Dear Kurl,
This is an extra letter, as I don’t have English again until Monday. I hope you don’t mind receiving two letters this week. It’ll just be a quick note, really—Lyle’s picking me up for a dentist appointment at 3:30 p.m., so I’ve just ducked into Ms. Khang’s classroom momentarily after school.
I want to explain why it looked like I was crying at lunch today at the bike racks, when you approached Bron, Shayna, and me. The moment was somewhat awkward all around, wasn’t it?
You didn’t technically approach us—it’s more accurate to say that you were just passing by us on your way to the bus stop. I suppose it must have been a surprise, looking over and discovering me with tears leaking down my face and both girls laughing unabashedly at me.
“What’s the matter?” you asked. “What happened to him?”
“Whoa!” Bron said. “What happened to you?” That black eye, Kurl! I’m sure all three of us were equally taken aback at the sight, but naturally it was Bron who didn’t hesitate to inquire.
“Nothing. A fight,” you retorted, and you veered off across the driveway before any of us could say anything more. I looked for you this afternoon, to apologize for our nosiness and to see if you were okay, but you didn’t come back to school after lunch.
Anyhow. Please know that you’re welcome to tell me about all this fighting if you care to (I can’t help but observe its frequency: that bruise on your cheekbone, today a black eye), but in the spirit of our “write about whatever you want” agreement, I won’t press the issue.
Meanwhile, though, I’d like to explain the phenomenon of my tears. My sister had just shown us an old postcard she found in one of Lyle’s books at home, in his Encyclopedia of Band Names. The postcard pictured a dive bar downtown called the Ace—do you know that place upstairs from the Skyline Diner, that diagonal sign with the sleazy-looking neon arrow pointing up the stairs? Anyhow, Shayna thought it might be our mother Raphael’s handwriting on the back of the card. Two short sentences: I must have impressed Axel anyways. He said the gig is mine if I want it. No address, no salutation.
Bron said she thought it must be an ironic postcard, printed as a joke by the bar, because there was no way the Ace would have been a bona fide tourist destination even back then.
Shayna said she was totally missing the point. “It must have been a solo gig, right? Not a Decent Fellows thing,” she said. “Mom must have had a side thing going.”
I badly wished to inspect the postcard more closely, but Shayna snatched it out of my hand and stuffed it in the inside pocket of her jean jacket. It was the snatching and stuffing that must have led to the tears on my face when you happened to pass by us. Something about this precious artifact from the past being handled so roughly. As I may have mentioned, there aren’t any photographs of Raphael Vogel in the Hopkirk house, so any evidence of my mother’s existence on this earth is freighted with extra emotional significance.
The truth, Kurl, is that I tend to cry quite easily. It’s a physical reflex I can’t seem to control, and I cry not only in reaction to sadness but to almost any emotional experience, including atypical ones like surprise and embarrassment. Cry is actually too strong a word for it. It’s more like involuntary leakage of a few tears, which I hardly notice and can try to hide with a surreptitious sweep of my fingertips. Naturally, though, it tends to throw more fuel on the fire when it comes to bullying and public-mockery scenarios.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
PS: I’ve found myself wondering, these last few days, how your brother got injured in Afghanistan. Don’t feel you have to disclose it, if you don’t care to.