The Instructions (69 page)

That’s why you’re jumpy. No one knows how to first-kiss anyone, Gurion. That’s why it’s so good. That’s why you’re so nervous. It’s probably why you look like you’re gonna cry.”

If I was about to cry, it was because Nakamook had spoken over a hundred consecutive words without cracking a single joke, and he wasn’t talking about killing someone—he wasn’t even angry at all. He was supposed to act Nakamookian, not concerned; not like someone I could disappoint. And it wasn’t only how he was talking, but what he was saying. I’d been worrying so hard about my shadiness that everything else had gotten blotted out. Over the previous hour, I hadn’t once thought about kissing June, or what I would say to her, and now that Nakamook brought it up, I couldn’t stop thinking: You are not only shady, but unprepared.

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My throat was closing. I swallowed to fight the choke and a noise came from my neck like stepping in tar.

I’m not gonna, I said, cry.

“You’ll cry if I tell you to cry, crybaby,” said Nakamook.

It was the right thing to say.

I thumb-stabbed at his chest and he blocked it, flicked my ear with his swearfinger.

I thought: If she breaks your lobe, she breaks your lobe.

Benji stepped aside, kicking the stopper out as I passed him.

The door closed slow and quiet behind me.

The curtains of the cafeteria stage were open. All that banging and sawing during Tuesday detention had been the noise of props being built and affixed to the stage for
Ponies and Rainbows
, a play I’d never heard of. Four rainbow-skinned rocking horses, rings in their noses, stood in the foreground. Ten wooden, 2-D, sitting-up teddybears smiled behind them. The bears were all day-glo, and larger than men, and their arms were stretched forward to hug.

June was at the lunch table nearest the stage, farthest from the door through which I’d entered. She sat the bench the same way lone cowboys sit horses, and stared at her lap, or something in her lap. She looked so much prettier than I remembered, it was impossible. How could I act shady to a girl that pretty?

All I wanted was to kiss her lips. I didn’t know how to start.

I didn’t know how to know if she wanted to kiss.

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I thought: If she breaks your lobe, your lobe will stay broke, you’ll be damaged forever, you’ll never recover.

I tried to remember characters in books, how characters start kissing in books the first time. That was easy to remember. Characters firstkissed in many books. But I couldn’t remember any books where characters actually moved from not-kissing to kissing, let alone to firstkissing. One sentence they weren’t kissing and the next sentence they were. But what about the space between them? Before they kissed, there had to be space between them, between each mouth, and they had to close the space in order to kiss, but how did they close it?

Did they just suddenly close it? Maybe they just suddenly closed it, I thought. It was possible they just suddenly closed it, I thought, but how did they know
when
to suddenly close it? How did they know if it was okay with the other character to close it?

I remembered that in movies there was sometimes some touching of hair. Almost always, actually. There was almost always hair-touching in movies, before the kiss. Or the ear. Was it the ear or the hair? It was the hair. The ear was something else. The ear was how you pick a fight in Fiji. My mother told me and I told Nakamook. A Fijian UN soldier once taught my mother you start a fight in Fiji by touching a guy’s ear. If you touch his ear and he doesn’t fight you, his snat trickles for the rest of his life because how could you let some guy touch your ear like that, like you were his to be touched on the ear by? You have to save face if your ear is touched by some guy.

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I told Nakamook once and he thought it was funny is why he’d sometimes go for my ear when we’d fakefight. And that was one way I knew we were best friends. Because my ear was a part of my head and I didn’t explode when he’d touch it.

So I thought the way to start would be to touch June’s hair.

If I touched her hair and she let me, then I could bend my head sideways. If she bent her head sideways, then I could lean forward.

And if she leaned forward, then I could press my lips against her lips, and then we would be kissing. The only way I’d lose face would be if she did everything but kiss me at the last step; if I pressed my lips against her lips and she didn’t press back. She could say, “You tried to kiss me,” and it would be obvious that it was true to any third person who might be looking, and there I’d be, a very trickling bancer.

If she didn’t let me touch her hair, though, or if she didn’t bend her head, or didn’t lean forward, then I could stop touching or trying to touch her hair and sit back like normal, and my face would be safe because a third person could think that maybe I wasn’t trying to kiss her, that maybe I was only touching her hair and bending my head and leaning forward. I thought: That is why this is a good plan.

But then I saw it was also a real dickhead way for me to scheme about someone I was in love with, and for a second I thought I was going to stand on top of a table and dive into the floor to flatten my neck discs because my plan was like Desormie making the girls sit in front for stretches. If a girl told some-642

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one, “Desormie makes me sit in front during stretches so that he can look at the contours of my vagina through the spandex,”

it would be impossible to prove. Desormie could say that the girl was a lazy stretcher and that he put her in front so that he could make sure she stretched the right way. He could say that she talked to her best friend too much during class and that he put her in front to separate them. Whatever he said, he would make the girl sound crazy, and she would look like a wolf-cryer, and people would want to know what was wrong with her and was her father touching her, and so her father would look bad, her whole family would, and her people. All of them would look bad because Desormie desormiated and the girl tried to stop him. Everything in the lunchroom looked like a weapon or a piece of a weapon.

The acids of my stomach stabbed me in the lining. The props on the stage would have been good to look at if one of them had a screwdriver in its forehead or the claw-part of a hammer. The claw-part of a Maccabee, I thought. Gurion Maccabee, I thought.

Lioncub Hammer. Like the name of a secret war. Operation Lioncub Hammer. Like the end of the world. Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee. Lioncub, son of Judah the Hammer, I thought, but it didn’t really help.

There was a fire-extinguisher mounted on the wall.

A weapon, I thought. There are so many weapons. Few people know it; you’re one of the few.

That didn’t help either.

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I thought how if I tried to kiss June, I might find out that I was like Desormie.

I thought I could take the fire extinguisher off the wall and throw it high in the air and stand under where it was going to land so my skull would get bent and my brains would get softened.

If I touched June’s hair and she let me and I bent my head and she bent her head and I leaned in and she leaned back and so then I leaned back, we would both know that I tried to kiss her, but if she said, “You tried to kiss me,” I would say, “You’re crazy.” And that was a wrong thing to do. And what’s worse is she would never say it. She wouldn’t say, “You tried to kiss me,” because she would know that Gurion would say, “You’re crazy.” It was cheap of me.

There were ovens in the kitchen behind the cafeteria counter.

I could turn them on and put my hand in. I could burn my hand so bad that it would always look bloody and June would never let me touch her hair with it, even if she liked the rest of me.

There were thousands of millions of ways to be a coward, I decided, billions and trillions of googols of ways, and no less than half of the ways were ways to save face or ways to act so you could save face later.

My stomach hurt so bad, though. If I didn’t try to kiss her I could get ulcers and become a tyrant. If I did try to kiss her, I could end up desormiating. I had my left fist up in front of my face to see which side of it would do the most damage to my nose if I punched my face and I was turning the fist when I saw the makeup flaking on the thumb-knuckle and I remembered 644

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the marks: that I was going to show my two יs to June. The יs reminded me of the Law. And there are no Laws about thinking.

Not one out of 613. There are only laws about doing. And then I thought about Maimonedes again, who said that there is a right order that all things you can do should get done in. Maimonedes said it’s just as important to do things in the right order as it is to do the right things. You don’t build a house to live with your wife in until you’re married. You don’t make cribs for babies who aren’t born yet. I decided that I could try to kiss June in the exact way I thought to try to kiss her, with the hair-touch and the head-bend and the forwardness first. I decided that it was the only right way to try to firstkiss someone. It was the best order because at each step she would have the chance to stop me, and I decided that was why I thought of it originally. It would be a cinch to stop me. She wouldn’t even have to say anything to stop me is why it was the best order. All I had to do was pay attention. And then if she didn’t want to kiss me, I would stop and I would not pretend I hadn’t tried. Pretending was the only thing that would make it like desormiating, the saving face. Trying to kiss June was nothing like Desormie staring at vagina contours unless after failing I acted like I’d never tried.

Walking toward her, I felt clumsy, like the only thing bracing my bones at the joints was some old, shot elastic. If I didn’t concentrate, my forearms would fall off my elbows. If I didn’t lay my weight down in just the right way, then when I took my next step I’d leave a foot on the floor, and then the other foot so I’d be 645

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walking on my ankles, and then my shins would get left behind and I’d be on my knees, and next my thighs and I’d be on my waist, and then I would be bouncing, destroying my sack, and I wouldn’t even notice any of what happened until my shoulder-socket dropped my last piece of arm and I couldn’t put my body back together again. All I would have to defend myself would be the teeth in my head.

June touched her hair to push it behind her ears and it changed in darkness. Her hair had at least seventeen shades of red in it.

The coat she was wearing to detention showed many of them off.

She wore it over my hoodie. It was a long red overcoat made of wool. It had a hood of its own and five wooden pegs on leather strings that shoved through the buttonholes to close it for protection. The red of the wool was the same red as rich blonde women’s lipstick in old movies. There was nothing on June’s head that was the same color as the coat.

I sat down on the bench on the other side of the table from her. I sat forward like I would eat, instead of like a cowboy. It was hard to figure out where to put my hands and my arms; if I should put them in my lap or on the table. If I put them in my lap, they would be under the table, and if they were under the table, it would take a lot of movement to touch her hair, and also it would look pervy in the meantime. If I kept them on the table, though, then they would be between us, doing the movements my hands do when I talk, which is distracting to some people because I point a lot with my pointer finger and sometimes raise 646

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the thumb to make a harmless gun-of-flesh that I jab in the air or swing around in a fast way with snaps from the wrist when I am saying something important. I didn’t want to scare her with wild hand movements and I didn’t want to look pervy, so I balanced it out by keeping my right arm on the table and my left arm in my lap. But maybe I looked perved out and scary at the same time.

“A penumbra is a part of a shadow?” June said to me.

The lighter part, I said. On the border.

“It’s a pretty word.”

I took the half-pad of hall-passes from my pocket and set it on the table. I said, I got you these yesterday, so you can go anywhere.

June said, “I’m worried about you.”

I said, I won’t get in trouble. I’m stealth.

She said, “I know you’re stealth. I’m not worried about you getting in trouble.”

I told her, I missed you.

“And maybe you’re crazy.”

I said, I like your coat because it shows off how many different reds you are.

Her face blushed and she turned away from me, pulled her hair into a ponytail. When she turned back, she was wearing two hoods.

I said, The color of your blushing is exactly the same as the color of the freckles on your face. I was thinking that the freckles were red until I saw you in your coat. Now I know the color of 647

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your freckles and your blushing is actually a very light pink color.

What’s amazing is when you blush your freckles disappear. I’ve never seen that happen before. It’s beautiful.

“No one else thinks it’s beautiful,” she said.

I told her, Everyone thinks it’s beautiful. Everyone thinks you’re beautiful.

She said, “No one ever tells me.”

No one? I said. Really?

“No one I trust,” she said.

I said, I’m telling you. I said, I think that what happened is that when you were a baby, when you knew some words but you couldn’t talk yet, you were just as gorgeous then, and everyone who saw you would say how gorgeous you were and you knew what it meant, but you couldn’t say anything because you didn’t know how to speak, and so you blushed because you knew how to do that, and you knew it meant thank you, even though you’ve forgotten now. And so one day—

June said, “Gurion,” = “Stop/Go on,” and then she smiled like she was getting tickled and she liked getting tickled but she didn’t want to like getting tickled.