The Instructions (5 page)
Authors: Adam Levin
Miss Pinge didn’t look.
Desormie said, “What I mean is, there’s a whole lot of absents you got there.” Then he said, “Gotta teach gym.”
He pretended to scratch his arm so he could flex it, and then he left the CASS on the desk and then he left.
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I hate that perv, I said to June.
She said, “Me too.”
Yeah? I said.
June made the noise “Tch” = “That was a useless thing to say, Gurion.” = “What you just asked me was not a real question.”
I said, Tch. It sounded inauthentic and I tried to ignore her.
It was hard for me to ignore people, especially pretty ones.
It was hard to ignore noises, too. Call-Me-Sandy said the same thing as my mom said about it. They said that to be a good ignorer you had to concentrate on another thing because if you just concentrated on ignoring what you were supposed to ignore then you wouldn’t really be ignoring what you were supposed to ignore because you’d be thinking about ignoring it, which was just another way of thinking about it.
So I concentrated on the face of Miss Pinge instead of June.
It was not as fun as concentrating on the face of June. June was pretty and also hot. Miss Pinge was hot but she wasn’t pretty. It’s the faces she made that were hot. But the face that she had when she was not making a face was not pretty. It was beat-looking, her resting face. When she was my age, she got her period early and her father dragged her in front of a mirror in her pajamas. He forced her to look into it and say, “You are an ugly girl and I hate you.” The face she made in the mirror acted powerfully on the bones and muscles of her resting face so that now it was a hint of the mirror-face. Certain kinds of men, on seeing the hint, would try to seduce her in hopes that once they’d gotten her naked, they 43
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could say something cruel to her and thereby elicit that original face she’d made for her father. Certain kinds of men like Ron Desormie. What a name. What a pervy name. What a perfect name for a perv like him. It could even be verbed like pasteurize.
I thought: It
could
be? No. It
will
be. I thought: From now on,
desormiate
= perv the world, and
rondesormiate
will, for a while, be an acceptable, however overly formal, variant in the vein of
irre-gardless
, then become archaic, whereas
sorm
and
desorm,
the slang of tomorrow, will eventually dominate, rendering
desormiate
itself the over-formal variant.
At that, I was tapped, though. I’d killed about a minute, but it felt like twenty. On the June-side, my neck ached from fighting my head.
I let my head turn and said, Here’s the new adjective you didn’t know you asked for.
Miss Pinge said, “Shh.”
I whispered, Junish: easy on the eyes, but—
June cut me off. She said, “You need to shave yourself.”
A couple people had told me that, but when I looked in the mirror, I could not see where they were talking about. There were no hairs on my face. I looked very hard every day. I wanted big sideburns.
Where? I said.
June said, “Uch.” Then she touched me near the area where my apple would obtrude if I grew up to have the neck of my father, and also she touched me right above that, which was the 44
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bottom of my chin, which was a part of my head, but it didn’t make me dangerous to get touched there that time. It made me want to hug her in a standing position and nose her in the hair. I wanted to kiss her fingers, too. They were cool on my skin, and I thought they would have a strawberry taste. I was sure that her hair would have a strawberry smell. The hair was red, all kinds of red, and I noticed on her wrist she had a pink freckle, very light pink, shaped like a י. I had two like it, one on each thumb-knuck, but mine were as black as felon tattoos and under two layers of waterproof makeup my mom made me apply every morning to hide them. I was going to rub off the makeup right there to show June the freckles, but exit-laughter rumbled behind Brodsky’s door. The laughter was the sound of the Boystar family, and once the door opened and Brodsky emerged I couldn’t start talking without getting us in trouble, and I worried that if I just rubbed off the makeup to reveal her the letters without a word June might feel creeped. Better, I decided, to show her later.
Name:
Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee
Grade:
5 6 7 8
Homeroom:
The Cage
Date of Detention:
9/22/2006
Complaint Against Student (from Complaint Against Student Sheet) 45
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Fight in the hallway with Kyle McElroy. B-Hall. Passing period (2nd–3rd). 9/19/06. Mr. Novy.
Step 4 Assignment: Write a letter to yourself in which you explain 1) why you are at step 4 (in after-school detention); 2) what you could do in order to avoid step 4 (receiving after-school detention) in the future; 3) what you have learned from being at step 4 (in after-school detention); 4) what you have learned from writing this letter to yourself. Include a Title, an Introduction, a Body, and a Conclusion. This letter will be collected at the end of after-school detention. This letter will be stored in your permanent file.
Title
Face
Introduction
There is snat and there is face. Snat is like water, but invisible. It can become violence, depending on what kind of shape the face is in.
The face is the dam that holds the snat back.
Body
Flood
If the face is suddenly wiped out by an enemy, the snat floods, and the faceless person spends all the snat’s violent possibilities in a single burst of attempted tackling, choking, or slamming the enemy’s head on the floor.
While the possibilities get spent, the faceless person shakes and 46
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cries. His aim is off, and his attack, unless he gets lucky, does no serious damage to the enemy: it is usually very easy for the enemy to dodge the burst.
Once all the snat has flooded out of the faceless person, his muscles disobey him and his fists quit. The enemy can stomp him into pudding without resistance.
Trickle
If, instead of being suddenly wiped out by an enemy, the face just gets cracked a little, then the snat trickles. If the trickler tries to caulk the crack, another crack will form. If he then tries to caulk the second crack, a third crack will form. Caulking a third will form a fourth, and so on. So caulking cracks never saves the face, but not-caulking cracks eventually might.
Cannon
The best is when a brick pops out of the face. It can happen two ways.
The first way is by trickles. Trickles further corrode cracks that go uncaulked. Enough corrosion will cause the snat to pop the brick that’s trickling. Snat will cannon through a brick-sized hole, and the person whose hole it is can aim the snat. He can turn the whole face in the direction of the enemy and blast that enemy faceless.
If the blast isn’t perfect, the enemy might pop a brick of his own—that is the second way a brick gets popped.
Once the enemy has popped a brick,
he
can aim snat through
his
brick-hole. That’s what a fight is: brick-popped enemies aiming their holes til faces wipe out.
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After it’s over, whoever’s not faceless gets all his bricks and snat back.
Conclusion
The Judge Samson always knew what kind of shape his face was in. Because the Philistines were running Israel, his face trickled at the sight of them, even if they were sleeping. But Samson knew not to throw down while he was trickling. That is why he spent so much time getting the Philistines to start up with him. They would cheat him or attack him and these actions would pop a brick out of his face. Then Samson would aim his hole and smite everyone. He’d aim his hole as soon as his brick popped and he never waited til his face got completely wiped out. Not til the very last second of his life.
At the very last second of his life, his sense of timing was gone, and his face trickled non-stop, but it wouldn’t pop a brick, so Samson got started-up-with by the trickling of the snat itself. His own snat wiped his face out all at once. Because he was Samson, his aim was amazing, even though he was blind, and his strength was astound-ing, even though he was shaven, and his flooding massacred every Philistine in the palace. Samson judged Israel for twenty years. In those days, there was no king in Israel and a man would do whatever seemed proper in his eyes.
Boystar’s parents looked like monsters in disguises. The mother’s 48
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eyebrows were drawn in dried-blood-colored pencil, and the hair of the father looked metal. They stood with Boystar in Brodsky’s doorway, talking to Brodsky in stagey tones.
“Well this is simply wonderful, Leonard,” the mother said to Brodsky.
“Yes,” said Brodsky.
The father said, “We look forward to it with great excitement.”
Brodsky said, “I’m glad.”
“Really Leonard, it’s—really looking forward to this,” said the father.
Miss Pinge stopped typing so she could concentrate on what they were saying. It was exactly what the parents wanted her to do.
Brodsky had opened his door because they were finished with their meeting, but the parents started talking about what they’d talked about behind the door in order to brag. The reason they kept using the words “it” and “this” instead of the words that “it” and “this”
stood for was so they wouldn’t seem to be bragging. They thought it would look humble to hide what they bragged about, even if the hiding drew attention to itself. I never understood why so many people thought humble = good, but I knew you weren’t humble if you were trying to look humble, so the parents were liars, and even worse, they were really bad liars, and so, for three seconds, I pitied their son, who always showed off, and didn’t pretend to try to not show off, which was probably because they wanted him to show off so they could pretend to not brag about it.
“So excited about it.”
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“I mean, really… This is… Really!”
Boystar’s hand was deep in his bag, rummaging loudly. The bag was a black leather messenger bag. His shoes and belt had high-shine buckles that matched its clasp. He always wore outfits.
He rarely fought anyone. Vincie Portite said it was because of his face; if something happened to his face he’d have a hard time being famous. Soon he pulled something from the bag and flashed it. It looked like a stack of baseball cards. Baseball was slow and baseball was suck. I wasn’t excited. Neither was June. Boystar came over.
“So,” Brodsky was saying, “I’m glad the trip to California yielded your son an enviable pop album. We’re thrilled to have him back at school, and, of course, we’re looking forward to this Friday’s performance.” The principal wasn’t a stupid man. He knew they’d stick around til he said what they wouldn’t.
“He and we look forward to it, too,” the mother of Boystar said through a shiver.
Her son, before us now, palming the stack, told me some things that were meant for June’s ears. He said, “Whuddup, skid?
I guess it’s like this: I’m doing a cut at the pep rally Friday. Second period, they get their first periods. That’s what they’re saying.
That’s what I hear. That’s what
I’m
saying. Want a new sticker?
Have a new sticker. Promote the new unit.”
He gave me a sticker. The stack wasn’t cards. It was stickers of him. On a background of glitter, the photographed Boystar was crouching intensely behind starry footlights. In his right hand he held a mike over his heart, and his left hand was clawed and 50
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raised in the air = “Wait, please wait, just give me a second,”
and his shades were low on the bridge of his nose, and his mouth half-open to tell you a secret to make you both cry. A banner at the bottom, bombstyle fonted, read:
EMOTIONALIZE. The Star’s
Reborn. New Album in stores this Christmas
.
June angled to see and her shoulder touched mine. I almost thanked Boystar.
June said, “Accessorize?”
Boystar had a silver Star-of-Boystar (*) earring that went with his buckles and bag-clasp. When he turned to June, the earring caught light from an overhead bulb and twinkled.
“Emotionalize,” he said, and twinkled. “Ee mo shun alize.”
Like June wasn’t kidding. Like she needed to be corrected.
He
needed to be corrected.
You’re on a sticker, I said. There’s a sticker of you. You look really sensitive.
“I know,” Boystar said. He said, “Girls like it when you look like a pussy, right June? And they’re the ones that buy units, the girls. And girls like stickers. These stickers move units.” He held a sticker out to June and said, “See? She wants my unit. She wants to give me money for it.”
June said, “Nope.”
“Only,” said Boystar, “cause you’re a dumb slut and while you’re asleep your father touches you.” The way he said it was really flat. Like the underdog new-kid psycho in a movie who the bad guy would shortly learn not to mess with.
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I thumb-stabbed the hand that was holding the stack and slapped him on the neck. I didn’t hit him hard. It was just a slap.
It was just to shock him, to show him how stealth I am and how slow he is and how sudden he would end if he monkeyed with June again. Still, he became pinkish and started breathing fast to keep from crying. Whenever people did that after I’d hit them, it made me feel sad for them, as if I should help them, and then angry because I didn’t want to feel sad for them since I had just hit them. I looked away.
