“Okay! Okay!”
In the mud room, I grabbed my wool-lined jacket and headed back out. Velvet was still on the picnic table, but sitting now, smoking. “Here’s a loaner,” I called. I balled up the jacket and tossed it underhand. It fell short by a foot or two, landing on the frosty grass. She looked down at it but didn’t move. “Make sure you stub out that cigarette when you’re done,” I said. She took a drag, blew smoke toward the sky.
“You find my book yet?” I said.
“I didn’t take your freakin’ book.”
She looked away before I did. I turned and jogged down the driveway. If she wanted to freeze out there rather than pick up the jacket, then let her. It wasn’t like she was doing me any favors.
It was a tough run. My lungs burned, my throat felt fiery from what was probably a cold coming on. Even at the top of my game, I’d never fully acclimated to running at those altitudes. “Your red blood cells adjust in a few days, Caelum,” Andy Kirby had told me once. “It’s your head that’s the problem.” Andy’s a marathoner and a math teacher. Andy, Dave Sanders, and I used to eat lunch together during my first year on the faculty. Dave was the girls’ basketball coach, and he followed the UConn women pretty closely—closer than I did. Good guys, Dave and Andy were, but during my second year at Columbine, I started bringing my lunch and eating in my room. I don’t know why, really; I just did. For a while, the kids—the needy ones—would squint through the window in my classroom door and want to visit me during my duty-free lunch. After a while, though, I got smart. Cut a piece of black construction paper and taped it over the glass. With the lights off, the door locked, and the view blocked, I was able to eat in peace.
See, that’s what Maureen didn’t get: that sometimes you had to play defense against that wall of adolescent neediness. Her job in the nurse’s office was half-time, which meant she could leave at noon. But more often than not, she was still there at the end of the school day. “Accept your limitations,” I’d warn her. “A lot of these kids are damaged beyond repair.” And you know what her response was? That I was cynical. Which hit a nerve, I have to admit. I wasn’t a cynic; I was a banged-up realist. You live to middle age, you begin to reckon with life’s limits, you know? You lace up your sneakers and run it out.
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
