The Shepherds

There were three of them: Danny Boyce, Lauren Ryder and Toby Bright. They met in Playgroup, and then always ended up in the same classes at school after that. In their first nativity play at infant school, they played the shepherds, and people just started referring to them by that name. The Shepherds. It just stuck. They were inseparable, those three. Best friends. Everyone in the whole town knew The Shepherds.

***

Danny died first. He'd been ill for about two years, and by his twelfth birthday he'd lost all his hair. His older sister, Bethany, had donated bone marrow, but it didn't work. Bethany had always been ugly and unpopular - when everyone found out she was going to be the donor, they said, well, at least she's good for something. But she wasn't, not really, because Danny still died. Danny was one of the most popular kids in the whole town, never mind the school. Everyone knew him. His funeral was huge. All the shops in town must've been shut that day, because literally everyone was there. Toby Bright was asked to read at the funeral; he read from the Bible - a passage selected by Danny's mum - and then he read a poem they'd studied at school, which Danny had acted out in front of the class. Sheila Henley followed Toby's reading with a song. Sheila hadn't even been particularly good friends with Danny, but she was the only girl in his year who could really sing. No one else from school read at the funeral. Lauren had been asked, but she didn't want to. She'd been the last one to see him alive.

Lauren had been at his house the day he died. She used to visit him twice a week, without fail. Everyone at school knew this, and people would often give Lauren cards and presents to pass on to Danny. People were always giving Danny presents. He used to accept them graciously, even though he probably didn't really want them. As well as passing on gifts from others, Lauren used to give things to Danny herself. She used to make collages of pictures cut out from holiday brochures, promising Danny that he'd be able to go to all these places once he got better. She even managed to convince the Art teacher, Mr Pennell, to let the whole class make a collage for Danny. It was that collage which she took to him on the day he died.

As Lauren was such a frequent visitor, she struck up quite a friendship with Bethany. Lauren was probably the only girl in school who could stand to talk to Bethany for more than five minutes. It didn't do Lauren any favours with the other kids at school, though, when they saw her talking to Bethany Boyce. After Danny died, Lauren's friendship with Bethany fizzled out, and Bethany ended up leaving town, and going to live with her dad in Scotland.

After Danny died, Lauren told people from school that he had loved the big collage. Other than that, no one knew anything about that last time Lauren had seen Danny. All anyone knew was that Lauren went round after school, then left after a couple of hours. The walk home probably took about half an hour, and by the time she arrived, Danny's mum had already phoned to say that he was dead.

***

Lauren Ryder made the best cup of tea in the world. Everyone said so. She was very precise about the way she did it, insisting that the water had to go in first. Lauren couldn't stand it when people ruined tea by putting the milk in first. Everyone at school knew that Lauren's tea was the best, and that was largely the reason why people would go to her house.

As far as anything else in the kitchen was concerned, Lauren was hopeless. She tried to cook, sometimes, but she couldn't do it. She once made chicken nuggets for Luke Brandon, but they were pink in the middle and he was sick. The whole school heard about it; Luke Brandon told everyone. Lauren's cooking became a running joke. And so whenever people went to her house after that, they'd have a cup of tea, but they wouldn't stay to dinner. That's just the way it was.

Since Danny's death, Lauren hadn't been so popular at school. A lot of the girls she'd been friends with before had only really liked her so they could be near Danny. There was nothing really wrong with Lauren, she just wasn't very popular. On her fifteenth birthday, she'd wanted to have a party, but she ended up going to the cinema with Toby Bright, because no one else wanted to come. People still called them The Shepherds, but neither Lauren nor Toby particularly liked that name anymore.

Lauren had developed a bit of a habit of skipping school. She used to go into town on her own, or invite people back to her house for tea (even though not many people really liked Lauren, few were foolish enough to refuse her offer of tea). One Thursday in February, Lauren was supposed to be doing a presentation in English, but she didn't turn up. The teachers all knew she was a regular truant, and Mrs Semple, the English teacher, had had just about enough of it. She started screaming and shouting when she realised Lauren hadn't come to class that day. Everyone said Lauren was really in for it this time, and her inevitable confrontation with Mrs Semple the next day was eagerly anticipated.

Lauren's mum, Fiona Ryder, worked at the launderette in town. She got home at 5.45 every day. And this particular Thursday, she noticed when she got home that the house was much hotter than usual. The heating was on full. She went upstairs, and saw that the bathroom door was shut. She knocked, but got no answer, so she decided to open the door. And it was then that she saw her daughter, naked and dead in the bath, with blood still spilling out of her wrists and pinkening the tepid bath water. And at that sight, Fiona Ryder passed out, right there on the blood-stained linoleum floor.

***

So, by the time he turned sixteen, Toby Bright had read at two funerals. The poem he read for Lauren was one she'd written herself, after Danny died. She'd only ever shown it to Toby; he was the only person who knew it existed. But when he was asked if he would read at Lauren's funeral, her poem was the first and only thing he thought of. It was about the empty feeling of grief, and how much Lauren missed Danny. Once Toby had read it, everyone decided that Lauren must have killed herself because she couldn't live without Danny. But she hadn't left a note or anything, and it happened more than three years after Danny's death. It was only Toby who was convinced, without a doubt, that Lauren hadn't killed herself because of Danny. But he wouldn't tell anyone why he believed this, so he didn't change anyone's mind. He got really angry about it a few times, complaining that people were turning Danny Boyce and Lauren Ryder into some screwed up Romeo and Juliet pastiche. Some people said that Toby was probably jealous, as he'd probably been in love with Lauren himself. But most people agreed that it wasn't like that. He was just upset. No one should have to attend the funerals of their two best friends before they've even turned sixteen.

***

Toby Bright had always been one of the cleverest people in school, a fact which led many teachers to make irritating puns on his surname. When the time came to apply to universities, Toby had no problem getting accepted. The university he chose was over a hundred miles from home, and some people thought that was probably the deciding factor for Toby. Since Lauren's death, he'd made no secret of his determination to get the hell out of here. Everyone knew that Toby hated both the town and its inhabitants, but most people chose to ignore this fact. When people saw Toby's parents, in the supermarket or at church, they'd ask how he was doing, and his parents would try and think of a non-embarrassing way of saying that they didn't know. He never phoned them. He'd tried to detach himself completely from his family and home. When he didn't return for the Christmas holidays in his first year, everyone assumed they'd never see him again. And they didn't.

But he did come back. On the seventh anniversary of Danny Boyce's death, the local hospital joined forces with the school to host a fund-raising weekend. They were going to open a new cancer unit, named after Danny. They were also going to open a commemorative garden in the park, which was to be named the Danny Boyce Memorial Garden. The school headmaster, Mr Punt, wrote to Toby at university, inviting him to read at the opening of the garden. When it was revealed that Toby was going to read at another public event, people started joking that he'll probably end up reading at his own funeral.

The weekend began with the surprising return of Bethany Boyce. Having reached the age of twenty, she was almost unrecognisable to most of the town, even to some of the people who'd been in her year at school. She'd sorted her teeth out, and done something to her hair, and suddenly she looked quite attractive. Word spread quickly all over town about the amazing transformation of Bethany Boyce, and she became the main topic of conversation for most people. The general excitement about Bethany that Saturday morning was probably the main reason that no one noticed that Toby hadn't arrived.

It transpired that, while he wholeheartedly supported the idea of the Danny Boyce Cancer Unit, Toby was pretty disgusted about the Memorial Garden. He didn't think the garden itself was a bad idea, but he was appalled that it was being dedicated to Danny alone, and not Lauren. It was true that people didn't really talk about Lauren Ryder anymore. Suicide was an unpleasant topic. Unlike Danny, who fought a heroic battle against leukaemia but was eventually defeated, Lauren chose to die in the messiest way, leaving her mother to find her in horrific circumstances. Parents all over town thought Lauren's suicide an act of sheer selfishness.

Toby himself never got the chance to voice his disgust at the way Lauren had been treated by the town - vilified at worst, ignored at best. He included his thoughts on the matter in his speech, which was to be read at the opening of the Danny Boyce and Lauren Ryder Memorial Garden, as he called it. The speech was given to Toby's mother at the hospital, along with the other items Toby had been carrying at the time of the accident. Toby's mother read the speech herself, at her son's funeral.
         
He'd come home on the train, and he got the bus from the train station. His train had been delayed, so he was already hopelessly late, and he had to go home and change his clothes before going to the town hall, where the festivities were already underway. So when he got off the bus, Toby immediately went to cross the road, not seeing the red car that was overtaking the bus at about forty miles per hour. It was almost fifteen minutes before Toby died. At first, he just lay there, staring upwards as his eyes began to glaze over. Everyone got off the bus, and pedestrians joined them in crowding around the body. A few people attempted to calm the frantic driver of the red car, whose cries could be heard two streets away: he just ran out in front of me ... what could I do? What could I do? Some members of the crowd recognised the bleeding body as Toby Bright, and began an effort to contact his parents. One man tried to revive Toby, who had slipped out of consciousness within three minutes of being hit, but to no avail. By the time the paramedics arrived, they were collecting not a patient, but a body.

***

Despite this new tragedy, the Danny Boyce Memorial Garden was opened as planned, only without the big ceremony. Bethany Boyce came and snipped a ribbon, and that was pretty much it. Despite the protests of a few members of the community, the garden was never renamed to honour either Lauren or Toby.

Within two years of its opening, the Danny Boyce Memorial Garden was closed after four teenage girls were sexually assaulted there. It had already been considered a pretty dodgy place; everyone stopped walking their dogs there only a few months after it opened, because Jenny Harrison's collie stepped on a hypodermic needle and only narrowly escaped having to have its foot amputated. These memorial things always seem like a nice idea at the time, but many residents ruefully acknowledged that you can't stop people being people. Drug addicts and criminals didn't seem to have that much respect for a kid who died nearly ten years ago.


People don't really talk about the Shepherds anymore; when they do, though, they always still refer to the group by that name - The Shepherds. It just stuck. And it's one of those things, where even though no one ever mentions them, everyone knows. You could talk to pretty much anyone in the whole town, they all know the story. They just couldn't forget a thing like that.


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BRIT ALERT
Please read before you review
I'm British and, as such, spell things differently than Americans do. Having been "corrected" on correct British spellings in many reviews before, I decided to add this disclaimer to some of my stories. Please bear in mind that many words ending -or in the US end -our in the UK; words ending -ize in the US end -ise in the UK; and we do not have the word "gotten" — over here it's simply "got". There are various other differences, of course, these are just a few that I'm always getting picked up on. Please consider our cultural differences before "correcting" my spelling and word usage!