Adam Levin - The Instructions

Why are you apologizing? I said.

“We’re sorry!” they said. “Please.”

Please what? I said.

“We didn’t mean to offend you.”

I said, How did you offend me?

“We don’t know.”

So what good’s apologizing? I said.

“We’re sorry.”

Soon more bandkids got on the bus, and then some Indians in their school-colored windbreakers: Maholtz, Shlomo Cohen, and Bam Slokum himself. They went to the seats in back. Marnie drove us out of there and I cracked my window to smell the storm. The plastic latches you shove into the frame were tight and my thumb-flesh got dented. I shook out my hands like thermometers, like the flesh-dents were mercury.

Vincie said, “That makes you look gay. Why’s Slokum on our bus? He’s not supposed to be on our bus.”

I said, Why don’t you ask him?

Vincie made the noise “Tch” = You trickle my snat, friend.

I let it go. It was mean to challenge Vincie about Slokum, but I didn’t like it when people used gay like a swear. There was a gay kid who used to go to Schechter with me who I won’t name because it’s a secret. He was in eighth grade when he told me, and I was seven. I was the first one he told. We were close and stayed that way until after I delivered Ulpan and his parents banned me from talking to him. I wished he wasn’t gay because it made him sad to be gay, and it would’ve made his parents sad if they knew, so he had to hide it, and Adonai didn’t like it either, there was really no getting around that — I tried hard to find a way the day this friend of mine told me, because that’s what he’d wanted, that’s why he’d told me; he wanted me to tell him that it was okay. But it’s clear Adonai doesn’t want Israelite guys to be gay. It’s exactly as clear as His not wanting us to use condoms, get blowjobs, play with ourselves, tell lies, speak ill of others, mix linen with wool, mix dairy with flesh, eat pork, eat shellfish, or shave, I’d explained, and so my friend was cheered after all — but when someone said gay like an insult, or fag , or homo , it was like they were saying something bad about my friend, which is like saying something bad about me for being a friend to my friend. And plus my friend was an Israelite, and Vincie wasn’t. Since it was Vincie saying gay , I knew he didn’t mean anything bad about me or my people, since if he did he’d also be saying something bad about himself since he was friends with me too, but still I didn’t like him saying gay that way because what he meant didn’t matter that much — he was saying something bad about us whether he wanted to or not.

The bus stopped at a red and Shlomo Cohen started walking up from the back. Shlomo played second-string point-guard for the Indians and I’d never spoken to him before. Marnie shouted at him to sit, so he ran. He ran to the seat behind me, put his head in the aisle, and said, “Which one of you is Gurion?”

I said, I’m Gurion.

He said, “They want you to come back there and talk.”

“Who?” Vincie said.

“Bam and Maholtz.”

“What for?” Vincie said.

Shlomo shrugged.

All three of us got up. “They don’t want to talk to you,” Shlomo said to Vincie.

“I don’t want to talk to you ,” Vincie said.

I set my hand on Vincie’s shoulder = It’s fine.

Eighth-graders talked way more than they fought. And plus, if they tried to attack me, I knew I could handle them for at least as long as it would take Vincie to get there. I was good at bus-fighting. I knew how to use inertia and I could always tell when the driver would hit the brakes. That was the best time to throw a guy.

Marnie shouted some more and Shlomo shrugged some more and Vincie sat down a couple seats closer to the back. I decided I didn’t like Shlomo. He wasn’t friendly to me and I believed in his shrugging. I believed it was true that he didn’t know why Bam and Maholtz wanted to talk to me, but he came to get me anyway, and that was not very Israelite of him. Israelites who didn’t act like Israelites disappointed me the most.

Shlomo sat in the second-to-lastseat on the right and Bam stared out the window from the 2/3-size lastseat behind him. Maholtz was standing in the aisle, gesturing to the other lastseat with his right hand, which was his weak hand. He had his left hand in the pocket of his windbreaker, where he kept his weapon. It was a sap with a lead-ball head that was spring-loaded for more than the sake of concealment. Cocked, it was about five inches long. Sprung and straight, it was nine. You sprung it with your thumb — there was a button on the grip. The grip was black steel and the button was silver like a stilleto’s button. When it was cocked, the sap did not look like a weapon. It looked like the missing piece of something useful and electric, like a drill or motorcycle. The rod the lead-ball head was attached to was rubber, a very heavy kind of rubber, but because it was rubber, it was bendy, and that was good because of torque. If you flicked your wrist at the pinnacle of your swipe’s arc, the rod’s bendy action would create an extra swipe for the lead-ball head, and the impact would be exponentially greater than what it would have been if the rod wasn’t bendy, and the lead-ball head would, on contact, turn your enemy’s bones into a powder so fine it would appear to be mist if the flesh and blood weren’t there to block you from seeing it.

Maholtz said, “Step ingto my office, Gooreeing.”

Bryan “Bry Guy” Maholtz was a high-stepping, button-nosed, prettyboy bully from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He suffered from a combination of a stupid accent and cloggy adenoids that added ng and nd sounds to the backs of certain vowels and gunged up some of his consonants, too. His smile was the kind that said, “Wait’ll this kid seends what I’ve got up my sleengve.” On top of the creepy speech d., Maholtz always kept his eyes slitted, like he was waiting to violate something quietly. And his jutting chin, his pushed-out lips — it was like he was rondesormiating the whole bus. He was not very good at basketball, either, but he sold steroids to the varsity starters so they’d be friends with him, which worked. Maholtz didn’t scare me, but I was not going to sit between him and the window.

“Have the window. Pleandse,” he said.

I said, I like the aisle.

He said, “Your pleandsure is my pleandsure.”

We sat.

He said to me, “Thing about Boystar: no one reandlly likes him much. I don’t reandlly like him. Bam over there doesn’t reandlly like him.” I looked at Bam Slokum. He leaned on the opposite window, his forehead on his arm. “You like him, Shlomo Coned?” said Maholtz.

“Not really,” said Shlomo Cohen, in a bored voice.

“See?” said Maholtz. “Not. Reandlly. Still though, the ladies like him. They like his musinc. It gets them horngy. He gets them pretty horngy, the girls, just by doing his little dances in the hallngway. It’s a very curious thing. But the poind is, there’s only one of him. And then therend’s us, his friends. Do the mangth — I will: Many girls mindus one for him > many of his friends mindus one of him = many more girls for his friends than friends for the girls and therefore don’t mess with our play, Goo-ree-ing. Right?”

As long as Boystar didn’t bother June again, I had no reason to go after him, but if I agreed with Maholtz, it would be like saying that I wouldn’t go after Boystar because Maholtz told me not to, and plus he was a disgusting person.

So I said to him, I’ll think about it.

Maholtz said, “Think abound what?”

I said, Your question.

He said, “You misunderstood. I didn’t an gsk you a question. I told you that you will, from now on, leave Boystar aloned.”