He might have what his mother calls “a big tantrum.” He had a big tantrum last night.
“I’m sorry, Leo,” the lady says. “You will see your mom soon. She’s going to stay here for a while, too. She’ll sleep right out there in the living room on the couch. She’s not here now, but she will be. And, look, she gave me some of your favorite things. See?” She points to the floor by the bed. Leo sees some of his toys. “Your mom even brought your blanket,” she adds, holding out his purple blanket. He needs it to ride in a car or when he wants to be in his closet.
He takes the blanket, sits on the bed, and rocks while the lady keeps talking. He blocks out her voice. He puts his head between his knees because he hears the scary sounds from last night. The fire trucks hurt his ears. So many people were yelling and there were red feelings everywhere.
My cell has white cement walls, a plain metal cot, and a small wooden cupboard for clothes. Obviously, someone—a cop, or Inez?—has raided my dresser at home and picked out a small wardrobe for me. Seeing a bra and undies in the mix makes me angry. The thought of someone pawing through my drawers.
When I look for my shoes, I can only find a pair of ugly white sneakers with Velcro, like my little brother, Leo, wears, since he can’t tie his shoes. They’re the right size, so I put them on.
We’re also given a notepad and a few pencils without erasers. I don’t know why. Do they think I might want to write home like I’m away at summer camp?
It turns out they let you leave your cell during the day and hang out in what they call the common area, where there are couches, tables, and a TV. I plan to just stay in my room, though. I already know I don’t want to make any friends in here.
But instead of sitting in my room all day, all of a sudden it’s like I’m this important person with lots of meetings to attend. Everyone wants to talk to me—including a geezer guy with enormous nostrils who is my lawyer, a woman doctor named Barbara, and a young-looking caseworker who asks me to call him Officer Andy.
They all act the same. Just like the police, they start out really friendly, asking about my boring life as if I’m the most fascinating person on earth. But when they start to ask about that night, I throw a white sheet over my brain so I can’t see a thing. I’m like a child wearing a ghost costume with no holes cut out for eyes. “I can’t remember,” I tell them. And it’s true.
After that, they stop being so nice.
On the morning of day three, I’m taken down a hall to a small courtroom where my lawyer, Mr. Dutton, makes me plead not guilty, even though I don’t deny what they say I did. When the judge announces the charges, I have to stifle a nervous laugh. My lawyer glares at me, nostrils flaring.
But how can I help it if none of this seems real? A few days ago, I was hanging out by my school locker, gossiping about boys with my girlfriends. My biggest worry was how to talk Inez into buying me a new pair of Jordache jeans. Now I’m locked up with junior criminals, I’ve been labeled a violent offender, and my biggest worry is getting beat up.
No wonder the only time I don’t feel like I’m dreaming is when I’m asleep.
And yet at night, when I do finally fall asleep, I get jolted awake by nightmares that leave my nightie and sheets soaked through with sweat. The bed’s thin mattress has a plastic cover, probably in case I pee the bed, which of course I would never. But this is like my entire body is wetting itself.
After the nightmares, I visit the community bathroom down the hall and use cold water to splash my face and try to dry my body with paper towels. In the mirror my eyes look buggy and wild. I look like a deranged person. Like someone who could do what I did.
Back in my room, I change into regular clothes. I strip the wet sheets and try to sleep on just the plastic. While I lie there shivering, I remember how the planet Venus rotates backward as it orbits the sun, while Earth and most of the other planets rotate forward, in the direction they’re going. That’s how I feel, like all of a sudden my life is turning in the opposite direction of where I want to go.
* * *
—
HERE’S WHAT I keep thinking. None of this would have happened if my father hadn’t died when I was five. It was a freak factory accident, they said, where his belt buckle got caught on a piece of machinery. So if Joseph Black had only worn a different belt to work that day, he’d still be alive. And then Inez would never have taken a job tending bar at the Tyee Lanes. And she would never have met Raymond Miller the night he rolled six strikes in a row and strolled into the bar to celebrate.
In the coming years, Raymond loved to recount how he met Inez—leaving out the fact that my dad’s body was barely in the ground. He’d linger on the bowling part of the story, and then he’d pat the cigarettes in his shirt pocket and joke that it was his “Lucky Strikes” that led him to Inez.
Now it’s weird to think how it would have been better for everyone if only Raymond had been a little less lucky that night.
The morning after the strikes, Raymond showed up at our crummy place in the projects with flowers for Inez and Pop-Tarts for me. Being only five and having only seen Pop-Tarts on TV—to save money, Inez usually fed me gross hot cereal with powdered milk—I thought Pop-Tarts were amazing, like getting to eat candy for breakfast.
Over the next few weeks, Raymond kept it up, trying to buy us with small gifts. Things like a gold locket for Inez and a Skipper—Barbie’s little sister—for me. I can’t remember all the other presents, but I’m pretty sure it was the four-holed toaster—four pieces of bread at a time!—that sealed the deal for both of us. They got married six weeks later.
That’s the problem with being just a kid. You let the littlest things impress you. You have no way of knowing that if this man marries your mother, the gifts will dry up, the Pop-Tarts will stop, the Rainier beer will kick in, and you’ll never feel at home in your own home again.
I still don’t know Inez’s excuse.
Just as soon as I was old enough, I came to hate Raymond with my whole heart, though I couldn’t have explained why. At seven, I started biting and clawing and kicking if he tried to spank me. At eight, I made a rule that he couldn’t hug me. I think I was nine when I began arranging the cereal boxes on the kitchen table to block my view of him sitting there smoking in the mornings while I ate my Lucky Charms.
After I started middle school, I began mocking him from across the dinner table. I’d copy the way his teeth clicked when he chewed. Or I would imitate his habit of jiggling his pinky finger in his left ear. That would set him off. But how could I help it if my ear just so happened to itch right after his?
Nine times out of ten, Inez took Raymond’s side.
At least they never made me call Raymond “Dad.” But, then, Inez never taught me to call her “Mom” or “Mommy,” either. She swore it was a women’s lib–type thing to do at the time—“preserving one’s identity,” as she put it. Later, she changed her mind and tried to change mine. But it was too late.
Now you couldn’t pay me a million dollars to call her “Mom.”
On the fourth day, I develop a new theory for how I ended up here. What if I never had a choice?
When I was in third grade, our teacher showed us a large wooden frame with fabric stapled over the top. She set it on a table and told us to roll marbles from one end to the other. Easy-peasy, of course. Then she put a heavy stone in the center and asked us to roll the marbles straight again. This time—duh, Ralph—they rolled toward the rock.
She was trying to show us how the pull of gravity inside a black hole is so powerful it sucks everything into it and nothing can escape, not even light. I’d been reading astronomy books since I was six, so this was old news to me. But I hadn’t yet learned that smart kids shouldn’t be show-offs, so I made sure everyone knew this.
Now the concept of black holes sparks a new idea. Up to now, as my life whirled by, I thought I could at least
decide where I wanted to go, could choose my next step. But what if all along I was like that second marble and my destiny was like a black hole, sucking me toward recent events, and I was helpless to resist?
It seems like that should make me almost innocent.
Later that morning, when I try to explain this to Officer Andy, he totally doesn’t get it. “You don’t deny you’re guilty, Venus,” he says. “So what do you mean you might be innocent?”
“I mean, what if it was just my destiny and there’s nothing I could have done to change it?”
“Well,” he says. He removes his wire-frame glasses and rubs his eyes like I’m making him tired, when all I’m doing is sitting here. “Maybe that’s true in some way,” he offers. “I guess we all have a destiny. But it doesn’t change the law. And the law says you have to take responsibility.”
“Yeah,” I agree, annoyed. “I get all that. But the point is, if it is a person’s destiny to do something they normally would never do, why should they be punished the same as a bad person?”
“Because that’s the law,” he says.
I sigh heavily and gaze out Officer Andy’s small office window at the big yard and the tall cyclone fence in the distance. It doesn’t seem fair that my caseworker gets to leave here at the end of the day and I can’t, when you can tell just looking at the two of us sitting here that he’s not a better person than me.
What I want to tell him but don’t is that I really, really want to go home. Most kids who go to Denney get out in a few weeks. Even days. I’m starting to think it will be longer for me.
The weird thing is, I kind of miss my mom. Not my mom now, since what happened is her fault. But I miss having a mom I don’t hate. It feels like not having one at all.
Of course, I miss my friends, too. I wonder how they’re going to treat me when I go back to school.
Thinking of my friends, I decide this is a good time to ask Officer Andy a question that’s been burning in my mind. I try to sound casual. “So, hey,” I say. “I was just wondering…do you think I can see a copy of the local paper? The one that came out right after…?”
I know my story is all over the news, because I’ve overheard girls talking. And I’m worried about what photo they used. I hope they didn’t use my seventh-grade school picture, which is super dorky. Jackie has some way better ones of me on her corkboard at home.
“I’m sorry, Venus,” he says. “That’s against the rules.”
“Don’t I have a right to read what people are saying about me?”
“That’s just the way it works. Maybe your mother could show the paper to you.”
I scowl, because he knows how I feel about her. “Can you at least please tell me what the paper looked like?”
“In case you’re wondering, there was no picture of you,” he says, and I’m embarrassed he guessed what I was worried about. “If I remember correctly,” he says, “the Herald used a picture of your house with police cars out front. I don’t know what the Seattle papers did.”
“Oh,” I say, thinking about how weird this is and yet strangely appropriate, too—since none of this would have happened if Raymond hadn’t moved us to that exact house on Rockefeller.
By now, I realize, the police are probably talking to all my friends, and my teachers, too. They’re probably asking questions about my relationship with Raymond or if I ever said I wanted to hurt him. I wonder if Jackie will tell them how I couldn’t stand Raymond and if she’ll act like she’s not surprised by what I did.
None of my friends could ever understand why I hated my stepdad so much. They all thought Raymond was sweet just because he was always inviting them to sleep over or offering to drive us places, like to Davies Beach or to the roller rink or to the movies. Sometimes he’d offer to pay for everybody: “Shhh. Now, don’t go telling Inez,” he’d say.
Once, when I tried to explain to Jackie how Raymond gave me the creeps, Jackie defended him. “Okay, but what about that time after we were shooting cans in the woods and he stopped at Thirty-one Flavors without us even asking?”
Now I want to call up Jackie and yell, “See? You were wrong. I was right about Raymond all along!”
But I know I’ll never make that call, because if my friends ever learn the truth about Raymond, they’ll wish they’d never met me. And besides, if I say, “I was right all along,” it makes it sound like I knew all along when I really had no idea.
That’s another thing that got me here. Nothing is as it appears. It’s like that with space. Objects that look round might not be, and stars that look close to each other might be billions of miles apart. And it’s the same with people. Only instead of standing too far away to see the truth, you’re probably standing too close.
That Friday afternoon, I lie on my metal bed and look at the ceiling, thinking of Leo. If he were here, he’d already know exactly how many tiles there are. So I count them, and there are twenty-two, not including partials. Then I notice that each tile has small marks on it, and if you used your imagination, you could think of them as stars. It made me want to get a ladder and a Magic Marker so I could map out some constellations.
Leo would love that, which reminds me of the night our toaster broke. I remember it so clearly because it was one of those bad things that turned into a good thing—in this case, maybe a miracle.
I was probably ten or eleven and Leo was about four or five. At that age, I loved to badger Inez with questions about the universe and tease her when she got them wrong.
On this particular evening, I asked her, “On a clear night, how many stars can you see with the naked eye?”
She was making one of her grossest dinners, creamed tuna on toast. I was in charge of making the toast, which was the only part of this meal I was planning to eat, unless the canned fruit for the night was peaches, not fruit medley, which I think should be outlawed.
“I have no idea,” Inez said, opening a can of tuna.
She dumped the tuna into the saucepan and started cranking the can opener on the soup. “I don’t care, Venus. I really don’t.”
“You don’t care?” I said accusingly. “You don’t care about what your own daughter is learning in school?”
“You’re not learning this in school,” she said. “You’re just reading your books about space.”
“So what? How could a mother not be interested in her daughter’s favorite subject?”
“Okay, Venus,” she finally said, like it was super hard just to talk to me. “Do you mean with the naked eye? And where am I standing? It depends on what part of space I’m looking at.”
She was right. The answer I had read in a book was three thousand, but that probably meant the number of stars that are visible in the entire, viewable sky.
“Okay. So yeah,” I told her. “With the naked eye and if you could see them all at once.”
“Three thousand,” she said, turning to look at me with a sly smile, still stirring the junk in the pan behind her.
She was right again. But there’s no way she could’ve known that unless she read it in one of my books, which made me mad. “You’re wrong,” I told her. “It’s not really three thousand, since lots of those stars you think you see already died a long time ago, so all you’re looking at is leftover light.”
“For God’s sake,” she said, turning back to the stove. Then she told me to set the table.
I was reaching for the plates when I smelled smoke. One of the pieces of toast was stuck in its slot and burning. I tried to force the lever up, but it wouldn’t budge—clearly, four holes doesn’t mean quality. When the fire alarm started going off, Inez yelled at me to unplug the toaster, while she dragged a kitchen chair out to the hall to stand on so she could reset the alarm. Leo had been sitting at the kitchen table spinning the wheels of a toy car and staring into their turning. But now he was wailing at the top of his lungs like
he always did when he heard any kind of loud noise.
I took Leo downstairs to my room to calm him down. I had discovered one of his favorite things was to watch the blue lava lamp I got at Spencer’s at the mall. I plopped down on my bed, expecting Leo to go straight to the lamp. But, instead, he lay down next to me—not touching, of course, because Leo hates that. He stared up at the mobile of the solar system hanging from my light fixture. I’d recently bought it when our class took a field trip to the Science Center in Seattle. I also bought dozens of glowing stars, which I stuck to the ceiling.
I didn’t realize Leo hadn’t seen them yet, so I began to point at each planet and name it for him. “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars…” Then I said, “Let’s count the stars, Leo, starting in the corner.” I tried to include him, even though I knew he wouldn’t join me. At this point, he hardly talked. Just single words, like no!, and our names, and doughn for don’t.
While I counted aloud, Leo continued to calm down. After a while, he was at that stage of a tantrum where the worst is over but your body still has the hiccups. I love that feeling, and it made me wish I could have a big tantrum, too, even though I couldn’t decide what I would cry about.
I had just begun counting the stars from zero again, and when I got to five, Leo said five, too, and then kept counting with me. I was never so shocked in my life. If I hadn’t been lying down I might have fainted.
I wanted to race upstairs to tell Inez that Leo could count out loud, but I was scared to interrupt him in case he never did it again. So, instead, I lay there listening to his small, mechanical voice—sex…leven…fiffteam…wendynime—as he counted with me across the starry ceiling.
So this is what Leo would sound like if he said more than a word at a time.
When we got to the end of the stars, Leo pointed at the mobile and made his grunting sound that means he wants something. I realized he wanted me to do it all again, so I started to name the planets again, and on the second round, he started to name the planets after me, pausing when we got to Venus to say, “Venus is red!”
My Name Is Venus Black Page 2
