“Yes!” the Side shouted.
Do I speak for you still?
“Yes!” it shouted.
Will you make us a liar?
No! we shouted.
There are fifteen minutes left in the schoolday, I said. That’s fifteen minutes before the no-hyperscoot contract ends. As long as the robots keep to the terms, the contract is ours to keep or to break. I say let us keep it. Let us honor the contract because our word is good. And so that no one may be mistaken, so that no one may think that we honor it out of fear of what the monitor might be hiding inside of his head, so that everyone will know that we honor it because we choose to, because our word is good, let us honor the contract beyond its demands. Let us be like the sweetest dream of the Arrangement. Let us be as the Cage has never been able to make us. Let us now all at once face forward in our boxes, still and silent as nightmares.
We did.
16 NAMES
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Interim — Intramural Bus
“What they meant was death to the idea of the Jew is what you’re telling me,” said Eliyahu of Brooklyn.
Pretty much, I said.
We were speaking Hebrew. At the end-of-class tone, the Side of Damage had lined up single-file and silent, gone out the gate one at a time, not one of them running or shouting til they’d stepped over the threshhold. I’d been last in line, Eliyahu just in front of me. Now we were weaving our way through Main Hall. I wanted to go find June at her locker.
“So the Jew of their rallying cry,” said Eliyahu, “wasn’t this Shlomo person, but some kind of abstract Jew for whom the Shlomo person stood.”
Could’ve been, I said. It was ambiguous. It might not have referred to Shlomo at all — they might have been talking about themselves.
“I don’t understand,” said Eliyahu.
Just then, a Shover coming toward us decided not to make way. I could see by his eyes. They’d flicked at my chest, then over my shoulder.
I checked him into a locker and we didn’t lose a step. A couple seconds later, the sound of the impact repeated. Vincie was behind us. He’d locker-slammed the Shover on the rebound.
A little out of breath, he said, “I need to talk to you.”
It can wait, I said.
“English,” he said.
Can it wait? I said in English.
“I guess,” said Vincie, continuing to follow us.
Back to Hebrew: Are you a Jew or an Israelite?
“An Israelite,” said Eliyahu.
When did you become an Israelite? I said.
“If I understand what you mean by Israelite, then I have always been an Israelite,” he said. “However, if I understand what you mean by Jew, then I have, admittedly, sometimes behaved like a Jew.”
I said, You understand. You’re a scholar, though — the Five aren’t.
“And so?”
So when they shouted ‘Death to the Jew,’ they might not have understood they were Israelites who had been acting like Jews, I said. I said, I think they might have believed they were Jews who had to become Israelites. And to become a new kind of person, you have to kill the person you already are — I think the Five might have believed they had to kill the Jews they were.
“Even though they were never Jews, but always Israelites.”
To our left, Ben-Wa Wolf played the pratfalling game on linoleum with Chunkstyle, Boshka, Derrick Winnetka, and a rock.
Even though, I said.
Eliyahu was frowning.
Look, I said, the Five aren’t scholars, and in one way that’s unfortunate, but in another it’s not.
“How can you say that? How is it not?”
A lot of scholars did me wrong today, I said, and—
“How?” said Eliyahu.
I’ll explain some other time. For now, just trust me. What I’m trying to say is think of it like this: No one on the Side’s a scholar except for us, and the Side is good, right?
“We’re not talking about the Side. No one on the Side yelled, ‘Death to the Jew.’”
That’s true, Eliyahu, and I’m not saying… You’re right. It was a foolish thing to yell, I said. Let’s leave it at that, though. They made a mistake. They yelled something foolish.
“And so maybe they’re fools.”
I said, Maybe even foogs.
“You’ll makes jokes now?” he said.
Yes, I said. And so should you. These fools are with us, that’s all there is to it, and everything else is working out okay.
“It’s working out I have an in-school suspension.”
In a room less prisonlike than the Cage, I said, and with five new friends.
“Maybe so, but those others will be there, too,” he said. “I should have to sit all day in a room with a boy who bruised my face and crushed my hat?”
Two, I said. And if Shlomo’s back, then a third who’d like to do the same.
“That does not sound like something that I will enjoy. In the Office, that Co-Captain Baxter kept showing me his fist, his middle finger—”
Only because he knew it was safe, I said. I said, He knew you wouldn’t attack him in the Office.
“And why should he have been so sure?”
He shouldn’t have, I said.
“People look at me and think I’m weak,” Eliyahu said. “They push me around. I can’t hide it.”
Hide what? I said.
“That I’m an orphan — who are these chubniks saluting you?”
Isadore Momo and Beauregard Pate stood shoulder-to-shoulder with three other short, husky guys by the southern doorway of the cafeteria. Each one had a line of thick writing across his chest in Darker:
Beauregard
FIRED A BULLET THROUGH HIS RIGHT TEMPLE.
Chubnik X
LIKE AN OVERGROWN HALO.
Chubnik Y
VANISHED COMPLETELY INTO THE DARKNESS OF NIGHT.
Chubnik Z
ONLY HATE AND HATE, SOLID AS STONE.
Momo
I PUSH THROUGH.
They were showing me victory fists.
That’s Big Ending, I said to Eliyahu. I said, They’re with us, too.
“What’s with the shirts?”
I don’t know, I said.
Like an overgrown halo and I push through were familiar phrases, but I couldn’t place them. Vanished completely into the darkness of night also seemed familiar, except how couldn’t it?
“I was saying—”
You don’t need to hide that you’re an orphan, I said. I said, Anyone who knows you’re an orphan — and I don’t think that many people do — could just as easily be scared of you for being an orphan as think you’re weak for being an orphan. So the ones who do think you’re weak — don’t let them push you around.
“I know I shouldn’t let them, but I do.”
I said, Not always. I said, You led that hyperscoot. And before that you fought back hard in the two-hill field — I saw some of it.
“I was very verklempt then. I told you that. I didn’t know up from down. If I knew up from down, I never would have done those things. So what am I supposed to do? Be verklempt all the time? I think it would be worse than getting pushed around.”
I spotted June. She wasn’t at her locker. She was about a quarter of the hallway away, talking to a big-eyed girl with an almost-shaved head and clown-pants.
I said, Anything you do, Bathsheba Wasserman might hear about it.