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

starting to trust me
too
much? Was she playing Shock the Teacher?
    But I sat back down and kept reading, and after the raunchy opening, “Hope Cemetery” took an unexpected turn. Became a meditation on Velvet’s grandfather, a stonecutter whom she knew only from his graveyard sculpture. (Later on, I Googled the guy. Three different hits verified that Angelo Colonni had been more artist than artisan, one of the best of the breed.) Velvet describes the change Hope Cemetery triggers in her. She stops doing business there and starts going, instead, to visit her grandfather’s art: floral bouquets, weeping angels, replicas of dead children, all of them released from blocks of granite. The essay ends back at her grandmother’s garage, where Velvet handles the chisels, mallets, and rasps that Colonni had used. In the last sentence, she slips one of her hands inside her grandfather’s battered leather work glove. And with that simple act, she feels a connection across time that’s both tactile and spiritual. It was a poignant piece of writing, better than she knew. I told her so.
    She said she thought it kind of sucked.
    “Well, it doesn’t,” I said. “Look, the Colorado Council of the Arts is sponsoring a writing contest for high school kids. The winners get cash awards. You should work on this some more and enter it. I think you’d have a shot.”
    She snorted. Some snobby rich kid would win, she said; it would be a waste of time and stamps.
    “Guess that lets you off the hook then,” I said. “Pretty convenient.”
    “Should I take out the beginning?” she asked. “If I enter that contest, or whatever.”
    I said I wasn’t sure. “It’s pretty raw. Might be off-putting to some straitlaced judge. But there’s a strange resonance between the beginning and the end. The glove thing, you know?”
    “What’s resonance?”
    “It’s like when something echoes something else and …
deepens
it. Makes it mean something more than it meant at first. See, there’s the initial effect of you putting the condom on the nameless boy, and it’s strictly business, right?”
    “Those guys were douchebags,” she said.
    “Yeah, well … but at the end, when you slip your hand into your granddad’s glove, it’s a
loving
act. So from the beginning of the essay to the end, you’ve changed, see? And it’s the sculpture that took you there. You get it?”
    She nodded.
    “So, to answer your question, it’s up to
you
whether or not you want to leave the opening image in or take it out.” “Yeah, but what do
you
think I should do?”
    “I think you should figure it out for yourself. You have good writing instincts. Use them.”
    At the end of that session, she thanked me for my help. First time. “You know a lot about writing,” she said. “You should write a book.”
    I told her I had—a novel.
    “Shut up! Did it get published?”
    “It was accepted for publication, but then it never happened.”
    “Why not?”
    “Long story.” “What’s it about?”
    The disappearance of a little boy, I told her.
    “Cool. Can I read it sometime?”
    “No.”
    “Has Maureen read it?”
    “Mrs. Quirk, you mean? No, she hasn’t.”
    “Why not?”
    Because it made me too vulnerable. “Because it’s asleep in a file cabinet in Connecticut,” I said. “I don’t want to wake it up.”
    She smirked at that. “So now you don’t have to work on it no more, right?” I told her I was beginning to feel like I’d created a monster.
    “What’s the title?”
    “Hey,” I said. “Let’s get back to
your
writing.” But she persisted. Pestered me until I told her.
“The Absent Boy,”
I said.
    She repeated the title, nodding in agreement. “Cool,” she said.
    On our walk back to the in-school suspension room, I brought up the subject of those graveyard blow jobs. “You’re not doing anything like that now, are you?” I asked. She looked away. Shook her head. “Because that’s pretty risky behavior, you know? You