Dear Little Jo,
Mark called again an hour later exactly like he’d promised. I didn’t want him to know I’d waited the whole hour on the sofa in Bron’s den, just sitting there holding the phone in my lap. When it rang I practically dropped it. I was that wound up.
“I’d come pick you up,” he said, “but it’s crazy over here; I can’t leave the bar.”
I told him it was all right.
He said he had just called Mom and found out I’d been booted out of the house.
“Did she tell you why?” I said. My heart started beating like crazy.
“More or less,” Mark said. “Listen, though. About Jonathan. Can we talk about him first?”
“Sure,” I said.
Mark said, “When I woke him up this morning, I asked him what the hell was really going on. You know, what had him so upset last night. He told me about that party the other night—just the night before last, right?—when you beat on that kid. What does he call them? The butcherboys. He told me he’d walked in on you and his sister having sex. Shayna—her name’s Shayna, right? And he told me a bunch of stuff he’d discovered about his mother, about how she died.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not trying to grill you here,” Mark said, “but that is some heavy shit. That last part, about his mom. Did you know about all that?”
“No,” I said. “Well, some of it. Not all.”
Did I know? I didn’t know, Jo. For one thing I didn’t know you’d seen Shayna and me at the party. I wasn’t planning on lying about it—I mean I’d written to you about it already; the letter is sitting in my backpack in a stack with a bunch of other undelivered letters—but in that moment I realized that, of course, you haven’t read that letter yet. And so maybe you’ve been thinking that on top of everything else, I’m going to lie about it to you. As if you need more betrayal.
“Anyhow,” Mark said. “About you getting kicked out of the house? Mom said she believes you’re a homosexual. Her word. She said Uncle Vik found a love letter, or something.”
I said, “He did.”
“A letter to a boy named Jonathan.”
“Yes,” I said. I swear at that point I wasn’t even nervous about telling Mark, about confirming it for him. Because all I could think was, What is it you discovered about your mom, Jo? What is it about her death?
How it must have felt for you to hear something like that, whatever it was. How what I did with Shayna, and then what we said afterward to the cops about Shayna being my girlfriend, must have made it so much worse for you. How being with Shayna may have seemed easier to me for a messed-up minute or two at that party, but it must have made everything so, so much more horrible and sickening and complicated and lonely for you.
I didn’t say any of this to Mark. It was just like the first call: all that stunned silence on my end of the phone. Maybe worse this time. I was so stunned by the fact that it was my brother Mark on the phone saying any of this in the first place. I mean I had to say something, but all I could finally manage to say to him was, “Are you mad?”
“At you?”
“Yeah.”
“No, Adam,” he said, “I’m not mad at you. I feel horrible about all this. Uncle Viktor beating on you, all this time? Jonathan told me about it this morning, that Uncle Vik beats you, so I asked Ma about it. She didn’t exactly deny it. I mean, Christ, Adam! Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
I said to Mark, “Me being gay, I mean. Are you mad about me being gay?”
“Well, I’m not an idiot.” He sounded kind of impatient now. “You’ve had, what? One girlfriend? For, like, five minutes?”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“I’m saying I knew, all right? Since you were in junior high at least. You were what, thirteen? You had that magazine in your room.”
“What magazine?” I said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My brother had me confused with someone else.
“Some gay magazine. You know, boy bands or something. Tiger Beat or something.”
“Tiger Beat isn’t a gay magazine.” Despite everything I laughed.
“It is if a dude’s looking at it in bed.”
“That’s—that’s insane.” I was laughing.
Mark started chuckling a bit too. “Oh, come on. All the queers on tour read that magazine. It was all they could get over there.”
“There are queers in the army?” I said. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation with my brother. I just couldn’t believe it.
Everything, everything out in the open. And suddenly I was really worried he would hang up, and it never would have happened in the first place. I got really panicky all of a sudden that I was imagining the entire phone call.
Mark said, “Where the hell have you been, Adam? This is the twenty-first century. The whole world is crawling with queers.”
I was crying. I mean the laughing had shifted directly into crying. I couldn’t speak at all. I held my hand over the phone.
“I have to go,” he said. “The beer truck just pulled up.”
“Okay,” I said. I had to try really hard not to let him hear I was crying. I don’t know why I cared, after everything else.
“You’ll be staying with me for a bit,” he said. “Drop by the Border for the apartment key later today, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s all going to work out okay,” he said. “I promise.”
Sincerely,
AK