“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.
“She was brought up to be Miss Prissy, Miss Perfect,” said one student who remembered the teacher talking about her past.
Kids from the Round Table also knew her father was somehow involved in government affairs, maybe a senator or something. Mary Kay told the group that she adored her father.
“But she never agreed with any of his morals,” Katie Hogden recalled later.
Mary's mother was another matter.
“My mom gave birth to me and she raised my brothers and sisters, but it was never anything more than that,” she told Katie, who asked about her mother a number of times.
After a while she stopped asking. She wished Mary had a close relationship with her mom, like she did with hers.
Mary's children were occasional visitors to her schoolroom throughout her teaching career at Shorewood. Although Mary professed great love for her children—and Katie Hogden, for one, never doubted it—there was something different about their relationship. It was not the same as how Mary treated the kids of the Round Table.