The Hour I First Believed

“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.”