The Instructions (106 page)

And I believed what I believed because I was an Israelite. That was the point.

Benji quit being my friend because I was an Israelite was the point. He wasn’t scared of Slokum
at all.
He was an anti—all along, a
crypto
-anti—but except no because he loved Jelly—so a

closet
fucken crypto-anti… Whatever he was it didn’t matter anymore. He wasn’t my friend, had quit our friendship for no good reason, so I wasn’t his. I wasn’t his friend.

We were no longer friends.

And for you scholars who protest, who say, “Wait now, wait a minute.
This
was your conclusion?
Closet-crypto-anti dot-dot-dot
?

No longer friends
? This seems a little crazy, Rabbi, no? It seems kind of easy, kind of—how should we say it? Not Gurionic. What about what June told you, in the two-hill field? She’d said Benji 993

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was crying. Why would Nakamook have cried in the two-hill field after you’d been humiliated if he wasn’t your friend? Shouldn’t that, to say the least, complicate matters? Why would you not take his tears into account?”

And I tell you, good scholars, I did. I took Benji Nakamook’s tears into account. I took his tears into account and rapidly dismissed them. I’d spent the six months since I’d been booted from Schechter taking all sorts of things into account that it turned out I shouldn’t have. I’d spent six months positing empathetic rationales for people who’d disappointed me, six months telling myself not to be disappointed, not to feel hurt, but to be understanding. That the scholars of Schechter and Northside who’d abandoned me had done so to be good sons and daughters—I’d convinced myself of that. That their parents had to fear me to be good parents—I’d made myself understand that as well. I’d told myself I wasn’t in any real trouble, nothing end-of-the-world, that the stakes were lower than they seemed to me to be, and that if ever I did face any real trouble, if push came to shove, if I was backed into a corner, caught in a pinch, if worse came to worse (worse came to
worst
?), all those who’d disappointed me would step up and… help me. Fight for me, even. They’d remember, all at once, that we were on the same side. They’d see I’d never cursed them, blamed them, mistreated them; they’d see I never thought of them the way they’d thought of me, and we would all reunite as if never divided. Except then I’d needed help. And none of them had helped me. None of them were helping me.

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Even the two who I’d believed were most separate from their like.

First Rabbi Salt, then Emmanuel Liebmann. In rapid succession.

In less than a day. And all at once it seemed I’d been offered a lesson from Adonai himself: quit counting blessings, start tallying offenses; quit providing excuses, start recognizing enmity; quit your forgiving, start bringing your vengeance. Nakamook had cried in the two-hill field? I was supposed to accept that as evidence of something good inside him? His tears were supposed to mitigate something? No. Not so. I’d been accepting too much, letting too much mitigate. I’d been acting like a Jew instead of an Israelite. When the twelve spies were sent out to scope the land of Israel, Caleb and Joshua said it was a go, and the other ten protested, saying to everyone, “Giants! Giants! There’s giants down there, Amalakites and Canaanites and Jebusites and giants! We’ll never be able to conquer them! They’ll smite us! We’re grasshoppers next to them! Grasshoppers, brothers!” and so God never let them, or anyone who believed them, into the land of Israel, and why? Because
fuck
those ten spies. Those spies were faithless.

Those spies were crazy, as were all those who believed them. God took them from slavery and still they were faithless. Is that not crazy? To see God here, and not see Him there? They were crazy and they didn’t deserve to live in Israel. And even crazier than that? What’s even crazier, scholars, is on hearing God’s curse, a curse from a God in whom they lacked faith—on hearing the curse from a God they doubted, I tell you good scholars: all those spies cried, as did all of those who’d believed them. Crazy, all of 995

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them. And so was Nakamook. Nakamook, after all, was crazy.

A psycho. A bully. After all, just a crazy psycho bully. And all crazies cried, all bullies and psychos. Who knew what they cried for? Really, who knew? Not me. I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t
like
one of them. And not you, scholars—you’re not crazy either.

So no. Just no. It just didn’t matter why Nakamook cried, and so it didn’t matter
that
Nakamook cried. All that really mattered was that Nakamook abandoned me. You don’t abandon friends.

We were no longer friends. And just as I had earlier, just a couple hours earlier, on returning from the first of Thursday’s two two-hill-field abandonments, I felt relief. Things felt a lot simpler.

Things felt like this: Fuck him, fuck them, fuck it all, it’s done.

And I pressed all my fingers against all my fingers and none of my fingers would break.

Benji was still grandstanding next to his chair. “No one else?”

he said to all the Cage. “All this whispering about the side of this and the side of that and none of the rest of you wants to step up against the Monitor in solidarity? Not one of the rest of you has anything to say?”

The Side of Damage was more loyal to me than even I was—

they’d been through with Benji since the moment they realized he wasn’t helping me on the high hill. And now they were all looking to me. It was just like the end of Group on Tuesday, except there were more of them. They were waiting for me to teach them something. They were waiting for me to show them what to do.

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I revolved my chair and faced forward in my carrel.

All of us did.

Not a minute later, I heard a chair scoot, followed by Jelly yelling, “Don’t!”

Everyone turned again.

“Now give me a pass to the nurse lest this piddling wound grow fatal with infection,” said Benji to Botha. A black bic pen pinned his t-shirt to the flesh beneath his bottom right rib. The shirt was a light blue. When Jelly pulled the pen out, the stain the blood made was lavender. She fainted for a second, falling forward onto Benji, who caught her with a wince, and for a second, yes, I did wish I could hang out with them, but only for a second.

Or maybe ten seconds.

Botha wrote passes and sent them to the nurse.

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15

TACTICAL

Thursday, November 16, 2006

6th Period–End of Schoolday

THE INSTRUCTIONS

Just before the end of sixth, Eliyahu returned to the Cage with a note. Small cuts were swelling below both his eyes, and some cotton plugged a nostril, but he’d quit the lean of the determined professor and acquired a menacing slouch. Head tipped to the left, he gave the note to Botha, then started toward my carrel, arms straight at his sides like holstered police batons, barely shifting and stiff.

“Sit down, Aye-lie,” Botha said, as he read the note.

Eliyahu got taller and taller.

“Note says you’re wanted in the owfice, Make-bee—I said sit down, Aye-lie.”

“I need to talk to you,” Eliyahu said to me. Up close I saw that his tzitzit were mud-caked, his fedora in tatters. Its felt was all matted and the crown bore a pattern of tiny dents that matched the tread on the Co-Captain’s Jordans. The hatband was gone. “Forgive me,” he whispered, “for yelling.”

“What dad I jes’ say,” said Botha.

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Eliyahu shot a glance at Ben-Wa Wolf, who scooted his chair.

And half the Side of Damage began to hyperscoot.

Eliyahu urged the other half on. He raised an arm overhead and beckoned nonchalantly, almost lazily, as if this were the ten-thousandth hyperscoot he’d captained that week. A black ribbon tied around his elbow—the one that used to band his hat—

flapped pennant-like.

Botha went to the nearest chair—Stevie Loop’s—and stilled it. The rest of the hyperscoot continued.

“I want you to know!” Eliyahu shouted into my ear, “that I was given an in-school suspension, but I told Brodsky nothing of your part in the fight!”

You would never do that! I shouted back.

Botha moved on to still Renne Feldbons’s chair, and Stevie Loop started scooting again. Lang and Wadrow were covering their ears. They were not amused this time.

“I am nonetheless verklempt!” Eliyahu shouted. “What I do not under-stand! Is why you protected those five boys who yelled

‘Death to the Jew’! Why you said to me ‘Don’t hurt them!’ It makes me very uncomfortable!”

The Five are Israelites! I shouted.

“Now I am especially verklempt!” shouted Eliyahu.

The teachers hated the noise so much, their eyes were closed.

I pulled Mr. Goldblum’s copy of
Ulpan
from my pocket and pressed it into Eliyahu’s hand.

Read it! I told him. I’ll explain more later!

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He spun to face the Side of Damage and the hyperscoot stopped.

“None of you’s—” said Botha. The end-of-class tone sounded.

“None of you’s going to the pap relly tomarra.”

“That’s a good one,” said Ronrico. “If by good you mean great,”

said Ben-Wa Wolf, “and great means an ingenius way to punish us without all the paperwork.”

Making their way to the gate, Lang and Wadrow shook their heads at Botha = “You are a fuckup.” He let them out, keeping his eyes on the pass he was writing for me, pretending to ignore all of us. There was little else he could do. It was a passing-period and no one was hitting anyone. No one was even cursing.

“Forty’d be a lot of CASS’s to write,” said the Janitor. “A lotta testimony against us.” “A lotta hard evidence that you’ve lost control of your students and Brodsky should replace you.” “So let it be unwritten that it may remain undone.” “All that pep will be wasted on the already peppy while we sit in the Cage, lamenting our lack of pep.” “We need that pep.” “We need a rally to inspire it.”

“Make-bee,” said Botha, waving the pass at me. “Go. To. The.

Owfice.”

Why? I said.

“I already told you.”

So tell me again.

“Note your frand brought,” Botha said to me, “says you’re wanted in the owfice.”

What’s a frand? I said.

Botha chewed his face.

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“We don’t get to see enough serious high-fiving between basketballers, Mr. Botha.” “We don’t get to see enough Jennys stacked in pyramids.” “Or hear enough words get spelled out with clapping.” “The special way the words sometimes sound like swears but aren’t, even though they really are.” “Double-entendres.”

“Homonyms.” “Spelled-out homonyms cleverly masking double-entendres.” “With clapping.”

“Make-bee!” said Botha. “Go to the owfice!”

“We don’t get to see enough Desormie in a tight suit, either.”

“His love of cheerleading.” “His gameday tent of finest gabardine.” “And don’t forget about the music!” “You’re gonna make us miss the Boystar.”

The air vibrated on my right: Mookus was crying.

I flashed my palm at the Side of Damage.

Some of them didn’t see.

“We won’t get to be in his video now!” “Shucks! Aw shucks!”

“And he’ll probably win a Grammy.” “Word on the street’s he’s next year’s favorite for best female vocal—”

Hey! I said.

The Cage went quiet.

To Main Man I said, You’ll be fine.

“Okay,” he said. He kept crying.

“Go to the Owfice, Make-bee.”

“You’ll be fine, Main Man,” said Vincie.

“Go to the—” said Botha, cut off by the beginning-of-class tone.

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I decided to give him a chance to be decent. I got up from my carrel and went to the gate—I didn’t even do a three-count—and when I stepped into C-Hall, I said, Tell Main Man he can go to the pep rally.

I said it quiet so that no one could hear, so Botha wouldn’t lose any face for acting decent, so being decent wouldn’t feel like a defeat.

“No,” he said.

‪

‫

‬

‪

‫

‬

‬

As I approached the mouth of 2-Hall, spacing out on dead-end thoughts about who’d ratted me to Brodsky, Call-Me-Sandy turned the corner into C. She had to pull her fingers from her cardigan’s buttonholes to wave hello.

“I’m sorry, Gurion,” she said.

Why? I said.

“You must have been waving at me forever.”

You waved at me first, I said.

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

Don’t be, I said.

“I’m—I guess I’m just feeling a little jumpy,” she said.

“Distracted. That false alarm. Rattled my bag of caramels, right? Or so you might say… because of how you put it when last we—”

Sure, I said.

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“Right,” she said. “And now I tell myself I’m going for a drink of water, but in fact the destination’s arbitrary. I’m on a disguised amble. I tell myself, ‘Sandy, you’re taking a walk to get a drink of water,’ but the truth is I’m not even thirsty. It’s just the water fountain’s the first destination that came to mind.”

Why can’t you just take a walk? I said.

“Because that would be a blatant, undisguised amble and it would defeat it’s own purpose: I’d know I was taking a walk because I was jumpy, and so I’d be thinking about my jumpiness, which would only make me jumpier.”

But you
do
know you’re taking a walk because you’re jumpy, I said. You just told me that.

Her fingers slid back into her buttonholes. “It’s not kind, what you’re doing. Undermining my healing strategy.”

I wasn’t trying to undermine your healing strategy, I said.

“Well, that’s what you were doing.”

There was nothing worth saying in response, so I made her high-five me, and then I made her high-five me again, and she laughed a syllable and I got away fast, thinking: Rat. Thinking: Deadkid. If Brodsky had seen me in the fight himself, I’d’ve been brought to the Office with the others.