Her devotion to Mary Letourneau, the woman who had ripped a hole in the heart of Shorewood Elementary, was an insult to those left to pick up the pieces. While they understood that Beth needed to be needed at that particular time in her life, the staff room was not the appropriate command post. She said her involvement was “the Christian thing” to do.
“Mary needs a friend to help her out,” she said. “Mary realizes it was wrong now.”
The other teachers agreed—the former teacher needed the right kind of help—but they doubted that Beth's running around town on Mary Letourneau's behalf doing favors for her was the right approach. For months, the teacher group iced out the music teacher.
“She was totally isolated that year. You'd go into the staff lounge and nobody wanted to talk to her. It wouldn't be that we wouldn't have wanted to talk to her if she wanted to talk about the weather, but all she wanted to talk about was Mary.”
For teachers outside of Shorewood Elementary it was equally rough. Word—“reminders,” they were called—came down from the district: Remember, Don't touch! Don't be alone! Don't let it happen to you!
Ellen Douglas and others were miffed by the warnings.
“That was a choice one teacher made. I was insulted that they were implying that this could happen to just anyone.”
Months had passed before everything that everyone knew was spoken. One teacher from Shorewood was so upset by the thoughts that had passed through her mind, she never told anyone about them. She recalled an incident in January 1997. It was an “early release day,” and a handful of teachers had gathered in the faculty lounge to work on a school musical production scheduled for the spring. The musical was always the Big Event of the year, a traditional celebration for all students, and the big send-off for the sixth graders who were leaving Shorewood for Cascade Middle School. Beth Adair had been in charge of the program in previous years, and though the music teacher had not abdicated her leadership role in 1997, personal problems had obviously distracted her. The other teachers knew that in order to produce the show, they'd have to step up their involvement.
Mary Kay Letourneau breezed into the planning session, only to announce that she had to leave right away.
“I can't stay,” she said firmly. “I have to meet with Vili.”
A couple of teachers exchanged puzzled looks, but said nothing.
What could be so important? one wondered.
“Couldn't you do that later?” another asked.
“No,” Mary said. “I need to take care of a student's needs. My responsibility with my students doesn't end because they have left Shorewood.”
Mary left the faculty lounge for her van and was gone for about an hour. It was uncertain if the van even left school grounds, though one teacher later thought that it hadn't.
“She was so freaking self-righteous about her 'student's needs.' It was loopy. She was so arrogant. It was as if she was saying there was something wrong with us—with anyone—who didn't think the way she did. As if we didn't care about our students after they left our classrooms. Of course, we did. But we also had work to do.”
When Mary returned to the lounge, her face was flushed. She seated herself at the big blond table, brimming with ideas and acting as if she'd never been gone. But it was not her rosy skin tones that stirred fleeting concern.
“She smelled like sex,” a teacher said later, still shocked by the scent and the thoughts that ran through her mind that January afternoon. “I thought about it for an instant, but I banished the idea as being an impossibility. It just couldn't be. She was in the van with Vili Fualaau in the parking lot. It couldn 't be that she just had sex with the boy”
Later, Mary Kay's words haunted the teacher who noticed the heavy, musky smell that lingers after intercourse.
“She said he has these needs. What was she talking about? Sexual needs?”
In time, reality would set in and events that seemed odd, but not sinister, were cast in a new light. Another teacher at that planning session agreed with her colleague that the Highline administration had dropped the ball.
“We didn't know about what happened at the Des Moines pier,” said the teacher. “If someone had bothered to tell us, maybe we could have done something. We didn't have the history that we needed to make the connection between what was happening with Mary and Vili.”
BOOK IV
Commodity
This is their lives, and they're not going to cheapen it.
—Bob Huff in an August 1997 interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
I was 12 years old and I never fed anyone… I wanted to see what it was like…
—Vili Fualaau, in Time Daily, October 18, 1998