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.
“Because she’s an unappreciative little brat,” I said. “I’m sick of her rudeness, and I’m sick of doing all the heavy lifting with this ‘buddy’ thing.”
“You know, ever since her birthday, she’s been standoffish with me,” Mo said. “I don’t get it.”
I shrugged. Said we never should have had her over.
I had trouble sleeping that night but didn’t want to wake Maureen. I went downstairs to read. Passing by the bookcase in the study, I noticed the space where my signed To Kill a Mockingbird was supposed to be.
THE COLORADO ARTS COUNCIL NOTIFIED the school that Velvet Hoon had won the writing award in her division. “I thought you might want to be the one to give her the news,” Ivy said. I suggested we do it together.
Velvet was asleep at her cubicle, her cheek against the desktop. When she heard she’d won, she looked more jarred than happy. “What do I have to do?” she asked Ivy. She wouldn’t look at me.
“There’s a ceremony in downtown Denver,” Ivy said. “At the State Capitol. You and the other winners each read a five-minute excerpt from your essays. Then you accept your award, get your picture taken, get fussed over.”
“I don’t want my picture taken,” she insisted.
“You get a check for two hundred dollars,” I said. “That’s not too hard to take, is it?” Velvet ignored the question. When I mentioned that we should go over what was appropriate to read at the event, she finally looked at me. “For instance, you’d want to omit the opening paragraph,” I said. “There’ll be younger kids there.”
“And assholes,” Velvet said.
Ivy looked from Velvet to me, then back again. “What I thought,” she said, “was that you, Mr. Quirk, and I could drive downtown together. The ceremony’s at five. And after, maybe we could take you out to dinner to celebrate. There are some nice restaurants at the Sixteenth Street Mall. Or how about the Hard Rock Café at the Denver Pavilions?”
Velvet nodded in my direction. “Can his wife come?”
“Sure. Sure she can.”
From across the room, Mrs. Jett asked what all the excitement was about. When Ivy told her, she wanted to know if she could photocopy the letter of congratulations for her bulletin board.
“No!” Velvet said.
Walking back down the corridor, I remarked to Ivy that Velvet was the most miserable award winner I’d ever seen.
“Not uncommon for kids with her kind of history,” she said. “So many bad things have happened to them that they can’t trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can snatch them back.”
At the end of the day, I stopped in the health office to see Maureen. Velvet was with her. “Velvet was just telling me the good news,” she said. “Congratulations to you both.”
“She’s the one who wrote the essay,” I said.
A kid appeared in the doorway, asking for a form for his sports physical. When Mo went to the outer office to get it, it was just Velvet and me in there.
“Didn’t I tell you you’d written a prize-winner?” I said. She shrugged. “Hey, by the way. When you were over at our house that night? Did you borrow my book?”
“What book?”
“To Kill a Mockingbird.”
She shook her head.
“Because it’s missing. And I know you really love—”
“I didn’t steal your freakin’ book!” she shouted. She practically plowed Maureen down getting out of there.
ON THE DAY OF THE award ceremony, Velvet was absent from school. Ivy caught up with her by phone in the afternoon. Velvet knew where the Capitol building was, she said; she’d meet us there. Some of her friends were going, too, so they could give her a ride. Ivy reminded her to practice what she was planning to read, to wear something appropriate for the occasion, and to make sure her swastika tattoo was covered.
The
