Adam Levin - The Instructions

“Just calm down, dog,” Acer told the Shover. “The question was directed to me.”

“Josh is more than welcome to comment,” said Ruth.

Josh? I thought. No, I thought. No way, I thought. Not this vain swallower of multivitamin supplements. Not this morning drinker of protein milkshakes. This wasn’t the guy. A million kids were named Josh. This was some other guy.

“I want to know who’s asking,” he said to Ruth.

“ I’m asking, Josh. Ruth Rothstein, ace reporter.”

“Cut the slippery shit.”

“Wow that’s gross.”

“You know what I’m asking you. Who said the blankspot was Christian?” Josh said.

“I can’t give up my sources.”

His shirt got tight against the force of his pec-flex. “Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid, Ruth. Sources give information , not opinions.”

“This was an accusation.”

“That’s a kind of opinion. Whose opinion is it? Is it your opinion?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s my opinion,” Ruth said.

“What would you say?”

“I’d say it’s an accusation that, while I’m by no means certain of its accuracy, I did find somewhat compelling til just a second ago, when you started getting whiny, and then it became very compelling.”

“Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. My brother says you’re titless, even flatter than you look.”

“But he’s hung like an insect,” Ruth said, entertained.

“It’s not true. He’s my brother. Our men are hung.”

“Matt’s hung like a cicada, and I know you must know that. What I don’t know is how you trust what a person — even your brother — says about size, if what he’s got is a wa but he calls it a wang.”

Wait. No. But yes. But no. That happened too fast. So no. But yes. Actually, yes. Jelly’d told me her sister had dated Josh Berman’s brother; Ruth was Jelly’s sister; Ruth had dated this guy’s brother; this guy’s name was Josh, but… Okay: so maybe June was…maybe this Berman…so she’d been his girlfriend, for whatever weird reason, but…Nakamook was right; he had to be right. They’d never kiss. She wouldn’t have kissed him. She would not have kissed this guy. I was certain. I was. Pretty certain. I’d been pretty certain, though… I’d been pretty certain she wouldn’t have been his girlfriend either, though… I’d been… And… His wang? Really? This is what I had to think about, there in the Office? June’s ex-boyfriend’s wang and his brother’s wang too? Standing there shaking their wangs, the two of them? One with a face, and the other with no face but the first one’s body, both shaking their identical wangs at June and Ruth and Jelly, too, for some reason? Shaking their wangs while flexing their pecs and high-fiving each other and kissing their biceps? That’s what I had to do in the Office was picture that?

“You catch that?” said Acer to the fuming Josh Berman. “She just admitted, in so many words, that she’s seen your brother’s dick.”

Enough with the dick, I said. Enough with the dick.

“What up, dog,” Blake said to me. “I didn’t even see you there.”

Enough with the dick.

“You the man,” Acer said.

Get bent, I told him.

Ruth reached her hand out and put it on my shoulder. It was nice of her to do that. It calmed me a little, though I felt even worse for having pictured her getting dick-shook at. She said to Acer, “Josh has seen his brother’s unit too, Blake, is I guess what I was getting at, and since size is relative, and oneself what one relates to, and since Josh seems to genuinely believe that his brother’s other than tiny, it doesn’t take much of a leap to conclude that, well, you know…”

Good, I thought. Yes. Berman’s got the tinywang. Way too tiny to shake at a girl. He wouldn’t even whip it out. If she saw it he’d be… I felt like a bancer. I knew what it was you did with your wang when you had a girlfriend and she would let you; I wasn’t two years old; I read a lot of books. I knew that you didn’t just shake it at girls, but if what you did with it was what Berman did with it with June… As bad as it was to picture him shaking it at her, that wasn’t as bad as what he really would have done, if he’d done anything that she would’ve let him, so I pictured him shaking it and felt like a bancer. Everything seemed gross. I wanted to hide. I was hiding.

“Just keep talking,” Berman said to Ruth. “Keep on talking. No one here’s listening. You’re not even in the room.”

“You heard the question about the blankspot for Jesus, though, right?”

“That’s not what it is at all!” said Berman.

“Who are you getting angry at? I’m not even here.”

“It. Means. Nothing. A blankspot is blank. Blank means nothing.”

“But if I’m not here, then who’re you trying to convince?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be objective? Aren’t you supposed to be a reporter? Is it my fault you’re flatter than a wall? Is it my fault Matt met another girl at Stevenson? Yes and yes and no and no, so listen to me: It’s meaningless. The blankspot is meaningless.”

“Well, not totally meaningless — it’s Frungeon’s,” said Acer. “The white stripe of Frungeon, Frungeon’s own nothing, the innermost symbol of his soul.”

“Exactly,” said Berman. “It’s got nothing to do with Jesus at all.”

“But it’s the innermost symbol of Frungeon’s Christian soul?”

“Fuck. You. Ruth. Rothstein,” said Berman, and grabbed his scarf and rushed out into Main Hall. One of the others grabbed his own scarf and turned.

“Cory,” Acer said to him.

“What?” the Shover called Cory said.

Acer hesitated.

Cory walked off to follow Josh Berman.

“Goldman!” Acer shouted. “Berman!” he shouted. “Don’t sweat it, you guys!”

And the other Shover added, “She’s just one of those kids who hates on the Shovers.”

Ruth said, “Drop the preposition and you’re onto something, fatso.”

That’s when Blake Acer tried to make friends with me. “That was sweet how you beat down those SpEds,” he told me.

You’re a cheesedick, I said.

“No, I didn’t mean… I meant in the locker-room…This morning’s what I meant… That Janitor SpEd and his friend with the smelly piss or whatever? Like the way you messed them up like that? I saw it with my own eyes and it was badass, man, those guys had it com—”

You’re a cheesedick, I told him.

“Oh, a cheesedick,” he said. Then he turned to the kid who Ruth had called a fatso. “Cheesedick,” he said. “Cheesedick, right?”

And each of them said “Cheesedick” and “Cheesedick, Tch.” = “We know how CageSpEds show affection with insults, we’ve heard them do it on the buses, and we can be down with it: cheesedick is a shibboleth we can all pronounce.”

I’m calling you a cheesedick, I said. You’re the both of you cheesedicks, and all of your friends. You’re smegmatic foreskins. Stinking, fungal, sebaceous fleshfolds.

“Smegma!” said Acer. “Fungal!” said the other one. “That’s funny!” they said, and they laughed it up loud, stealing glances to see if I was joining them yet. A couple seconds later, the laughter’d grown louder, like all laughter does when the laugher starts to force it. They no longer believed we’d soon laugh together, but they pretended they did to save face. It was the same move they’d pull when B-team bully Bryan “Bry Guy” Maholtz would grundy or push down a Shover in the hallway, the same laugh they incited the bandkids to laugh when they’d trip or wallslam or bookrocket a bandkid. It was textbook caulking, this laugh-along laugh, an offering of peace that = “We don’t want to fight you” while managing to ≠ “We don’t want to hurt you.”