Other Shepards (9 page)

Geneva shakes her head. “I spent it on Miss Pia.”

“Figures.”

“But she said I was going on a trip. What do you think she meant by that?”

“She wanted to make you happy so you felt like it was worth your money. There’s no such thing as a real fortune teller.” I grip Geneva’s fingers in my hand. “There’s no such thing as a psychic, or a future predictor, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not real.”

“I always thought that what makes something real is deciding it is.” Geneva readjusts her hand so that it notches more tightly into mine. “I wish I knew what that last rose was for, though,” she says sadly, with a small backward glance at the shop.

“Who cares?” I say. “You make your own fortune, right?”

And yet it seems sort of typical that the story of my sister’s future was interrupted in order to tell the tales of my family’s past.

“T
HAT’S A COOL JACKET.
Military style.” Louis salutes me and smiles.

“She traded it for her other one at a thrift shop yesterday. This morning she sneaked it out of the house in her book bag.” For once, Geneva makes me look better instead of worse. Louis whistles approvingly.

We have bumped into each other in front of our vendor again this morning. Louis knew I would be here. I could tell by the way he stood, looking down the block when Geneva and I were no more than two specks drifting up the sidewalk. I knew by the way that he dawdled, drinking his juice, that he was waiting
for me
. The thought is still spiking my stomach as my mind memorizes images to savor later. Louis Littlebird has a chip in his bottom front tooth. Louis Littlebird wears a silver chain around his neck and a plain gray sweatshirt under his leather jacket today.

“I’ll walk you two over to Ambrose, if you want,” Louis says. “I got time.”

Geneva pushes ahead of us. “I can escort myself,” she declares over her shoulder. I could give her a hug right then for good sisterliness. I did not even have to make a bet.

Louis walks with a fighting lift in his jaw and a sleepy smile that makes him appear relaxed and thoughtful. I want to imitate his style, to take something of his and make it my own.

“So where do you usually hang out after school?” he asks. “You and your friends.”

“Oh, you know. Chatterbox Diner, for one.” Which is not a complete lie. Kathlyn LeDuc and I have been to the Chatterbox on Friday afternoons whenever I stay over at her house, but it is usually my responsibility to bring Geneva home directly after school. But Louis does not need to know that I spend most afternoons taking care of my little sister. “Except this past week, Geneva and I have been heading straight home after school, since we’ve been helping an artist friend of ours paint our kitchen.”

“Sounds boring.”

“No, it isn’t. Really. We get to paint pictures on the wall.”

“Oh, like a mural? My older brother did that once on one of the outside walls of our school. It was a tribute to the Grateful Dead after Jerry Garcia died. He got suspended. But he said some things are more important than rules.”

“Totally.” I cannot wait to record this story in my L. L. Notebook of Facts.

We turn the corner and he slips his hand into mine. “Know how to thumb wrestle?” he asks. “I’m the undefeated champion in my family. It’s easy. Hold your hand in mine like this, all fingers in, but keep your thumb free, like that. Okay, when I say go, try to pin my thumb under yours. Ready?”

“No, wait.” I stop walking. “I can’t do this and walk. Now I’m ready.”

“One two three, go!”

Our thumbs jab and pounce with the mechanized movements of two monsters in an old Godzilla movie. Louis wins promptly, his thumb squeezing mine bloodless.

“Best outta three,” he says, and beats me again.

“Strong thumbs,” I comment, shoving my tingling hands in my pockets before he tries for a rematch. “I like that in a guy.” I had only meant to make a joke, but I wonder if my comment was too slinky. Thankfully, Louis doesn’t seem to mind or notice.

“It’s from giving my mom neck rubs. She gets bad headaches. I know all the right pressure points.”

Louis’s comment seems kind of slinky, too, and I am not sure what to answer, so I do not say anything.

We walk quickly to catch up with Geneva. Words that have been stumbling around in my brain now slip past my lips.

“You could come over,” I say. “After school, I mean. To see our mural.” I feel the tips of my ears ignite.

“Yeah?”

“I mean, only if you have time.”

“As long as I can catch an F train near your house. I’d need to be home by six to help make dinner, otherwise my mom’ll holler.”

“We’re 176 Waverly. Between Greenwich and Seventh Avenue South, on the corner below West Tenth.”

“Yeah, that’s easy. Okay. Like four-thirty?”

“Sure. We’ll be there. You can meet Annie. She’s the artist. She’s very cool.”

“And your folks?”

“They’ll be at work. They won’t be home until after six.”

“You got food?”

“I think so. Definitely.”

“And I can paint, too?”

“Totally.”

“Okay. See you there, Sergeant Shepard.” Louis salutes me again, then glides to a stop not too short of the curious crowd milling around the school’s entryway. Just as I hope, the whispers and stares begin.

“Who was that?” Kathlyn pokes me in the shoulder after Louis moves out of earshot.

“That’s Louis Litterbug, Holland’s new boyfriend,” explains Geneva. “Mom hasn’t met him. She’ll haaate him,” she sings as she skips away to the door where her class is lining up.

“Don’t call him that,” I call out to her retreating back.

“Quite the leather-clad rebel escort,” says Tyra Sharp, a stylish, not altogether friendly girl in my class who gets most of her attitude from the fact that her mom is a made-for-TV movie producer. “Do tell more.”

“Do tell,” parrots Tyra’s best friend, Mindy Bruner. Suddenly I am the focus of more attention than I can remember since I won the tennis award. Except this kind of attention is way better.

“He’s coming over this afternoon,” I say. From all around me, there are sounds of approval.

Classes seem to double or triple in length as I wait for the day to be over. Louis is my secret to savor and hoard, and I safeguard it with a bet.
If everything goes right with Louis today, then you one-hundred-percent absolutely have to tell the parents about him within the next week.
It will be a hard promise to keep, because I am sure the parents won’t like Louis, but I feel better knowing the deal has been made.

“He’s coming to our house?” Geneva repeats as we walk home from school that afternoon. “Does Mom know?”

“No, but Annie will be there. She’s our supervisor, and she told me to invite him, remember?”

“Sure I remember,” Geneva answers.

At home, however, Annie is nowhere to be found. Books are scattered on the kitchen table, and a box of chalk lies opened on the counter. A thumbnail sketch is taped to the refrigerator.

“Where do you think she went?” Geneva looks depressed. She rolls a stick of chalk over her palm. “Looks like she has everything all set up for us, like she wants us to get started. That must be the final sketch.”

“And Louis is coming.” A point of fact that seems more hazardous now that Annie’s not around. “What are we supposed to do?”

“Change clothes, first off. You don’t want him to think you wear your dumb uniform out of school. And you have pen on your cheek.”

“Oh, gross!” There is no time to think in the next fifteen minutes, as I concentrate on unearthing the right T-shirt to go with my jeans, brushing my hair fifty flattening strokes, borrowing one of Mom’s hair combs—then tossing it back on her dresser when the hair style makes me look like I tried too hard—and going through the business of sketching on and wiping off makeup.

I do not even hear the rattle of the front gate, or the doorbell.

“He’s here!” yells Geneva.

I squint one last time in my bedroom mirror, then the hall mirror, rub off more lipstick with the back of my hand, and glide down the stairs.

Geneva and Louis are standing in the kitchen. “It’s called a
trompe l’oeil
,” Geneva is explaining in her know-it-all voice, “which means trick of the eye in French. That’s what we and Annie are making in our kitchen.” She grabs one of the opened books on the table. “See? These birds are my idea. It’s going to be like a tropical paradise, sky all around. Cerulean blue plus cadmium scarlet are my bird colors. I picked them out.”

“I never saw anyone’s kitchen look like paradise,” Louis says with a smile as he glances over at me. I wave.

“We have creamsicles and salt-and-vinegar potato chips,” I tell him. I had practiced saying this sentence in the mirror and it comes out perfectly.

“What’s wrong with your voice, Holland?” asks Geneva. “If you’re getting a cold, don’t come near me. I’m very susceptible,” she informs Louis.

“Aren’t we all,” Louis replies seriously. “Do you have juice?”

“Yep.” I move to the fridge and cupboard.

“And we have coffee. Look, Holland, did you notice Annie left a full pot on?”

“Oh, great.” It is Annie’s own blend, too. Inhaling the warmth of spicy vanilla nutmeg makes me feel more at ease. “The artist came by earlier to set up,” I explain to Louis. “But who knows where she is now. She’s a little bit random.” I hand Louis a glass of orange juice, which he drains in an instant and hands back for a refill. His fingertips graze mine in the exchange; they are rough as bark, warm as summer. The sensation leaves me dizzy.

“She from around here?” Louis asks. He picks up a piece of chalk and jiggles a blue line on the wall, then steps back to look at it.

“She lives uptown,” I explain, “but she’s an artsy type. Her boyfriend’s an actor.” I immediately wish I hadn’t said the word boyfriend, since Louis might think that I consider him to be my boyfriend, or am considering boyfriends in general. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“I can do those trees,” Louis says, pointing to the refrigerator. “The sketch shows that you’re going to put a big spiky one right here. I’ll do that one, if you want.”

“I’m like the worst artist in my class, so if I’m allowed to paint, you definitely can.”

“She’s great at science,” Geneva says. “You should see her cell diorama. She got a ribbon.”

“Whoa,” says Louis. I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not, so I just roll my eyes and say nothing.

Geneva turns on the radio and Louis changes the dial.

“University station,” he explains. “It plays all the buzz clips, no repeats.”

“I never knew the University had its own music station,” I say.

“Our dad works for the University,” Geneva tells Louis.

“If your own dad works for the University, how could you two not know about this station?” he asks.

“He’s kind of old,” I admit.

“
I
knew about it,” Geneva says unconvincingly.

Louis uses bold, decisive outlines to define his sketch, so that the shape of his tree becomes as strong as the shape of the space around it. Geneva concentrates on details. She works on a far corner of the kitchen, filling a bird of paradise into the arm of a free-floating branch. The bird’s plumed head and rubbery toes are in perfect proportion. The leaves of my own sad shrub are a blur of uncertainty: nothing like the “espalier” diagram I am trying to copy from one of Annie’s books. No matter how I move my chalk against the wall, I cannot give life to my plant.

“I want my kneaded eraser,” I grumble after a while. Louis and Geneva barely acknowledge my words. Their chalkings are gorgeous compared with my own smudges. As I’m leaving the kitchen, I allow myself a glance at the lazy ripple of muscle that moves across Louis’s back as he works. He wears his sweatpants low, and I can see the white band of his underwear elastic. I watch for a while.

Upstairs, I cannot locate my eraser. I kneel on the floor and quickly dump out the top drawer of my desk. I don’t even know what I am doing up here, or why I care so much about finding the stupid eraser, anyway. It won’t make my sketch better, that’s for sure. A hot sweat begins to stick under my arms. I should change my T-shirt. No, that would look like I’m thinking about my outfits too much. I stand up and grab my deodorant, then bang it down again. I feel desperate.

Something about Louis’s presence in the kitchen makes me want to run. I imagine a panting flight out the front door, up the street to the Peacock Caffé, where I can sip an Italian soda in solitude. But running is not an option, not now.

Again I drop to crouch over the spilled contents of my desk. Still no eraser. I stand up and fling open the drawers of my dresser, recklessly searching for a T-shirt. In the half hour that he has been in my home, I could fill my entire notebook with facts about Louis Littlebird. The problem is that this Louis is more unpredictable than his notebook entries. He cannot be closed up inside a desk and savored between classes. Just thinking about writing in my notebook conjures up an image of my sweaty handprints, damp over the pages and plastic cover, and I realize my notebook, and my invented Louis, are no good to me anymore. The real Louis will not bend in the directions I choose, or beam back the thoughts that I project like light into a mirror.

Imaginary people are so much easier.

Fingers tap at the door.

“Yes?”

“It’s me.”

“You can come in.”

“Hey.” Louis stands in my room, an alien in my oasis of girlishness. His gaze skims my matching furniture, and I want to hide a dozen things—my horse posters and my Madame Alexander doll collection, to start. “Find your eraser?”

“I’m still looking.”

“Your sister’s like,
intense
about that bird. I don’t even think she noticed I left the kitchen to find you. Anyhow, I quit art for today. Come downstairs and admire my tree.”

“Okay.”

But instead of going downstairs, Louis ambles past me to the edge of my bed, where he sits and then stretches out on his back, lying halfway across the bedspread while his feet remain planted on the floor. I wonder if my bed will smell like Louis after he gets up. A thrilling thought. “I’m beat,” he says. “Tryouts killed me. I hope I make JV.”