My Name Is Venus Black(29)

Which is my first assignment, I remind myself. My hands are growing more and more clammy with excitement and nerves as the Metro bus rumbles on and off the highway, making its way toward the city through a seemingly endless number of stops. Finally, we roll across a long bridge and into a tunnel. And after the tunnel, we are suddenly in downtown Seattle.

I watch out the window for the Capitol Hill area of Seattle because a newbie at Echo named Carla told me it would be a good place to find restaurant work. She also suggested I list my last place of employment as the Crab Pot in Renton, since they recently went out of busines. I exit the bus and march up Madison Street, checking out any hotel that doesn’t look too much like a flophouse or too nice for a felon.

By now I’ve put my hair in a big thick braid down my back. Seeing those reporters was a wake-up call. If I don’t want to be Venus Black, I better disguise myself a little. It would be smarter to just hack off my hair and dye it blond, but I can’t bring myself to even consider that. Apart from an occasional trim, I haven’t cut my hair since the night of my failed escape from Denney.

Every time I think of going short, I remember the look on the fireman’s face when I asked him, sobbing, “Will you at least please cut it straight?” I think he really tried. And ever since, I’ve had this silly fantasy that someday I’d go find him and thank him for being kind—and if my hair was short, it would kind of ruin the moment. Or maybe it’s just a point of pride. Either way, the braid is my best option.

After exhausting myself checking hotel prices, I settle for the only-partly disgusting St. James Hotel. At the registration desk, a guy smoking a pipe asks for my ID. Thank you, Annette Higgman. And just as I suspect he’ll do, he barely glances at it. Or maybe through the cloud of smoke he can’t read that I’m supposed to be three inches shorter with brown eyes.



I have a theory about photographs. If you have a prominent nose, no one notices anything else.

My room is on the third floor, and so naturally the elevator says it’s broken. It probably hasn’t worked in years. The carpet on the wide stairs is dirty and worn, and at my door, it takes a while to get the key to work. Clearly, the room was a steal because it is a dump. I gaze at the crummy floral bedspread, the cracked, filthy window, and the old-fashioned steam radiator like the ones we had on Rockefeller—and I feel ridiculously happy. Because it’s my room. All mine.

For a second, I think I might burst into tears of joy, which scares the impulse right out of me. After not being able to cry for so long, I’m afraid that if I ever do, my tears will take me back to places and memories I never want to visit again. At this point, years of counseling have put way too many holes in that sheet I used to wear.

I am bummed to notice there isn’t a TV. The phone on the side table is accompanied by a card warning of charges for local calls. Seriously? I shouldn’t care, since I have no one to call, but nevertheless I feel an overwhelming urge to phone a friend and shout: “I’m free! I’m out! It’s over!”

I sprawl on the bed to think about my plan. I have the numbers of a couple of friends who got released from Echo Glen about a year ago. I really liked one of them, Carmen. But calling her up right now would make me feel like I was going backward. Like I’m still Venus Black.

Of course, I know the number of the house on Rockefeller, but I can’t imagine Inez is still living there. Not that I would call her, anyway. I haven’t seen my mother since a few years ago, when I finally agreed to do some counseling with her. She tried to convince me how sorry she was for dismissing and ridiculing my suspicions about Ray. For a second there, I almost believed her. But then the next time I saw her she asked if she could sell the rights to our story to some woman named Anna Weir in California. “She’s a great writer and she promises to be fair. If Anna’s book did well, maybe there’d be a movie….”



I haven’t spoken to her since. She and Anna Weir can go…well, you know.

I didn’t exactly keep in touch with old friends, either. Jackie wrote me once during the first year. Her handwriting—curvy and round like cartoon words—looked the same as when we passed notes in junior high. She apologized that her mother wouldn’t let her talk to me or visit me at Denney or Echo Glen. She wrote about the latest gossip, like who made out with whom at a dance. What teachers she got for winter semester.

I never wrote her back. But once in a while I would pull out her letter and read it again, marveling that I used to live in that world, that I was once a girl like her.

Most of the time, I worked hard not to think about the life I almost had. Like whom I might have dated. How popular I might have been. On my sixteenth birthday, though, I couldn’t help wondering what it would have felt like to get a driver’s license, celebrate with friends at 31 Flavors, and finally get to cruise Colby Avenue.

Now, though, my having such a life or doing such normal schoolgirl things seems so far-fetched it strikes me as absurd.

After using the rusty hotel bathroom down the hall, I unpack my small suitcase into an old wooden dresser. That takes about one minute. Now what? I’m anxious to look for work, but it’s only 2:00 P.M., and Carla said the best time to check at restaurants is between 4:00 and 6:00 P.M.

I wish I could take a nap, but I’m way too wound up. I could read the paperback I got from my counselor. You Can Heal Your Life. Sharon knows I think such books are full of shit and have nothing to do with my life. But I flip through a few pages to make sure it’s the same old easy solutions and sentimental crap I hate. Sure enough, my eyes immediately fall on a page, some of which is in all caps: