The Instructions (41 page)

To me, Pinge said, “Your ears must be burning.” = “Brodsky’s been talking about you.” = “Brodsky’s got you made for the scoreboard.”

It took me a second to figure that out, though. My A was a little bit D’d.

Are the lobes very red? I said to Miss Pinge.

I disliked Berman, but that wasn’t it. Or that was partly it, but not all of it; the wangtalk and meanness to Jelly’s sister, the being June’s ex, the maybe having kissed her and the dickshaking imagery—it got me pissed, but none of that was what D’d my A.

It was Cory, Berman’s friend. I’d disliked him on sight, as I had all the others, and that didn’t bother me—because he was a Shover, it 373

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didn’t bother me—but when Acer said his name and I found out it was Goldman, I liked him even less. That was what bothered me. I never liked, to start with, when I didn’t like an Israelite. Whenever I met one I didn’t like, instead of trying to find reasons why I might come to like him, I’d try to find reasons for why it was okay not to like him. I’d try to find a way to like not liking him, and I didn’t like that about me—it seemed weak.

“The lobes?” said Miss Pinge.

And suddenly I understood what she’d meant about burning ears, but Brodsky’s door was open and he might have been listening, so I kept up like I didn’t know what she’d meant. I approached her desk, asking, You got my record?

“I do,” she said, leaning forward a little.

Behind me, in his office, Brodsky coughed—fakely?

Can I have it? I said.

“I don’t know,” Miss Pinge said.

The Shovers packed up, went out to to the bus circle, Ruth taking down their statements on a stenopad.

You don’t know? I said.

“Maybe,” Miss Pinge said.

Brodsky coughed again, a string of—yes—of fakes, and a ball of muscle heated up between my shoulders, right where he aimed the beams of anger that shot from his eyes. He was definitely coughing to get my attention. It was not a good sign. I’d assumed that if he was going to question me about the scoreboard that day, then the note Eliyahu’d brought would’ve said 374

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for me to come down to the Office immediately, not when school let out. Except Brodsky probably knew I’d think that, and that’s probably why he did it the way he did it. It was a solid tactic and it was stupid of me to expect that showing up for my record would game him out.

Is this a can I/may I thing? I said to Miss Pinge. Or a magic word thing? I said.

“Yes,” she said.

May I please have my record?

“Yes,” she said. She reached under her desk and came up with two thick manila envelopes, the kind with the bobbin and the red twine fastener. The red twine fastener gets wound around the bobbin.

I said, Two copies?

“Just one,” she said.

I said, How many envelopes does Nakamook have?

She said, “That would be confidential.”

I said, I bet mine are thicker.

Miss Pinge said, “I bet so, too.”

I said, Lots of people have written about me.

“That’s a very positive way to see it,” she said. “I think Mr.

Brodsky wants to talk to you, kiddo.”

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In his doorway, I told Brodsky: Miss Pinge said you want to talk.

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And then I stepped over his threshold and saw that the wingnut I’d given him was gone from his blotter. It wasn’t anywhere on his desk.

He said, “I’ve been doing some math.”

I unwound the twine from the bobbin of the top envelope and started pulling out the contents—vaccinations, prescriptions for drugs I wouldn’t take, copies of birth certificate, Social Security card, admissions records—

Brodsky stood up fast behind his desk. He said, “The average number of students in Tuesday detention is twenty. Do you know how many students are in detention today?”

I shoved the contents back down in the envelope.

He said, “There are forty-one students in detention today.

That’s over one fifteenth of the school. There are so many students in detention today, Gurion, that we had to assign a second detention monitor.”

The top item in the second envelope was my first Step 4 CASS

from Botha. The offenses listed were “Destruction of School Property” and “Incitement to Destroy School Property” = I’d bent paper-clips into grasshoppers and taught Main Man and this slow boy, Winthrop, how to sculpt and trigger them.

Brodsky slammed his fist down onto the desk, wishing it was my nose. He said, “You, Ronrico and Mikey Bregman account for three of the students in detention. And Eliyahu, who, this morning, was every bit the tragic posterboy for sweetness and piety, put his
fist
through some
glass
some sixty minutes after 376

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meeting you. He’s a fourth.”

I said to Brodsky, I like Eliyahu. I said, He’s a scholar.

Brodsky said, “That’s just what he said when I asked him about you. No few people have said that about you, Gurion, but I am beginning to believe that the praise is hollow. You are failing to live up to expectations— Don’t smile!” he said.

I couldn’t help it—I’d found a copy of this letter from the social worker at Northside Hebrew Day that asked my parents for permission to meet with me regularly. I’d seen the letter before, right when my mom received it in the mail, but I hadn’t seen my mom’s response, which was stapled to the copy. The response was in her usual all-caps handwriting, in marker, sideways, on top of the text of the social worker’s original letter: “YOU WERE ALREADY

TOLD ‘NO, THANK YOU’ ON THE TELEPHONE. THIS

TIME IT IS ‘NO.’ I WOULD RATHER NOT HEAR MYSELF

SAY WHAT I WILL SAY IF THERE IS A THIRD POLITE

REQUEST. SINCERELY, TAMAR MACCABEE.” I covered my mouth with my hand.

Brodsky said, “Listen to me!” = “Look at me!”

But first I looked to see what the next document was—something by Sandy called “Assessment of a Client: Gurion Maccabee,”

and the one under that was a letter to Brodsky from Rabbi Salt; I put both on top—and then, when I looked up, I saw the clock on Brodsky’s desk. It said 3:41. Four minutes til June.

I shoved all the contents back in the envelope.

Brodsky said, “After Eliyahu was sent here? Six other students 377

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in the lab advanced from step 1 to step 4 in under thirty minutes.”

Maybe it was because Brodsky’s “I’ve been doing some math”

bit, which was about a thousand beats too long to be intimidating, was actually starting to intimidate me a little anyway; maybe it was how Sabra my mom was; maybe it was because I was thinking I’d see June in less time than it takes a beginning-of-class tone to follow an end-of-class tone; maybe it was because that made me nervous; maybe it made me nervous just because I was in love with her or maybe because I was in love with her and had seen her ex-boyfriend who she might have kissed; or maybe I was just nervous… whatever it was, I laughed a little. Something made me laugh a little.

Brodsky hit the desk again and leaned forward and his head was pinker than ever. He said, “Leevon Ray and Vincent Portite are in detention for taking wingnuts off the vents in A-Hall yesterday. They said they were having a contest.” He said, “Don’t interrupt me.”

I hadn’t interrupted him.

He said, “Not including you, eleven of the forty students in today’s detention are there as a result of your influence, whether directly or indirectly. What do you have to say about that?”

I said, I’m not only responsible for the actions of my friends, but for the actions of people who see my friends act—that’s what you’re saying to me.

“And now you choose to speak like an adult,” he said. “You only act like a mensch when your ass is on the line?” He pounded 378

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the desk rapidly, five times, once for each syllable in “ass is on the line.”

I said to him, I don’t know what speaking like an adult has to do with being a mensch, and I don’t know how it is that you expect a person to defend himself to you when you don’t even have a handle on free will.

“Free will!” Brodsky said.

I said, If those kids you listed aren’t responsible for their own actions, then why would I be for mine, let alone theirs? If I said there was a bomb in the cafeteria and people got trampled, that would be one thing, but I haven’t done anything like that.

His hands were shaking in the air. He stilled them, then knocked his pencil cup sideways off the blotter. It hit the wall and spilled and I got a little startled.

He said, “Who wrecked the scoreboard?”

I said, I don’t tell on people.

He said, “So you know who it was, then.”

I said, I don’t tell on people.

He said, “Was it Nakamook?”

I said nothing.

He said, “Was it Portite? Leevon Ray? Angelica Rothstein?”

I said nothing.

“Did you wreck the scoreboard?” he said.

I said nothing.

“I asked you if you wrecked the scoreboard,” he said.

I said, I heard you.

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His whole face twitched then, like the muscles he was forcing to scowl were losing a rebellion, or starting one. “I will keep you here until I get a sufficient answer to my question,” he said.

It was a completely dumont condition. I’d never heard anything so babylike from Brodsky before, and that is when I understood—he was desperate.

It wasn’t just that he had no proof that I’d wrecked the scoreboard—I’d known he had no proof: I’d gotten rid of the pieces and was the only one who saw me do it = I had total control over all the evidence against me—it was that he actually
needed
proof.

Wrecking the scoreboard was big. I could get arrested for wrecking the scoreboard, taken to court, expelled. Wrecking the scoreboard was so big that suspicion, no matter how strong or who it belonged to, was not enough to nail me, and it never would be.

I’d had the upper hand the whole time and I hadn’t known it.

“Answer me,” Brodsky said.

The clock said 3:45 and I was safe, but being safe was not getting me any closer to June. I knew Brodsky couldn’t keep me there forever, but he could definitely keep me there til the end of detention if he wanted.

“
Did
you wreck the scoreboard?” Brodsky said. “Did you?”

The first “did” was too loud and his voice faltered on the second, like he heard the first one and didn’t like what he’d heard.

I thought: He doesn’t like treating me the way he is treating me. He’s treating me differently than usual because he wants me to act differently than usual.

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Click click click.

I thought: There are a million kinds of different-than-usual.

I decided to try the first one I could think of.

In between deciding and actually trying, though, I got completely paralyzed. The paralysis lasted twice as long as a decision to blink takes to become the action of my eyes blinking.

That is less time, even, than it takes to say the word No. The first time I ever got paralyzed like that was in a shopping cart when I was four. My mom took me to the Jewel for fruit to make fruit salad for a barbecue at her colleague’s house. The lemons were shiny and I wanted one, but I didn’t want to ask my mom to buy it for me because I was playing a game that day where I would not ask my parents for anything, so I just grabbed one of the lemons and looked at it and waited for my mom, who was looking at whipped toppings, to see the lemon in my hand and

offer
to buy it for me. She didn’t see. She put some whipped topping in the cart and pushed us past the melon stand, where this kid in a baseball uniform was pulling on his little sister’s hair while she cried and their mother sniffed cantoloupes. We got some apples and walnuts and went to the checkout line. We were right behind the mean kid’s family. The mother got her change and took the mean kid’s hand and told him to hold his sister’s hand while she pushed the cart, which was very full. I still had the lemon. I had put it in the pocket of my hoodie by then. The mean kid’s family started walking off, and I saw by the way that the sister was moving side-to-side in these little circles that the 381

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mean kid was either crushing her fingers together or twisting her arm, and I reached my hand into my pocket to take the lemon out and set it on the runway so my mother, who was looking in her wallet for her credit card, would offer to buy it, but then I thought: I will steal this lemon, and right when I was about to remove my hand from the lemon to leave it in my pocket, the paralysis passed through me and I knew it was my muscles reacting to the sound of Adonai telling them No! so I kept hold of the lemon and took it from my pocket after all. Then I threw it hard at the mean kid’s neck. His head jerked forward and he let go of his sister’s hand and spun around to see who did it. I pointed at him and he started crying. He didn’t revolve again til I dropped my finger, and then he was pulling on his mother’s shirt, but she shooed him off and I didn’t get in trouble. I still can’t say for sure how it is that Adonai knew I was about to steal the lemon, or how He ever knows when to shout No! at the muscles, but I do know He can’t hear your thoughts, and so I believe that He must be a highly talented reader of faces, and that there must be something very startling to Adonai that a human face does right before the human it belongs to is about to do wrong. In Brodsky’s office, it was different than the time with the lemon because I did not understand how what I was about to do was wrong, and the paralyzing No! of Adonai lasted only as long as it always does, which, if you’re not expecting it, is little enough time to deny it just happened. So I denied it, quick as a blink, and did what I’d decided to do to get out of there:

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