“Benji,” said Jelly.
“Gu Ri On,” said Nakamook.
“And what does love feel like?” Scott went on. “Does it feel like the sound of cantaloupes smashing beneath fleshy hammers? It does indeed feel like melons exploding! Have you warmed her by the balustrade near ornamented parapets? Embraced her in the sandstorms of the Negev and the Sinai? Wherefore art thou, Gurion Maccabee? Will you leave us all behind for this lovely tomato? Will you be a shaved Samson in the nosebleed seats, watching from the bleachers while all of our keesters get handed to us red by basketball and pervs and robots and tall people, your ass’s jawbone long-gone and unswinging? Must she dull your ferocity? Can’t you be a lover and a fighter, Gurion? Can’t you be righteous and also be awesome? Can’t you even remember the justice love needs for protection? Please?” Mookus said.
I said, I’ll still bring the justice.
“So said Jesus,” said Scott Mookus.
Nakamook said, “Jesus never fell in love, Scott — but Gurion, listen, I learned a new action last night.”
Jelly said, “Please don’t do eyelid flips. Don’t ruin… lunch.”
Nakamook said, “It’s not eyelid flips. This kills eyelid flips. I’ll never do eyelid flips again,” he said. “Watch.”
Then Nakamook raised his shoulder-tops up to the top of his neck and his head started shaking in this tight, twitchy way, like a wire getting boinged. A couple seconds later, the breath of his nose was hissing and his face was completely red and his eyes were wet. He said, “You see? Do you see?” and when he said it, the voice was coming out of the top of his throat, Grover-style, like it was grinding against itself.
Scott said, “Ha! Haha!”
Leevon was sitting on the other side of me. I’d forgotten he was there until he poked my elbow. Then he did the same action as Nakamook did, and he did it even better so that the water on his eyes dripped down his cheeks and his cheeks looked loose.
Then Main Man did the action.
Then Jelly did it.
Then I tried to do it but I couldn’t.
Nakamook stopped after a minute, and when he stopped, breath came out of his mouth in one heavy push. He said, “It’s called ‘I’m Ticking.’”
I said, Why?
He said, “Because when you do it, you can hear that ticking inside your head. I think it’s from drops of brain-blood that whack themselves against the backs of the eardrums. Didn’t you hear the blood ticking?”
I said, Don’t be a wang to me because I can’t do it — you know I didn’t hear any ticking of blood.
He said, “I wasn’t being a wang, you spastic wang. I didn’t know because I couldn’t see. When you do the ‘I’m Ticking’ action, it’s hard to see. There’s a bright flying saucer shape that blots out the middle of anything you look at.”
I said, Tell me how you did it.
Nakamook said, “I can’t explain it. I just did it.”
I said, Tell me how you discovered it.
He said, “I was in my room and I was bored and I wanted to break something, but there was nothing good to break except the window and I didn’t want to break the window, so I beat on the heavy-bag, but it wasn’t good enough, I didn’t want to hear thuds, let alone gaspy thuds, I wanted a breaking sound, a snapping kind of crunching sound, a shattering window sound, the one sound I couldn’t hear without doing something I didn’t want to do, and that’s when I decided to invent a new action, and I performed my first I’m Ticking.”
I said, Come on! How did you do it? I said to Jelly, How do you do it?
She said, “I just did it.”
Then Leevon did it again.
Main Man said, “Leevon is I’m Ticking-ing and he doesn’t talk. Jelly can I’m Ticking and she is a biter. Benji I’m Tickings and he is maybe psychopathic. Even I can I’m Ticking and I am diseased in a very rare fashion. What’s wrong with you?”
I don’t know, I said.
Mookus said, “Watch me like a vulture watches a fat mammal that is limping across the floor of a rocky canyon with its tongue out even though I’m your friend who you would never eat.”
Main Man performed the action again and I watched him closely. After a few seconds, I got scared for him because of his heart.
I said, Stop Scott.
He stopped. He was breathing very heavy. This was called hyper-ventilating. It was also called catching your breath. It did not look like Main Man was catching his breath, though. It looked like Main Man’s breath was catching him. It looked like Main Man was getting breathed.
I told Benji, You shouldn’t have shown that to Main Man.
Scott said to me, “Please don’t worry.”
I said to him, Don’t I’m Ticking again.
Nakamook said, “Main Man’s fine. You’re just pissed you couldn’t do the action, you baby.”
It is true I was pissed, but I wasn’t just pissed. I was desperately trying to not think about kissing.
Main Man said, “Ha ha.”
I told him, Yeahyeah.
The end-of-lunch tone got born and died.
“Go to your carrels,” Botha said. He was standing by the doorway, clipboard in claw.
As I was getting up from the teacher cluster, Ronrico Asparagus and Jenny Mangey entered the Cage and rushed me so fast I flinched. “We have questions,” said Mangey.
The two of them came across the room with me and when I turned my head to look at Benji, he made a crumpled face = “Why is Asparagus walking beside you as though he were other than a longtime foe of ours?”
At my carrel, I sat, and Mangey handed me a piece of paper that looked like
WE DAMAGE
DAMAGE WE
WE DAMAGE WE
“Which one is right?” Mangey said.
I stared at the words, trying to understand.
Mangey leaned in close. She was bright pink along the hairline from scratching. Ronrico leaned in close, too, not smelling like pee. If his pee was as pungent as it was said to be, then he did not get any on his pants, which was a blessing. I had never peed beside him, so I didn’t know the true strength of his pee’s smell. The “Ronrico Asparagus has pee so pungent” saying was invented before I got to Aptakisic. Most people said Nakamook invented it, but Nakamook said it was the Janitor. I thought it was Nakamook. It was just the kind of pithy saying Benji would’ve invented, and he was the kind of person who would have given credit to someone else for it, if giving credit to someone else would have made it funnier, which it definitely would have since the Janitor was Ronrico’s closest friend, and his being the inventor would not only be very kaufman — the only thing more kaufman than to sniff a friend’s pee was to sniff a friend’s pee and then speak of what you’d sniffed — but would augment the saying with a sub-plot of betrayal.
“Which one?” Mangey said to me.
Ronrico said, “It’s one of the first two. I know it.”
Mangey whispered, “Ronrico was bombing the lunch tables and the bleachers with the first two, and he thought he was so smart, but I told him he was not so smart and that he should write WE on both sides of DAMAGE.”
Ronrico said, “You didn’t say which side of damage we were on, Gurion, but you did say we were on the side of it; not the sideszzz of it. You said the side.”
Oh! At the end of Group you mean, I said.
“Yeah,” Mangey said. “What do you think we mean? Jeez.”
The Janitor came over, and he leaned in. That was three people leaning close to me. I thought: Now it is a huddle. I thought: Don’t touch my head.
Ronrico said, “Back off a little, Mikey.”