The Instructions (46 page)

The world may be villainous, the world may be virtuous, but to believe the world wholly villainous is no less blinkered than to believe it wholly virtuous, for a virtuous world is one in which the virtuous overcome the villains, and a villainous world one in which the villains overcome the virtuous. Thus: without virtue, there can be no villainy; without villainy, no virtue. So if we value our belief in the tendency of the world to be virtuous, we must be grateful for the villainous aspects of the world which test the instances exemplifying that tendency. Yet that is a macro-level assertion, and such assertions are easy.

What of true love? What of mine? Or yours? We can agree that true love is the sweetest of all things, yet love untested cannot be known to be true. And who tests true love if not villains? And so if we value 421

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our true love, must we not, in turn, be grateful for the existence of the villains who would thwart it? Must we not be grateful for their attempts to thwart us? And how do we reconcile this gratitude with our insistence that they are villainous? How can anything that is necessary be considered villainous? If, for example————————

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.”

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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 423

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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 424

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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.

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“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.

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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.

I said to Benji, Co-Captain Baxter’s on your bus.

There were nine regular buses, but only three intramural ones.

“That bancer,” said Benji.

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I said, He knocked Eliyahu’s hat off.

“Want me to avenge you?” Benji said.

“Thank you, but no,” said Eliyahu. “If need be, Gurion has taught me how to send forth metaphoric boulders from my hands, but I hope need won’t be. Such a need fulfilled would pain my stomach.”

Benji said, “If you don’t wreck him, he’ll come for you again.”

“Boulders in his brains when he comes for me then, but boulders no sooner,” said Eliyahu. “However, if he does come for me, and when he comes his friends accompany him—”

“Sure,” Benji said. “I’ll cripple his friends.”

“I was thinking restrain,” said Eliyahu.

Nakamook said, “A wheelchair restrains.”

“True,” said Eliyahu, “but just short of a wheelchair is a cane, and what is a cane if not but a bludgeon waiting to happen?

Surely it would be better if those we once restrained were not, the next time we encountered them, carrying bludgeons, let alone bludgeons whose contact with our bodies would be made somewhat ironic by the origin of their carriage’s necessity.”

Nakamook said, “Actually, to be a bludgeon, in the purest sense of the word, a cane would have to be extra stout and weigh more at one end than it does at the other. Still, even if they were just canes, we’d be—”

“We’d be in a very cocked-up situation with a bunch of needless chazerai
that who would want to bother with it?” said Eliyahu.

“Killing would make more sense than crippling,” Nakamook said.

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“There’s no need to talk that way,” Eliyahu said. “It’s uncalled for, really.”

Benji said, “Just pattering, man.”

“My apologies for misunderstanding,” said Eliyahu. “I have a hard time with the deadpan esthetic. I love Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx, and can enjoy Groucho, but Buster Keaton and Andy Kaufman, who—though I occasionally find them delightful—they trouble me the rest of the time. While we’re on the subject, I might mention my belief that girls who like Woody Allen movies are nicer girls than girls who don’t, and I have little use for Jerry Seinfeld. That is not to say
no
use, but rather—”

“You have to like Kramer, though,” Nakamook said. “You have to love George Costanza.”

Eliyahu said, “Those two are wonderful, sure, but Seinfeld himself?”

“Well, he’s no Larry David, I’ll give you that, except—”

“I share that opinion,” Eliyahu said.

The cafeteria detention let out. Vincie exited through the southern doorway with Asparagus and the Janitor, who nodded at me =

We’d come to your locker, but Nakamook is dangerous. I didn’t wave them over. I knew Nakamook wouldn’t attack them, but he would not be happy to stand next to them, either, and he was getting joy from talking comedy with Eliyahu—they’d moved on to Sacha Baron Cohen and Sarah Silverman; Nakamook claimed Cohen might be as good as Larry David, and Eliyahu, like my father, agreed 429

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with Nakamook, allowing that it was possible the two were equals, yet holding that Cohen had yet to prove his longevity, that only time would tell, and the same went for Silverman as for Cohen, but she was so gorgeous that her future seemed sadly to be a lost cause; she’d most likely drop serious comedy for animatronix and family pap like Robin Williams and Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin and Bill Cosby and almost every other truly funny performer of the previous half-century who hadn’t died by forty and wasn’t Gilbert Gottfried or Richard Pryor—and I saw that it was good: Benji seemed either to have accepted my defense of Eliyahu’s concerns about June’s Israeliteness, or, at least, forgiven him those concerns in favor of being friendly. It was warm, there in Main Hall, in the day’s last minutes, and now here was June, making it warmer—her locker was just down the hall from mine, and she was smiling while she twisted her combination. Right when I noticed, she pulled my hood on to hide her profile, and it seemed like she did so
because
I noticed: like it was my noticing itself that pulled my hood on, and plus it was my hood, in her freckled hands, and this time it didn’t feel chomsky at all for me to be in her proximity and not approach her. It felt like flirting. She’d told me not to talk to her til the next day’s detention, and I would do as she told me, and she would know I was willing to do as she told me, and maybe she would wish—maybe she was
wishing
, right there at her locker, behind my blue hood
—
that I wasn’t forbidden from what she’d forbade, and that, good scholars—that would be even better. Vincie banged fists with Ronrico, came over.

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I said, Eliyahu, this is a liar called Vincie Portite.

Vincie said, “I’m no liar.”