The Paper Shepherd Read online

  Max struggled to keep himself at a polite distance from Tiar for several weeks. This was his problem, he thought, and he could fix it through diligence and self discipline. He didn’t suggest camping out anymore and resisted when Tiar hinted that she wanted to. He sat a little further from her on the couch watching movies. After school, he claimed he would be studying in the library all night and sent Tiar to walk home with Jen and Sarah. Now you’ve just resorted to lying, he chastised himself. One sin begets another. He was too ashamed even to look her in the eye.

  As his desire for her failed to diminish, Max took more aggressive action to avoid giving in to it. He found himself looking forward to driving Tiar home from basketball games, knowing she sometimes would change in his car to save time and he would see parts of her anatomy he aught not see. Instead, he insisted that she shower in the locker room before coming out. He didn’t want any “stinky little girls” in his car, he said flippantly with a weak smile that was not returned. When they were watching a movie at his house, if Tiar complained of being cold, Max pointed out that there was an afghan on the chair if she wanted it. Never again would he drape it over both of them, as he used to. When her tiny foot steps appeared under his window while he was practicing for choir, he hid from them, closing the window. It broke his heart to watch her lower her head and walk away, but it’s for her own good. She didn’t understand what she was doing to him with those sultry eyes. He alone would have to struggle to keep himself from destroying the future he had designed for himself or the friendship that was just as valuable.

  Autumn pressed on. In late October, dark storm clouds moved in. Snow covered the school yard and the park. It blanketed the streets making them look pure and white. It also covered the Franklins, back yard. Tiar had a project to do for history about President McKinley. What time she did not spend in the library she spent at the coffee shop, covering the entire table with books and reprints of old newspapers from microfiche. Finally, in the first week of November, she handed the paper in. There were a few warm days and the snow, now gray and slushy, melted into the storm drains. Tiar was on her way home when she ran into Max who invited her over to shoot hoops. What could it hurt? she thought to herself. She needed to get out some energy now that the paper was over.

  In the backyard, Tiar and Max played basketball. It had been a month since their last game and Max played more aggressively than usual. Tiar suspected he was punishing her for something. For what, she was not sure. She tried to push the thought out of her mind. She drove toward the basket for a lay-up and Max ran toward her, shoulder lowered. She landed hard on her back. She got up and tried to ignore the pain as she fetched the ball and lined up for a jump shot. Max swiped at the ball, trying to get it out of her hands. Without thinking, she elbowed him hard in the face. Max recoiled away from her.

  “Shoot, Bird!” he said. “That really hurt.” He held his nose. “What in the heck has gotten into you?”

  “What’s gotten into me?” she echoed, holding the ball between them. “I thought you were going to kill me on that last play.”

  “Stop being so melodramatic.”

  “You know what?” Tiar said, letting the ball drop out of her hands. “I’ve had it.” She turned to go, skipping quickly up the stairs to the back porch.

  “I’m going to homecoming with Michelle,” Max said to her retreating back. It was a simple enough statement, but it was the product of a plan he had been working on for the past few weeks—the plan that gave him confidence he could be around Tiar now without a problem. He’d found a way to let her shoulder some of the burden of keeping a distance between them. She was an honorable girl. She wouldn’t, he knew, go after another girl’s boyfriend. He didn’t know why he chose this moment to blurt out that information. Maybe because he was frustrated by how the game was going—how he still found the smell of her hair intoxicating as she ran past him for a lay-up. Maybe for a split second of frustration and weakness, he wanted to hurt her. Maybe he figured she was already angry at him and he couldn’t make the situation worse. Whatever the reason, her response was not what he was expecting. Tiar, half way up the stairs to the back porch, turned to face him.

  “And?” she asked, evenly.

  “And what?”

  “And, so, what? I heard about that a week ago.” Max looked at her, trying not to show his surprise.

  “You’re not angry?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Why should I care? You and me…We’re not a thing you know. Anyway, you’ve been acting like such a dick lately,” Max glared at her for her use of profanity. “Well you have! I’d have a better time with Jen and all them anyway.” Tiar sat down on the stairs. “So, is that what all of this was about?” she asked.

  “All what?”

  “You pushing me away all the time. You’ve been treating me like a leper,” she said.

  “I have not....”

  “You have too. But if this is why, well, I guess I’m glad. I’m happy for you, Max. Okay? I don’t want to ruin your chances with Michelle. But, why didn’t you just tell me? I thought you were having some sort of problem with me. I was afraid you didn’t want me to be friends with you anymore, and I couldn’t figure out why. Do you know how much that hurt?” Max’s heart sank, ashamed at the pain his emotions were capable of producing. He sat down next to his friend on the stairs.

  “I’m sorry, Bird. I’ve been.... confused lately.”

  “What could make you so confused that you’d forget your best friend?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m really sorry,” he said, genuine remorse showing in his eyes. “Are we going to be okay?” Tiar just nodded silently. She stood up, gathered her belongings and walked into the house. Max knew better than to follow her. She needed a long walk to cool down.

  From then on, a new normal developed for Max and Tiar. Tiar now purposely kept a respectful distance from him. Gone were their weekly explorations, replaced by weekends spent at the library studying, Max with Michelle and Tiar with which ever of her female friends did not have a date that afternoon. Homecoming came and went. Jen had decided that the hip thing for 1993 was to go “stag”. She, Tiar, Dana, and Sarah went together, splitting a limo.

  Michelle, who usually made the fifth in that cafeteria’s “Fab five,” now made an effort to find Max and sit with him whenever she could. At first, he was quirky and refreshing compared to the hormone driven jocks she usually dated. He never made aggressive advances. He never made physical advances at all. In fact, he barely ever looked her in the eye, preferring to look at books and sit exactly 9 inches apart in comfortable silence. Nevertheless, she eventually began to feel threatened by how much information he could weave effortlessly into any conversation. In fact, they were not really conversations, but impromptu history lectures he gave every time she called him after school. Her flawless make up and perfectly matched outfits were lost on him. She wondered how Tiar could manage to spend so much time with him and not have her brain overheat.

  One day in early December, a few weeks after Homecoming, Max and Michelle had stopped on the way home from school for ice-cream. After their shakes came, Michelle took a deep breath.

  “Max,” she said. Her tone already told him what she was going to say next. “I think you’re a really great guy. You’re cute, you’re nice....”

  “But, I’m not your type,” he filled in unemotionally.

  Michelle shook her head, her face looking apologetic. “And plus, I know your intentions are good, but I can’t help thinking you belong to someone else.”

  “What do you mean, Michelle?” Max asked.

  “Ti,” she said simply.

  “I told you, we’re just....”

  “Friends. I know, you told me.” She stared out the window, and then back at him. “But you want more than that, don’t you?” Max looked down at the table and nodded his head. “And she doesn’t feel the same way?”

  “I don’t know. I never told her,” he explained.

  �
�Why not?”

  “Because…” Because, I’m not allowed, Max thought, hesitating. Not me. “She’s been my best friend since I was eleven years old. I can’t… I just can’t. I’m sorry to have involved you in this whole mess.” He looked down at the table, obviously ashamed. Michelle felt he was blowing the whole situation out of proportion. Still, she felt sorry for him. She put her hand over his on the table.

  “It’s okay, Max,” she said. “I knew this wasn’t going anywhere.” Max finally looked up at her.

  “I’m glad your feelings didn’t get hurt,” he said sincerely. “I know I don’t have any right to ask you this, but please, don’t tell her what I said.”

  Outside, it was getting windy and Tiar pulled up her hood against the cold as she walked past the ice-cream shop. She saw Max inside with Michelle. They seemed to be having a very serious discussion. Her hand was affectionately over his. Tiar tried to convince herself to feel relieved. Before he started dating Michelle, Max seemed to be fighting with himself for months, but she was the one who kept getting hurt. Now that he and Michelle were together, he and Tiar could be friends again. Tiar tried to ignore Michelle’s boasts in the locker room about what she was doing with Max in their many hours together outside school. Jen told her, unsolicited, what she had heard, using every juvenile metaphor she could think of until finally just blurting out to her oblivious friend sex, Ti. It means sex. Whatever it was, Max seemed almost serene. Tiar’s heart sank to see the two of them together. She wanted to hold hands like that. She wanted to kiss someone. There were plenty of guys, her friends assured her, who would love to “break her in” but Tiar hesitated to take anyone up on the offer. She always assumed that this first, like so many others in her life since age nine, would be shared with Max.

  In her mind, Tiar knew this first was different from all those others. It was impossible to ask Max to stop thinking about her as a little sister and start thinking of her as a girl friend. She was, after all, the little girl who he got sweaty with shooting hoops. She was the girl he lay on a muddy lawn with in a sleeping bag and who he hung out with, smelly and gross, when he came home from his job dragging trees around and she finished a day of washing homeless dogs. How could he ever feel serious or romantic about her? She was the silly girl who dragged him to Ashford Hollow Sculpture Park, a sanctuary of rolling hills and fanciful creations of metal, glass, and paint. She dragged him over muddy trails to see the eight foot long metal insects and winding red metal swirls that had sprung from some artist’s imagination to prance heedlessly in the quiet, respectable forest of western New York. She was so frivolous… so embarrassingly childish… she even tried to cajole him into returning after the parked closed for the season. She wanted to see, she explained, impassioned, how the park looked without its leafy green garments, the sculptures popping out against a white snowy canvas. How embarrassing, she thought to herself now, feeling young and stupid. Max… So grown up now. Once the snow arrived, Max promulgated a precise and well planned argument about the moral and legal dangers of trespassing. His words made her imagine vividly Jack’s hot, angry breath on their necks, chasing them down the muddy slopes after his fellow deputies tracked their foolish, felonious footsteps in the snow.

  Tiar now suspected Max’s objection had nothing to do with fear of apprehension by local authorities. Max was simply not interested in nonsense and fantasy. He was dating now. He had no time for the ephemeral. He had no interest in the curves of twisted, brightly colored metal. He needed the real curves of a real woman with a real body. Michelle had all those things. Tiar knew she had already ruined her chances of Max seeing that she had them too.

  I ruined the whole thing, she thought sadly. Looking through the window of the ice-cream parlor, Tiar saw her friend, her heart aching. She’d always assumed Max had seen her as irreplaceable after all the days they’d shared in art museums and rail way museums, the hours of silly stories they told around a camp fire in his backyard. She saw now how comfortable he was casting that aside. Well, I can live without that too, she thought. That was nothing. That wasn’t important.

  Tiar turned from the window and pulled her scarf up to cover her cold nose. She did not have time to think about that now. She had a term paper due in a week and she had barely started it. With her game schedule, tonight was one of the only solid nights she had to write. She walked home fast, practically running. She thought about which she wanted to eat tonight, the tasteless chicken microwave dinner or the tasteless beef microwave dinner. A year ago, she petitioned her guidance counselor for permission to take home economics so she could at least learn a few things to cook for herself. Our honors students do not take home economics, she was told in no uncertain terms. Your other honors students have parents, she didn’t answer back. Boy, do I miss Eleanor. Tiar knew that Mrs. Franklin would feed her no matter who Max was dating. But, Tiar had been limiting her trips to their house regardless. Exactly because Eleanor knew her so well, she would inevitably ask Tiar why she looked so glum. Tiar knew she could not answer, because the boy I have a crush on is at the library with Michelle Guarini. It just wouldn’t do. Nor could she discuss her relationship woes with her friends who thought that any boy with a tongue to stick down her throat should be acceptable. She would deal with the loneliness and hunger herself.

  Coming into her uncle’s house, she ran up the stairs and went straight to her room. There was a sticky note on the door in her uncle’s hand writing. It said simply, “call” and then there were numbers, too many to be a phone number.

  Tiar went to her uncle’s room and knocked on the door. He wasn’t usually home this time of day, but she heard music from under the door. He came to the door in his bathrobe.

  “What, orphan?” he asked her gruffly. She held up the note on two of her fingers.

  “What’s this?”

  “You’re going to visit your brothers in London. Call this lady. She’s my sister. You’re going to spend spring break there.” He slammed the door behind him, eager to get back to the blond occupying his bed. Tiar walked back to her room and slammed the door, cursing at him under her breath.

  4

  Tiar sat at the kitchen table, fuming. She had tried to work on her history paper the night before but the same image kept running through her mind—a week in rainy, cold, dreary England with two boys whose idea of fun was pulling her hair and putting worms in her pockets. Ick! She apathetically ingested a few more bites of her left over macaroni and cheese—one of the few things she had figured out how to cook for herself. Her Uncle Henry would only buy the cheapest kind with the powered cheese that he could get in bulk from the warehouse store. Orphans don’t deserve the expensive stuff, he protested when she asked for anything of better quality or nutritional value. Tiar flipped through the newspaper, sipping her coffee. She had a basketball game tonight. It was going to be a long day. She was about to close the newspaper when something caught her eye. She carefully tore a rectangle from the corner of the page.

  “Are you ripping my paper, orphan?” her uncle called down the steps.

  “Whore fucking dog,” she said under her breath. She folded the paper up and put it in her pocket, hoisted her backpack onto her back and ran out the door with renewed energy. She had a plan.

  The girls’ basketball team, after narrowly leading for three quarters, pulled out ahead in the last quarter to stomp their opponents 90 to 75. Tiar was glad to see Max in the stands again even if he wasn’t there to see her. After the game, she showered and walked home, looking forward to a good night’s sleep. The next day after school, she walked to the Franklins’ house. When she walked into the kitchen, Mrs. Franklin was at the table, pulling the ends off snap peas. Tiar sat down and began to help her.

  “Max has a game tonight, dear,” she said.

  “I know,” Tiar answered. “I came to see you.” Tiar pulled the bowl of snap peas in front of her and Mrs. Franklin got up to work on another part of dinner. “Mrs. Franklin, I have a favor to ask, and I hope you won
’t be mad at me if the answer is no,” Tiar began.

  “What is it dear?” Mrs. Franklin asked. She couldn’t imagine where Tiar was going with such an inauspicious introduction.

  “I have to go to London over spring break to check up on my brothers.”

  “Good for you, Tiar. I’m sure you’ll have a great time,” Mrs. Franklin said absently. She had nearly forgotten Tiar had brothers, having barely heard about them in years.

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about.” Tiar pulled the news paper clipping out of her pocket and, unfolding it, handed it Eleanor. Eleanor examined it. All companion tickets just $150.

  “If it is okay with you, I would like to invite Max along. I know it sounds screwy, but we would be staying with my Aunt Genine and she said I could bring a friend if I want. We would have separate bedrooms and everything. Pretty much all he would have to pay for was airfare and for museums and stuff. But, I didn’t want to ask him without running it by you first.”

  Eleanor looked at the paper with fascination, as though it were the deed for something very valuable. It did sound strange to let her son travel around the world with an under-aged girl to stay at a stranger’s house. At least, that was how Jack would see it. But, on the other hand, he would technically be an adult by then, and the girl was their Tiar who they had practically raised. If she put it that way, Eleanor was confident she could win Jack’s reluctant approval.

  Ever since Max had shown an interest in history, Eleanor had encouraged him at every opportunity, driving down to museums in Manhattan on three day weekends and working over time to send him to summer camp at a local university. This would outweigh all of those efforts combined. Having gotten a doctoral degree in history herself and growing up in Great Britain, she knew firsthand what it meant to see the treasures the British had collected in the days their empire spanned the globe. It was not an opportunity to pass up.