Anyhow. The three of us were spread out across the store, flipping through albums in various categories. Bron had already found Etta James’s Tell Mama for the post she was writing about her maternal aunt, Constance Otulah, so she was back in the P-for-Prince subsection of R & B. Shayna was over in Metal, and she and Bron were chatting across the aisles, reminiscing about some party last spring at which everyone had spontaneously gathered around and started dancing to “You Shook Me All Night Long.” I’d been absorbed in the liner notes of an early Flatt & Scruggs record, only eavesdropping with half an ear.
They were a couple of minutes further along in the conversation when I snapped to attention: “He sounded like some kind of wild animal in a trap!” Bron was saying. “I swear to God, the hair on my arms stood straight up.”
“Is this Kurl?” I asked. “Are you talking about Kurl?”
Shayna rolled her eyes; I’d told her about our English assignment. “Jojo is some kind of Adam Kurlansky anthropologist, now that he’s getting letters from him.”
“I heard,” Bron said. “You do know that guy would swat you like a gnat if you ever tried to talk to him in real life, right?”
“What happened at the party, though?” I said.
Then Bron recounted how the members of the football team had bent a wire coat hanger into the letter W for Wolverines and heated it up on the stove and burned it into each other’s skin. When they came around to you, Kurl, you sat down in the kitchen chair like everyone before you. The others had taken off their shirts or jeans to accept the brand somewhere hidden, but you told them you wanted it right on your bicep. When they brought the hot wire near your arm you kept flinching away, and when they tried to hold you steady for it, according to Bron, you “suddenly went nuclear.”
Everyone thought it was funny, at first, and they jeered and piled on and held you down on the kitchen floor. Strongest guy on the team scared of a little pain, Kurl dishes it out but he can’t take it—that sort of thing. But you really went crazy, Bron said. Shayna chimed in at this point and said that you broke the quarterback’s nose. Dented the door of the stainless-steel dishwasher. Burned somebody’s face when you shoved the brand away. For a while it became a real brawl, and by the time you got free you were pretty banged up, and some of the Wolvies were quite upset. You just sort of disappeared from the party after that.
“You know, that’s why he got kicked off the team,” Shayna said.
“He wasn’t kicked off,” I said. It bothers me that people at school seem to be embracing this new version of the story so wholeheartedly. “He quit. Bron, you wrote the article. You said he quit.”
“Well, it was never a hundred percent clear. The coach wouldn’t say, when I asked him, and they certainly haven’t been begging him to come back.”
Shayna shook her head and waved an AC/DC record at us. “That party was the beginning of the end,” she opined. “Refusing the brand made him an outsider. He could never win back their trust.”
I said, “I really don’t think that’s how it went.”
“I’m just telling you what Rachel told me,” Shayna said. “She said things weren’t the same after that night.”
“You mean with Kurl and Teresa?” Bron asked. “Rachel said they broke up because of that party?”
“Wait, who’s Rachel?” I said.
“She said that was the beginning of the end, yeah.”
“Well, Rachel is full of crap. Teresa’s grades were slipping, that’s all. Her parents were worried about her Princeton acceptance.”
“Who are these people?” I said. “Are we still talking about Kurl?”
“Rachel is Teresa’s cousin,” my sister said. “You know Teresa Lau, Kurl’s girlfriend from last year?”
No, I did not know. I didn’t know you had a girlfriend, Kurl, or had had a girlfriend, at one point. Alienated from all the common knowledge of Lincoln High, as usual.
“They broke up,” Bron told me, but I’d already gathered that much.
“She was such a snob,” Shayna said.
“Because she wanted to go to college?” Bron said. College is currently a slight point of contention between Bron and Shayna. Bron is already starting to study for her SATs, and this behavior is unacceptably nerdy to Shayna. She works in little jabs whenever she can about Bron being “so bougie” and “so extra” and “such a tryhard.”
“Was Kurl…” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask them. “Did it bother him?”
Bron shrugged. “Teresa goes to Princeton now, Jojo. She wasn’t really Kurl’s type.”
“She was a snob,” Shayna repeated, catching my eye and grimacing meaningfully in Bron’s direction. Given the dramatic drop in Shayna’s grades last year, she will likely not be going to Princeton next year, either.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
PS: It’s Sunday evening now. I wrote this letter in bits and pieces over the whole weekend. Reading back over it just now, I’m noticing how the tone has changed, and the pacing: It’s much less breathless and rushed, isn’t it, when one isn’t trying to cram everything in into forty-five or fifty minutes? Here at home I have the time to sit at my desk with a cup of hot chocolate or a bowl of cereal and stare out over our street, piecing together the details of the day in a way that makes sense. It’s easier to write what I’m thinking about if I actually have time to think.
Saturday, October 3
Dear Little JO,
I guess technically it’s your turn to write. But I feel like writing a letter more than I feel like starting my ecology report on amphibians. And it’s not like we can’t cross over once in a while. Khang doesn’t seem too fussy about how many letters I write, now that it’s obvious I’m actually sticking with the assignment.
We did a roof today down in Bloomington. All day there were dozens of turkey buzzards in the sky. I asked Sylvan what he thought they were after and he said maybe a deer.
I chose amphibians for this ecology report because once in the forest I found an animal I couldn’t believe was even real. A tiny lizard red as a fire truck. I was maybe nine or ten. It skittered across my palm and dug its way under the leaves and was gone. The fastest living thing I’d ever held. I remember looking it up afterward and it wasn’t actually a lizard but a newt. A Red Eft. The librarian told me the Red Eft doesn’t live in Minnesota. She showed me a map at the back of the book with its habitat range. It must have come down from Canada, she said, around the whole north shore of Lake Superior.
Turns out mostly this newt never leaves the water. It goes straight from larval stage to aquatic adult, which is olive-yellow, speckled, with a flattened tail. But sometimes for unknown reasons it takes a detour. It grows lungs. Turns red. Goes to the woods and spends one to three years as a Red Eft before it returns to its pond or river and transforms back into a water creature. Red Efts are bolder than other salamanders. They hang out aboveground and gather in groups. They don’t even mind the sun. Probably it helps that the red skin is toxic to predators.
I don’t know why I’m giving you all these details. Chances are not good that you’ll ever spot a Red Eft in this part of the country. But I guess if you ever do you’ll know how chancy and amazing a thing it is.