The judge had spoken. The gavel pounded. Three to five years in the state correctional facility. This wasn't jail. This was Prison, as in real full-on big boy prison... or should I say, big girl prison. Either way, the cuffs went on, and two burly uniformed men escorted my daughter out of the courtroom. She had been charged with embezzlement, and stood convicted. The evidence was clear. She was guilty as charged.
Her mother swore she was innocent. Val had been wrongly accused. She must have been swindled, taken a fall, been framed by the real criminal. At the very least, a horrible mistake had been made. Of all the injustice, there was no way her little girl could have done something so wrong.
I knew better.
How did I know? Well, Valerie had never been what anyone would call a good kid. Her mom always claimed she just fell in with the wrong crowd and that the trouble she got into was someone else's doing. Like any good mom, Jennifer couldn't imagine that her own flesh and blood could actually be a criminal.
That was the furthest thing from the truth. All through grade school, Val refused to take direction from anyone other than her mom. Even as a child, it infuriated Val that she wasn't in charge. Val fought with anyone who had even the slightest bit of authority over her. One year she even got banned from the lunch room for throwing vegetables at the lunch lady, simply because she didn't want them on her tray.
To this day, I think Val holds the all-time record for being sent to Principal Gregory's office. I'm betting that guy still has my phone number on speed dial. At first, he would insist we come to have a meeting with him at the school. In those meetings, her mom would always deflect Val's responsibility and smooth things over. There were so many meetings that Principal Gregory and my wife were on a first-name basis. Somewhere around the thirtieth incident, he got tired of seeing us and stopped calling.
None of this bad behavior in her early years surprised me. I pretty much saw it coming. Val absolutely hated being told what to do. Her utter disdain for authority was evident almost from the day she was born. Even as a toddler, she could have a three-hour tantrum just because someone said the word no. To keep the peace, I actually stopped telling her no. Give her consequences instead. That's what the experts all said. Val didn't care. Consequences meant nothing to her.
By high school Val was regularly skipping class, getting into drugs, and stealing just about anything she could get her hands on. Just like in grade school, her mom would defend her to a tee and put the blame on everyone else. I get it. Of course, I do. No one wants to think their kid is the bad apple, but I knew Val didn't just fall in with the wrong crowd. She was that kid parents tell their children to stay away from. She was the bad kid ring leader.
Word of Valerie's shenanigans came our way all too often. Of course, Jennifer would hear none of it. In her mind, that just couldn't be. Val's older sister had been such a good kid. In fact, Shannon was almost too easy. About as perfect as a kid could get. She was pretty, got good grades, and had tons of friends. The worst thing Shannon ever did was drink from the milk carton.
Valerie was nothing like that. She wasn't particularly pretty, had trouble making friends, and hated school. She also despised her older sister's goody-two-shoes life, which was part of the problem. Sibling rivalry ran deep in Val's veins. They fought constantly, and since it seemed she couldn't be better than her sister at anything, Val was dead set on doing the kinds of things her sister wouldn't.
It probably didn't help that Shannon and I were close. Shannon liked her mom, but she and I shared an unusually strong father-daughter bond. When I noticed that Val was feeling left out, I went out of my way to find common ground with her, but that father-daughter bond I wanted never took.
Val did bond with her mother, at least in a way. I guess that's pretty normal. It didn't hurt that Jennifer couldn't see how bad Val's behavior really was. It was as if she had blinders on. Blinders that were installed by Val's ability to manipulate her. In fact, Val went to great lengths to make sure her mom only saw what she wanted her to see. Val seemed to put an extraordinary effort into making sure she never disappointed her mother.
Val's hatred for school was likely her biggest issue. All of her bad behavior, all of those meetings with the principal, were part of her master plan. She fully intended to be so bad that she got kicked out. In her mind that was the easiest way to be done with being told what to do.
Of course her plan to get kicked out didn't work. The inept public school system just passed her on, even with her behavior problems and failing grades. She had another plan though. Val literally stopped going to school the very day she was legally old enough to drop out. When we realized what she had done, her mom and I tried to convince her she needed to go back. It was like talking to a stone wall. That is until Jennifer told Val how disappointed she was in her. At that point, Val sheepishly agreed to give school another try.
To Jennifer, Val's word was good enough. I wasn't so trusting. To make sure Val held up her side of the bargain, I dropped her off in front of the school every morning on my way to work. Then I'd watch to make sure she went inside. This little process made me almost an hour late for work every day, which my boss wasn't happy about. Luckily my boss had a kid about Val's age, so she let it slide so I could help Valerie through what Jennifer simply called a tough time.
Little did we know Val wasn't actually attending any classes. I'd drop her off, and she would go in through the school's front doors and straight out the back. Then she would sneak off to spend the day with other kids who had lost their way.
It wasn't until they had a teacher "in service" day that I figured out what Val was doing. I'd dropped her off like always, and I sat and watched as she happily waltzed in through the front doors. At dinner that night, she told some barely believable story about what happened in English class that day, but I knew it was all a big fat lie.
Earlier that day, my boss asked me if Val and I wanted to join her and her kids for lunch. Taking your kids to lunch on those odd days when they didn't have school had become a tradition at my company. It didn't take me long to figure out there was no school that day. I also knew that Val was full of shit.
I waited until later to call Val out about her bullshit story. That's when she admitted that she had dropped out, citing the very law that said she was old enough to quit. On registration day she didn't sign up for a single class. Instead, she forged and filed a form from the district stating that we were moving out of state. She knew that would stop the truancy calls. It was strange how proud she was of the way she had weaseled out of having to go to school.
Throughout our conversation about her quitting school, one thing stayed constant. Every time Val had something new to say, with each additional confession. She made me promise not to tell her mother. Even though she thought she was old enough to make that kind of decision, it seems Val's still deeply cared about not disappointing her mom.
I left it up to Val to break the news to her mom about dropping out, but I told her she would have to do it sooner rather than later as her er mom was going to figure it out anyway. There was no way I was going to be late for work every day it she wasn't going to school. Val begged me to pretend to still drive her, but I didn't give in. For the first time in years, I flat-out told her no.
It took a week, but Val finally fessed up. She told her mother point blank that she had dropped out. But according to Val, dropping out wasn't going to be a problem. She was all set to work on this graduation certificate that was supposedly just as good as a GED.
Of course, we never saw her attend any classes or, for that matter, study in any way. When we challenged Val about this program, she showed us the paperwork, complete with brochures and application forms. I knew it was all fake. It looked good at a glance, but it was full of errors. Errors that someone with a high school diploma just wouldn't make.
I called Val out on it, and as usual, she made me promise not to tell her mom before she agreed to talk about it. When I pointed out the problems with the documents she had, She tried to tell me some other kid must have pulled a fast one on her, but I knew better. She had no problem forging the document that said we were moving. This phony certificate program crap was likely her idea too.
I just shook my head and wondered. I mean, she was a smart kid. If she would just put half the effort it takes to come up with this bullshit into her schoolwork, she would probably graduate at the top of her class.
Indeed I had promised not to rat Val out to her mom, and I wanted her to be able to come to me if she was ever in real trouble. So I let the whole fake GED thing slide on one condition. It was then Val and I had what turned out to be the first of many long father daughter talks about life.
It was during this very talk that I decided to remind Val of the house rules. To live in our house you had to either be in school or working. She nowhere else to go but still refused to go back to school. So I made her promise she would get a job. I figured having to do something horrible for minimum wage might make school look like the better choice. That is... If a dropout like her could even get a job.
Much to my amazement, she actually found work. She found a job at a motel as a maid. I don't think cleaning rooms for a living was what she had in mind when she dropped out. But there she was, doing a job that only paid for each room cleaned. She was making even less than minimum wage at a job she hated. My plan seemed to be working. I started prepping her for a return to school, or at the very least, to get into a real GED program.
I had to hand it to her. She actually stuck it out. She went to work every day and came home too exhausted to do much of anything. The thought crossed my mind that she was smoking pot at this job and was coming home stoned. But who was I to say? I'd never done any of that stuff. I couldn't tell you the difference between a pot smoker and someone with hay fever, but she had become as lazy as a sloth. No wonder she couldn't clean enough rooms to make much money.
Time flew by. Just six months into her maid gig, she managed to land a better job with a regular paycheck. My best guess is she lied through her teeth about how old she was. Turned out some guy who was staying at the motel got her set up for an interview. She said that he coached her on what to say as well.
