Dear Kelley by Kevin Brown

Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash

​I didn’t believe Jamie would beat you up, find you with his fists after school even though I told him to, every day for a few weeks. I treated life like the Atari video games that were just becoming popular, something like Chopper Command, where we would hit reset every time we made a mistake all so we could make another and another and another. He told me about it on the bus ride home; we were proud of ourselves. If I saw the students I teach behaving that way, I would want to shake them until their self-satisfaction fell off their faces and rolled down the hallway, never to be seen again. I’ve passed middle age by now, so I wear self-righteousness on a too regular basis, as if I never made such mistakes myself. But what can I say for the self I was then?

I was young and I was dumb and I wanted not to be on the bottom of the popularity pyramid for at least one moment, I wanted to know what it felt like to be aligned with Jamie and Alan and Joey who beat me up like it was their hobby, beat me up on a rotation like the universe had employed them to keep me in my place, and I thought that I could show that you were beneath us all—though that was already obvious to everyone, even me—and I was mean, though I didn’t know it then, and I wanted somebody else to suffer like I did, that feeling of wonder that came over me when I looked at other boys talking and playing with ease, without wondering what everybody was thinking about them all the time and when my parents sent me to your house to explain—as I had said over and over that I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it—your mother didn’t believe me because she knew me better than I knew myself, but you forgave me and I was almost in tears and I said I was sorry; I was sorry; I was so so sorry, and I never did anything like it again. But I know enough now to know I didn’t change—I’m still mean and I’m still dumb—but at least I rearranged what I worry about: popularity isn’t a priority; people’s opinions are as fickle as a boy who turned on his next door neighbor just to prove he could. And my ego has never recovered from the beating I gave it that night.

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Kevin Brown (he/him) teaches high school English in Nashville. He has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on social media sites at @kevinbrownwrites or at http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/