Responding to a Letter
No matter how long he studied it, Paul could never decide if there was an internal logic to the piles of paper, books, and sticky notes which appeared on John’s bed when his brother was working on something. On one hand, it looked like chaos – stickies all over the wall, not even straight half the time, and sometimes parts of the frame of the bunk, books stacked up while still open or closed around pencils holding a place, papers, mostly articles printed off public library computers, in untidy stacks all over the rumpled bedclothes – but on the other, John’s thoughts were always organized whether he bothered to point out the connections to everyone else or not and he never allowed so much as a scrap to leave his personal space. Joe, in the bunk below, could complain about many aspects of sharing a structure with John, but never that John allowed his interests to spill over into the one bit of the house which was explicitly Joe’s, marked with a sign and everything.

The variety John had out today tipped the scales toward there not being any sense to it all, though. There were library books on the First Nations, the child-friendly versions of the Greek myths from their adoptive mother, Alison’s, collection, the history timelines she used as part of their homeschool curricula, a book of historical trivia, Stephen’s very old and battered beginning charms book, one of the encyclopedias open to a picture of Odin and his ravens with The Horse and His Boy on top of that, and even more sticky notes than usual, without any apparent sense to the ones he could make out - Bf first war death -> Silver Spears, fly by night, Nox - sprntl magic Muggle trick?, C. 249.

His brother, wedged cross-legged into a corner, peeled another yellow square off the pad and stuck it to the wall before acknowledging Paul’s presence at all. “Julian sent me a letter,” he said, apparently meaning this as an explanation, since he gestured toward the mess. Quickly, he plucked a sheet which seemed to have been folded up many times from between the pages of a library book, shaped it into a paper airplane, and threw it toward Paul, who caught it and didn’t bother to point out that John could have just handed it to him before unfolding it and looking over the page of their sister’s handwriting.

Dear Two,

Today I have been learning about parasytes, so of course I thought of you. I know the answer now, but see if you do before you look it up: do they have thoraxes? Enclosed is a copy of my drawing of a chizpuffle since that was part of what we had to do in CMC. We had to write an essay, too, but I didn’t get a chance to copy that.

As usual, everyone talked a lot (you will be very impashent with it when you are in school, if there are not a lot of Aladrens or people like them in your year, I am sure), and I talked to my classmate Kemmay (I am sure I spelled that wrong, but I think I left my yearbook at home and can’t remember how it is) and we talked about our families. He has a sister named Coco, which he says means Night in Blackfoot – I told him about the Lady Julian and St. Stephen and John Lenon

John had corrected Julian’s spelling throughout the letter in red ink; here, he had used it to draw, very carefully, a picture of a hand holding a dagger, with lines around it, like in a Muggle comic, to indicate it was stabbing someone, presumably their sister. Paul couldn’t help but start laughing, especially as he read on: and Singer Paul (Julian had evidently decided not to even try spelling that last name) who really probably has done the best of all of us.

That is us, but what I was going to say is that he doesn’t know why she’s named that. Someone called a chief had to approve Kemmay being named Thunder, so maybe they did her, too, if that is not all a boy’s thing, but they know what the names mean, so it must all mean something – other than just what the words mean, anyway. Paul shook his head; Julian was much better-spoken in person than on paper, but the loop-the-loops her conversation could take always required concentration and sometimes backtracking to really follow at all. He wasn’t sure what the problem was, if Alison had read her too much medieval philosophy in the cradle or not enough. I thought you might find it all very interesting, and that you might enjoy looking up the creation stories and gods and all to see why Night is a good name. I do not really have time, so you can tell me all about it.

There was just a plain, straight, red horizontal line beside that statement; John, evidently, also thought it was very clever of Julian to get him to do her work for her by appealing to his intellectual arrogance and insatiable desire to know everything. Paul shook his head. “She knows you too well, Johnny,” he said.

John paused long enough in putting his sticky notes into his notebook – more evidence of a system – to make a disgusted noise. Paul finished the letter.

That’s all for now until I get the paper back and send that to you and Mom to rip to shreds. My love to the elders & Three & S&P, (this had received John’s final annotation, “What about me?”) Your busy sister, J1.

“Well, that explains some of this,” Paul said, gesturing toward the First Nations books and including, mentally, probably some of the print-outs as well. “What about the rest of it?”

John scowled. “I couldn’t find much,” he said. “It looks like the Blackfoot – feet?” His scowl turned into his usual pondering frown for a moment before returning in full force – “don’t really like telling outsiders things, it said. I’m going to have to tell her to get off the couch and look in that library they have there.” For a moment, his expression turned hungry; Julian really had been unkind, last year, to write home with such a loving description of the Sonora Academy library. Here, they were largely limited to a Muggle library, newspapers, and whatever they could get for change in copies and editions so far past secondhand that they usually had to be charmed back together as soon as they got home with them. This made John’s habit of annotating everything he read a problem, one solved by a lesson on book ciphers, to catch his interest, and then the use of the notebooks, where he wrote down the page and line number of what he wanted to comment on and could keep it on hand to refer to when rereading. After he translated it out of the dashed-off sticky notes which he often used for first impressions, anyway. “The most interesting thing I found was this,” he added, waving one sticky note not yet in his book around to demonstrate what he meant, then apparently realizing Paul couldn’t read it while it was in the air like that. “The first death in a war in that mythology, it happened with an aspen stick, and it’s in the Trivia - “ he smacked the relevant volume with the print-out – “that there was a dueling society once where you had to have an aspen wand to get in – they’re associated with fighting magic.”

For a moment, John’s expression had lit up with the excitement of making connections, but then it fell into a scowl again. “Which made me think about something, but I need to talk about that with Mom.”

John began busily scribbling in a space between two sticky notes, his eyebrows nearly touching in concentration. Like Paul, he called Alison “Mom” even though they both, unlike Joe, remembered their own mother; Paul didn’t know if, unlike him, John thought of Alison as his mom, too. The one time Paul had ever started to raise the subject, John had replied that what he remembered about Samantha Bower, sometimes of Vancouver, was that he didn’t like her, and that had been the end of it.

It was a fair enough opinion. She hadn’t exactly been a contender for Mother of the Year even at her best; at her worst, she had barely noticed she had kids. She had run off three, four times before Joe was born and the state decided it had had enough of her theatrics and failure to educate them and brushes with the Statute of Secrecy and they had landed with Chris and Alison.

His first reaction, he remembered, to this strange new family unit with its two very strange preexisting children, one of them who had greatly surprised him by not being another boy, had been to decide that they were crazy, but slightly less than his mother; after that, he’d started to wonder a little, before eventually coming around to deciding they would do. Stephen and Julian he accepted as an additional brother and a sister, even; it was just calling Chris and Alison ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ in his head which posed a problem, though he’d taken up doing so out loud because he hadn’t wanted to confuse Joey.

Sam (she had tried the ‘mom’ thing with John, but had told Paul to call her Sam before his brother was born, because ‘Mom’ had made her feel too old back then and now habits were hard to break) wrote to him, sometimes – officially, all three of them, still calling them Paul, John, and Joseph Bower in the addresses even though that hadn’t been the legal case for quite some time now, but John refused to read them and Joe was still too little to know anything about it. Honestly, Paul thought he was too young to hear all the stuff she said from his mom, and he was nearly sixteen. She had been married for a while, had rambled on about some pipe dream of them coming to live with her. She’d gotten divorced. Been hospitalized. Stopped drinking. Started again. She had been married again, the last time he’d heard from her, the third or fourth time, the second time with that specific husband, who she did not ramble about them coming to live with. Paul didn’t know if that was because Dominic, the Rinse-and-Repeat, as Stephen had nicknamed him after Paul filled his adoptive brother in on the news, was unfit for step-fatherhood or if it was because Paul had only ever answered one of these letters, two years ago, when she’d been living in Red Deer just after her remarriage to Dom.

“She’s teaching Joe in the kitchen right now,” he said. “Should be done in, I don’t know, half an hour or so. I saw them with the books when I left Julian’s room.” It had been his homework period, and they all used Julian’s room as an unofficial study when she was away at school. Because of this and Alison’s general dedication to keeping up the house, it wasn’t as dusty as it might have been, but Paul was still pretty sure the fuzzy feeling and mild headache he had weren’t entirely Hemingway’s fault.

“Just enough time to finish this,” John muttered absently. “I should probably give her a few minutes afterward, too,” he added.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Paul said.