The Paper Shepherd Read online

  The novelty of pretending this Jordanian émigré was a terrorist had quickly worn off. This was neither because of her peers’ more precise understanding of geography nor because of the birth certificate that confirmed that she was born twenty miles from Hectortown. It was merely because her classmates had gotten bored with their adolescent “towel head” references. By now, Tiar’s peers fully accepted her as Max’s much more interesting younger sister. For her high school freshman friends, there was a certain allure to Tiar being all but parentless. With coffee being the closest thing to a hot meal that was served in the Alfred Mansion, Tiar drank it excessively by age eleven which made her seem irresistibly sophisticated. She never had a curfew as her uncle seemed to hope she would disappear one day and never come home. With no one monitoring what she ate, she spent her lunch money (which her uncle calculated out to the cent) on junk food which she willingly traded for the carrots, cucumbers, and apples that her friends’ mothers packed in their lunch boxes. Every time she grew an inch, her uniform skirts would become scandalously short until a diligent mother reported it to Mrs. Franklin who would let out the hems or, when necessary, buy Tiar the new uniform skirts her uncle felt no responsibility to supply. Outside of school, her clothes always reflected exactly what the “popular kids” were wearing as they were in fact the treasured outfits her friends had out grown.

  When Tiar did break any rules, there was no one for the school to call. Tiar’s uncle handed anything addressed to him from St. Jude’s straight to Tiar to deal with. Although he seemed to enjoy yelling at her, his relationship with her ranged from complete disinterest to resentment and sometimes outright hatred based entirely on his levels of sleep, caffeine and alcohol. His harangues were completely uncorrelated with her behavior. In addition to supplementing her personal repertoire of curse words in both English and Arabic (also an aid to her popularity), this completely random verbal abuse allowed Tiar to act with relative impunity. Despite this, Tiar never intended to violate any of her school’s burdensomely abundant regulations. But, if her best friend, Jen Caponata, wanted to know if her new lip gloss was too tinted for the school’s strict ban on make up, Tiar was her designated guinea pig. If any of the girls in class were caught with a contraband fashion magazine, Tiar would step up to claim responsibility despite having no interest in them. Other then the few elderly nuns raised in a time when corporeal punishment was still encouraged, no one knew how to influence Tiar’s behavior. Once a teacher got the enterprising idea to call Jack Franklin regarding Tiar passing notes in class. After he disrupted the entire student body by showing up in his police cruiser with his lights and sirens blaring, the faculty decided not to repeat this tactic.

  By fourteen-years-old, Tiar had a reputation, accurate or not, for being irreverent, brave, and physically perfect. Her peers no longer cared where she came from. The only mystery about Tiar that baffled her peers was why she was so attached to her nerdy older brother who often was the only force pushing against a tidal wave of peer pressure. As the two entered their teens, anywhere Tiar went outside of school, Max was bound to be. It was silently understood that any invitation to her would automatically include him as her self-appointed chaperone. And so, when Tiar left the girls’ locker room to go to an after-game party, Max waited in the parking lot in his 1984 Volvo station wagon to drive her to the event.

  As they passed farms and forests, the two teens discussed Tiar’s recent athletic performance. The critique quickly degenerated into a debate about strategy and when it was appropriate to pass to a team mate versus taking a shot at the basket. Tiar, as she always did, insisted that passing is “sharing” with team mates and sharing is always good. Max, whose combined field goal and assist statistics during his freshman year caused him to be bumped up to the varsity team by the end of the season, expounded on his more logical and geometric analysis of the game. He wove in equations from calculus and physics she wouldn’t see at school for another three years. Having heard this explanation many times before, Tiar sat silently and stared out the window at the undulating country side, all the time her mouth unconsciously reciting the speech silently to herself. Her eye brows jumped and dove dramatically, her facial expressions mimicking Max’s as he reached his emphatic conclusion. When he was done, she watched the barns, rocks, and hay bales littering the pastoral landscape. The two teens were on their way to a party at Jen’s father’s beach house on Lake Eerie. It sat forty miles outside of Hectortown sandwiched between a golf course and the chilly banks of the Great Lake. Having bought the house mostly to impress business contacts who owned homes at the same country club, Mr. Caponata let the house sit unused most of the year. Jen, whose oldest social contacts had just reached driving age and whose parents were distracted by a messy divorce, was eager for the opportunity to use the empty property. Max and Tiar drove in silence for about twenty minutes before Max finally pulled over into the drive way of a farm to turn on the overhead light and inspect Jen’s crudely drawn map more closely.

  “This just does not look right at all,” he said, frustrated. Tiar examined the map he was holding.

  “Looks like she wants you to go for about one more mile and then you’ll get to this little bridge over a stream and then turn left at the traffic light after St. Teresa’s,” she said, pointing to what looked on the map like a little house with a cross on the top. Max squinted through the dim light at the map and then at Tiar.

  “Are you sure?” he asked doubtfully.

  “If our alternative is staying here?” she returned with a shrug. Max mirrored her shrug, turned off the overhead light and pulled back onto the road. A few minutes later, the car rumbled over the small bridge before a traffic light. As Max waited for it to turn green, he looked over at the gleaming white clapboard building that looked eerily blue in the moonlight. St. Teresa’s Roman Catholic Church announced the lit marquee on the lawn. The light turned, and he sped on into the darkness. They had gone another mile before Max felt something was out of place.

  “That’s amazing that you could decipher that from Jen’s drawing,” he mused to Tiar.

  “Humm…” she said, half paying attention.

  “I mean, especially since the map doesn’t mention the name of the church.” Tiar turned toward him from the passenger seat.

  “Jen must have told me the name when she gave me the map,” Tiar guessed. Max, unconvinced, none-the-less accepted this answer and drove on. Less than ten minutes later, the Volvo arrived at the Caponata’s house and pulled onto a spot on the grass at the end of a long line of cars. When Tiar and Max got to the house, she immediately was absorbed into the dancing. Max went to the kitchen, poured two sodas, and walked back into the living room without sparing a word or a glance to any of the other attendees. Max, well aware he was present as Tiar’s chauffer, and not as a guest, did not feel cheated being left out of this social scene. He’d prefer not knowing these illegal communions of underaged inebriation and debauchery existed. He retreated to an armchair in a dark corner and watched Tiar dance. When she danced, she could move her back like a snake, her arms like silk scarves being tossed about in a breeze. Tiar couldn’t remember when or in what context she had learned to dance this way, but it clearly didn’t happen in New York. Max envisioned waves of pheromones emanating from her in the dark like a shimmering bioluminescent glow, entrancing the brains of every male in the room and making her their prey. But Tiar seemed oblivious to the attention she drew.

  After a few songs, Tiar stopped dancing and Max waved to her from across the room. She walked over to him and sat on the arm of his chair, accepting the soda he had poured for her. After draining the glass, Tiar got up and danced for another half hour. Eventually, she excused herself to go to the bathroom. Max took the opportunity to stretch his legs. Each room of the vacation house had its own music and lighting scheme. Even without partaking in any of the alcohol that flowed freely at the party, Max found it disorienting. Hearing laughter, he climbed the stairs. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms
, some seniors he recognized from the basketball team were gathered around a table playing poker.

  “Hey, Max,” one of them yelled out to him. “Want us to deal you in?”

  “No thanks, Chuck,” he answered respectfully. He hated cards. He hated any activity that left the future to chance. He was about to leave when the team captain, Jim Perenty, called out to him.

  “Hey, Max, did you bring that sister of yours?” Judging from how slurred his words were, Max estimated the six pack of crushed beer cans littering the rug around Jim’s chair were all his.

  “Which sister?” Max said, playing dumb.

  “You know... what’s her name, Tina?”

  “Tanya?” Someone else at the table offered.

  “Terra?” added someone else. “Yeah, I saw her downstairs.” Shoot. Max flinched.

  “Well, tell her if she wants to come upstairs, I’ll deal her in too,” Jim said, winking at Max and patting his lap.

  “I’ll be sure to tell her, Jim,” Max said, a friendly smile hiding his revulsion. Standing in the upper hallway, he heard a familiar laugh through the window mixing with the sound of waves crashing. Tiar was standing in the garden with her friends Jen and Michelle. Max sped down to them and tapped Tiar on the left shoulder.

  “You nerd,” she said, punching Max on the shoulder playfully. Max started to back away, thinking Tiar wanted privacy to be with her friends. But, instead, she leaned close to his ear. “Where have you been?” Her hand brushed lightly past his, a look of relief in her eyes.

  “Around,” he said evasively, omitting Jim’s invitation. It was his turn to whisper in her ear. “It’s a nice night. Want to camp out?” he asked.

  “Now?” Tiar asked, looking back at Jen and Michelle, who had continued their conversation without her. He nodded. Even in the dark, his blue eyes looked intense.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “What the heck.” She said good-bye to her friends and followed him out to the car.

  “Is everything okay, Max?” she asked as they were backing out of the driveway. Max put the car in drive and headed east for Hectortown. As the sounds of the party moved further and further behind him, he visibly relaxed, as though he had narrowly escaped a car crash.

  “Yes, Bird. Everything is just fine.”

  Three hours later, Tiar and Max lay in sleeping bags in a tent in the Franklins’ back yard. Max had been lucky; it was a good night for camping out. After quickly erecting the pop-up tent, the two teenagers roasted marshmallows in the crisp autumn night and made up 22 new constellations before turning in. They had been in the tent, lying silently for a good ten minutes when Max heard Tiar yawn. She rustled around in her sleeping bag.

  “Max?” she asked sleepily. “Do you think they’ll ever build a water slide on the moon?”

  “Why do you ask that, Bird?” he asked, not opening his eyes.

  “Well, because, I don’t think a water slide would be very fun on the moon,” she reasoned. “With gravity being so much weaker there, you’d probably go down really slowly.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” he agreed. “Good night.”

  “Good night.” There were another few minutes of silence before Max heard Tiar’s voice again, barely awake.

  “Max, do you think they would even use money on the moon? If everyone works for NASA it wouldn’t make much sense.”

  “No, I suppose it wouldn’t. Good night.”

  “Good night.” Max heard Tiar turn over in her sleeping bag. She was now laying on her stomach with her face half buried in her pillow. There wasn’t a peep out of her for a good five minutes. Then he heard her voice next to him again.

  “Max,” she began. He was fairly sure she was now just talking in her sleep. “Think there are... other planets... apple trees?” Max smiled at her in the dark.

  “It’s time to go to sleep little bird. Okay?”

  “Okay. Nighty night.”

  2

  Maxwell Franklin sat bent over his small wooden desk, studiously examining the faces in his comic book by the warm yellow glow of the lamp as if studying a lost, ancient language. There were thoughts and emotions occurring in those characters, thoughts which escaped the grasp of text beneath. These were just crude drawings of faces, and those faces crude external projections of the truth inside. They were a shadow of a shadow of the truth that he was urgently dedicated to deciphering. If the trudging sound of rubber soles on the carpet runner distracted him, his visage betrayed nothing. These footsteps were a language he knew well. He could already anticipate, based on the frequency and amplitude of the thuds, the latency of the leg lifted from the top step to the landing, the degree to which she lifted her feet or let them drag, the mood of person who moved through the hall. He could predict with certainty the psychological weight on the young woman who approached, the resigned despair with which she would release that weight onto his thin twin bed, and the pitch of the whining springs under that weight as she let herself fall. He did not need to look up to see the carelessness with which she would abandon her fight against sadness and gravity and flop down, her legs, pure white and perfectly shaped like an alabaster statue, hanging over the side of the bed under her plaid skirt. He did not look up from his garish, geometric faces to look at hers, her smooth flesh obfuscating the meaning that her body language communicated to him through the objects she touched. He had heard those steps a thousand times in the 5 years since they first climbed these stairs. They spoke to him in a hundred variations-- rapid, slow, heavy, springy, sliding, gliding, jumping. He had memorized the subsequent whine of the stretching metal holding her small body up on his mattress and correlated this with conversations that always followed.

  “What’s wrong,” he initiated, interrupting her pout without looking up.

  “Nothing,” Tiar mumbled, still staring at the ceiling, her hair spilling over the bed spread.

  “You’re home early,” he pointed out. Tiar mumbled something under her breath. Max finally tore his gaze away from his graphic novel and looked at her.

  “Practice was canceled today so Jen, Michelle, and Sarah went dress shopping,” Tiar explained, pretending to pay attention to her finger nails to avoid Max’s inquisitive look.

  “For home coming?” he interjected. “Why didn’t you go?”

  “Oh, no,” Tiar said heatedly, sitting up so suddenly the bed shifted half an inch toward the wall. “They picked out their homecoming dresses in eight grade and had their moms order them from the bridal shop over the summer, so they could get tailored in time. They decided to go out today for confirmation dresses.” Max shook his head dubiously. In the very Catholic microcosm in which they lived, it had become fashionable in recent years for girls to try to outdo one another with their confirmation dresses, often wearing gowns that would rival actual wedding dresses for elegance and whiteness. Max thought it was a disgusting perversion of a sacrament meant to dedicate one’s self to the Lord’s work. But, this was only one of many things he found enigmatic and tedious about human females. As he reflected on this, he realized this was probably not what weighed so heavily on his friend.

  “Feeling left out?” he theorized.

  “No,” Tiar grumbled, kicking one of the tassels on the rug. “Maybe. Probably. A little.” Max exhaled sympathetically. As Tiar’s temporary stay in Hectortown stretched on indefinitely, his family began taking her to church with them. They didn’t want to interfere with her own religion, which they assumed was Islam. However, since she spent almost every meal with them when not at school, and this was where they were between breakfast and lunch on Sundays, it seemed rude not to take her along. She listened attentively, kneeled when they kneeled, stood when they stood, and eventually knew every hymn by heart. But no amount of ecclesiastical knowledge, no amount of inclusion from this loving family, and no amount of popularity at school would repair the abyss of not knowing. Her ignorance of her family’s origins, religion, location, or reasons for abandoning her left Tiar perpetually vulnerable to storms of brooding dysph
oria. Max had learned over the 5 years they had known one another the only way out of these storms was to quietly acknowledge them and let them pass. He sat next to her on the bed and put his hand over hers, a technique he had mastered with much practice. Early on, he would interrogate her, challenge her logic, or try to get her to see that mysteries were fun, not painful. For a brief span when they were 11 and 13-years-old, he experimented with patting her hand and saying, “They’ll come back someday.” But this, which they both now suspected was a lie, mercifully evolved into indirect eye contact and a sympathetic nod.

  After the requisite few minutes of silent rumination, Max hopped up and walked back to his desk, this time sitting to face Tiar.

  “Did I tell you about the project I’m working on?” he asked excitedly.

  “You mean the homework you assigned for yourself for the class the school does not offer?” Tiar said cynically. A few months ago, Max had unsuccessfully tried to convince his Advanced Placement American History teacher to assign the class to write an original biography based on primary source material such as birth records, marriage certificates, diaries, letters, and church records. He thought this would help his classmates appreciate how text books were written and, considering the popularity of detective television shows at the time, inspire his classmates to be more interested in history as a whole. The teacher, under pressure to increase scores on the national Advanced Placement exam and correctly gauging that his students would find this assignment boring if not punitive, flatly refused. His enthusiasm undampened, Max convinced the eleventh-grade guidance counselor of St. Jude’s that there should be a history club for the high school and was given permission to start one.