Dear Kurl,
I’m writing you again after a ninety-minute internal struggle not to write. Giving in makes me feel weak and pathetic on top of lonely and depressed. Bron came over after school this afternoon. She’s been stopping by to drop off your letters, and I’ve spoken to her out my bedroom window. But this time our front door was unlocked, so she came right up to my room without ringing the doorbell.
“You know, before she started cutting class all the time, Shayna used to look for you at school every day,” she said. “She worried about you all the time. She’d drag me over to wherever she thought you might be skulking around at lunchtime, just to get you in her sights and reassure herself that you were still alive.”
“What a burden I was,” I said. “She must be so fancy-free in Moorhead.”
I’d taken my tent down last week and left it by the curb on garbage day, so now there’s just a mattress on the floor. I’ve taken most of my posters down, too. I could see by Bron’s expression that my Inner Sanctum appears forlorn. Derelict. Woebegone.
She sat in the desk chair in front of the window and snooped through my bookshelf for a few minutes. Then she said, “Listen, Jonathan, I need to apologize to you. That’s why I came over. For telling the cops that Kurl and Shayna were a couple, you know? I’m really sorry about that.”
It hurt. Your name hurt. Why did I ever call you by the same name everyone else uses? I should have made something up for you, something private, like you did with “Jo.” Then I’d never have to hear it in other people’s mouths.
I’d been playing a Prince record, and when it ended I went to put on another one. I pulled Dirty Mind out of its sleeve, but then realized I had no desire to play it. I put it back onto the pile, and then I picked up the whole pile. I asked Bron to help me bring all the records downstairs, back to Lyle’s milk-crate shelving. When she left, I made her take my turntable with her, suggested she donate it to Isaiah and Ezra or something.
“I’m only taking this to keep it safe for you, so you don’t throw it out your window or something,” she said.
But I know with absolute certainty I won’t be asking for it back.
Yours truly,
Jo
PS: I wrote to Abigail, by the way. I assured her I’d forgotten all about someone reporting the butcherboys after the locker incident, that I wasn’t the slightest bit upset with her for intervening. I didn’t tell her this: If anything, I’m grateful to her, and you should be grateful to her, too, Kurl. It’s thanks to her that the school has a record of Dowell’s assault against me that day. If his parents have looked into filing a complaint against you, I’m sure they’ve come directly up against that. Any official investigation would result in a bullying charge on his academic record.