Even if I was wrong, though, and timeliness was just an excuse for Nakamook to avoid stepping up to Bam, I couldn’t see how Bam would have any better an excuse for not stepping up to Nakamook. Bam didn’t fight as often as Benji (or as often as me for that matter), but he had been in enough fights to be as generally feared as Benji, so I knew the excuse couldn’t be that he was a pacifist. It wasn’t possible that Bam didn’t know he was Nakamook’s arch-enemy — not with all those SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY bombs everywhere — but maybe he needed some more immediate kind of provocation to fight. Some people were like that — they possessed mellow snat and resilient facial masonry. My dad was like that. Had I been Bam, though, the bombs would have provided me more than enough reason to step up to Nakamook.
I remembered bumping into Bam in Main Hall that morning. I remembered all that brotherly chinning of air and got pissed at myself all over again. Here was Benji, loyal, lunchless Benji, my best friend Nakamook, starved by his mother and yet uncomplaining. How could I act brotherly toward his arch-enemy? How could I give my best friend half my sandwich and carrots, then stiff him on the cheesepuffs? I couldn’t, unless I was a dickhead — I wasn’t.
I flattened my brown paper bag to make a plate and dropped half a handful of cheesepuffs on it. When I delivered to Benji what remained in the baggie, I had snap-style energy from getting angry, and instead of just pushing it across the table, I flung it at his chest, and without even looking up, he caught it.
Botha, eating hotlunch left-handed at his desk said, “Mind the cheese doodles, Maccabee.” It sounded like, “Moinda chase daddles, Makebee.” He said it to remind me he was watching. The Cage was set up so we could be watched with great ease by the monitor and the teachers. Everyone in the Cage knew it, always. Except for how they locked you in, that was the main thing that made it the Cage. There was no reason to remind anyone, especially not at Lunch.
I said to Botha, The mind Maccabee, cheese doodles.
I liked that joke. I used the exact same words that Botha had used but the words meant nothing the way I put them in order, and they sounded like they meant something since I said the sentences in the same way as he’d said the originals, and with the same rhythm, and that demonstrated that English words were meaningless by themselves, that they were just lung- and mouth-sounds unless they were in the correct order, which was a paradox because the correctness of the order of a string of words depended on what the words meant, but if correct order was what gave words their meanings, then how could their meanings determine the correctness of the order? No one knew, and no one else thought the joke was funny, either.
Except for Scott Mookus, who told us all, “Ha! Haha! Ha!” That’s how he laughed. It was because of the Cocktail Party Syndrome that he didn’t have a real laugh. You could get him to do it forever, though, just by doing it back to him.
Nakamook said, “Scott ha ha. Ha ha ha.”
Mookus said, “Ha! Haha! Ha!”
Botha said, “Quiet the nonsense.” Quoydanawnsinz.
I said, Australia used to be a prison.
“Main Man haha!”
“Haha! Haha!”
Jelly said, “Georgia was a prison.”
“Australia’s a country,” Botha said. “Australia’s a contnent.”
We didn’t respond.
He said, “A whole contnent.”
I smelled nasty hotlunch.
Main Man and Leevon had it. I didn’t look at what it was. If I looked at their trays and I saw something that I usually liked, I would like whatever it was less the next time I had it because I would think of how bad the smell of the cafeteria version was. If I found out what they were eating and it was something that was one of my favorites, it would be like falling in love with the wrong person; how if you fall in love with the wrong person, then when you fall in love with the right person later on, you will remember the smelly version of being in love and it could threaten to make the good version less good.
When I was wrongly in love with Rabbi Salt’s daughter, Esther, I told her I loved her and she said she loved me, too, but after I got kicked out of Schechter we hardly ever saw each other, so I wrote her a poem without a title, which at the time didn’t seem half as hammy as it was. I thought it was funny.
I got my dad
to get Caller ID
so I would know when you called.
They gave us a box.
It costs five bucks a month
but it doesn’t work—
your number and your name
disappear from the window
the second right before I check it.
On the Shabbos after I got officially kicked out of Martin Luther King Middle School, my family had dinner at the house of the Salts. I passed my poem to Esther under the table during the chicken. She read it through the glass of the tabletop. Then she told me that my poem made her sad and that since I wrote it, it was me who made her sad, and that sadness of the girl was a sure sign of a bad match. Then she broke up with me, but I didn’t believe it at first. I thought she was just upset, just talking. She said, “Any bond between two people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it the least.” We were in the Salts’ backyard by then, and a rabbit was watching us. I said tsst to the rabbit and the rabbit took off. I repeated what Esther said to me and I noticed that it was not officially correct English because it was only two people. It should have been, “Any bond between two people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it less.” I told Esther about the grammatical problem because I wanted to change the subject because I still didn’t think she was serious about breaking up. And then she started crying and, for a second, I thought maybe she was serious about breaking up, but then I thought: No way. We’re in love with each other, and people in love with each other might argue, but they don’t break up with each other, not when they’re in love. And I decided she was crying because it was Rabbi Salt who’d spoken the relationship wisdom to her, and no one likes to think their father is mistaken.
Esther sniffled in a way that I thought was cute because it wasn’t gross at all, even though it meant wet snot was moving around inside of her face. The sniffling made me want to touch her sleeve, but I did not touch her sleeve. She was Hasidic, and the sleeve was too close to the hand for them.
So I said, It doesn’t matter, Esther, because it sounds better with ‘the least.’ It’s really impossible to know which is the right way to say it, because the problem might not be ‘less’ and ‘the least’ but ‘any two people.’ If you said, ‘Any bond between three, four, or five people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it the least,’ that would have been correct English, but correct English is not usually the strongest kind of English, anyway.
She was wearing a brown scarf that had fringes and she wiped the tears on her cheeks with the fringes mashed together. The rabbit came back and it was staring at her. I threw a woodchip at its head and it ran. I didn’t like rabbits at all. They’d stare off like thinkers, but I knew they weren’t thinking.