Wally Lamb - The Hour I First Believed

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.

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.