Dear Kurl,
Instead of writing about my “primary influences” as Ms. Khang suggests, I’d like to take this opportunity to answer the question you asked me yesterday at lunch. “Why aren’t you sitting at the gay table?” you said, and you pointed at a table way across the room, beside the composting/recycling sorting station, where a heavily pierced eleventh grader was making out with her Goth girlfriend. Two or three freshmen were also over there, hunched miserably over laptop screens. It was hard to say whether they knew it was the gay table or not. Shayna and Bron call it the Gable, and its eradication is one of Bron’s pet causes. She points to the existence of the Gable as an example of social apartheid, the formalization of hierarchy, and the perpetuation of power imbalances. I’m sure you didn’t intend your suggestion that I go sit at the Gable as an insult or a slur of any kind, Kurl, even if it does unfortunately stand out in my mind now, in retrospect, as the first and only sentence spoken aloud between the two of us. Your tone was exasperated in a way I recognized from many of my conversations with Shayna on this same general topic. An elder-sibling impatience.
My difficulties, before your appearance in the cafeteria, had resulted from simple mathematics. There were more of the butcherboys than there were seats left at my table. Naturally I was in the middle of taking my first sip of milk when I got the classic hip-to-shoulder nudge from behind. It was Christopher Dowell who made first contact, and my milk spilled all over my vintage poplin shirt. “Move, fudge-packer,” Liam VanSyke ordered me. “This is our table.”
I attempted the Stonewall Maneuver, named after the great gay-rights moment in American history but in reality nothing more than behaving as if one is a wall made of stone. I stared down at my tray, unwrapped my tuna wrap, bit into said tuna wrap, and commenced chewing.
“You deaf?” Maya Keeler picked up what was left of my milk and poured it over the tuna wrap. Maya is the blond girl who isn’t more than an inch or so taller than me. I can’t fathom why, but it appears that she may currently be romantically involved with Dowell. In any case, Maya seems to have emerged, in these first few weeks of sophomore year, as the butcherboys’ mastermind, the brains behind the whole operation. She’s the one, for instance, who engineered the poetry-anthology soccer game you witnessed a couple of weeks ago. Just before Dowell knocked the book from my hand, it was Maya’s voice behind me saying, “There, check it. Right there.”
But let us return to the scene at hand. Phase two of the Jonathan Hopkirk Defensive Plan: Look for Rescue. I took a quick, surreptitious scan of the cafeteria for a lunchroom monitor, but of course the butcherboys had already done that before they moved in on me. No one wants a detention, let alone a mandatory anti-bullying essay assignment. Even I am not worth that hassle.
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