If Loving You Is Wrong (16 page)

As Mary Letourneau's phone calls increased over the school year, the thought did cross Judy's mind that it was a little out of the ordinary. It didn't alarm her in any way; it just made an impression that the teacher had found something special in her daughter and both were benefiting from the mentoring.

“I knew she was a lot older, but she always struck me as the big sister Katie never had. I never felt the age thing was odd. I did wonder how a mother of four had so much time to spend on the phone with her students. Mary always struck me as young and fun-loving. It was great that she was young and loved the sixth-graders,” Judy said.

The lights in room 39 were almost always the last ones to dim at Shorewood Elementary. For a time, some wondered if Mary Letourneau was so disorganized that she couldn't get her work done in the manner of most other elementary school teachers. It was true that there was never enough planning and correcting time, but
ten
P.M.? Others who knew her better thought disorganization could be a factor, but also weighed the idea that Mary just didn't want to go home. Maybe she didn't have much reason to go? Her marriage was in deep trouble and she frequently hinted at that. At one point, three teachers cornered Mary Kay to tell her that she shouldn't be so vocal about her problems with Steve. They understood she wasn't happy and didn't want to go home, but why didn't she want to get home to her children? What was so terrible about home that kept her from her own babies?

She called on Katie Hogden a number of times to bail her out of her mental disarray.

“
Katie, please! Let me go photocopy this... fax that. Please!”

Katie was happy to help. She'd sit at Mrs. Letourneau's desk for hours using the answer key and marking paper after paper while Mary ran off to take care of an errand.

“She always had a gazillion things to do,” Katie said later.

At the end of the day when darkness fell, Katie would help her teacher load up her bags with projects and papers that would never get finished. She'd carry them back and forth each day, unloading and reloading. Blanketing her desk in an avalanche of paperwork, she always said she was going get it done,
that night.
But there was always more to do. The distractions of daily life piled up and, in time, would bury her.

Danelle Johnson was a magna cum laude graduate of the school of hard knocks. She'd had it rougher than most, but pulled herself up from the abyss of living on welfare to cleaning toilets to a job with her own office at a community college. Her laugh was always ready, masking the realities of a life that sometimes seemed too hard, or just plain unfair. Her voice was deep, the result of cigarettes and the decibel level sometimes required of a mother of six. At forty-six, Danelle Johnson was doing the best that a single mother could. She had a good job, a nice house. Food stamps and welfare were a distant, but never fully forgotten, memory.

Her youngest were boy-girl twins, Drew and Molly, two sandy-haired kids with the push-me, pull-me relationship typical of brothers or sisters of similar age. They hated each other. They loved each other. They were close. They couldn't stand the sight of the other. They were Shorewood Elementary students from kindergarten to sixth grade. And they struggled every step of the way, forcing their mother to make herself known at the school office whenever the twins were having difficulty.

“I was famous at Shorewood,” Danelle said later. “All I had to do was call down there and say 'This is Danelle' and they knew exactly who I was and why I was calling.”

Danelle's job of nearly two decades had provided stability for her children, allowing them to start and finish in the same school—a not-so-common feat in a district that draws from the apartments and projects of the poor.

And even though Danelle and her own grown children formed an extended family, the focus on the school remained paramount. School, she hoped, would be their chance to do something better, as it had been for her when she hit rock bottom.

Their lives revolved around Shorewood.

“That's why what happened is so sad. Sad and disgusting,” Danelle would say later.

When sixth grade came in the 1995–96 school year, daughter Molly was enrolled in Mrs. Letourneau's class and her twin brother, Drew, was assigned to a teacher across the hall. Drew's best friend was Vili Fualaau. For a time, everything looked all right. Danelle Johnson hoped against hope that her children would get through sixth grade with enough knowledge to make the transition to junior high.

When Danelle showed up for her son's and daughter's parent-teacher conferences in November, she was looking forward to talking with Mrs. Letourneau. Molly thought so highly of her teacher, but her grades were still below average and Danelle considered school more than a popularity contest.

Mrs. Letourneau was rushed. She barely had five minutes to discuss her troubled student. She told Danelle that she needed to get more involved with her daughter's homework. She wasn't encouraging and she didn't seem particularly interested in talking about Molly at all. Danelle was mystified. The woman she had seen around school in the past was outgoing, friendly,
and perky,
and above all, interested in connecting with parents and students. This lady wasn't interested in that at all. At least not on that day.

“She seemed a little strange,” she said later.

Chapter 24

AT THIRTY-EIGHT, SOONA Fualaau had plenty of problems. With an ex-husband in prison, and bills and eviction notices in the mail, the heavyset woman with long black hair streaked in gray lived stoically in a burdensome world. She'd worked dead-end jobs at everything from taking orders at a Taco Bell to cashiering at the Roxbury Texaco. But she wasn't alone. The school was a valued link in her life on the level of the church where her father was a founding member and she, naturally, was a devoted part of the Samoan congregation. When the Fualaau house caught on fire it was Shorewood teachers and students who collected clothing to get the family of five going again. Soona was poor, but her sons and daughter could transcend all of that because they were stellar in different ways. The teachers at Shorewood saw their potential very clearly.

“Every single child in that family had promise, were gifted in one area. Vili's was his art, Perry with his voice, Leni was the athlete, Favaae was a mathematician,” said one teacher.

As is often the case in places like White Center, when personal ambition does not exist and parental support is not there, promises go unfulfilled. Though Leni, the sole daughter of the family, did earn an athletic scholarship, she didn't make it to college.

Vili was Soona's last chance. And teachers at Shorewood knew that if he could develop his talent, he'd have something to hold on to. He had the opportunity to develop a passion and a talent that would carry him through high school.

“Every teacher tried to help him out and be a mentor. It wasn't just Mary who recognized the artistic ability in him and was trying to look outside to try to find help. She might have been the most successful at doing that because she drove him to his art class,” said one who knew the situation well.

As early as first grade and certainly by second grade, Vili Fualaau was seen as a child with undeniable artistic talent. One teacher saw it then and inquired at the YMCA to see if they could help an underprivileged kid. He could benefit from extra attention in an area in which he clearly excelled.

“If you could see his work in first grade it is about like it is now. It was that unbelievable,” a teacher said.

Whether Vili Fualaau was the Second Coming of Picasso or not was a topic of debate. Some considered the boy's artwork provocative and developed beyond his years. Mary Letourneau would nearly bring herself to tears as she thought of Vili's creative genius. Others didn't see it that way at all. They saw his creations as no better or worse than the high school artist who later pumped gas for a living and painted houses on the side.

But to Katie Hogden, her friend's talent was without limit. She noticed it in fourth grade, and two years later it was even more clear to her. Mary Letourneau had seen it two years before Katie when she taught him in second grade. With her love of art and the creative process, Mary had found her perfect student.

Certainly there were reading, writing, and math lessons, but it seemed to some observers that time in Mary Letourneau's room was filled with mask-making, drawing, and painting. When one volunteer parent brought in copies of Monet's water lily series, it was Vili who created the most stunning replica.

“It was amazing to watch him draw,” Katie said later. “It was like he took a picture with his eyes and copied it.”

The only thing Vili seemed to have trouble with was self-portraiture. Though he captured much of his physical appearance, his eyes, his mouth, Vili always made his nose two sizes too small—a kind of Michael Jackson makeover that Katie found both amusing and touching. She teased him in the way sisters or very good friends often do.

“You're Samoan,” she said. “You can't help your nose. It adds character to you.”

Vili would laugh and tease her right back, telling her she was a roly-poly.

“We both knew the other didn't mean it,” she said later.

Of course later media appearances would prove that Vili Fualauu was more a typical teenager than a great intellectual, as Mary and the lawyers would eventually proclaim to the world. Teachers at Shorewood didn't know what Mary was talking about when she carried on about the intelligence and maturity of the boy. They never thought Vili was any more grown-up than other sixth- or seventh-graders.

“He was a boy. He looked like a boy,” said one teacher.

And if Vili wasn't all that Mary made him out to be—though he might have thought so—he certainly had his following within the classrooms of Shorewood Elementary. Said one who knew him at the time: “Everyone knew him. Not everyone liked him.”

Yet when the yearbooks were distributed at the end of the year, no one would have a longer line for signatures than Vili.

There was another side to twelve-year-old Vili.

Said one close friend: “I never knew quite what was going on with him, either. He has two very distinct personalities, and they are completely different from each other. One side you know everything about him, and the other side you don't know anything about him.”

One side was Vili, the other had the nickname Buddha.

Katie Hogden saw through it: “He has one side,” she said, “ 'I'm a little thug, I'm a G [gangster], I'm hard, I know how to take care of myself,' and he'll talk to you for five minutes and he'll pick the personality you like best about him and he'll stick to that personality. Just to impress you, to make that imprint in your mind that you'll remember him now.”

That Vili was the manipulator.

“He'll pay attention to the expression on your face when he starts his personality... I know he uses it for inspiration... The reason we were friends was because I saw right through him.”

Don't play these games, I know you're not like this, she thought.

Katie felt sorry for the Vili that Mary Letourneau would later say she fell in love with—the artist.

“The side where he knew what he wants out of life, but he's kind of scared to let it happen because he thought with his family—his money situation—he'd never get to have it come true anyway. He didn't share that with a lot of people.”

Vili could charm and cajole to get what he wanted.

“New shoes!” he called out to Katie Hogden one morning when she walked in wearing a pair of Nikes right out of the box.

“You can't have them,” she shot back.

But Vili didn't give up. He told her how much he wanted a new pair of shoes, but his mom didn't have enough money to buy them for him. Katie felt sorry for him. Vili must have seen it because he continued to press the point in a niggling way that elicited more sympathy than annoyance.

“I traded him for his sister's Champions that were too small for him so he could have my designer Nike shoes,” Katie said later. “One day I just took them off and gave them to him. He was so happy. Just thrilled.”

* * *

For those who knew Vili, it was plain that no matter what had gone on in his life, no matter what troubles his mother and sister and brothers had endured—and the list was long—nothing hurt like the subject of his father, a convict named Luaiva Fualaau.

Most who knew Vili considered Luaiva Fualaau, a former auto mechanic, preacher, and purported father of eighteen, off-limits. If Vili wanted to talk about him, fine. But smarter kids knew never to bring his name up first. The fact that his father was in prison and the reason for it worried the twelve-year-old, who hadn't seen much of his father since he was two. Luaiva had assaulted his wife, and later another woman. Vili would sometimes describe some of the attacks against his mother when they lived in Hawaii. Violence scared him.

Katie remembered some time later: “He just wanted to make sure that his family was not going to end up like [his father] ended up. He never looked down on his mom for that, I don't think he ever did. He had a lot of hate in his heart for his dad. A lot.”

Chapter 25

THOUGH SHE DIDN'T bring up her family often, kids from the class knew that Mrs. Letourneau had grown up in a sunny world far from White Center.