Adam Levin - The Instructions

The chair I was in, though mostly wooden, was held together by metal bolts that showed at the joints of the legs and the arms. To distract myself from Boystar, I tried to pry the arm ones out with my fingers. This task proved im-possible without any tools, so I did a successful visualization that I would tell Call-Me-Sandy about in Group. Each time his knocks got harder and faster, I imagined that Boystar’s head expanded. Soon it was so huge that his mouth and his eyes became thin black lines between inflated skin-folds and the only thing sticking out was his nose-tip. I flicked it with my pointer and his head popped apart, but no blood sprayed. The visualized Boystar was a rubber robot.

I timed it perfect, the flick of my visualization. Miss Pinge had been looking at Boystar through the glass while he was knocking, and then she cut her hand across the air, karate-chop style, and the knocking stopped, and it was right when she’d chopped that I’d flicked. I liked it when things went together like that. Not just timing things like the chop/flick/knock-stopping, but space things, too. Like all the man-made products that fit into other man-made products that were not made by the same men or for the same reasons. Like how the sucking wand of my parents’ vacuum held seven D batteries stacked nub to divot, and my Artgum eraser, before I’d worn it down, sat flush in any slot of the ice-cube tray, and the ice-cube tray sat flush on the rack in the toaster oven, the oven itself between the wall and the sink-edge. I liked how the rubber stopper in the laundry-room washtub was good for corking certain Erlenmeyer flasks and that 5 mg. Ritalins could be stored in the screw-hollows on the handles of umbrellas. Wingnuts were the best, though. They fit over pens and many other types of cylinders with perfect snugness, and you could fasten and unfasten them without any tools. I carried many wingnuts in a small drawstring bag. They’d jingle when I walked, and often when I fought, and if I didn’t want to jingle I’d tighten the drawstring.

There in the Office, I checked my pocket to make sure I had the bag on me — I did — then decided to give a wingnut to June. She could put it on a shoelace and wear it as a necklace or tie it by a lanyard to one of her belt-loops, in which case I’d tie one to the chain of my wallet, and then, sometimes, walking next to each other, our sides might collide and make a new noise, something between a clang and a click, but neither a cling nor a clink nor a clank, nothing any known onomatopoeia described.

Miss Pinge’s computer beeped long and steady, and Miss Pinge growled. She clapped her hands once and held them clapped, in front of her mouth. She said, “I’m going crazy. Out of my fucking mind. I’m flipping out. I’m going bonkers.” Then she remembered that I was there, and she told me: “I’m sorry. You didn’t need to hear that.”

I nearly said, “Don’t sweat it, I won’t rat you out,” but Brodsky’s door opened before I had the chance, and that was probably better anyway since Pinge’s worried ears could have easily appended an “at least not right now” to the sentence’s back end. Mine probably would’ve.

If Brodsky’d heard her cursing, he wasn’t showing it, and she saw I wasn’t ratting, at least not right then, so she went back to typing like nothing had happened.

By that point, June was already walking toward me. I didn’t stand up til she got close enough that all I could see was the graying black cotton of her message-free t-shirt. She was taller than me, but only a little, and narrow top-to-center, so it didn’t matter anyway. My arms could encircle her torso no problem.

“Your turn,” she said. “I was told to tell you ‘ Your turn.’”

Brodsky was waiting in his office, at his desk.

I stayed where I was, admiring June’s face, all the many freckles in their many different forms, none of which clustered blobbily. The biggest was to the right of the curve of her right eyebrow. It was also the darkest. The lightest, beneath her lower lip, on the left, was shaped like the planet Saturn.

“What?” June said.

You okay? I said.

“Yeah. I just got a detention. It’s nothing.”

Are you sure you’re okay?

“I’m fine.”

You’re sure?

I wanted her to look at my eyes and start crying so I could tell her how everything was okay.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

Here, I said.

I removed the drawstring bag from my pocket. Thirteen wingnuts jingled inside it. I felt mean and wrong for wanting her to cry, so I instead of one, I gave her twelve.

“What’s this?” she said.

I said, Wingnuts. They jingle.

I poured them in her hand. They jingled.

Brodsky coughed fakely to get my attention. It was a habit he had.

June said, “You should go in there.” She pushed her thumb at Brodsky’s doorway, and I saw the freckle on her wrist and remembered.

I whispered to her, I have something to show you.

She said, “Don’t be sick, Gurion, I like you.”

Not my wang, I said. I wouldn’t show you my wang like that, June.

She said, “Show me later, then. Don’t get in trouble.”

I said, I’m in love with you. Be in love with me.

June said, “You’re in love with me.”

Yes, I said.

“Which means you’ll be in love with me forever,” June said.

Of course, I said. It can’t help but mean that.

“Exactly,” June said. “It can’t help but mean that. That’s just what it means.”

We’re in total agreement.

“Except no one can see to forever,” June said. “And so no one can promise forever,” June said. “So when you say you’re in love with me — it can’t really be true.”

But it is, I said. It’s true, I said.

“I’m not saying you’re lying. It’s just—”

I’m not lying.

“What you mean is you believe you’ll be in love with me forever. And probably that you’re glad about it — glad you believe it. That’s what you’re saying when you say you’re in love with me.”

Yes, but also—

“That’s drastic,” June said.

The color of her eyebrows was almost blond, and the gaps between her teeth like getting winked at so fast it might not have happened and you hope it did, plus her voice had this scratch that ran underneath it, as though last night she’d hurt her throat screaming and you were the first person she was talking to today in a tone that was louder than a whisper.

When you touch my head I don’t explode, I told her.

“Mr. Maccabee,” said Brodsky.

I said, I’m in love with you, and I have to show you something.

“Gurion,” said Miss Pinge.

June said, “You should go. You can show me what you want to show me later, in detention. You’ve got detention today, right?”

I said, I always have detention.

“Good,” she said. Then she chinned the air at the wingnuts in her hand. She said, “Thank you for these. And I’m sorry I said ‘Frontier Motel’ before. I was in a bad mood and I thought you’d be mean. You have a reputation.”

June slid the wingnuts into a pocket and jingled while she walked her June Watermark walk — more than a stroll, but shy of a swagger; just a little bit swaybacked — out into Main Hall, too far away from me.

Brodsky said my name again. I looked in his office. He was pointing his pointer at the chair before his desk. “Gurion,” he said. Then he blinkered with the finger. “Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee,” he said.

I am, I said, that I am.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

3rd Period

ULPAN

Lay your cardboard planks down. Lay them down on the lawn. Lay them down so the short side is facing me. Lay them down so that I am facing two rows of you. It does not matter if you are in the front or the back row. From up here, I can see all of you. From down there, you can all see me. Lay the planks on the lawn so that a foot of grass-space separates you from those on all your four sides.