Though for most, Mary Kay kept a brave face and a smile so indelible a Sharpie could have drawn it, there were times when it seemed things were sinking in.
“Where are my babies?” she asked. “All I hear is, 'Are you done with the book?' But I have to play along. What choice do I have?”
But she couldn't finish it. The book was such a shambles, such a farce, that she couldn't fix it fast enough. It was her life, not theirs, after all.
“At best I think I can make it a C+, but doesn't our story deserve better than that?”
Even a year after she traded her baggy jeans and layers of oversize T-shirts for prison garb, Mary Kay Letourneau wasn't “over” insofar as the media was concerned. Personally, however, she was running out of steam despite the fact that the public was still interested. She was still news. She appeared over the phone on Oprah during the winter 1999 television advertising “Sweeps”.
“I didn't know what Sweeps was,” she told a friend with an exaggerated sigh, “now I know that when they want to boost their ratings it means putting me on the air.”
According to Mary Kay, Bob Huff sent a letter in early 1999 stating that he found her entirely responsible for the delay of the American edition of the book. Nothing, Mary Kay believed from everyone around her, but the book mattered.
“You seem to be totally out of touch with the reality with the… book… in completing your part. You have a million and one excuses… ”
According to Mary Kay's interpretation of the missive, Bob Huff was going to demand Vili's share of the advance and cut her out because she was in violation of the contract.
“Vili is the golden egg to Huff,” Mary Kay told a friend not long after the ultimatum was made. “Through my name he gets that title, he gets the money because of it. If Vili and I were married, Bob doesn't get his twenty-percent because we don't need him.”
All she could do was dial phone numbers and wait for a jaded world to right a wrong, for her lawyers to drop off the face of the earth, for Vili to make good on his promise to love her forever. The problem was that Vili was still a boy, unable to make adult decisions for himself. His mother and his lawyer Bob Huff needed him. And as Mary saw it, it was better for those players that she was confined to a cell at the Washington Corrections Center for Women.
“For a while she kept thinking that she was getting out of here any day now,” a fellow prisoner said a year after Mary Kay became an inmate there. “She kept saying that Vili was working on getting her out of here. I felt sorry for her. I wouldn't count on Vili for anything. He's just a kid. He's not working on getting her out. As long as she's in here, she's worth something to them. Sad, isn't it? Isn't she something more than a way to make money?”
Yes, she was more. This teenager in a woman's body was a friend, a teacher, a mother, a felon. To some she was also a predator, a child rapist. To Mary Kay herself, when soaring with manic enthusiasm, she was a goddess. Among the notes Steve Letourneau turned over to King County Detective Pat Maley was a list of attributes that Mary Kay had once written about herself. It was crafted in a diagram format, with circles and arrows leading from one word to the next as she raced to reach the definition of who and what she was.
“Strong, smart, passion in life, beautiful, look young, loving, faithful… sunsets, a family, giver… sunny days, kissing and lots of sex-love.”
“Me.”
Vili Fualaau, on the other hand, is still trying to figure out who he is and how he fits into the world. His body has morphed from a boy's to a young man's since he first kissed his sixth-grade teacher. His mustache has grown from a shaky C to a solid B. He's taller. He smokes. He attends school sporadically and girls flock to him in greater numbers than they might have before all of this happened. He alternates between seemingly shy and push-the-envelope outrageous. A father of two, he's a teenager trapped with a grown man's responsibility. He's seen the world's highs and lows and is connecting the dots in between.
Lawyer Bob Huff isn't sure about the kid's prospects; he's only sure of what might have been. The whirlwind of the Mary Kay Letourneau story both lifted Vili up and pulled him down.
“Besides a trip to Paris, a little money in a trust—which ain't that much—he's not better off. When we were promoting the story in France, there was the brush with celebrity, the world of art, maybe some scholarships would come his way, then the big bubble burst. And nothing. The English version of the book didn't happen. It could have happened. I wanted that for Vili. I wanted him to be able to make the rounds here to tell his story. But Mary Kay ruined that.”