It is true that my exile would leave the Side of Damage leaderless, at least til someone else stepped up; and true that Botha would almost certainly regain the ground he lost on Thursday, ground now occupied by my friends. That was the suck of it, but this was the thing: what could I do about it? That was the thing. What could I do about it? Brodsky wasn’t bluffing. I would not be allowed back into the Cage. It wasn’t up to me. It was either expulsion or June, and expulsion would be good for none of us.
So why did I want to resist it, this gladness? Why, in Main Hall, was I dragging my feet as if beaten? Was I faking it? For whose benefit? For my own benefit? Was I playing a role, like Brodsky’d implied? Can you fake yourself out? I did feel fakey, but I did not believe you could fake yourself out. I’d never believed anyone could fake himself out. You could be misinformed, you could fail to see the truth, but I didn’t see how it was possible, logically, to fake yourself out, especially not while suspecting yourself of doing so…
My thoughts kept spinning, and I wasn’t solving anything, only getting H. I needed to do something, or maybe to prove something — something concrete and simple, something effective. I needed something to focus on, something to focus me; I needed to take aim at something and nail it. The clock in the gym.
I turned into B-hall, tearing down streamers, shredding pep rally posters and Boystar flyers, uncovering WE DAMAGE WEs. I hid in the central doorway and looked. Behind centercourt, fifteen chairs were shaped roughly like a half-flattened V, like the body of a crow in a stickman universe. A line of five chairs formed its east wing; its west was two such lines set parallel. In this west one sat Blonde Lonnie, smashed-nosed, plus all of the B-team minus Maholtz. Dominating the whole tableau was a scaffolding rig strung with light-cans and — panels and a pair of spotlights. The rig appeared to hold the laws of physics in contempt: Twenty feet high and thirty across, it stood on two legs of thin steel piping with speakers for ankles and telescoping feet — four for each leg — which should have locked into something heavy below them, something stable to stay them, a pillar of concrete or lead, but didn’t. They didn’t lock into anything at all.
The bleachers, extended, blocked my forward periphery. I stealthed under the eastern ones to scope more.
Maholtz and Slokum stood behind the west hoop. Eight chairs formed a row between the northern sideline and the lowest bench of the western bleachers: a special gallery in which a cheerleader now sat, stealing glances at Bam and chewing her nails. Slokum cracked his knuckles and wrote in a notebook. He looked smaller to me than the last time I saw him. His face was turned away, and maybe that’s why, but his back seemed slouchy and a lot less wide. I remembered how I’d helped him to make fun of Nakamook, and I didn’t want to think of that, and looked away.
I crossed the doorway’s-width gap between the two sets of bleachers. Ducked beneath the western set to see what lay east.
Arrows made of cardboard were taped to the floor to form a path. They led from the locker-room to centercourt. In the tipoff circle, just a couple yards north of the chair-row, two cardboard squares were taped to the floor on either side of the halfcourt line. The locker-room-side one had a star of Boystar on it. The side-exit-side one said MOKUS. I didn’t see Scott anywhere and I thought that was suck. He could memorize a song after hearing it once, and I was pretty sure that they wouldn’t have him dance, so they probably didn’t need him to rehearse, but stilclass="underline" if the basketballers got to skip first period, they were bancers for not letting Scott skip too. And they should have got his name right, the dentists. It was probably Boystar who gave them the spelling.
And there he was. He kept bursting from the locker-room to pose before the bleachers. Each time, he stopped at a different arrow on the path. Cameramen milled, coordinating angles. Chaz Black clapped and Boystar’s parents made suggestions about his posture. I thought about shooting him, decided against it. Decided against it because now I could do it later, better, more repeatedly. I would not be short of chances now. Kiss my girlfriend? Murmur in her ear? Even stepped regular and busted every time, I could give him six beatings before getting expelled. Every day we’d have Lunch together, Recess too.
Lunch-Recess, I thought. That was another thing. I’d no longer be in the same room as my friends for class, but there was always Lunch-Recess. Rather, there wasn’t always Lunch-Recess. Now there was Lunch-Recess; now I would have irrevocable cafeteria privilege. Now, whenever my friends in the Cage were also granted cafeteria privilege, we could eat together, speak outdoors in the schoolyard together, plot without whispering, no Botha down our necks. Maybe I could lead from exile. To do so would be hard, but to believe it was impossible was way too dramatic.
And I saw it wasn’t yet time to smash the gym clock, either. It was not yet time to get caught. I had often told myself there would be a time to get caught, and I had always been certain that the time wasn’t yet, but then last night I’d decided the time for stealth was over; if the time for stealth was over, though, why shouldn’t I get caught? Because the end of the time for stealth was only over when it came to the scholars? Why should that be? Why should it be different with me and them than with me and the rest of the world? Why shouldn’t I just rush in there and smash the clock and smash the Boystar, smash everything I could til the Arrangement put a stop to me?
Because, I thought, they’d put a stop to you, dramaface; they’d put a stop to you before you could finish.
That was one potentially good answer — good if a time was to come when the Arrangement wouldn’t put a stop to me.
But what made me so sure that time would come? What made me so sure Adonai was ultimately with me? Why was it that when something horrible happened, I read it as encouragement from Adonai to do more of whatever I’d been doing before the horrible thing happened? Why was it that instead of thinking I was being punished for what I’d done, I thought I was being punished for what I hadn’t done? for where I’d fallen short? When I got kicked out of Schechter and Northside and MLK and when those Canaanites stoned the rabbi at the Fairfield Street Synagogue and when I got banned from the homes of all the scholars and when Slokum humiliated me and when I saw my father get trampled, why was my first thought You need to bring the messiah faster? Why wasn’t it You need to stop trying to bring the messiah so fast? or even You need to stop trying to bring the messiah? let alone This has nothing to do with Adonai, for there is no Adonai?
And was I even truly wondering about this stuff, there in the doorway? I was asking myself the questions, yes, and I had asked them before, thousands of times, and supplied the arguments against the beliefs toward which I tended as best as I could, but before, as now, the questions seemed merely ponderous, the arguments no better or worse than the ones opposing them, the ones I held.
Can arguments against tenets of faith do anything other than exalt faith among the faithful? Did the faithful ever say anything to the purveyors of such arguments other than, “Yes, maybe what you say makes sense, but I disagree nonetheless. That is how strong my faith is. Thank you for testing it. Now I know better where I stand”? If they ever said different, I’d never heard it. It wasn’t so much different from when Jelly told me I shouldn’t love June because she made violent drawings, or Slokum said it was impossible to love her. I loved her. I just did. Despite, regardless, or otherwise.