Tuesday morning Benji was limping. When I asked about it, he said the same thing he’d said about his damaged face the day before — that he kept wiping out on his skateboard — and then he told me his mom found all his Darkers and threw them away. He called me his “secret weapon” and “last best hope,” and I remained his combover artist — his combover re-toucher, really; Darker ink takes multiple showers to scrub clean.
By Lunch on Tuesday, the Cage students were no longer laughing at Benji’s progression so much as getting really uncomfortable about it. By Wednesday, even the discomfort had worn off. I asked Vincie Portite why Benji kept going, and I asked him if he agreed with me that Egon, wherever he was, would, by now, feel properly avenged, and want, if he were a real friend to Benji, for Benji to relent. Vincie said, “Tch. Benji’s not Egon’s friend. He stepped up for him, sure, but that was last week. What this is now has fuck-all to do with Egon Marsh. This is just Nakamook, Gurion.” Botha, for his part, continued to trickle, stepping Benji for every minor infraction he was able to spot. Nakamook’s stories about the streak of terrible skateboarding luck responsible for his body’s increasing state of battery kept getting wilder.
Re-touching the combover Thursday morning, seconds after having just watched him puke a color that was way too pink to blame on bad eggs, I understood that Benji, wrong or right, saw no way to end the progression any time soon without losing face. His commitment to defiance increased in proportion to the amount of punishment he suffered; he’d keep getting stepped by Monitor Botha and claiming to streak unluckily on a skateboard he didn’t possess until… what? Until some outside, benign force that had nothing to do with anyone else’s authority — particulary not Botha’s or Aptakisic’s — ended the progression is what. The end had to come organically, or at least it had to seem to.
And the only benign force I could think of that might fit the bill was the force of his own follicles: he would quit the progression only when his hair had grown in too thick for his scalp to show ink. I thought.
I was too scared to ask him if I was right, though. Not scared of him, but for him.
This was because of something that happened on the second morning that I drew on his head. I hadn’t thought twice about it at the time, but after telling me his mother took all his Darkers and I was his secret weapon, Benji’d said, “She didn’t get this, though,” and he’d pulled a black crayon from his jacket pocket. I should have just taken the black crayon and used it, because you can wash black crayon from your skin with a little soap and water, so if you don’t want your mom to know that you’ve been drawing on your head all you have to do is spend a couple minutes inside the boys bathroom before you go home. If what you drew on your head with was black crayon. When Nakamook had shown me the black crayon, though, I didn’t think about that. All I thought was how black crayon would show duller than Darker ink, and that after showers in Gym, a crayoned combover would need to be re-applied.
It’ll wash off, I’d told him, and plus it won’t look as good. I’d said, I’ve got my Darker right here anyway.
And then I’d brandished it.
He could not admit that he’d prefer the combover to wash off; not when the less-wash-offable version of it would serve the progression better; to do so would be to openly allow that his defiance was — at least to some degree — subject to the will of someone other than himself, and he wasn’t built to do that, not even when doing it would prevent him from being injured. And he was no liar, Benji — except when he lied to protect those he was loyal to — so he could not insist on using the crayon for untrue reasons, either. If I had known, on Tuesday morning, the way Benji was about snat and face, I would have understood that the crayon was a way out for him; I’d’ve kept my mouth shut about its washability and used it gladly. He would then have been spared at least a couple of the uglier imaginary falls off his phantom skateboard. But I hadn’t considered that til Wednesday evening, after he’d called me on the telephone — a unique phenomenon (Benji hated the telephone) — and, without solicitation, taught me the principles of snat and face. And by Thursday morning I knew that asking him if he’d end the progression when his hair grew back would only make it impossible for him to allow his hair to grow back. If I asked him, then any future ink-blocking hair-growth might seem intentional, a long-term plan. And because any plan — let alone a long-term one — was not organic, he would feel obligated to keep his head shaved. So I didn’t ask.
And I saw that it was almost beside the point anyway, because how long would it take for the hair to get thick enough? If after a week he was puking blood, I didn’t even want to picture what kind of injuries he’d suffer after two weeks, or three. And he was my best friend by that point, one of my only friends at Aptakisic, and certainly the only scholar-brained kid I knew who was allowed to talk to me anymore. So after re-touching the combover that Thursday morning, I saw I needed to protect him from himself. And then I figured out how.
What I did was, during Lunch — I was still allowed out of the Cage for Lunch back then, and Nakamook (owing to all the little infractions Botha kept nailing him for) wasn’t that day — I went over to the table in the cafeteria next to the one where all the Cage kids were sitting, and I got up behind Daryl Duncil, a biggish seventh-grader who I’d seen laugh at Main Man by the bus circle that morning, and chopped him sideways on the back of the neck so he leaned forward, then grabbed two fistfuls of his hair and plugged his face into the cafeteria table until he made glug-glug sounds and stopped resisting. And then, before Floyd dragged me to Brodsky’s, where I received my first ISS, I grabbed Vincie Portite by the collar and told him to get the word out that if anyone in the Cage brought a Darker to school before Tuesday or mentioned to anyone—anyone, I stressed — the threat I was about to finish making, they’d be praying I showed them the kind of mercy I just had Daryl Duncil.
Friday morning I left my Darker at home and said so to Benji. He asked Vincie for his, but Vincie said he’d left his at home, too. So did Leevon Ray, Jelly Rothstein, and every other kid from the Cage who passed the doorway of the C-Hall bathroom. I stood behind Benji the whole time, but a little bit beside him, too. That way, anyone he solicited who hadn’t gotten my message was able to see the suggestive gestures I kept making with my fist while shaking my head No.
Over the weekend, the ink on Benji’s skull faded to nothing. Monday morning I hid in the teachers lounge doorway until I saw him enter the Cage.
With that, the progression was over.
When I got to Call-Me-Sandy’s, Group was already seated in the circle of folding chairs. The arrangement was this: Call-Me-Sandy next to My Main Man Scott Mookus next to Vincie Portite next to Leevon Ray next to the Janitor next to Asparagus next to an open chair next to Jenny Mangey next to Jelly Rothstein next to an open chair next to an open chair next to Call-Me-Sandy.
I wanted to sit beside Main Man but couldn’t. I either had to sit between Mangey — who often cried during Group so you felt like you should hug her, but then when you did she thought you were her boyfriend — and Asparagus — who I’d just punched the wind from an hour before — or next to Jelly Rothstein, who bit and was a girl so I couldn’t hit her when she bit, or next to Call-Me-Sandy, who had a good, soft voice and looked like she probably smelled clean and sensible, like laundry detergent or talcum powder, but was also the most arranged one of all of them, which meant it was no good to sit where you had to turn your head to see her because then she could tell when you were looking.