Dear Kurl,
I am positively reeling from the layers of irony in your letter. There are so many convoluted twists and turns of irony here that I nearly biked straight into the side of a bus on my way home today. That’s how preoccupied I was, trying to sort it all out.
I love the part where you blame me firstly for touching your hand, at school too yet—as though it was a lap dance in the middle of the cafeteria!—and secondly for getting you into trouble with Ms. McGuire and therefore with the vice principal. How conveniently you overlook the fact that I was the one sitting there quietly in my chair while you were the one throttling Christopher Dowell right in front of the librarian.
He had your letter in his hands, yes. I’ll concede your point about the carelessness of carrying any of your letters on my person, given my attractiveness to the butcherboys. But your reaction to the situation was out of all proportion. You were like the Terminator. You grabbed Dowell by the throat and slammed him so hard into the shelves that four or five books tumbled out the other side. No wonder Ms. McGuire showed up within mere seconds. The sound of falling books must be like a dog whistle to a librarian’s ears.
You snatched your letter from his hand and flung it in my general direction.
“Whoa. Chill, man,” Maya said. She had leaped up from where she’d been doodling on my notebooks and was backing away.
Dowell was choking, but you weren’t letting him go. “Stay the hell away from him,” you said.
“Kurlansky, we’re sorry, man. We didn’t mean anything by it,” Maya said. I think Maya Keeler would like nothing more than to be a puppy at your heels, if only you’d grant her permission. Your very own apprentice menace.
I spotted Ms. McGuire marching toward us up the aisle. “Let him go,” I suggested to you.
You let go, and Dowell clutched his throat and doubled over, gasping. But still he managed to tell you to go fuck yourself.
You hauled him back upright by his hair.
“Hey, Kurl,” I said, trying to tip you off about the librarian’s imminent arrival.
You leaned right into Dowell’s face. “Now, why would I fuck myself,” you snarled, “when there’s a cunt like you?”
You’d delivered the sentence calmly enough, your lips right next to Dowell’s ear. Your quiet-doom routine at its absolute finest. But when you uttered it, Ms. McGuire was standing all of two inches behind you.
You will remember I once mentioned that there are certain vocabulary words that tend to backfire on those who wield them? Jonathan Hopkirk Defensive Plan, phase three: Hope They Hang Themselves with Their Own Rope. Remember?
Well, the C-word would definitely qualify as one of those vocabulary words, Kurl. It’s right up there near the top of the list.
The whole time you were choking Dowell, uttering those despicable words, listening to Ms. McGuire order you to the VP’s office, your face never betrayed the smallest hint of emotion. Not even a flicker.
And seeing it—watching you stand there like a marble pillar while Ms. McGuire made Maya pick up the fallen books and then told the two of them to get lost so she could deal with you, watching you so carefully not glance over at me even once, not even when you slung your backpack over your shoulders and turned and walked out—I realized it’s a completely different face than the one to which I’ve been getting accustomed. It was quite a jolt to see it and to remember that before we became friends, it’s the only face I ever saw.
But my absolute favorite part of your letter is the passage about the glass orbs and the fascinating light patterns and the shattering into fragments. You’ve encapsulated the essence of my personality in a single, brilliantly elaborated metaphor. You’ve nailed it. You’ve got me in a nutshell.
Here’s what I need you to do, Kurl. I need you to stop mixing me up in your head with yourself. Listen carefully now, because it’s an established fact in the Hopkirk household that I am at my most insightful when I’m at my angriest:
Your glass ornament? It’s not me; it’s you.
Go ahead, take as much time as you need to recover from this revelation and think it through. Your brilliant metaphor describes yourself. Adam Kurlansky lives inside a shell. A perfectly smooth, hard exoskeleton designed to ensure that no influences from the outside world can possibly penetrate, and nothing can ever escape.
It is hardly a mystery why you wear this shell or where you perfected it. Just by way of a minor example, I am willing to bet any money that you borrowed this afternoon’s degrading use of the C-word directly from the mouth of Viktor Kurlansky. I’m assuming that what you meant in your letter by I’m just handing him an excuse is that Uncle Viktor’s going to holler at you for fighting at school again, and I’m willing to bet he won’t use the politest language when he does so, especially if he happens to have been sampling the vodka. There you go, Kurl: your complete, complimentary family psych assessment, courtesy of
Yours truly,
Jo