Adam Levin - The Instructions

But then Nakamook’s arm was suddenly blocking the rest.

“Why are you making that face at my paper?” he said.

I said, It’s weird — it doesn’t sound like you.

“What do you mean?”

The way the sentences move — and the words you’re using.

“The diction and the rhetoric?” he said.

The syntax, too, I said. Doesn’t sound like you.

“You always write the way you talk?” he said.

Half the time I don’t even talk the way I talk, I said.

“Me neither,” said Benji. “Let alone talk the way I think.” He didn’t want to be pissed at me anymore.

I pulled the Coke out of my bag and set it on the table.

I said, Want a warm Coke I got from the teachers lounge?

“Thank you,” he said. He sipped the Coke and set it down. Benji loved Coke.

I said, You’re leaving rings on the table. What kinda slob are you — the Coke’s not even sweating. It’s room temperature.

“Shut up,” he said.

I said, No. I said, You shut up. Look at those rings.

He said, “There’s no rings.”

I said, You must be crazy, because look at those rings. I said, Look at the rings, Benji. I said, I think you need a coaster. Look at the rings! Don’t you think you need a coaster? Say you need a coaster.

“You’re a spaz,” he said.

I said, Say it. Say you need a coaster.

“Wow,” he said, “I need a coaster.”

I said, Luckily, I’ve got a coaster for you.

Then I dropped the hall-pass-pad on the table, and even though my sucky timing ruined the joke, Nakamook laughed his face off because he was my best friend.

I said, You can have half of those, but if you sell them—

He said, “They’re my favorite things to have at school. You can go anywhere with them. No way I’d sell them. Thank you,” he said.

He liked me again. I said, You’re welcome. I said, Know what else? I said, Before I came in here? June snuck out of detention to meet me in the hallway.

He said, “Nice. Is she your girlfriend now?”

I said, She said she never kissed Berman.

“I told you,” he said. “Is she your girlfriend now?”

I said, I don’t know. I said, I should’ve asked her.

“No way,” he said.

Benji was single, but girls went nuts for him. He’d had six different girlfriends in the first five weeks of school and broke up with all of them because he wasn’t in love. Even though he’d have told you fighting, girls was Nakamook’s favorite subject to talk about. I don’t even think fighting was his second favorite — I think it was manners.

He said, “Any time I’ve ever asked a girl if she was my girlfriend, she got angry at me, like I should know already, and anytime I’ve ever asked a girl if she’d be my girlfriend, she got freaked out, like I should know that if I had to ask, there was no way.”

I said, That’s crazy.

He said, “It’s only sorta crazy, actually. I think I figured it out a little. I think it’s like this: If you’re asking a girl if she’s your girlfriend, it’s probably because you kissed her, and if you kissed her already, then she already thinks she’s your girlfriend, which makes sense, and so by asking her if she’s your girlfriend, it sounds like, ‘Did you kiss me because you’re my girlfriend, or just because you’re easy?’ which means you think it’s possible that she’s easy, which is a mean thing to think about a girl who was nice enough to kiss you. And then if you ask a girl to be your girlfriend, you probably haven’t kissed her, and so it’s more like you’re asking for permission to kiss her, which is not a cool thing to do because why would you ask that?”

I said, Why wouldn’t you ask that?

Benji said, “Girls decide who gets to kiss them, right? So if you haven’t kissed a girl, it’s because she hasn’t decided to kiss you. And if she hasn’t decided to kiss you, and you ask her to be your girlfriend, which is the same as asking her to kiss you, then it’s like you’re telling her to go faster, which is like telling her she’s prude — it’s either that or she just doesn’t want to kiss you. And that’s the part that’s the most suck, because after you ask her to be your girlfriend and she gets freaked out and stops talking to you, you can’t even just be glad it’s over and that you got it out in the open so that the healing process can begin; you’ll always have to wonder if you might have had a chance that you ruined by asking, and maybe, instead of feeling relieved about having put everything out on the table, what you should do is run very quickly at a picnic table so you trip on the bench of it and your head smacks the boards and gets splintered.”

I shouldn’t say ‘girlfriend’ to June, I said.

“Right,” he said. “You just have to wait and see if she decides to kiss you.”

But I shouldn’t try to kiss her, I said.

Benji said, “Of course you should try — if she decides.”

I said, And she’ll tell me if she decides?

He said, “Don’t look worried, Gurion. You’re smart. You’ll be able to tell if she decides to kiss you.”

I said, How will I tell?

He said, “Wait and see. There’s signals. You’ll know.”

And then I thought of something that made no sense if what Benji said before was true.

I said, Esther Salt was my girlfriend and I knew it and I never kissed her.

He said, “How’d you find out she was your girlfriend?”

I said, She told me I was her boyfriend.

“There you go,” he said. “She decided.”

I said, But you said the girl decides about the kiss, and the kiss decides the girlfriend part.

“I said the kiss decides the girlfriend part, but that doesn’t mean the girl can’t decide the girlfriend part, too, without the kiss,” Benji said. “There’s really not much that a girl can’t decide about. They don’t have rules.”

I said, I don’t understand.

He said, “I don’t really, either. I’m kinda just making it up.”

I said, Maybe June decided she was my girlfriend but didn’t tell me.

Benji said, “It’s possible.”

She stole my hoodie, I said.

He said, “Well I guess if she—”

I said, This is making me explosive. I said, I really want to kiss June.

He said, “Who wouldn’t?”

I said, I will break your skull.

He said, “I didn’t mean I wanted to. I meant who, if they were you, wouldn’t want to? You’re in love with her, you said. You wrote it down. Of course you want to kiss her.”

I won’t really break your skull, I said.

Nakamook said, “You can’t get to my skull.” Then he touched my earlobe to be a show-off, and I put mock-strangulation to his throat.

Mr. Klapper let us out of detention a couple minutes early. When he collected the assignments, he handed out dum-dum lollipops with weird, texty wrappers. “Not because you’re a bunch of dum-dums,” he said, “but because my son is a dentist.”

Eliyahu caught up to us at my locker.

Where were you? I said.

“Afternoon davening,” he said. “In the reference section. My aunt and uncle become verklempt when I daven in the house.”

I said, They’re not orthodox?

He said, “They’re not.”

There was a note in my locker from My Main Man Scott Mookus.

H LLO!

Soon th nd.

— Mookus

Main Man dropped all his E’s. He’d pronounce them when he spoke, but couldn’t see them written, so he’d leave blanks for them when he wrote. It is fin sinc you can assum th sound of th m. And ink is saved.

Nakamook yanked a string of Eliyahu’s tzitzit and said, “What’s your intramural bus?”

“I was told Bus One,” Eliyahu told him.

“Mine too,” Benji said.