“I’m sorry. It’s—Kurl, we’re not talking about Shayna; we’re talking about you, here.” Bron is crying now. “I’m sorry. It’s just, with everything that’s happened, I don’t know what to do.”
I reach over and hug her. Hold her for a minute until she sniffles and pushes me away.
“Well, this is textbook,” she says. “Kurl, you finally disclose, and then you end up trying to comfort the person you disclosed to. This is so not cool. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve had a little longer to get used to it,” I say.
“Bron’s right, though. We should report it,” you say.
Bron shakes her head. “It’s actually his choice, Jojo, not ours. It has to be his choice.” Then she climbs out of the tub, saying she’s going to go find Shayna.
It amazes me that everyone was so normal, actually. I mean obviously we’re all upset about Prince in one way or another. The whole reason we’re here at Bron’s house is because Prince died today and this is supposed to be some kind of wake. And the girls are obviously in the middle of a fight about something else too. But still I was amazed that I could reveal this secret and the whole world wouldn’t fall off its axis.
Sincerely,
AK
Friday, April 22
Dear Kurl,
“So what was your problem tonight?” you asked me, after everyone had said good night. We’d stripped the coverlet off Zorah Otulah-Tierney’s bed and piled all the extra pillows in the corner of the bedroom so it would feel less perverse to fool around in there.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You were quiet.”
So you had noticed. I’d thought you were too busy having fun with the Otulah-Tierney clan. You’d held your own surprisingly well against the twins through several rounds of Overwatch on the PS3.
“At first I thought I was embarrassing you, showing off my scars like that. Then I thought maybe you were pissed that I never told you why I quit the team. That you didn’t like finding out about all that at the same time as the others.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I mean I’m sorry I never told you.”
“It wasn’t that,” I said.
“Then what?”
I couldn’t say it. Saying it, it seemed to me, would make it more possible.
“Your heart is beating so fast,” you said, and laid your ear against my chest.
I ran my palm over your shorn scalp. Your broad, strong skull.
“Come on, Hopkirk. Spill it.”
“If you don’t have secrets,” I began, and my voice cracked. I heaved a breath and swallowed a throatful of tears. “If you reveal everything, and free yourself altogether of shame, then what? What can I give you that you can’t get from anyone else?”
You lifted your head to peer at my face. Frowned.
Tears ran past my ears onto Zorah’s pillow. “That group hug in the hot tub? You attract people, Kurl. As many as you let in, they’ll come right in and adore you. There will be dozens. Hundreds. As many as you want.”
You made a scoffing noise in your throat and started to lick the tears off my cheeks. Swift little touches, like a cat lapping milk. After a minute you stopped and switched to kisses, kissing my jaw and my ears, and then my mouth, lightly. Then without warning you hooked your thumb between my teeth, tugged my mouth open and plunged your tongue as deep as it would go. You groaned, and the sound moved up from your chest all the way down my throat and straight into my groin.
You pulled back. “You felt that, right?”
I was breathless, full of heat. It was so fast! I could barely nod at you.
“That’s only you, Jo. That’s all you. Only you do that to me.”
“You did it.”
“Nope.”
I laughed. We were both wrong, of course: It was both of us at once, striking that humming, hungry chord together.
Yours,
Jo
Sunday, May 8
Dear Kurl,
All our talk. All the beautiful sentiments we’ve expressed to each other about our limbs twining together like vines and our minds sharing the same food and our hearts drinking from the same cup.
All our talk is empty, isn’t it? Or it’s superficial, at least—it describes something we feel at certain sparkling moments, something we feel all over the surface of ourselves but not deep down, not truly all the way through.
I know now that there are depths of you to which I can’t travel. There are areas I’ve never seen and am not permitted to go. You’ve cordoned them off, strung barbed wire around the perimeter, laid land mines. I get too close and you’re instantly up the tower with a bullhorn, hollering warnings. Watch your step. Danger. Back off.
It was only our third time inside my tent together. It brings back all my anger and frustration to realize that it’s only been three times, total, in all these months.
Lyle was out of town, and Shayna was singing at the Ace, and you and I were in my tent. It was late, Kurl; you’d come way later than you said you would. I waited forever. But I didn’t mind because now that you were here, the tent had lost its musty canvas chill. It was warm, and it smelled like you. Like us. I was already naked and it felt hot and tender, and we’d only begun. We had the whole rest of the night, or so I thought.
And then I caught a glimpse of the raw stripe across your hip, the beads of drying blood. Did you think leaving your T-shirt on would be enough to hide it? Did you think it was too dark in the tent for me to see? Did you think I wouldn’t feel you wince when I gripped your hip bone?
I sat up. You tried to pull me back down, but I shook you off. “You were late because of your uncle?” I said.
You sat up, too, and folded the sheet over your lap. You didn’t answer.
“Did you have to wait until he was finished? Until he passed out, or something?”
“Yes,” you said. Your mouth came to mine and your hand found my thigh, trying to end the conversation.
“Why?” I said. “Why didn’t you just grab the keys, get in the car, and leave?”
Silence.
It made sense to me, suddenly, why you’d jogged over here instead of driving, arriving sweaty, saying you need to shower, asking to borrow a T-shirt of Lyle’s even though his largest one is still too tight on you. You’d been in that state, hadn’t you?—the state of needing to keep moving so you wouldn’t feel like you were dying. Unable to rest or be still.
I pinched the hem of your shirt and lifted it. More stripes reached around your ribs. More raw skin.
You swatted my hand away. “Leave it.”
I grabbed the hem again and yanked on it, hard, until the shirt ripped at the shoulder.
“What’s wrong with you?” you said.
“With me? What’s wrong with me?” I filled up with anger then. My whole body swelled with outrage. I said, “You’re hurt, Kurl; why are you pretending everything’s fine?”
“I’m not pretending,” you said. “I just don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“It’s not okay.” I hunted around for my shorts and pulled them on. I was so angry that my hands were shaking. “You never want to talk about anything, Kurl. You’re like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand.”
You laughed. “Really? I’m like an ostrich?”
“It’s not funny.” I crawled out of the tent and switched on the overhead light. Everything in my room looked pathetic to my eyes, naïve and juvenile. The bookshelf with its volumes of poetry, the row of comic books on the bottom shelf. The leather suitcase spilling out my vintage ties and handkerchiefs. Leaves of Grass lying on my desk, opened to a passage I’d planned on reading to you. Silly, romantic, superficial stuff.
And meanwhile you were hurt, Kurl. You kept being hurt, and hurt, and hurt, and there was nothing I could do to help you or to stop it. Nothing was helping.
You came out of the tent, blinking in the light.
“You don’t want to talk about it? Let’s talk about something else,
then,” I said. “Like your essay.”
“What essay?”
“Your autobiographical essay. For college.”
“What does that have to do w—?”
I cut you off. “Why haven’t you written it yet? Why do you keep stalling, and refusing to talk about it, and telling me you have it under control?”
“Because I do have it under control.”
I’d caught the sharpness in your voice and felt a nudge of satisfaction at eliciting a reaction from you, finally. I wanted to see you get as furious and desperate as I felt. So I pressed harder: “You’re lying, Kurl; I can tell. Go ahead and stick your head in the sand, but I’m not going to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re not planning on writing that essay at all.”
A slow, angry flush came over your face. I could see the tightness in your jaw, that lockdown look coming into your eyes, but I ignored it.
“Tell me the truth. You’re not even planning to try, are you?”
Silence.
“I knew it.” I plucked Leaves of Grass off my desk and waved it at you. “Ms. Khang chose you for this. She wants you to have a future. Why are you throwing it away?”
“You and this fucking book.” You snatched it out of my hand. “I don’t have to take this shit from you.” You hurled the book across the room so hard that when it hit the wall it thudded to the floor in two pieces, its spine split.
“Nice,” I said.
You moved fast, scooping your sweats and soiled T-shirt from the floor, getting ready to leave, but I beat you to the door and raised both hands and pushed you back. “You’re just scared,” I said.
“Get the fuck out of my way,” you said.
“You’re a coward, Kurl.”
Your fist crashed into the door beside my head. The splintering crack burst through my skull like a gunshot.
“You little asshole.” You wrenched your fist back and cocked it again. It hovered in front of my face just long enough for me to see how your arm shook and how blood sprang up across your knuckles.
Then you dropped your arm and flung yourself backward, so fast that you stumbled and landed hard on your ass. Your shoulder plowed into a tent pole, and you scrambled, crabwise, along the edge of the sagging canvas until you were backed up against the bookshelf. “Oh, fuck, I’m sorry,” you breathed. “Oh, fuck.”
I slid down to the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees. I was dizzy and cold. My heart was pounding, but it didn’t seem to be circulating any blood around my body.
There was a long silence. You were still clutching your jogging clothes, and you used your sweatpants to mop up the blood on the back of your hand. You’d gouged your knuckles quite badly, and you looked at the injury with great absorption, holding your hand there, fingers trembling slightly, in front of your face.
“You should leave,” I said.
You nodded but didn’t immediately move. “There’s no point to the essay,” you said, quietly. “I can’t go to Duluth.”
“What?”
“College. I’m not going.”
“Why not?” I said.
“I’m not leaving my mother in that house with him.” You were still staring at the blood on your hand.
“That’s insane.”
“It’s not insane. It’s a fact. He works it out on me until he’s spent.”
“You can’t—that’s not…” But I couldn’t think of anything to complete the sentence.
Another long silence. You looked up and gazed dully over my head, staring at the hole you’d punched in the door.
“Kurl,” I said. “This is your life we’re talking about.”
A bitter, hopeless smile came over your face. You swept your hands in a gesture that took in the splintered door, the collapsed tent, the wrecked book, and your own damaged torso. “This is my life.”
You left, then. Heaved yourself to your feet, walked all the way around the other side of the tent to avoid approaching me head on. I moved aside to let you out. I listened to your footsteps on the stairs, the shuffling sounds as you put on your sweatpants and shoes. Then the front door clicked quietly shut like a coffin lid.
This morning I found your socks still folded together on my desk. I sat here at my desk staring at your socks and remembering how, when you arrived late last night and headed straight into the shower, I’d picked up your sweat-damp socks off the floor and lifted them to my nose before putting them aside.
I remembered how you’d once caught me doing the same thing with another pair of your socks, and how you’d laughed and called me pervy.
“It’s the socks’ fault, not mine,” I’d said. “They just keep floating up here to my face and forcing me to sniff them.”
Silly. A silly conversation, just for the joy of it. Sparkly, superficial, like everything we’ve said to each other.
As I sit here this morning, writing all of this out, I know that I said none of the things I actually believe are true. I should have said that you’re heroic, trying to keep your mom safe in the face of your uncle’s abuse. I should have said that you deserve to be safe, too, Kurl, and that it breaks my heart into a million pieces to see you trapped like this. Instead, in my fury and helplessness, I managed to imply that somehow it’s your fault for not writing the essay, for not taking the college lifeline. It’s not your fault, Kurl. I know that. I’m sorry I called you a coward.
The worst part of all is that it wasn’t just last night, was it? This fight has been brewing for ages between us. It’s been weeks and maybe months already, Kurl, that I’ve been learning to watch for the coded signs of your temper. I’ve been teaching myself to recognize where the trees have been felled, where the soil is torn up, where the trenches are dug. Without realizing it, I’ve already been turning back before I get close to your danger zone. Your no-man’s-land.
Yours,
Jo
Thursday, May 12
Dear Little Jo,
I’ve written lots of letters this week and ripped them all up. What’s the point though? You’re right. You’re absolutely correct to say that I’m dangerous, that I’m a minefield, that there is a no-man’s-land around me. A place where you better not go. I mean look what I did to your bedroom.
You said that I’m throwing my future away. This future that Khang has chosen me for and that you keep imagining would be so great for me. But I hardly see it it as throwing it away, because there isn’t any future for me. There never was, Jo. All those times you talked about the future after high school, all those amazing plans and opportunities. I knew it didn’t apply to me. For me there’s only Uncle Viktor.
Whenever I hear Uncle Viktor drunk and starting to yell and stomping around the house after my mother, I don’t stay out of the way or leave the house. I go downstairs and get in his face and say things I know will set him off. Sometimes I take shortcuts even. I give his shoulder a little shove, or mess up his hair, or laugh in his face. I mean it doesn’t take much.
I take off my shirt and kneel on the floor when he tells me to. Or if he comes at me with his fists instead of his belt, I back myself into a wall so he can get a better shot even if his aim is bad.
I can feel the anger pour out of him while he’s doing it. Every blow he lands drains it out of him, and within a few minutes he’s blubbering and swaying and begging for my forgiveness, for my mom’s forgiveness, holding on to her while she leads him like a little kid to the sofa and pats his hands and says she’ll make him another drink in just a minute, just rest a minute, just get your breath, Viktor, until seconds later he’s passed out.
The anger pours out of Uncle Viktor onto my skin, into my skin. It seeps through my scratches and bruises and pools up at the center of my body, deep inside, and stays vaulted in there like toxic waste. And like any toxic waste dump, I guess eventually it springs a leak.
You’re right, Jo, that you can’t be anywhere near me when this leak happens. I mean look what I did.
I’m s
orry I let things go so far with you. I don’t just mean our fight, although of course I’m sorry about that too, about destroying your property and threatening you like that.
But I also mean the whole thing. Me and you. I should never have exposed you to me this much. I guess I thought maybe I was improving, that you were maybe improving me, or that I was improving under your influence or something. I should never have let it get so far though.
I’m so sorry, Jo. Especially because you’re the kind of person who should never, ever get exposed to that kind of ugliness. I mean you are so generous and kind. And I don’t know. Tender. I know you hate it when I say things like that about you but it’s the truth. I don’t know how else to describe this pure way you have of being in the world, of being with other people.
Anyway it’s over now obviously. I’m sorry I waited until you had to see the ugliest part of me, the toxic, ruined center. At least breaking up means I can promise you won’t ever be blasted by it again.
Sincerely,
AK
Friday, May 13
Dear Kurl,
Kurl, I can’t stand myself when I talk like this. I should tear this letter to shreds. I hate its tone: so knowing, so smug in my ability to ironize, to hover above the whole squalid, humiliating scene and narrate it in an entertaining way.
And anyhow, why should I be attempting to entertain you? You probably won’t even read this letter, now that you’ve made it clear you want nothing further to do with me. For the record, I accept your apology, but in no manner nor degree do I accept your breakup. I cannot actually think about you breaking up with me, not right now, hiding out in a bathroom stall trying to regain my composure enough to survive the rest of the school day, and for that matter not anywhere, not ever. I refuse your breakup, Kurl. I simply refuse it.
Yours,
Jo
Friday, May 13, 7 p.m.
Dear Little Jo,
I got home from school today and everything I own was sitting out on the front lawn. I knew right away my uncle had found out. I mean it’s not necessarily a direct leap but I just knew. I think it was the way my babcia’s quilt was spread over some of the stuff. I went over and lifted up the corner. Books, boxes of old school assignments, the old desktop from my room. My mom had probably put the quilt there to protect my stuff in case it started raining. But it was like the quilt was signaling something to me, like it was a message from Viktor to me: I know all about you.
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