half the rest of the Cage. You got expelled after three out-of-school suspensions. Those were OSS’s. You got an OSS after three in-school suspensions in the same semester, which were ISS’s. You got an ISS if you had four detentions for the same reason in one quarter. All they ever gave me was detentions and once in a while ISS’s.

Desormie’s auto-tinting eyeglasses were almost as big as laboratory goggles. He took them off and blew steam on the lenses. Then he wiped the lenses on his shirt and put the glasses back on to read the standard document. He’d answered the CASS questions at least five times in front of me, but still he had to mouth the words of them as he went along. I noticed a red lint-string attached to his shirt-hem by static and I wanted it removed but it wouldn’t remove itself and I wouldn’t ever touch him, so I scratched an itch on my head and read the pervy stories in his face: He was a notorious de-pantser in the hallways of his grade school. The first time he went to the bathroom after eating beets, he looked in the toilet and thought he was dying, so he played with himself. His wife was scared of him was why he married her. He thought polack was the Polish word for Polish person. That’s the story of his life that his face told. It was the story of a perv in the making. The story of a perv on the make.

And the story was true. He was always caressing between his tits when he talked to women and making girls who wore spandex tights sit in front during sit-ups and leg-stretches. It was all there in the mouth. Its top lip had a pointy edge. Its word-forming movements made it look like he was chewing food that he thought was gross but wouldn’t say was gross because it was impolite but he wanted you to know it was gross so he showed you — like the food was so bad he couldn’t hide the ugliness of his own mouth-actions so you were supposed to admire how polite he was for not saying anything. I hated him. And that’s not just an expression. I hated him the way the tongues of smart girls prefer bittersweet chocolate to milk. I hated him the way Jews endangered Jews and burning matter grabs oxygen. I hated him from the moment I met him, and at the moment I met him it was as if I’d always hated him. I hated him the way he hated me. Helplessly, I hated him. Without volition. And it is true that there were others as despicable as Desormie, even within the walls of Aptakisic, but I had to learn to hate those others. They had to teach me how to hate them. Desormie was the only person I ever hated a priori. Our enmity was mystical.

Miss Pinge told me Brodsky was in a meeting. She said I’d have to wait. I was already waiting, but what she meant was I didn’t have to wait on my feet. To get that across, she stuck out her pointer and jabbed it back and forth. The jabbing was something Emmanuel Liebman had long ago taught me to call a blinker action. That label referred to the orange blinkers that were mounted on the tops of construction horses; the horse showed you where it was that you shouldn’t go, and the blinker showed you the horse. I.e., it showed you a showing. The jabbing of the finger was a blinker action because it was a pointing at a pointing. It pointed at how the finger was pointing at the three fake-oak waiting-chairs next to the door.

I didn’t like it when people blinkered for me — it seemed condescend-ing — but I did like Miss Pinge, so I decided I’d wait just a three- (not a five-) count, before I revolved and went to the chairs. Before I’d even counted to two, though, something flat sailed over my shoulder, then landed with a clap on Miss Pinge’s desk. A wooden bathroom pass the size of a textbook.

“I was nice to give you that pass,” Pinge said. “It would’ve been nice of you not to throw it at me.”

“I threw it on the blotter,” said Eliza June Watermark.