The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  From West Belleview, I took a left onto South Kipling. My destination, the park entrance at Bear Creek Lake, was a haul, and eight miles there meant eight miles back. I’d forgotten to grab my gloves, and my hands felt cold and raw. I was raw on the subject of Velvet Hoon, too.

  Velvet had been my project before she was Maureen’s. The year before, she’d clomped into my second-hour creative writing class in those silver boots, waving an add-to-class slip like a taunt. Hoo boy, I remember thinking, my eyes bouncing from the nose stud to the neck tattoo to the horizontal scar peeking through her stubbled scalp. The kids were seated in a circle, freewriting in their journals. Twenty-two, twenty-three kids in that class, and I don’t think there was a single pen that didn’t stop dead on the page.

  “We’re finishing up a writing exercise,” I whispered. “Have a seat.” She ignored the empty one in the circle I indicated and, instead, exiled herself to a desk in back. Someone made a crack about Star Trek: Voyager, but because the put-down was borderline inaudible and the reaction from the others minimal, I decided to let it lie. Velvet didn’t. Her arm shot into the air and gave an unspecified middle-finger salute. Most of the kids didn’t notice, but the few who did—Becca, Jason, Nate—looked from Velvet to me. I stared them down, one by one. “Five more minutes,” I announced. “Keep those pens moving.”

  When the bell rang and the others exited, Velvet stayed seated. She took an inhaler out of her pocket and gave herself a couple of puffs. She kept looking from her schedule to her photocopied floor plan of the building. “Big school,” I said. “It’s like a maze when you’re new, isn’t it? Can I help?”

  She shook her head and prepared to go. As she approached, I looked past the “fuck you” accoutrements to the kid herself: broad nose, freckles, skin the grayish tan of Earl Grey tea with milk. I wondered why someone with a six-inch scar running along the side of her skull would choose to shave her head.

  “So where you from?” I asked.

  “Vermont.”

  “Really? I’m a transplanted New Englander, too. Where in Vermont?”

  “Barre.”

  “That’s where they have the big granite quarries, right?” I caught the slightest of nods. “Oh, and by the way, your inhaler? You’re supposed to leave it at the nurse’s office. School rule: they have to monitor everyone’s medication. My wife’s one of the nurses here, so she can help you. Mrs. Quirk.”

  Without responding, she trudged past me and entered the crowded corridor. “Holy crap!” someone shouted. “Shoot it before it breeds!”

  The non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice: for these kids, “letting your freak flag fly” is both self-discovery and self-defense. You cry for this bunch at the mandatory pep assemblies. Huddled together, miserably, in the upper reaches of the bleachers, wearing their oversized raincoats and their secondhand Salvation Army clothes, they stare down at the school-sanctioned celebration of the A-list students. They know bullying, these kids—especially the ones who refuse to exist under the radar. They’re tripped in the hallway, shoved against lockers, pelted with Skittles in the lunchroom. For the most part, their tormenters are stealth artists. A busy teacher exiting the office or hustling between classes to the copying machine may shoot a dirty look or issue a terse “Cut it out!” but will probably keep walking. And if some unsubtle bully goes over the line and gets hauled to the office, there’s a better-than-average chance the vice principal in charge of discipline is an ex-jock and an ex-intimidator, too—someone who understands the culture, slaps the bully’s wrist, and sends him back to class. The freaks know where there’s refuge: in the library, the theater program, art class, creative writing. So maybe if Velvet had ratcheted down the hostility a couple of notches, or laid low for a week or so, or worn clothes a little less assaultive, my creative writers might have embraced her. But it didn’t happen.

  A few weeks after her arrival, Velvet’s guidance counselor, Ivy Shapiro, appeared at my door in the middle of class. A pint-sized New Yorker in her early sixties, Ivy had a no-nonsense style that a lot of the faculty found abrasive. There were grumblings that she always took the kid’s side against the teacher’s, no matter what the issue. I liked Ivy, though, despite the fact that she was an obnoxious New York Yankees fan. “Excuse me a minute,” I told the kids.

  “Velvet Hoon,” Ivy said. “Attendance?”

  “She shows up.”

  “She working?”

  “Sometimes. She handed in a story today, which sort of surprised me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I told her about the ten-minute warm-ups we do at the beginning of each class. I collect them and keep them in the kids’ folders, so they can look back and see if they want to expand something into a longer piece. “Velvet’ll do the exercises, but she won’t hand them in. The one time I pressed her on it, she balled up her paper and stuffed it in her pocket.”

  “She doesn’t trust men,” Ivy said. “What’s her story about?”

  I shrugged. “Just got it.”

  She nodded, asked about Velvet’s interaction with the other kids.

  “Zilch,” I said. “Unless you count the sneering.”

  “Theirs or hers?”

  “Goes back and forth.”

  Ivy asked if I could make it to an after-school meeting on Velvet the next day. “Depends,” I said. “You serving refreshments?”

  “Sure. And crying towels for Red Sox fans.”

  That night, after dinner, I read Velvet’s story. She’d titled it “Gorilla Grrrrl,” so I was expecting some Jane Goodall living-with-the-apes thing. Instead, I’d gotten a handwritten twelve-pager about a badass female outlaw whose mission in life was to wipe out every Gap store in the country. Bombs detonate. Merchandise goes up in flames. Preppy kids and store managers get expended. At the end, the unnamed heroine kills herself rather than let an Army SWAT team take her. But she goes down victorious. Everyone in America’s become too scared to shop at the Gap, and the corporation sinks like the Titanic.

  It was usually the guys who gravitated toward violent revenge fantasies. The girls skewed more toward poetry of the I’m-a-bird-in-a-cage-because-you’re-my-boyfriend variety. So Velvet’s out-of-the-box yarn caught my attention. At the end of her story, I wrote.

  GOOD NEEDS WORK

  1. The story’s well shaped. 1. Tone unclear. Is this a parody?

  2. Political aspects are interesting. 2. Characterization. Who is she? Why is she so angry?

  3. Original! 3. Grammar, spelling

  Let’s talk about this. For a first draft, you’ve accomplished quite a bit. A-P.S. I think you mean Guerrilla Grrrl. Look it up.

  Later, in bed, I aimed the remote at Law & Order and turned off my light. The dogs were already asleep, and I thought Maureen was, too. But in the dark, she started talking about Velvet. By virtue of the kid’s twice-per-school-day asthma treatments, she’d become one of Mo’s regulars. “She scares the other kids,” Maureen said. “When she walks in, my hypochondriacs suddenly feel better and want to go back to class.”

  “Could be the shaved head,” I said. “The Uncle Fester look’s a little over-the-top, don’t you think?”

  Mo shifted positions. Pulled the blanket around her. “Her medical records came in today,” she said. “The poor kid’s life has been a horror show.”

  I was just dozing off when Mo did something she rarely did: initiated lovemaking rather than following my lead. She was insistent, too, stroking me, straddling me, rubbing the head of my stiff cock back and forth against her belly, her thigh. At the side of the bed, Sophie started whimpering.

  “Hey, slow down,” I whispered. “Or I’m going to—” When she put me inside of her, I started coming. She came, too, fast and hard. Hers lasted and lasted. I’d think she was done, and she’d shudder some more.

  While she was in the bathroom, I lay there wondering who she’d just fucked. Me? Paul Hay? Some new guy I didn’t know about? The toilet flushed.
Her shadow moved across the wall. She climbed back into bed and scooched up against me. “So what did all that just mean?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she finally said. “I got scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. Can you hold me?”

  * * *

  AT THE MEETING THE NEXT afternoon, the six of us waited ten minutes for the school psychologist to show. Dr. Importance, a lot of us called him. “Well, screw it,” Ivy finally said. “We’ve all got lives. Let’s get started.”

  Ivy said she hoped a little context might help us cope with someone who, admittedly, was a very complicated young woman. “Now to begin with, she’s an emancipated minor. That’s always an iffy situation, but in Velvet’s case, it may be for the best. Her experiences with adult caretakers—”

  “Okay, hold it,” Henry Blakely said. “I apologize for wanting to take twenty-five kids through an American history curriculum, but frankly I don’t care to know who spanked her or looked at her crosseyed when she was little.” My space in the teachers’ parking lot was next to Henry’s. His back bumper had two stickers: “I’d Rather Be Golfing” and “He who dies with the most toys WINS!”

  “Trust me, Henry,” Ivy said. “It goes way beyond spanking.”

  “So that gives her a get-out-of-jail-free card?”

  “Of course it doesn’t. What I’m saying is—”

  “No, here’s what I’m saying. She’s combative, she refuses to do the work, and if she shows up in my class wearing those penis earrings again, she’s going to get the boot, same as she got today. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have two decent kids in my room, waiting to take their makeups.”

  Ivy sat there for a moment, gathering herself. “Decent and indecent,” she said. “I guess it makes life easier when you can put kids in two camps and write off half of them.” She reached into her big canvas bag. “Almost forgot. Mr. Quirk wanted refreshments.” We passed the Mint Milanos around the conference table and told our tales of woe.

  Audrey Gardner said she had trouble getting past the swastika tattoo on Velvet’s calf. “It’s upsetting for some of the students, too,” she said. “Poor Dena Gobel came to me in tears.”

  Ivy said she was “all over” that one—that she and Velvet had just had a heart-to-heart about the Holocaust. “It was a case of stupid judgment, not anti-Semitism. When she was living in Fort Collins, she got mixed up with some skinhead assistant manager at the Taco Bell where she used to hang out. Getting the swastika was apparently some kind of love test. It shouldn’t be a problem anymore, Audrey. I bought her more Band-Aids than there are days left in the school year, and she says she’ll wear them. What else we got?”

  Bill Gustafson said most days Velvet came back from lunch “on cloud nine.” Andy Kirby said that, on her second day in his class, Velvet declared algebra irrelevant to her life and strolled out the door. “Haven’t seen her since,” he said. Gerri Jones said Velvet had never shown up for gym.

  “How about you, Quirk?” Ivy asked.

  I reported that on the bad days, Velvet was openly hostile, and on the good ones, she was merely passive-aggressive. “But she comes to class, right?” “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 crosse
d 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.