Adam Levin - The Instructions

Do people ever call you ‘Bry Guy’ to your face, Bry Guy? I said.

His pocket-hand flexed around the handle of his sap and the knuckles stretched windbreaker nylon, but I knew he wouldn’t pull the weapon. How I knew he wouldn’t pull the weapon was that I was watching his face, and all his face did was fold up into little sickly colored pouches of totally normal rage. If sapping Gurion was truly his plan, the face would’ve signalled Adonai to yell No! at Maholtz’s muscles and I was sure I would’ve seen it. But even if I was wrong about the existence of a pre-sin face signal, or about my ability to see one, I knew for sure that his weapon was useless in the face of my stealth. I’d have made claws of my fingers and palmstruck his windpipe into stickman dimensions before he had the chance to find the silver button with his gangly thumb, let alone to bring his arm back for the swipe. The second he pulled his weapon, I’d have made it mine. I liked his weapon. I wished he’d pull it.

All he did, though, was remove his empty hand from his pocket and cut it across the air slowly, left-to-right = “Luncky for you, Goo-ree-ing,” and when I didn’t do whatever it was that Maholtz was used to people doing when he offered them a very clear example of trying to save face, he did the same hand-cutting thing again while shaking his head left-to-right-to-left-to-right = “You don’t even know enough to know you’re luncky, much less how luncky, dumbass,” and when I still didn’t do whatever he wanted, he said “Tch” to me, and I said to him, Bry Guy, and he said, “You hearnd this kid, Bam? You hearnd this kid?”

Bam Slokum continued staring out the window and leaning on it with his forehead and one elbow. The hollow between his neck muscles where the top of the spine is housed was wide enough and deep enough to secure a superball, and he could actually do it, too — he could flex the back of his neck and hold things with it. I saw him do it in the hall once, to the thumb of a girl called Kylie Watson. He had to get on his knees so Kylie could reach, and then once she got the thumb in, Bam tightened his neck, bowed down like a Muslim on a prayer mat, and Kylie, following the pull on her thumb, fell on Bam’s back, giggling.

When Bam spoke, in the direction of the window, he moved his thick hand around above his head to emphasize certain words. His voice was yawny and quiet and weirdly punctuated. It surprised me, the way he talked. I’d only ever heard him speak in very short sentences. The waving hand was the only thing that showed his impatience, flicking at the wrist on words like “pick” and “most” and “sit” and “mewling.” He said, “Maholtz you’re a scumbomb, no one likes you, why you always gonna pick on people? Gurion I want you to leave Boystar alone. He told me all about what happened, and probably it was lies, I’m not saying you were wrong, you were probably right, and this isn’t about who did what to who but who’ll do what to who in the future, tomorrow, day after, whenever, first who being you, and the second one Boystar. You came out ahead, I hope you’ll leave it at that, I anticipate no objections on your end, you seem like a solid no-bullshit-type person, you don’t vibe me funny, I can tell that you listen and you want to understand, so I’m asking you to hear me, to listen, understand: Lana Mary Wilder is endlessly beautiful, the most gorgeous sophomore at Stevenson High, and for two years of Fridays she sat for the kid — pro-grade sitter, Lana, sat for me once, too, actually, we made these weird cookies, a whole nother story, it was years ago anyway — but she stays in touch with him, Boystar I mean, and she gets all upset if he calls her up crying, and he calls her a lot. Mewling and whining like a fraidycat crybaby famous little brat. He calls her up, worries her, and then she feels troubled, she gets all upset. I’m about to go see her is why I’m on your bus, I’m going to her house, and he’ll have already called, probably called her at lunch, so understand I want to tell her that it’s all taken care of. So she won’t be upset. You understand.”

“If Wilder’s all upsendt,” Maholtz explained, “she won’t be giving up the tints and sweet pussy.”

Bam reached across the aisle and the width of my body, and held Bryan Maholtz by the front of the hair. His arm was so long that he was able to do this without rising even a little from his seat. He said, “I’m really just super tired of hearing you, Bryan.”

Once his face was exposed, I could see that Bam’s jaw hardly moved when he spoke. His voice stayed yawny and even and, watching him close-up like that, I saw that I’d been right in the hallway that morning when I’d guessed his kingliness came from the faces he made — the face, actually: there was just one. It was as unchanging as his voice, the face, and describing it as a half-smile doesn’t explain much except for what it would look like on someone else in a photograph. A half-smile can mean almost anything, I think. It can fit almost any situation — it can mean whatever the person watching the half-smiler thinks is most appropriate at the time. Bam’s face was more intentional. It was set in a pre -smile. It was the face of someone who has just leaned in your direction to hear something important that you are about to say — maybe the punchline of a joke he is expecting to be entertained by, or the conclusion to an argument he thinks you’ll convince him with. When someone pre-smiles like that, it is impossible to read the stories in the person’s face — at least for me. It is also impossible to want to hurt the person. You want to perform for a person like that. You don’t want to disappoint him. Bam was impressive.

Vincie ran down to us. He must have seen a blurred version of the hair-pulling action and thought I was in trouble. I showed him my palm = Not yet, and he stopped short beside the seat of Shlomo Cohen.

Shlomo made the noise “Tch.”

“So I’m asking you to leave Boystar alone,” Slokum said to me.

Vincie said to Slokum: “Nakamook’ll fucken—”

Bam said, “I don’t stress Benji Nakamook and I wasn’t even talking to you Portite with your fists in the air like that like maybe you want to do something we all know you won’t do anyway so you might as well relax. I’m just asking your friend to leave someone else alone so my life can be a little easier, what do you say?”

I said, I’ll think about it.

Bam said, “Good,” to me. He said to Vincie, “You can tell Nakamook a lot of Fridays have passed and I don’t feel too dead.”

“I’m not your fucken messenger,” Vincie said.

“My messenger or Nakamook’s asskissy lackey, whatever you call yourself,” Bam said, “you’ll deliver my message.”

By the time Bam said “whatever,” Vincie had already spun and started back down the aisle, slapping his fingers along the tops of the seats on the way to his own. Right when Vincie spun, Bam’s pre-smile twitched away, like the stories in his face were fighting to get told, and if the twitch had lasted another billionth of a second, I could have read the stories, but it didn’t last another billionth, and Bam finished speaking his sentence. Then he started talking to me again. He said, “The thing about Nakamook—”

“Would you pleandse let go of me?” Maholtz said.

Bam said, “Only if you promise to quit talking about girls in front of me because when you talk about girls Maholtz it makes me want to hide every girl in the world in a castle you can’t get to and I don’t have a castle much less one you can’t get to and even if I did have a castle you couldn’t get to it wouldn’t be big enough for all those girls so promise?”

“Yes,” said Maholtz.

Bam twisted the forelock. “Promise,” he said.