Free The Instructions by Adam Levin Page B

eyebrows cranked up to what used to be his hairline = “Surprise, Gurion, it’s you who’s made the mistake.”
    I saw my curved reflection in the bend of Brodsky’s handset, down by the mouthpiece. My neck was three or four times the width of my face in there, just bulging out—begging, it seemed, for a chop—and the hairs June had touched were glossy and sharp.
    When at last I found my eyes, just barely pinpoints, reflected blood-red by a trick of the light, I thought: I could take you. I could wipe you out, Gurion. I could end you, easy, with just these bare hands.
    Then Brodsky moved the handset, held it out before me, and I was looking at the pattern of holes in the earpiece. Brodsky said,
    “Gurion.” So did my father. I rumbled some gooze, brought the thing to my face.
    Hello, I said.
    “Are you hurt?” said my father.
    I said, There was a charleyhorse, but I fixed it.
    He said, “I’m glad you’re not hurt. I am not glad about this phone call.”
    I said, I’m sorry you’re bothered at work.
    He said, “It’s not that, boychical. It’s the fighting.”
    That’s when I started crying. It happened sometimes when I’d get worked up and he’d call me something nice in Yiddish. I tried to cry quietly so he wouldn’t hear.
    “Why haven’t you told me you’ve been getting in fights? And 82
    ADAM LEVIN
    THE INSTRUCTIONS
    why did you fight with these boys today?” he said. “Did that Benji put you up to it?”
    No, I said. And he’s my best friend, I said, and you shouldn’t talk about him like—
    “He’s a criminal,” my dad said.
    I sniffled back some gooze.
    My dad heard it. He said, “Crying? Are you crying? What’s this crying? Is it Scott?”
    Whenever I cried, my dad would ask if I was crying about the last thing I’d cried about, and the last time I’d cried was a week before, right after I’d read about Williams Cocktail Party Syndrome in my mom’s Synopsis of Psychiatry and found out Main Man would surely die young.
    I said to my father, I didn’t break any laws. All I did was break rules.
    He said, “This is something to cry about? Rules? If you did nothing wrong and you’re not hurt and your father loves you and so does your mother and these girls that call you at night on the phone who they love you too—and you know what just came in the mail? Front-row balcony for Chaplin just came in the mail.
    Cry? Why cry?”
    Girls hadn’t called me at night since I got kicked out of Northside Hebrew Day School. Front-row balcony for Chaplin, though, was good news. Once a year, around Christmas, City Lights , which is the single best movie ever made, gets shown at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Hall with full orchestral accom-83
    ADAM LEVIN
    THE INSTRUCTIONS
    paniment. We’d gone every year since I was four, but we’d never gotten balcony, and I always wanted balcony.
    I had to sniffle again. I did it.
    Then my father said, “Not that you shouldn’t cry. It’s fine, you know, if you like it. Don’t get me wrong. In fact, it’s good. You’re a ten-year-old boy. The world is big. It’s hard. I was just asking.”
    I said, I’m in trouble.
    “Trouble?” he said. “What trouble? You’re not in any trouble.
    You’re loved. You’re unhurt. Maybe you have to sit in this in-school suspension. This is trouble? This is to cry about? No. This is the world, not trouble. Trouble is for when you do wrong, for when you break laws. A suspension: this is something else. This is a punishment. This is for when you break rules, an in-school suspension. You’re a good boy but you break rules. You just have to learn to not break rules. So you go to in-school suspension.
    There’s no trouble there.”
    The crying was pretty much gone. I said, I don’t want to be in suspen-sion.
    He said, “If you wanted to be in suspension, it wouldn’t be a punishment. So you’re in suspension. So what. Avoid it from now on. Don’t fight. Don’t fight don’t fight don’t fight. Now listen,