The Instructions (87 page)

What? I said.

“Well then we can’t justify having the second cookie on the heels of the first.”

Why do we need to justify a second cookie? I said.

She said, “You told me these are the best poppyseed cookies in Chicago, and we only have four, which means we can’t waste any, which means they need to be savored. To savor the second one immediately after we’ve already savored the first, we need to eat it differently from the way we ate the first—we need to eat it in a way that our mouths can’t remember. If we press and chew the first one, then what can we possibly do to the second one that our mouths won’t be able to remember?”

What? I said.

“Nothing, Gurion.”

So we should chew the first one, satisfy the chewing desire, and then press the second, I said.

“But that’s playing it safe,” she said. “And we’re in love, which means it’s safe for us to be dangerous. If we act safe while it’s safe for us to be dangerous, we’re not taking advantage of being in 809

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love, and we could ruin it that way.”

I didn’t understand exactly what June was saying, but I decided to believe her because it is dangerous to believe in what you don’t understand, and I thought she was saying she wanted me to be dangerous, and I wanted to be what she wanted me to be.

I said, So then let’s try to press the first cookie and chew the second, and if we end up chewing the first, we’ll wait til later, when our mouths forget, to have the second.

June agreed to the plan.

And we tried to press and ended up chewing the first cookie.

She started putting the cookies away, and I said, Wait. Eating the second cookie now would be a waste, and being wasteful is dangerous.

“Yes!” she said.

So we each ate a second cookie. I put the whole thing in my mouth and chewed it into a paste without swallowing and then stuck my paste-covered tongue out at June

She yanked down on my hood-strings and pretended to chop me on the throat. I staggered and came back to land a drunk-looking haymaker on the locker next to her and dented it. Then I collapsed against the dented locker, swallowed the cookie-paste, and put my pointer in my mouth. I flexed my swearfinger and dropped the thumb, made a shooting noise and shuddered. I was feeling very good.

“Is that how you’d do it?” June said. “With a gun in your mouth?”

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I wouldn’t do it at all, I said.

“Me neither,” June said. “If I did do it, though, I’d want to do it with a gun in my mouth, except I’d have to be a cartoon first, so I could pull the trigger nine times.”

Nine? I said.

“Maybe,” she said, “Bangbang. Bangbangbang. Bang.” She extended a finger every time she said bang. “Six times,” she said,

“not nine. And if I did it with my back to a sheet of clangy steel, I could pull it just three times because every gun report would get followed by the bang from the back of my jerking head smacking the clangy steel.”

I said, It wouldn’t be the same, though. It wouldn’t be the same rhythm as the one you just said. You said, ‘Bangbang.

Bangbangbang. Bang.’ With three shots and a sheet of clangy steel, you’d get six bangs, but it would sound like: Bangbang.

Bangbang. Bangbang.

“You’re right,” she said. “It would either have to be six shots, and no sheet of clangy steel, or there would have to be two sheets of clangy steel—the second one just behind the one behind me—

attached to pulleys, and someone operating the pulleys, so that only the first sheet was lowered for the first gunshot (bangbang), then both for the second gunshot (bangbangbang), and none for the third (bang).” She kissed me on the left eye-corner. “You pay so much attention to what I say,” she said. She said, “So how would you do it?”

I said, I’d kill as many hard-to-kill enemies as possible. I said, 811

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I’d go straight to the center of the Arrangement and explode.

“Like with a bomb?” she said. “Like a suicide bomber?”

Like Samson, I said. I said, And probably with a bomb, but I wouldn’t be a suicide bomber. I’d only make power-kills, generals and political figures.

“If while bombing you commit suicide, you’re a suicide bomber—doesn’t matter who the target is.”

A forged pass is no more a lie if you use it on Miss Gleem than if you use it on Jerry, then, I said.

“That’s true,” June said. She said, “Showing a forged pass to Jerry is a lie. I never said it wasn’t. You’re the one who tried to say it wasn’t. What I was saying is everyone’s a liar, and I don’t care about the Deaf Sentinel, so lying to him isn’t any kind of betrayal. Miss Gleem, though—she’s my friend and I don’t want to betray her. I’m not a betrayer.”

I really wanted June to ditch with me.

I said, The pass doesn’t have to be your lie, anyway. It could be my lie. I told you I forged it, but maybe you didn’t see me forge it—maybe you thought you did when really you didn’t; maybe I was only faking the forgery—so for all you know I’ve been lying about it being a forgery; for all you know, it was given to me by Miss Pinge to give to you for being late to Art, and I’m just trying to impress you with forgery skills I don’t really have.

“But that’s cheap,” June said, “because I do know it’s forged.

Plausible deniability is cheap.”

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I said, So you might as well just ditch with me and then get punished.

“I like Art,” she said, “and if I ditch, Miss Gleem will feel bad—I know her. I’ll see you at 11:00.” She sandwiched my right hand between both of her hands, lifted it high, dropped it, and ran to class, twelve wingnuts jingling in the pockets of her stolen hoodie.

I had wingnuts too—I had thirteen in a drawstring bag. I had a lot of things. I had an Israelite girlfriend who I loved and I had nearly half a pad of hall-passes and an IDF fatigue jacket with a wide-mouthed pennygun in the secret pocket. And I had the Side of Damage. I thought: What is the Side of Damage? And I thought: The Side of Damage is the thing you lead. I thought: The Side of Damage is dangerous.

I was still too happy to just go to the Cage. I wanted to do something—I wasn’t sure what. I flipbooked the passpad, made it a cylinder, flattened the cylinder, pocketed the passpad. I tried to break my fingers and my fingers wouldn’t break. I poured the bag of wingnuts in my hand and they jingled. The paint on the wings of the black one was nicked; this was the one with which Nakamook had blown off the rockinghorse’s face while June and I kissed on the stage in the lunchroom. CHUCKETA-CRACKETA. That was the noise it made. I pinched it between my thumb and pointer. It was small enough to sneak, if I wasn’t mistaken, between the metal rods of the gym clock’s mask.

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The gym wasn’t empty like it should have been. Boystar was

LOCKER ROOMS

POOL

throwing a tantrum under the hoop beneath the clock. The heap

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of scoreboard wreckage had been removed, and he stomped on the spot it used to occupy, yelling “Jesus! Jesus Christ!” At “Jesus!” he raised his arms. At “Jesus Christ!” he slapped his hips. The person he was yelling at was his father, who stood slump-shouldered at the free-throw line, his pomade bending light into a halo. He shook his head = “No, this behavior is nothing I can brag about,”

and the halo got dull and tilted.

I was in the midcourt doorway, trying to be a wall. It wasn’t easy. B-Hall doorways were smaller than C-Hall ones. They barely buffered sound and their shadows were thin.

“Listen to me!” Boystar was yelling. “Please! I’m telling you!”

He kept raising his arms up and slapping his hips.

There were other people there, too, but none of them watched the tantrum.

At the top of the key, Boystar’s mother was crouching beside the Highway 61 acoustics man I’d seen the day before. He knocked his fist twice on the floor in front of him, then revolved and did it again. The mother leaned in.

Another man was on his knees on the bleacher-side sideline at half-court. He was outlining three sides of an air-rectangle like actors playing directors do in art movies about old Hollywood.

He squinted through the rectangle and tsked his tongue in concentration.

My chemicals were ticking. How could I smash the clock with all these people in my way? Why was this guy framing shots on the sidelines? I dropped the black wingnut into my pennygun.

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If I shot the clock and the shattered glass fell like I imagined, shards would slice off Boystar’s nosetip and knife deep into his shoulders, his feet. The problem was the bleachers—they blocked my vector of attack and there was nothing I could do about it.

Even if I risked moving to the center of the doorway and edging into the gym proper, where anyone in there could see me if they turned their head, the post the hoop hung from would deflect the projection.

Could I run at the acoustics man, shove him out of the way, then shoot the clock from the top of the key?

A guy in a suit as metal-looking as the hair of Boystar’s dad came out of the door of the boys’ locker-room. “Our star the Boystar!” the guy said to Boystar, adjusting his belt.

“I’m not happy about this, Chaz. I’m not happy about this at all,” said Boystar. “I’m really fucking unhappy.”

The guy in the glitzy suit—Chaz—put his arm around Boystar’s shoulder and whispered something in his ear.

Boystar said, “You’re a real sweetheart, too, Chaz Black, but that’s got nothing to do with anything.
Emotionalize
is about being sexy.”

Explosive as I was getting, I probably
could
move the acoustics man and hit the clock. Or I could even just race across the gym and hit the clock running—my chemicals were making me simple; my aim would be true—but I would get seen, caught.

Chaz said, “Sexy is as sexy does, my friend.”

Boystar’s dad clutched his own neck and looked at his feet.

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As if he knew what I’d been considering, the acoustics man moved to the southeast corner of the gym. He struck a tuning fork and said, “Nice.”

It was too soon to get caught. Would it always be too soon? I didn’t think so, but I knew it was too soon right then. I turned my pennygun upside-down above my palm and shook it til the wingnut fell out.

Boystar’s mom touched the elbow of the acoustics man. “Is that a tuning fork you’re using?” she asked him.

“Sexy people aren’t diseased,” Boystar said. “And you said I’d get a blue faux-hawk and we’d shoot in LA and you’d CGI me doing fly aerial shit in halfpipes. You tricked me and it’s stupid and I’m thinking hard about hiring a lawyer.”

There was an X of masking-tape on the sideline where the shot-framer had stood. He was working his rectangle at halfcourt now.

Chaz was saying to Boystar, “No one tricked you, buddy.

Circumstances have changed. And for the better, I might add.

Frankly, we got lucky. This video’s gonna nice up your image and it ain’t gonna cost much.”

“I don’t care what it’s gonna cost. I’m gonna be rich. I’m gonna be so rich. The only reason I even agreed to sing with that retard was so Brodsky would let me go on tour. Like that ever even mattered. Tch. If he had any faith in me,” said Boystar, pointing at his father, “he’d know how big I’m gonna be, and he’d just withdraw me from this shithole and hire a tutor. Now the whole 817

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world’s gonna see me chumming some Jerry’s kid?
Emotionalize
is not about dances with retards, Chaz. It’s about being sexy.”

I pulled pennies from my pocket.

Chaz said, “Listen. You treat this Mookus with affection—

smile at him, put your arm around his shoulders, make wowie-zowie kindsa faces if he breaks out the fancy footwork like they do in that sensitivity-training video we watched together—and all this advance negbuzz we’re getting about
Emotionalize
being too explicit for the tween set is gonna disappear forever. Churchmoms around the world are gonna be humming ‘Infantalize Me’ over the pot-roast like it was the Cats! soundtrack or something. And