The Hour I First Believed

On our walk back to the in-school suspension room, I brought up the subject of those graveyard blow jobs. “You’re not doing anything like that now, are you?” I asked. She looked away. Shook her head. “Because that’s pretty risky behavior, you know? You deserve better.”

“I made them use a condom,” she said.

“Which was good. But still—”

“Except this one older dude. He wouldn’t use one, so I charged him extra. Plus, he worked at Radio Shack, so he used to boost me some cool stuff. Handheld video games and shit.”

A few days later, velvet handed me a revision of “Hope Cemetery.” The sex act was intact, but she’d sanded down the rough edges and sharpened the connection between the opening and closing images. She’d grasped the concept of resonance, all right. At the bottom of her paper, I wrote, “This essay is as polished as one of your grandfather’s sculptures.” Sitting across from her at lunchtime the next day, I watched her read the comment. When she was done, she looked up, expressionless. She stared at me for a few seconds more than felt comfortable.

That night, I had Maureen read Velvet’s essay. “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, unless Jerry Falwell’s the judge, how could she not win this thing?…What? Why are you smirking?”

“Sounds like Mr. Neutral’s misplaced his objectivity,” she said.

“Yeah, well…if some kid comes up with a piece that’s better than ‘Hope Cemetery,’ I’d really like to read it.”

VELVET’S SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY WAS COMING up, so we invited her over to the house for dinner. It was Maureen’s idea. I felt a little iffy about it—mixing school and home—but it wasn’t as if anyone else was going to do anything for the kid. Mo ordered a cake and one of those balloon bouquets. She made a vegetable lasagna. We shopped together for Velvet’s presents: dangly earrings, jazzy socks, a leather-bound journal for her writing.

Velvet wanted to be picked up in front of Wok Express, the takeout place near where the State of Colorado rented her a room. Mo drove over there, waited half an hour, and then called me. “Should I just come home?” she asked. “Oh, wait a minute. Here she comes.”

Back at the house, things got off to a bumpy start. Velvet took one look at Sophie and Chet and headed for higher ground—her butt on the back of our sofa, her big silver boots on the seat cushions. She’d been bitten by a rottweiler once, she said; she didn’t trust any dogs. We kept trying to convince her that ours were friendly, but she wasn’t buying it. I had to put them out in the garage and let them bark.

And then there was Velvet’s party outfit: cargo shorts, fishnet stockings crisscrossing the uncovered swastika tattoo, and a stained T-shirt with a cartoon picture of Santa Claus raising his middle finger. “Fuck You and the Sleigh You Rode In On,” it said. Maureen handled the situation gracefully. She asked Velvet if she wanted a house tour. On their way upstairs, I heard Mo suggest how chilly it was at our house. When they came back down again, the kid was wearing Mo’s blue pullover sweater.

We’d planned to have her open her gifts after dinner and birthday cake, but the minute she saw them, she tore into them. She put on her new earrings, pulled off her boots so that she could wear her new socks. She kept picking up the journal and rubbing its soft leather against her cheek.

“This dinner’s good, Mom,” Velvet told Maureen, even though she performed an autopsy on her square of lasagna, piling all traces of vegetable matter onto the cloth napkin beside her plate. Two or three times, she got out of her chair to whack her balloon bouquet. When we lit the candles and sang “Happy Birthday,” she wouldn’t look at her cake. She blew out her candles with such ferocity, I thought the frosting might fly across the room.

When Velvet went outside for a smoke, Maureen and I cleared the table. “This is going well, don’t you think?” Mo said.

“Uh-huh. She calls you Mom?”

“She just started doing that. I don’t think anyone’s ever had a party for her. Do you?”

“From the way she’s behaving, I’d say no. Do you think we can let the dogs back in? They’re going crazy out there.”

Mo shook her head. “She’s really scared of them.”

We ended things a little after nine. Mo stayed home to clean up and I drove Velvet back, the balloons bobbing and blocking my view from the rearview mirror. En route, I asked her if she’d had a good time.

“Yeah,” she said. “You and Mom are awesome.”

“Why do you call her Mom?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Cuz she’s my mom.”

“Yeah? How so?”

She didn’t answer for several seconds. Then, she said, “I’ll give you a blow job if you want. I’m good at it.” At first, I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t think of anything to say. “You know the Salvation Army store? Just drive around back where the drop-off bins are.”

“Velvet,” I said. “That’s so inappropriate, so disrespectful of…How can you spend the evening with us, call her Mom, for Christ’s sake, and then—”

“Okay, okay,” she snapped. “You don’t have to get all moral about it. It’s not like you’re doing me any favors.”

When I stopped for a red light, she swung the door open and jumped out. “Hey, come back here!” I called.

She did, but only to snatch up her gifts, minus the balloon bouquet. I followed her for about a block, trying to coax her back into the car. It was dark. It was late. We were a mile or more from where she lived. “Get away from me, you perv!” she screamed. Hey, I didn’t need that bullshit. I hung a U-turn and gunned it in the opposite direction.

I didn’t get it. She’d enjoyed the evening. Why did she have to sabotage it? I was sure her come-on was going to piss off Maureen as much as it did me.

Except when I got home, I didn’t tell Mo. “That was quick,” she said.

“Yeah. No traffic. The dogs need to go out?”

“Just came back in. I see she forgot her balloons.”

“That’s a red flag, isn’t it?” I said. “That ‘Mom’ business?”

“Well, I’m not going to make an issue of it, Caelum. If she wants to call me Mom, what’s the big deal?”

I let go of Velvet’s bouquet. It rose and bumped the ceiling.

The next morning, the balloons were floating halfway between the ceiling and the floor. By the time Aunt Lolly called for her Sunday check-in, they were grazing the carpet. You moved, they moved; they were like wraiths. I kept losing track of what Lolly was saying. Kept wondering why I’d let the whole day slip by without telling Mo what Velvet had said. Which of the two was I trying to protect? Or was it myself I needed to shield from Velvet’s sleazy offer?…“You know what Shirley Pingalore told me the other day?” Lolly was saying. “That they had to cancel the sports program because of overcrowding. They’re using the gym as a dormitory. Seventy-five beds and two toilets. It’s pathetic.” I opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed a steak knife.

“What’s that?” Lolly said.

“What?”

“Sounds like gunfire.”

AT SCHOOL ON MONDAY, VELVET was a no-show. She was MIA for the rest of that week. I kept meaning to say something to Maureen, but then I kept not doing it. I didn’t want to say anything to Ivy Shapiro, either—have her start playing twenty questions. Velvet’s proposition had come so out of nowhere, and had been so goddamned embarrassing, I decided to just bury it.

She resurfaced the following week, but when I went to pick her up for our noontime discussion, she told me she didn’t want to meet with me anymore—that she was sick of it. Mrs. Jett had left the room to get some tea, and the other kids had been dismissed to lunch.

“You’re sick of it, or you feel ashamed about what you said during that ride home?” I said. “Because if it’s that, then—”

“What’d I say?” she asked. “I don’t even remember.”

“Yes, you do.”

She told me she wanted to read what she wanted to read, not the boring crap I gave her. Writing was boring, she said. I was boring. She’d just written all that corny shit because she knew that’s what I wanted to hear. She felt sorry for Maureen, she said, married to a geek like me.

“Well,” I said. “I guess we’re both wasting our time, then. Good luck.”

“Wait,” she said. “Just listen to me.” I kept going.

Before I left school that afternoon, I wrote a note to Ivy, resigning as Velvet’s “faculty buddy.” I was vague about why—spoke in general terms about how it had worked for a while, but then she’d shut down. I kept thinking about what Ivy had said: that kids like Velvet manipulate situations. All I needed was for the kid to claim I was the one who’d suggested sex to her.

At home, I told Mo I’d packed it in as Velvet’s tutor. “Why?” she said.