Sex. Murder. Mystery(138)

“She called me to talk, she wouldn't call them to talk. They'd call her. She would always be there for them, always have time for them. Besides me and Tony and Vili, I don't think she called them [the other kids in the class].”

Years later, Judy Hogden smiled with the memory of Mary Letourneau and the attention she paid her “special” students.

“One thing that I noticed was that there was a handful of kids in that class that Mary saw something special in. After Katie graduated from sixth grade, Mary put her arm around me and said, 'Katie is truly a gift from God, a very special young lady.' She taught to those kids and the other kids came along for the ride. Mary had her special kids and she focused in on them. I think a lot of the other kids were just there.”

Of course, not every child in the classroom made it to the Round Table, but whenever Mary saw a child with talent—art was always the most precious gift—she did what she could to foster emerging abilities. Mary thought nothing of reaching into her own purse to pay for art supplies for a child who came from a financially strapped family. Other teachers did it, too. But in some of the schools in the Highline School District, such supplementation would have proved costly.

One child, a quiet and sensitive girl, was adept at creating sculpted forms and Mary Kay went out of her way to see that she had supplies. It wasn't only Vili Fualaau who seemed to benefit from the extra attention.

“She was an excellent teacher,” Katie remembered, “but our school couldn't really provide everything she needed to teach every student the way she could have. She kind of like nurtured the ones that had like gifts that could be helped, because she knew that if she didn't do it they'd go on to Evergreen or whatever school and probably wouldn't have thought of taking care of those gifts themselves.”

For the most part, students loved her for it. Said one: “She went out of her way to help kids when she saw something that interested them when it seemed like they didn't have a lot of joy in other parts of their lives. There were a lot of troubled kids in my class. It was an interesting year.”

If Vili was the artist, Katie was the writer. It was her love of writing that she thought first bonded her to Mrs. Letourneau. Be it poetry, short stories, even more typical reports, Katie infused her work with originality and a sense of fun that her teacher enjoyed, and to some degree, identified with.

“I always showed mine [work] to her and she was amazed, because it was so much like how she writes. It was the same perspective. We used to make jokes about being left-handed and being divergent. That was the thing of the year,” she said.

As the weeks of the school year flew by, Katie found herself redefining the relationship with Mary Letourneau. Mary Kay told her how inspiring she found her student's writing, the control she had of the language, the freshness of her perspective. They'd talk for hours about their thoughts and feelings and how to capture it all on the blank page of a tablet.

“There was a lot of trust,” Katie said later. “She was somebody that I could look up to as an adult and she was also somebody I was equal with at the same time.”





Chapter 23

THE LEAVES DROPPED into a heavy pile along Thirty-fifth Avenue SW when parent/teacher conferences rolled around in early November 1995. Judy and Lee Hogden had looked forward to the meeting with Katie's teacher. By then, Mary Letourneau's phone calls had become frequent and the Hogdens knew that the teacher viewed their daughter as “special.” They arrived at Shorewood Elementary a few minutes early for their five-thirty appointment—the last one of the day. They had been told the conference would last about fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour.

More than two hours passed. Two hours of hearing a teacher praise their daughter's brilliance, talent, and friendship.

“She just sat there and talked and talked about Katie. Her writing. Her future. How much they had in common. Time just went by. Lee and I looked at the clock,” Judy remembered.

“We left Katie home alone and I'm sure she's wondering where we are,” Lee said. “Mary, I'm sure you need to get home.”

Mary Kay was in no hurry. It was clear that despite four children and a husband at home, she'd rather be sitting there with the Hogdens than anywhere else. “Oh, no, that's okay,” the teacher said. “If I wasn't here, I'd have to be at a sixth-grade teachers' meeting. I'd much rather talk to you than the other sixth-grade teachers.”

The teacher went on for a while longer and the Hogdens thanked her for all they had done for Katie.

Their daughter was waiting at home.

So were Mary Kay's children.

Judy Hogden was a sensible, well-read woman who along with her husband, Lee, had long known that their daughter was “born an adult.” She was a girl who had no trouble talking eye to eye with older people. Katie once teasingly told her mother that she felt like she had to read Seventeen to learn how to act like the typical teen. She just didn't relate as easily to kids her own age, though no one would have said she was a nerd or a recluse. The phone always rang in their house, and Katie was usually the one to get on the line.