“Our stuff,” she said. She kissed my chin and pulled me back out.
Miss Gleem entered the cafeteria, came fast in our direction when she noticed the props.
“Can you believe this?” June said to her. She smacked the wingnut-shot rocking horse on the back of his head. He bounced. Then rocked. June laughed. Nakamook sprinted from the bathroom to Main Hall.
“Who would do this?” Miss Gleem said.
“Some genius,” said June.
“Junie!” Miss Gleem said. “Someone destroyed art.”
“It wasn’t art,” June said, “until it was destroyed. It was a very badly executed set for a play, and someone made an installation piece out of it. I was just about to draw it. You see where my sketchbook is?” She pointed at the table by the stage where her sketchbook lay — covering, I noticed, the half-pad of hall-passes, baruch Hashem. She said, “I think that’s the perfect angle to draw it from. But I want to draw it with this rocking horse rocking — that way it’ll look like it’s just been struck by whatever genius struck it with whatever it was he used to take its face off. That’s good, right?”
“It’s not good at all, Junie,” Miss Gleem said.
I was thinking: Here we are, redhanded, and instead of being stealth about it, instead of hiding, June has shoved our redhands so close to the face of the art teacher that they don’t look red anymore because they don’t look like anything anymore, because they are covering the art teacher’s eyes.
“You’re right,” June said, “it’s not good. I can get it to rock the way I want it to by smacking its head, but the rocking will stop before I can get back to my sketchbook. That’s why I’m showing Gurion how to smack the head. That way I can sit by my sketchbook, and Gurion can smack it, and I can get a sense of how the rocking horse’s motion relates to its surroundings, which is, I’d think, one of the keys to understanding the installation artist’s intentions. So give it a shot, Gurion. Let’s see what you can do for me. Smack the horse.”
“I don’t think this is very nice,” said Miss Gleem.
I was thinking: June is doing something new. She is doing a new kind of blinker action.
“Who cares if it’s nice?” said June. “It’s art.”
I thought: GURION AND JUNE DESTROYED THE PROPS = the construction; GURION AND JUNE ARE STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO THE DESTROYED PROPS = the construction horse that draws attention to the construction; and JUNE HAS OPEN CONTEMPT FOR THE PROPS = the blinker on the construction horse that draws attention to the construction horse that draws attention to the construction…
I thought: The new thing is how THE WAY JUNE KEEPS GOING ON AND ON ABOUT HER OPEN CONTEMPT = a surge of electricity so huge that the blinker pops its bulb, and the flash of the pop is temporarily blinding, temporarily disorienting, and by the time Gleem’s eyes adjust, she will be more concerned about the surge and the blinker than the presence of the construction; the more she worries about the surge and the blinker, the less the construction horse will seem to her to signify the presence of the construction.
“Smack the horse,” June said to me.
I love you, I said.
“Smack the horse,” she said. “Smack it on the head.”
I smacked the horse on the head. The horse hopped, then rocked.
“Why’d you smack it like a sister?” June said. “Smack it harder, like this.” June smacked the horse on the head. The horse hopped, then rocked.
“Junie, please,” Miss Gleem said.
“Smack it!” June said.
I smacked it. The horse hopped, then rocked.
Other detentioners had come to the cafeteria. They filled up the tables in back by the bathrooms and they laughed. Miss Gleem revolved to face them and shook her head left-to-right = “Not funny.”
“Just last night,” June said to Miss Gleem, “Gurion’s friend called me up to tell me how Gurion was all tough, and I believed him, but now — don’t you think he hits like a little sister?”
Who called you? I said.
“Benji. Don’t worry — he said nice things. Anyway,” she said to Miss Gleem, “I need the horse to be smacked the way I smacked it, not the way Gurion smacked it — you saw the difference, right?”
“I think so,” Miss Gleem said.
“Of course you saw the difference,” June said, “but Gurion didn’t.”
“Some people aren’t visual thinkers,” Miss Gleem said. The voice of Miss Gleem sounded flat like a zombie’s — she was so surprised by what June had been saying and by how happy the sight of the busted-up stage made the detentioners, who were shouting new words out like, “Knocking-horse!” and “Deady-bear!” that she was distracted from what she, herself, was saying. The surge had worked.
June kept it working.
“It’s true,” she said. “A lot of people aren’t visual thinkers — especially the ones who designed this ugly set — but do you think, Miss Gleem, that since you can see how I want it to rock, that you could maybe smack it for me while I watch from the table?”
“I want you to get off that stage and sit down and I want you to think about what it would be like if some vandal destroyed your art,” Miss Gleem said.
“You mean if my art wasn’t actually art but set-design and my set-design was suck?” June said. “Because I don’t think I can imagine what it would feel like if someone destroyed my set-design that was suck and I called art, because set-design is not art and my art is not suck.”
Miss Gleem said, “Well, you try to imagine it, June. You try until you figure out how.” She wasn’t distracted from herself anymore, just really angry. “Get off that stage,” she said.
While I followed June down the steps to the table where our stuff was, Nakamook was trailing Vincie and Leevon into the cafeteria. All of them showed us victory fists, and I showed them mine back. June kept her head down, her hands in her pockets.
Once we were sitting, she went at her sketchbook like I wasn’t even there, and I thought: It’s important to let her draw, don’t bother her. But then, when Miss Gleem handed us our detention assignments, June started working on hers without saying anything to me, or even signalling anything, and I whispered to her, You are the mother of the hyper blinker action.
She still didn’t say anything, or give any sign that she’d heard me, and I thought she was being stealth: I thought she didn’t want Miss Gleem to hear us talking. But we had just kissed perfectly and I felt less alive not talking to her. Plus, the worst that could happen would be if we got another detention, and that didn’t seem so bad at all. Still, I waited awhile to say anything else. I waited til Miss Gleem went to the opposite side of the cafeteria to quiet down some kid who’d started whistling.
You really tricked Miss Gleem, I whispered to June.
Again: nothing. Like she hadn’t heard me.
I whispered a little louder: You really tricked Miss Gleem.
“I know that,” June said. “You don’t have to tell me that,” she said. Then she kicked my shin, hard, and my knee banged the table-bottom.
From the other side of the cafeteria, Miss Gleem said “Hey!” but she didn’t know to who.
“Did that hurt?” June said to me.
I said, Hurt?
I thought she was flirting.
“Hurt,” she said, full-voiced.
She didn’t sound like she was flirting.
“Hurt,” she said.
“June!” Miss Gleem snapped.
June was showing me her teeth, but it wasn’t a smile. Her jaw was shut and her lower eyelids were trembling. “Did it hurt?” she said, kicking at my shin again.
I grabbed her ankle before the impact. I was totally confused.