The last drops of milk were shaken out over my hair. The other kids at my table were now looking decidedly uncomfortable. Two senior girls zipped up their backpacks and vacated, leaving more than enough space for the butcherboys, but we’d moved past mere logistics now and were well into the principle of the thing.
Dowell reached down and “tased” my ribs with his fingers so hard that I winced sideways and almost toppled off my chair. “Pay attention, faggot,” he said.
Pardon the cliché, but at that moment I really did heave an inward sigh of relief. Phase three—Hope They Hang Themselves with Their Own Rope—was a triumphant success. Believe it or not, faggot is a word I don’t hear all that often. The F-word has become so strongly associated with homophobia and gay bashing that it’s almost magical in its ability to attract public disapproval.
Dowell had overstepped. The other butcherboys leaned away and shuffled back slightly, putting a tiny amount of space between themselves and Dowell and me, isolating us, glancing around for reactions. A couple of nearby kids had turned to watch.
“C’mon, asswipe, get up,” Liam said, but I could hear it in his voice; he was embarrassed, almost apologetic. “We need your seat.”
I swear, Kurl, me continuing to sit there with my sodden sandwich wasn’t just mulishness. I was preoccupied with a whole array of anxious thoughts: about how everyone was watching, about how I’d forgotten to set my alarm that morning and had to run out without breakfast, and how I’d spent all my money on this tuna wrap which was now a soggy mess, and how now I’d be shaky and stupid with low blood sugar for all my afternoon classes.
Anyhow, I finally looked up, and my eye met Dowell’s, and he reached over and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and hauled me up out of the chair and cocked his fist and—well, you know the rest, Kurl, because that’s the precise moment you intervened.
My deus ex machina. It’s as though you appeared out of nowhere. You stepped right up to Dowell and me, and he immediately let go of my collar. Your face was utterly expressionless. I had noticed that about you already, watching you pass in the halls or sitting out on the steps behind the gym: You have this way of keeping your face perfectly still and serene no matter what’s going on around you.
Last Thursday, for instance, I watched a couple of junior girls approach you in the parking lot. They’d been whispering and giggling about you—I could see that even from halfway across the lawn, so I’m sure you saw it from where you were standing beside the driver’s-side door of your car.
You had a vicious new bruise on your cheekbone from some fight or another. I’ve heard the rumors about your fighting habit, of course. People are saying it was fighting that got you booted off the football team. I even overheard someone say you punched the coach.
Anyhow, when the girls finally worked up the nerve to approach you and started to chat you up, I wasn’t sure whether you would grin and flirt back or drive them off with a snarl. But you chose Option C, Kurl: Perfect Neutrality. You lifted your chin in a polite “hey” gesture and put a hand to your cheek and dropped it again—I guessed correctly about their opening line; they must have asked you about the bruise—but your expression stayed blank and you turned back to your car so soon that the girls practically wilted and slumped away.
That’s more or less how events proceeded in the cafeteria, too, isn’t it? You didn’t shake a fist, didn’t say, “Get lost, punks,” or whatever a person would typically say to disperse a group of butcherboys—you didn’t even sneer. You didn’t have to. That fading bruise on your face makes you look downright menacing. “Will fight anyone, for any reason,” it proclaims.
You gazed down upon Dowell for less than three seconds before he caved. He barely paused to snatch his bag of chips and his bottle of Dr Pepper off the table before turning tail and scuttling away. They’d all disappeared by the time I got my heartbeat back under control, and I collapsed into my chair at the now-empty table.
You picked up my milk-flooded tray and stood looking at me. For about one millisecond there was the tiniest flicker of something troubled across your face—I don’t know, I’ve thought it over quite a bit and I can’t puzzle out what it might have been. Maybe you were considering whether to ram the tray down my throat. You said, “Why aren’t you sitting at the gay table?” And then you turned and stalked off.
My answer? I am squarely with Bron on this one, Kurl. The Gable is Discrimination 101. Designating a specific area of a supposedly common space for a minority group, even unofficially, implies that the rest of the space is off-limits for that group. But in the interests of being forthright, I do know what you meant. You meant, “Why are you putting yourself in the path of these monsters, and if you’ve found yourself in that path accidentally, why are you staying here?” Answer? Choose one of the following: A. Stupidity. B. Stubbornness. C. Fatalism. D. Masochism. E. All of the Above.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
Wednesday, September 30
Dear Little JO,
You’re kind of a nosy little bugger aren’t you? Watching my face in the parking lot et cetera. How about you quit stalking me and spying on me around school. And I think I was pretty clear when I said no more poems. Do you really believe you’re the guy Walt is writing about? Do you think you’ve figured out the disdain and calmness of martyrs like he says? Do you think getting pushed around in the caf by a bunch of little jerkoffs makes you understand the large hearts of heroes?
I mean come on. Even the fact that you call them the butcherboys turns the whole thing into something more poetic and romantic than it is. Where did you come up with that name for them anyway? It doesn’t even make sense given the fact that half of them are girls. The thing about you, Jo, is that you seem to be sort of fooling yourself a lot of the time.
My brother Mark started in the Reserves when I was twelve years old. I guess he would’ve been seventeen at the time. Sometime a few months in, he told me about this one recruit at Camp Ripley who got caught giving a blowjob to a UPS delivery guy. Before his hearing the guy shot himself with his assault rifle. I remember Mark saying, At least he did the honorable thing. At the time it made me think of old-fashioned knights, samurai or something. The honorable thing. I mean when you think about it like that I guess you don’t have it so bad at Lincoln, Jo.
Sincerely,
AK
Wednesday, September 30
Dear Little JO,
I felt pretty bad about that last letter so I’m writing you another one during my free period. I mean it doesn’t matter if we put extra letters in Khang’s box. It’s not like she’s going to take marks off for doing that.
In Math I sit pretty close to Bron. We got to talking and at some point I told her about Khang’s assignment and that I’m writing to you. She thought it was hilarious. She goes, I bet you’re getting more than one page a week from him. And I bet he’s making you write more than one page a week too.
I said she seems to know you pretty well for being the kid brother of her friend. She said she and Shayna let you tag along with them everywhere since you don’t have friends your own age. I mean I was already aware you don’t have friends from seeing you at school alone all the time. But Bron sort of calls it like she sees it, doesn’t she? She says things that don’t sound harsh at the time but look harsh when you write them down. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m mostly alone at school too. Alone everywhere actually.