Read Online The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb - Free Book Online

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