Adam Levin - The Instructions

“Five or six.”

June came toward me, not looking at me.

I heard Ronrico say, “Oh but I’ve got feminine problems, too, Miss Gleem!”

June laughed.

Miss Gleem said, “Just stop, Ronrico.”

Ronrico said, “Sorry, Miss Gleem,” and June flicked her eyes at me = “Get out of the doorway”/“Come into the hall,” and then turned into the doorway and continued past me.

As soon as I started getting up, I remembered how I was supposed to be suffering and, instead of standing, I crouch-walked along the doorway’s sidewall, and when I made the turn into Main Hall I pressed my spine on the corner as hard as I could.

We sat next to each other, leaning back against the lockers with our knees up.

“What happened?” June said.

I said, I’m sorry. I said, I got stuck in the Office and—

June said, “That’s fine. What happened to you is what I mean? You look like something happened to you. Or at least you did a minute ago — now you look happy.”

I told her, I said a terrible thing to Brodsky. I said, I hurt him in his own office.

“Why?” she said.

I was trying to speed things up, I said, so I could sit by you in detention.

“It worked out, then.”

How’s that? I said.

She said, “You hurt someone to get something you wanted, and then you didn’t get what you wanted and that hurt you. It’s fair.”

I said, But you’re here, now. I said, I’m not really hurting anymore.

“Probably Brodsky isn’t either,” she said.

I’d wanted her to look in my eyes and see me suffering, then tell me everything was fine. And, in a way, she did tell me that, but we were next to each other and she was facing forward, and I wasn’t suffering anymore. Still, I wished she would hug me, so I tried to think of something that might evince her sympathies which might become a hug. It was hard to think of anything like that, though. What did I have to complain about, really? If I had failed at something that might undermine my self-image or whatever, that might work, but — boom.

I said, And plus, the thing is, I couldn’t do this action.

June said, “What action?”

I said, Nakamook discovered this action that everyone at lunch could do except for me. I said, Your whole body shakes and your face gets red and tears fill up your eyes. It looks like a seizure.

June was already doing it. She I’m Tickinged for about half a minute. Her face became darker than her freckles and her irises shook inside the whites. I didn’t like to see it, but it was good to see it, because while she was doing it, I thought: If June had a disorder that made her I’m Ticking for minutes at a time out of every hour of every day, would you, Gurion, still want to sleep beside her on the beach of the Dead Sea, even though she would shake you awake every night and probably drool on you while she did it? and I thought: Yes, it would be hard to do, and sometimes very gross, but I believe I would still want to sleep next to her.

And then I got happy because June didn’t have any disorder like that.

When she was finished with the action, she said, “That’s called the Electric Chair.”

Benji calls it I’m Ticking, I said.

“It’s been the Electric Chair for years now,” she said. “Since 2003. That’s when I invented it.”

How’d you do it? I said.

She said, “I used to want to be a modern dancer, and one time, in the third, while I was home from school with strep, I was watching this amazing video of a solo dance by a choreographer from Philadelphia named Kathryn TeBordo who all she did was sit down in a folding chair and then get up from it, but it took her twenty minutes because the dance was so slow that you could hardly see her moving, and it hurt to watch it, in my sternum. My sternum vibrated and I started thinking how completely in control of all of her muscles Kathryn TeBordo was that she could move that slow, and how I wished I could do that with my body and I would never be able to, but that maybe I could do the opposite. I thought maybe I could be totally out of control of all of my muscles at the same time. But I couldn’t figure out how that would work because if I just started flopping around, it might look like I was totally out of control of my muscles, but really I’d be controlling them — I’d be making them flop around. And so then I thought — and it was only because I had this really sweaty fever that I was able to think it, I think — I thought that in order for a person to truly be out of control of all of their muscles, they first have to be trying to control all of their muscles, and their muscles have to disobey them, because you can’t actually try to be out of control, right? That doesn’t make sense. That was the problem. You can only try to be in control, and then fail to control — that’s what out of control is, a kind of failure. So I decided I would try to make my muscles do something impossible. I decided I would try to make my muscles tear themselves and maybe even crush my own bones while they tore. And I tried, and then I tried harder, and then I was doing the Electric Chair, which at first I called the anti-Kathryn TeBordo, but I changed that fast because I loved TeBordo’s dancing and ‘anti’ made it sound like I was some kind of hater.”

I said, You’re the smartest girl I’ve ever met.

June looked at her knees and shivered.

You’re my favorite person, I said.

She brought her knees up to her chest.

I remembered how I’d failed to warm her with specialkid visions and took off my hoodie to spread it over her shoulders.

She said, “I’m not cold. Take it back.”

I took it back.

You’re my favorite person, I said again.

But she wouldn’t look at me, so I tried to do the Electric Chair, and I thought I was maybe getting it.

I touched her left elbow and got a friction shock. When I pulled my hand back, I saw the corner of her mouth lift and fall and lift and fall. She was trying not to laugh.

I said, June.

She said, “You’re just nodding your head and flopping around. It’s the opposite of what you want to do.”

I stopped nodding and flopping.

She said, “Make a fist.”

I made a fist.

She said, “Close it as hard as you can… See, your whole arm’s shaking.” She said, “Just do that with your neck now, and then the rest of you.”

I did what she said and the brain-blood started whacking itself against my eardrums. A silver dot appeared in the center of June’s forehead and bloomed into a bright white flying saucer shape. I was doing the Electric Chair.

June said, “Stop now. You look gross.” It echoed when she said it.

I stopped.

“In a second,” she said, “I have to go back into detention, and there are still things we have to talk about.”

I said, I love you.

She said, “That’s what I mean. I’ve been thinking about you all day and I believe you, and I like believing you, but it’s too soon to believe you. You don’t really know me.”

Tell me what you think I need to know, I said.

She said, “I knew you’d say that, and I think that even if I told you, you’d love me anyway, if you really do love me, but the thing is that I don’t really want to tell you, so…”

I said, So then I don’t need to know. And so you don’t have to tell me. I love you anyway.

“But—”

All I need to know is there’s things you don’t want to tell me, and that those things are things that I don’t need to know. So now I know that. I know all I need to.

“That’s — well — that’s a pretty good answer, actually, but—”