Dear Kurl,
Yesterday at school, when I walked past Maya and Dowell and a couple of the other henchmen sitting outside on the stacking chairs by the gym door, Maya said, “Oh, hey, it’s Kurlansky’s buttplug.”
The others laughed. At first I kept walking, but then I looked back to see whether Dowell was laughing along with them. He wasn’t—he glanced away from me, across the parking lot at the empty school buses.
I turned around and walked back to Maya.
“What happened to your buttplug costume?” she said.
Kurl, I will confess that I was terrified. I had no desire to face any more physical pain. But the stakes seem to have shifted, somehow, since the last time one of the butcherboys made a crack at me or tripped me or jabbed me with a sharpened pencil. It’s not been that long, just a few weeks, since the party at Bron’s. Dowell is still in his arm cast, though he always wears his hoodie sleeve with the cuff slit open and pulled down over it. Partly my newfound courage must have come from the news that he’ll be switching schools after this year. Bron told me she heard that his parents are sending him to a boarding school in Connecticut, that he has an aunt there with gobs of money who offered to “step in.”
So what does this news mean for me? A foreseeable end to the threat, I suppose, or a fundamental shift in the nature of the threat, at least. The butcherboys without Dowell—without the enforcer, the muscle behind the operation—are purely a psychological menace. I suppose I decided, right at that moment, that I was finished allowing my psyche to be menaced. And as this was Maya’s first overture since the party at Bron’s house, her first attempt at post-cataclysm humiliation, I felt it was an important juncture.
Anyhow. I was terrified, but I still walked right up to her. And when she asked about the buttplug costume, I said, “Listen, I really need to know what more you want from me, Maya.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Maya said. She hopped down from the stack of chairs, and Liam and the other butcherboys followed. Dowell stayed where he was, though.
“I would just really like this to be over,” I said. “Maybe you could tell me what you want from me, in order for us to be finished.”
Maya laughed so that the others would laugh, which they did, except for Dowell. “Oh my God,” Maya said. “Do you think you can take us now, or something?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“So what are you going to do, sic Kurlansky on us like he’s your dog? Do you have him on speed dial or something?”
Laughter, but Dowell wasn’t laughing.
I said, “Maya, you’ve been siccing your friends like dogs on me for nearly two years straight. I’ve gotten hurt. Christopher’s gotten hurt. I’m not that interested in keeping it going, and honestly, I don’t think Christopher is, either.”
“Shut up, Jonathan,” Dowell said, but he wasn’t getting down off the chairs. Also, he’d used my name. Not a name—not a derogatory name—but my name.
Maya looked up at him. “What are you, friends now? Wait. Are you fucking him now?”
Laughter, laughter. “Shut up, Maya,” Dowell said.
“Maybe he’s your buttplug. Is he your buttplug now, Chris?”
“Shut the fuck up, Maya!” And now Dowell got down off the chairs. He stood there a moment looking from me to the others as if he was trying to decide whom to punch first.
The others had stopped laughing, distracted by anticipation. Then Dowell shifted his weight, shuffled a step back, and drifted casually away along the wall.
“Where are you going?” Maya said.
Dowell didn’t turn around. He used his cast to shove off from the wall and struck off across the parking lot. He lifted his good hand to shoulder height. His middle finger poked up out of his hoodie sleeve.
“See? Nobody is interested,” I said. “I’m actually not that interesting of a person, to tell you the truth.”
Liam laughed at this—accidentally laughed at what I’d said—and Maya had to shoot him a look so he’d stop.
It occurred to me that it must be something of a slog, heading up the butcherboys. Maya’s a hateful, vicious little reptile, but she’s also surprisingly intelligent. In Geography last year she gave a presentation on water conservation, and her slide show impressed me with the depth of its analysis and the elegance of its design.
“My clothes were interesting, maybe,” I told her, “but that’s over now, too. I’m just a boring, scrawny little gay kid. Nobody’s interested.”
It was unprecedented, Kurl. I couldn’t read Maya’s expression. If I had to guess, I would have said wary. It was as though she was suddenly waiting for my next move, rather than making the next move herself. It was nothing I’d experienced before.
Even as I turned around and walked away I was bracing myself for attack. I was certain she’d see her mistake, feel the ground she’d lost, and attempt to recuperate it by ordering Liam to give me a punch to the back of the head or at least a good hard shove to send me sprawling. “Now you’re interesting,” she’d say, or something. Anything, to get the butcherboys laughing at the correct person again.
Miraculously, though, at precisely that moment Mr. Kwan rounded the far corner of the building and came strolling toward us, straight for the gym door. By the time he was past, I’d put enough distance between the butcherboys and me that I knew I was off the hook, at least for the time being.
Kurl, I need to give credit where credit is due: It’s you I have to thank for my newfound perspective, for my sudden awareness of the relative triviality and irrelevance of the butcherboys as predators and me as prey. You told me right from the start that I was drawing fire for my aura, for the bubble I was in. And I kept making a case for deliberately living in a bubble over the gruesome realities of high school. Well, the evidence is in: You were right and I was wrong. There is no advantage to remaining inside a bubble when all it does is leave you floating around delusional, isolated, the object of everyone’s sharpest weapons. I like to think I’ve finally, officially burst out of my bubble once and for all.
Yours truly,
Jo