He’d stayed out of speaking range since I’d come down the hill. I’d been telling myself he was waiting for privacy, but now that I was alone — the others half a hallway off, either puzzled or giggling in front of June’s artwork — I saw how stupid that thought had been. If Benji’d wanted to speak to me alone, he would have scattered the lot of them and spoken. And had he done that, even if all he’d said was, “Hey” I think I would have forgiven him on the spot. I think I would have assumed I’d missed something obvious; that there’d been a solid reason for him not to help me in the field; that despite, if not because of, my efforts to forgive the others, this reason eluded me like a deer a duckhunter. Indeed, the very fact he couldn’t be forgiven on the same grounds as the rest of them — while always his friend, I’d never been his protector — might not have occurred to me at all. Had he only said “Hey.”
But he hadn’t. He didn’t. He kept on not. He wouldn’t even look at me.
What I decided was he’d write me a note.
And after we’d been in the Cage for ten minutes, I decided the note he was writing was long, more like a letter than a note, and I decided the letter would right everything between us.
The anticipation got me H with vigilance. It was the last letter in the world I’d want Botha to intercept. In the meantime, though, just about everyone except Benji was tossing me notes—“We Revenge We” “The Side of Damage is the End of Basketball” “You got snuck up on!” “Slokum dies Friday!” “I am a defiance!” “Death to the Arrangement!” “
The Side of Damage believed I wanted a hyperscoot.
And so there was a hyperscoot.
Botha beat his fist on his desk and we couldn’t hear it over our noise. But the teachers, Miss Lang and Mr. Wadrow, though they covered their ears, looked on in simple amazement, even smiling a little: it was the first hyperscoot they’d witnessed, and they didn’t know to be terrorized — they thought it was just random weirdness. Clearly they hadn’t spoken to Miss Mingle or Miss Plotkin since before fourth period, and Botha must not have told them about hyperscoot, either. That surprised me for a second, but it shouldn’t have: it was, above all, his authority that hyperscoot damaged, and a trickler like him would want that information to remain hidden for as long as possible.
Though I was glad the Side of Damage was so battle-ready, the teachers needed to understand hyperscoot was a tactical weapon, and because the current hyperscoot wasn’t in response to any obvious offense the Arrangement had provided us, they couldn’t have understood, so I stopped it. I waited til all robot eyes were directed elsewhere — there was nothing to be gained by letting them know there was a leader, let alone who that leader was — and then I showed the Side of Damage my palm. They stilled their chairs.
“Tomorra you’re eating lunch in here,” Botha said.
It was a show of weakness and he knew it. We would have all stayed in the Cage for lunch on Friday anyway: I was banned from the cafeteria, and the rest of them would have wanted to eat with me. So then what was the point of his sentencing us to lunch in the Cage? This was the point: He knew we would think of the punishment as our having gotten away with something — and we did think of it that way; half the hands in the room were hiding sly smiles — and that therefore we wouldn’t respond with another hyperscoot.
And if we didn’t respond with another hyperscoot, Lang and Wadrow, who Botha was so concerned with impressing, and who had no clue that we’d want to eat lunch in the Cage, would believe that Botha’s power was intact.
So we should have hyperscooted in response to the sentencing. If we had, Botha still would have known that he’d shown us weakness, but he’d also have looked weak in front of the teachers. It took me a minute to think of that, though — for those first sixty seconds after the sentencing, I was, like the others, too busy being impressed with our small victory to imagine a larger one — and after that it was too late. A delayed response would not look like a response. Just more randomness.
As the minutes after the hyperscoot quietly passed, I became less and less convinced that Benji was writing me a letter, more and more convinced that he’d been too afraid of Bam to help me, that he’d been just as afraid as the rest of them and was ashamed. That kenobi line of his about timeliness and vengeance and pride and propriety — maybe it was, after all, just impressive-sounding babbling, a clever-phrased reason to explain away the fact that after two years of arch-enmity he’d never once stepped to Slokum; to make it sound to others, maybe also to himself, like he wasn’t plain scared. If there is such a thing as a disloyal thought — and I’m not sure there is — that would be an exemplary one. But my options were narrow. Either I could (disloyally?) believe that Benji was ashamed for having been afraid to fight the one guy he swore up and down was his enemy — and in the perfect storybook situation no less, a situation in which the fight would rescue his best friend — or I could believe that Benji wasn’t loyal to me.
But why would he be disloyal? Because despite all his naysaying about the Side of Damage, he actually wanted to lead it and he thought my defeat would put him in that position? Or maybe his naysaying was understatement; maybe he hated the Side of Damage, and he thought my defeat would break it apart? Maybe he wanted the Side of Damage to break apart because he thought that would mean that we’d go back to how it used to be, just me and him and Vincie and Mookus and Leevon and Jelly and sometimes Mangey against everyone? When he seemed to come around to the idea of being friends with the Janitor and Ronrico and Eliyahu and Ben-Wa, could he have just been faking it? Was it the earlier two-hill field thing? that I hadn’t invited him to meet the scholars, who didn’t, in the end, show anyway? Was he jealous of June for being invited? All of these things, though possible, didn’t ring even slightly true, and, more to the point, they were too abstract: They didn’t supply motive enough for anyone capable of preventing it to stand by and watch his closest friend get humiliated. So either he’d been too afraid to fight Slokum or… what? Or he had quit our friendship.
And what reason could he have had for quitting our friendship? The only one I could think of didn’t seem good enough at all. Maybe finding out that you’ve been given an inferior version of Ulpan justifies smashing exit plaques and pulling alarms—I was certainly pissed enough to do something like that by the time Nakamook had exited the Nurse’s — but it doesn’t justify abandoning your best friend. Benji wasn’t an Israelite, and I would not act as if he were. To do so would be to pretend. To do so would be unfaithful of me and condescending to him. To do so would be chomsky. And Benji was the most anti-pretend person I’d ever met. He wouldn’t have wanted me to merely act like he was an Israelite; he’d have wanted me to believe he was an Israelite, or that Israelites weren’t Israelites. And I didn’t believe those things. And I couldn’t believe those things. And it is no easier to change what you believe than it is to change what you want, and my beliefs were far older than Benji’s desire — if my changing my beliefs even was Benji’s desire — so if either of us needed to bend, it was him.