Dear Kurl,
A good reason to write a letter: to tell a story.
Once upon a time, Christopher Dowell and I used to be friends. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I never told you our story. For several months in the spring of fifth grade, we would walk home together after school once or twice a week and play video games or jump on his trampoline. He was roughly twice my weight back then, too, but the only practical result of the size difference was that Dowell liked to give me piggybacks. He was terrible at reading and writing, so I used to read aloud to him often—school handouts, comic books, even the onscreen scripts from Pokémon while we played. He was called “Christopher” by everyone back then. Never “Chris,” only “Christopher.”
For some reason Dowell always had about twenty or thirty golf balls lying around his backyard, and once we made up a hilarious game in which we’d stuff all the golf balls into our shorts and jump off his shed roof, over the edge of the safety net, and onto the trampoline. We would film each other’s jumps on his sister Laurie’s phone. On impact the balls would fly out the cuffs of our shorts and bounce violently up into our faces and come raining down onto our skulls. Sometimes they’d ricochet right back into our crotches or leave bruises on the undersides of our arms.
Recounting this to you, I’m finding the pseudo-sexual nature of the game glaringly obvious. But at the time it was simply fun. Normal.
Dowell went to a different junior high than me, so we didn’t cross paths again until last year, by which time I was wearing my Walt Whitman garb and he was a butcherboy. I suppose fond memories weren’t enough to overcome the social gulf between us. Or maybe it’s more directly correlated than that: Maybe remembering the piggyback rides and the golf-ball game fills Dowell with retrospective loathing and intensifies his will to violence.
Yours,
Jo