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“Yup.”
“You get a chance to read her story yet?”
I nodded. Summarized the plotline of Velvet’s revenge fantasy.
“Wow,” Audrey said. “Quite an imagination.” No one else said a thing.
Dr. Importance showed up at the one-hour mark and signed off on the decision to pull Velvet from the mainstream. She’d receive her education, instead, seated at a study carrel in the in-school suspension room. Teachers would forward Velvet’s work to Ivy, who’d see to it that it was completed and returned. It was a house arrest of sorts.
Ivy said what Velvet needed was a faculty “buddy,” one of us who’d be willing to check in with her each day—say at lunchtime—so that she’d have adult contact with someone other than herself and Mrs. Jett, the detention room monitor, aka “Hatchet Face.” “How about it, Caelum?” Ivy asked. “She seems to have opened the door a crack to you. You want to give it a shot?”
“Can’t,” I said. “Cafeteria duty.”
“Well, what if I talk to Frank? See if we can get you reassigned?”
My crucial mistake was shrugging instead of shaking my head.
After the meeting broke up, Ivy said she wanted to share some of the particulars of Velvet’s biography off the record, provided I thought I had stomach enough to hear them.
Mom and Dad, both drug addicts, had had their parental rights revoked when Velvet was seven. For fun, they and their friends had gotten her drunk, taken her to a carnival, and put her by herself on the Tilt-a-Whirl. Velvet had tried to get off the ride mid-spin and ended up with a concussion and a gash on the side of her head.
“I’ve seen the scar,” I said.
“There was a grandmother in Vermont. She took her in for a while. Decent enough person, I guess, but Velvet was too much for her to handle. She kept running away, back to her mom. The family shipped her out here five or six years ago. An uncle up in Fort Collins said he’d take a crack at her. Which he did, literally, many times over. She was twelve when she moved back to the grandmother’s. Then Grandma died and she came back to Colorado. She landed in the emergency room, then bounced into the foster care system. When she was fourteen, she had an abortion.”
“The skinhead?” I asked.
“No, he came along later. It was one of her foster brothers or their friends—she couldn’t say who. She only knew it wasn’t the dad, who’d never touched her, or the upstairs uncle, who’d never penetrated. His thing was urinating on her.”
“Good God. And we’re supposed to save her with academics?”
What was hopeful, Ivy said, given Velvet’s history with men, was that she’d singled me out as someone at the school who she might risk trusting.
“She doesn’t trust me,” I said. “She’s not even civil.”
“But that story of hers,” Ivy said. “The character’s angry, alienated, self-hating. That’s a form of disclosure, isn’t it? Maybe she’s testing the waters with you, Quirk. And wouldn’t that be awesome, if she could establish a trustworthy relationship with an adult male? Begin to build on that?”
“Well, she and I have one thing in common,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Drunken fathers.”
Ivy smiled. “Yours, too, huh? Listen, I’m in a great ACOA group, if you ever want to go to a meeting.”
I shrugged. Told her I had no talent for acronyms.
“Adult Children of Alcoholics,” she said.
“Oh, right. Thanks. But no.”
“It helps,” she said.
“Probably does,” I said. “But my dad died when I was a kid. I buried all that stuff a long time ago.”
“Oh,” she said. “So was I the one who just brought him up?”
VELVET AND I BEGAN OUR sessions by examining “Guerrilla Grrrrl.” She said it was neither a parody nor a reflection of herself; it was just some stupid story she’d made up because she had to. No, she didn’t want to revise it. With deep sighs of disgust, she fixed the spelling and run-on sentences and declared the job done. In the next few weeks, I gave her two more writing assignments. For each, she wrote variations on the first story.
She was a reader, so there was that to build on. During one of our early go-arounds, I asked her what kind of books she liked. “I don’t know,” she said. “Different kinds. But not that Shakespeare shit.”
“So what’s your favorite book?” I asked. I was grasping, frankly. A dialogue between “buddies” is tough when you’re the only bud who’s talking. Velvet answered my question with an indifferent shrug. So I was pleasantly surprised when, the next day, she took a Chiclet-sized piece of paper out of her back pocket, unfolded and unfolded it, and handed it to me. “These are my top four,” she said. “I like them all the same.” She had scrawled fifteen or sixteen book titles and crossed out all but Dune, Interview with the Vampire, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and To Kill a Mockingbird. I told her that Mockingbird was one of my favorites, too. She nodded soberly. “Boo Radley rocks,” she said.
That weekend, in Denver, I wandered into the Tattered Cover. I’d meant to browse for myself. Instead, I filled my arms with books for Velvet.
She read them, too: Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, H. G. Wells. She balked at Dickens at first, but after she’d read everything else, she picked up Great Expectations. “I thought this was gonna suck, but it doesn’t,” she told me, halfway through the book. “This dude gets it.”
“Gets what?” I said.
“All the different ways adults fuck with kids’ heads.”
It was a pretty perceptive observation, but her jailer, Mrs. Jett, heard the f-bomb and approached, pointing to a hand-lettered sign on the wall titled “The Ten Commandments of In-School Suspension.” The woman had actually cut cardboard into the shape of Moses’ stone tablets. She stared hard at Velvet, her pencil point tapping against Commandment Number Five, “Thou Shalt Not Use Profanity.”
Goddamnit, I thought. Back off. Let the kid breathe. “Hey, let me ask you something,” I said. “Did you have to climb into the Rockies and pick that up personally, or did God the Father FedEx it to you?”
“Whoa, dude! He just iced her!” a kid in another cubicle announced. Mrs. Jett’s chin quivered. She asked to speak to me in the hallway.
“I don’t appreciate your sarcasm,” she said. I told her I didn’t appreciate her eavesdropping. “I don’t have to eavesdrop, Mr. Quick. When you and Miss Hoon are having your lunchtime tête-à-têtes, we can all hear you plain as day.”
“Yeah, first of all, it’s Quirk, not Quick,” I said. “And they’re not tête-à-têtes. They’re literary discussions.” If she wanted to get on her high horse, I figured, then I sure as hell could climb up on mine.
“I don’t consider the word I heard her use to be ‘literary.’ Nor do I appreciate your casual attitude about my standards. I’d like you to consider the fact that you’re a guest in my classroom.”
“So this is a turf thing?” I said.
“No, sir. This is an education thing. I work with children who are largely in the dark about the rules of acceptable social behavior. Now I may not be as well-versed in lit’rature as you are, but I can certainly guide them in decency.”
“Lady,” I said. “Loosen up.”
When I returned from the hallway, Velvet slipped me a note. “That rocked!” it said. “She’s a fucken bitch.” And that, more than the books, was our big breakthrough.
I began signing Velvet out of jail at lunchtime. We’d swing by the nurse’s office first, so that she could take her asthma medicine and pick up the bag lunch Maureen had started bringing in for her. Then we’d head down to the English wing.
I started letting Velvet borrow my books: Vonnegut, Kesey, Pirsig, Plath. One morning, I took my prize possession out of our bookcase, dropped it into a Ziploc bag, and brought it in to school.
“It’s a first edition,” I said. “And look. She signed it.”
Velvet ran her finger over Harper Lee’s signature. “Dude,” she said. “This is a fake.”
“No, it isn’t. I bought it from a reputable dealer. It’s authenticated.”
“Whatever that means, it probably don’t mean dick,” she said.
“Dude,” I said. “Watch your language.” She kept touching the signature, staring at it in disbelief.
Ivy popped in one day after school. “Looks like things are going well with Velvet,” she said. “I walked by at lunchtime today and you two were deep in conversation. I almost didn’t recognize her without the scowl.”
“Yeah, the glacier’s starting to melt a little,” I said. “She’s bright.”
Ivy smiled. “One suggestion, though, Red Sox. Keep your door open.”
“Because?”
“Because kids like Velvet can manipulate situations. And people. It’s one of the ways they learn how to survive.”
“Look,” I said. “I’ve been teaching for twenty years. I’ve seen plenty of kids play plenty of teachers, but I’ve never been one of them, okay? So unless you want to tell me how she’s manipulating me—”
“I’m not saying she is, Quirk. I think you’re doing a great job with her. All I’m suggesting is that you leave your door open.”
Our conversation left a bad taste in my mouth. Wasn’t she the one who’d set up this “faculty buddy” thing? Wasn’t she the one who’d gotten all revved up about the idea of Velvet trusting a male teacher? Now that the kid was moving in that direction, it was a problem? I did leave the door open for the next few sessions, and it was hallway racket and one interruption after another. “Hey, Mr. Quirk, you busy?” “Yo, Mr. Quirk, what’s happening?” So I started closing it again, and locking it. I suggested we sit at the back of the classroom where no one would bother us.
Writing-wise, I wanted to wean Velvet away from those comic-book plots she kept cooking up, so I bought her a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Velvet’s conclusion was that Lamott was “pretty wacked but pretty cool.” She reread the book, underlined her favorite parts, Post-it-noted pages. “No offense,” she said, “but too bad she’s not my teacher.” By the third week, her copy was held together with rubber bands, and Velvet had started writing about her life.
She steered clear of the really tough stuff—her parents, the foster home horrors—but what she wrote was still pretty compelling. She had this tough-vulnerable voice, you know? And an instinct about detail. She wrote this one piece about running away, and it was you getting into those cars that pulled over to the side of the road. It was you sitting in those Wal-Mart snack bars, waiting for folks to get up and walk away from their half-eaten food rather than tossing it. I don’t mean to overstate it. She wasn’t a genius or anything. But for better or worse, she’d lived more—suffered more—than most kids, so she had more to draw on. Reflect on. And she’d take feedback and run with it. Come back with a revision twice as good as her first draft. And damn if that wasn’t a rush.
One day, I asked Velvet to write about her favorite place. “My favorite place now or ever?” she asked.
“Ever,” I said.
The following Monday, she handed me an essay titled “Hope Cemetery.” I asked her where it was. “Near my grandmother’s house in Vermont,” she said. “I used to go there to think and shit. I couldn’t make it come out like I wanted. If you don’t like it, just rip it up.”
I’d been telling Velvet to grab the reader’s attention from the beginning, and “Hope Cemetery” sure accomplished that. It opened with her fitting a condom over some kid’s dick. During her second try at living in harmony with Grandma, Velvet had begun giving blow jobs behind a mausoleum at the back of the graveyard, ten bucks a pop. I stopped reading. Put the paper down and walked away from it. Was she starting to trust me too much? Was she playing Shock the Teacher?
But I sat back down and kept reading, and after the raunchy opening, “Hope Cemetery” took an unexpected turn. Became a meditation on Velvet’s grandfather, a stonecutter whom she knew only from his graveyard sculpture. (Later on, I Googled the guy. Three different hits verified that Angelo Colonni had been more artist than artisan, one of the best of the breed.) Velvet describes the change Hope Cemetery triggers in her. She stops doing business there and starts going, instead, to visit her grandfather’s art: floral bouquets, weeping angels, replicas of dead children, all of them released from blocks of granite. The essay ends back at her grandmother’s garage, where Velvet handles the chisels, mallets, and rasps that Colonni had used. In the last sentence, she slips one of her hands inside her grandfather’s battered leather work glove. And with that simple act, she feels a connection across time that’s both tactile and spiritual. It was a poignant piece of writing, better than she knew. I told her so.
She said she thought it kind of sucked.
“Well, it doesn’t,” I said. “Look, the Colorado Council of the Arts is sponsoring a writing contest for high school kids. The winners get cash awards. You should work on this some more and enter it. I think you’d have a shot.”
She snorted. Some snobby rich kid would win, she said; it would be a waste of time and stamps.
“Guess that lets you off the hook then,” I said. “Pretty convenient.”
“Should I take out the beginning?” she asked. “If I enter that contest, or whatever.”
I said I wasn’t sure. “It’s pretty raw. Might be off-putting to some straitlaced judge. But there’s a strange resonance between the beginning and the end. The glove thing, you know?”
“What’s resonance?”
“It’s like when something echoes something else and…deepens it. Makes it mean something more than it meant at first. See, there’s the initial effect of you putting the condom on the nameless boy, and it’s strictly business, right?”
“Those guys were douchebags,” she said.
“Yeah, well…but at the end, when you slip your hand into your granddad’s glove, it’s a loving act. So from the beginning of the essay to the end, you’ve changed, see? And it’s the sculpture that took you there. You get it?”
She nodded.
“So, to answer your question, it’s up to you whether or not you want to leave the opening image in or take it out.”
“Yeah, but what do you think I should do?”
“I think you should figure it out for yourself. You have good writing instincts. Use them.”
At the end of that session, she thanked me for my help. First time. “You know a lot about writing,” she said. “You should write a book.”
I told her I had—a novel.
“Shut up! Did it get published?”
“It was accepted for publication, but then it never happened.”
“Why not?”
“Long story.”
“What’s it about?”
The disappearance of a little boy, I told her.
“Cool. Can I read it sometime?”
“No.”
“Has Maureen read it?”
“Mrs. Quirk, you mean? No, she hasn’t.”
“Why not?”
Because it made me too vulnerable. “Because it’s asleep in a file cabinet in Connecticut,” I said. “I don’t want to wake it up.”
She smirked at that. “So now you don’t have to work on it no more, right?” I told her I was beginning to feel like I’d created a monster.
“What’s the title?”
“Hey,” I said. “Let’s get back to your writing.” But she persisted. Pestered me until I told her. “The Absent Boy,” I said.
She repeated the title, nodding in agreement. “Cool,” she said.
