My Name Is Venus Black(5)



“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.”

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