The Janitor said, “I have a question about the side of damage, though. I’m not sure exactly what it means.”
Ronrico said, “None of us are, but if you don’t stop breathing on me, I’ll touch you on the skin.”
The Janitor leaned closer to Mangey.
“I’ll lick you on the cheek,” Mangey said.
The Janitor stepped back and Vincie Portite came into the huddle. He said to me, “What the fuck is going on here? Why are these people standing here at your carrel? Are we friends with these people now? I thought we weren’t friends with these people, except for Mangey who we were kind of friends with. Now we’re all fucken friends?”
“Why don’t you just go ahead and stare at June Watermark, Vincie, you stalker,” said Mangey.
Wait, I said. Wait. June’s the girl you have a crush on?
“Nope,” said Vincie.
Why’d Mangey say that then? Why’d you say that, Mangey?
“He stares at her at Lunch!”
“I don’t,” Vincie said. “I stare at someone else. She sits near June a lot.”
I’m in love with June, Vincie.
“Really? Does she love you back? I hope so, man. I’m not even in love, I don’t think, just in very deep like, and it’s really fucken lonely not to be very deeply liked back. I can’t imagine how—”
Not to be very deeply liked back by who? I said.
“I’m not saying,” said Vincie. “I don’t want to fucken say. But you know I’d tell you if it was June because you just said you loved her. That would be a big fucken problem if she was my crush — so I’d tell you.”
Mangey said, “But—.”
“Mangey’s a fucken troublemaker. Listen to me. I told you I’ve liked this girl since kindergarten, right?”
A million times, I said.
“And June didn’t go to school with me in kindergarten. Did she, Mangey? You went to school with me in kindergarten, so you would know — was June in fucken kindergarten with us?”
“No,” Mangey said. “It’s true. She wasn’t.”
“See?” said Vincie. “All is well, except for how the girl I like deeply does not like me deeply back.”
I banged fists with Vincie, all kinds of relieved.
Sorry, I said.
“No problem, man. But what I was saying is,” he said, chinning air at Ronrico and the Janitor, who were making kiss-faces at him, “are we friends with these two knuckleheads now, or what?”
We’re all on the side of damage, I said.
“So we’re all friends or what though?” Vincie said.
“I told you we were friends now,” Ronrico said to Vincie. He said to me, “Vincie tried to say at recess that you didn’t mean we were friends and I told him he was wrong, just like how I told Mangey she was wrong about the bombs on the tables and the bleachers.”
“I said to Ronrico that he was a fuckface,” said Mangey, “because when you said we were on the side of damage, you didn’t mean that we were to the side of damage: you meant that damage is on one side, which is the side we are for, and then something else is on the other side, which is the side we’re against.”
“And then,” said Ronrico, “I told her that it was not me who was the fuckface since it was her mom who was the fuckface, because of how we already decided in Group that it was her mom who was the one who fucks like a fucker and that Gurion would not have said ‘We are all on the side of damage’ and left it that way if there was this whole other something else that we are against like Mangey is saying — I told Mangey it was maybe her that was the fuckface because of genetics and that you would have told us what the something else was, and I told her that it is true that I don’t know if we are on the right or the left side of damage, but I do know that it is one or the other. And that’s why I switched off the sides with the bombs. I did thirteen, starting with the WE on the left. So now there are seven WE DAMAGEs and six DAMAGE WEs.”
“Who’s right?” Mangey said.
Botha said, “In your seats.”
Those huddling around me pretended not to hear him.
I spoke fast. I said, We are all against the arrangement, always. I said, Sometimes we are on the left side of damage and other times on the right. Often we are on both sides, so both of you are correct.
“So I don’t have to fix the bombs?” Ronrico said.
I said, The bombs are good.
“Thank you,” Ronrico said. “Tomorrow I’ll scrape a huge WE DAMAGE WE into the four-square court with a rock. I would’ve done a four-square one today, but we had indoor recess, so I did the bleachers with a Darker instead — Oh we forgot!”
“Hey!” said Botha.
“Hey back at you!” said Vincie Portite, hand over eye. “I didn’t hear a tone yet!”
“The scoreboard,” Ronrico said.
Mangey said, “It’s smashed.”
Vincie said, “He knows already. God! You don’t listen to Vincie.”
“Did you really know already?” said the Janitor.
The beginning-of-class tone sounded and Botha scattered the huddlers to their carrels by shouting, “Mind the loin there!” What he meant was my tape-line.
Forty carrels were bolted to the walls of the Cage; sixteen to the east wall, and twelve to each the north and south. Stuck to the floor behind every student’s chair was a line of masking tape the width of his carrel. The rule was that you were supposed to keep the back legs of your chair in front of your line at all times. As long as your back chair-legs were in front of your line, your head would be between the walls of your carrel, which rose five feet higher than the surface of your desk and extended two feet beyond the desk’s edge. Because only the thinnest, most flaccid carpet covered the Cage’s concrete floor, and because all the feet of the chair-legs were metal, the noise of the feet rubbing the floor when you’d scoot your chair was a squeaky kind of groan that was wholly distinct from other Cage sounds, so breaking the Tape Rule was a risky move, since Botha — at his desk between the bathroom doors, in the middle of the west wall, facing east — or a teacher at the cluster in the center of the room, was likely to look in your groan’s direction. If you were over your tape-line, you’d get step 1. Step 1 was a warning. Three warnings in the same half-day = step 4: detention.
While following the Tape Rule, the only direction you could look that wasn’t walled off and didn’t end in floor or ceiling was behind you = you weren’t able look at anyone else without conspicuously revolving your head. And so there was also the rule of Face Forward, which was exactly what it sounds like. The rules of Quiet At All Times and Always Be Sitting — those were exactly what they sound like, too — combined with those aforementioned to make it near-impossible for students to initiate communication with other students without getting noticed, then stepped, by the robots.
On top of the rules, the stain-colored carrel walls were insulated thickly so that whispers below the robots’ audial threshold couldn’t break through them, and if you wanted to send a written message to someone, not only did you first have to ball the paper (folded notes’ trajectories just weren’t reliable), which got too noisy if you didn’t crumple slowly, but you basically had to be sharing a wall with the intended recipient, for it was near-impossible to arc even a balled note much greater a distance than the next carrel over with any kind of accuracy, which meant that if Benji Nakamook, say, was more than one carrel away from you, a note you wrote him, in order to get to him, would have to be tossed to every student between you, and since each between-student would need to unball it to see if it was intended for him or another, and because no student could see what any other was doing inside of his carrel anyway, every between-student could and would read the note without any fear of getting beaten up, so even if every kid between the two of you was willing to risk steps for tossing your note, and even if the note did eventually get to Nakamook without being detected by Botha or the teachers (the likelihood of which decreased with each potentially noisy de- and re-crumpling), you wouldn’t have written anything important in the note, and thus probably wouldn’t have bothered writing to begin with.