The Liberation of Max McTrue

By Kim Culbertson

Have you ever had an extraordinary day?

Max hadn’t. Until one winter day when he met a girl.

THE LIBERATION OF MAX MCTRUE takes place in a single day. The classic Boy Meets Girl story. Well, sort of: Boy meets homeschooled girl. Boy ditches school. Boy finds his future. And there's an ice cream truck. And archery. It's a bit like what would happen if FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF and THE ALCHEMIST had a kid, well...a kid who was a YA eBook novella. You get the idea.

Max took a day off and found his life.

Who changed your life today?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781618428325

Kim Culbertson

Kim Culbertson has taught high school English, creative writing and drama for over ten years in both public and private schools and sees her writing as an extension of her teaching. She lives in the Northern California foothills with her husband and daughter, where she loves to drink coffee and look at the clouds.

Book preview

for my students,

past, present, future,

who have taught me how to not give a middle finger to the universe

Kim Culbertson

When the student is ready, the master appears – Buddhist Proverb

PART ONE:

SCHOOL

FIRST PERIOD 7:55–8:50 A.M.

SENIOR ENGLISH, MS. ROSSI

Two significant things happened to Max McTrue that day.  One was that his student teacher Ms. Rossi was definitely not wearing a bra in first period Senior English class.  The second was that he met Clara Jane Ramsey.  The first got him through an excruciating lecture on the theme of morality in Pride and Prejudice (Ms. Rossi’s lectures had nothing on her lack of undergarments, not to mention the physical irony she invoked that day).  The second changed his life forever. 

Actually, they didn’t happen in that order—no, Max had met Clara Jane earlier that morning, purely by accident, and without much incident.  In fact, by first period Max assumed that the clingy striped blouse that Ms. Rossi had deemed work-appropriate that morning would be the only thing of significance to impact his day.  Still, had he stopped to consider the incident, the interchange with Clara Jane at Java Jewel, her hair wet on that winter morning and curly in small loops about her face, had he stopped to ponder the way their worlds overlapped for that brief reaching-for-the-napkins-while-she-reached-for-the-sugar sort of way, he might have had an inkling.

But, honestly, that shirt of Ms. Rossi’s, or what was under it, was too distracting for him to ponder much in the way of chance meetings.

And Max, to be fair, didn’t consider himself much of a ponderer, had managed to make it most of the way through his unremarkable scholastic career without having to, well, think about things.  At least this is how he saw himself.  But before jumping to conclusions about Max, it’s important to point out that he was actually a naturally sensitive young man, intuitive in ways that boys aren’t supposed to be, not really.  Max knew something wasn’t quite right in the same way a tooth begins to ache but doesn’t cause you much trouble so you ignore it and avoid chewing on that side for a few days until it goes away.

Truth was, Max felt off lately.  Floating.  Distant, like he was watching a version of his own life through a straw.  People had always liked him.  His friends’ parents trusted him.  Teachers thought he was a good kid who mostly stayed out of their way and did what he was told.  Other kids liked him, called him all sorts of endearing nicknames that were not very creative derivations of his last name.  In football, he was McTrain for being steady, fast, reliable, a name that served him equally well in baseball.  In photography class, he was McLenscap.  Math: McFractions.  People would say things like, I don’t believe it - is that McTrue? when he would tell them something and then they’d crack themselves up.  He was McLovin’ for a brief stint when Superbad was popular, McMuffin, McKicker (football again), McDodge (his car), or sometimes just Mc – whatever.  It got old, but he didn’t really mind it.  Up until now, he didn’t really mind most things.

Now suddenly it was senior year and his friends were busy assembling thick college applications, heavy with the sum of their years of service and vigor and aptitude, and teachers and parents and random adults needed to know what he planned to make of himself someday, what he had planned.

Plans.

Plans were simply outside the hazy field of Max’s thoughts, that pair of socks he wore once and then let slip to the bottom of the drawer, never to emerge again.  His friends seemed to know how to plan, knew where their lives were going, knew they were heading to a fancy college or their uncle’s auto shop or traveling in Europe for a year.  But his whole life, Max had not been consumed with the anxious need to plan things,  didn’t seek out what made him different, what stood him apart from the crowd.  In fact, his firm planting in the middle of the pack had made for a smooth elementary and secondary career.  He wore the same sort of clothes most of the boys around him wore, played sports, worked his job, did his homework outside on the cafeteria benches most of the time, filling in slots and lines and making sure he held his GPA a little above the 3.0 line so as not to attract attention to himself. 

Max had actually started to feel some slight irritation at the fact that for so long he’d been rewarded for being so casually average and now, out of nowhere, the thing to do to get into the right sort of college, the right sort of future, was to figure out what set him apart from that same crowd he’d been so pleasantly snuggled into the middle of.  It would piss him off if Max were the sort of boy to get really pissed off about something.  Which he wasn’t.  Not so far.

As for the future, that out-of-sight-out-of mind-just-over-the-horizon haze, well, he hadn’t wondered much about it at all.  When things came his way that denoted the future – college brochures, dental appointment postcards, notices about the upcoming prom – he simply did one of two things: handed them to his mom or stuffed them in the bottom drawer of his desk, thereby erasing any need for him to think about them anymore. 

Sure, he wondered about things – what would he have for dinner, would the next Bond movie suck, what did Heather Taylor in his Planet Earth class look like naked – but he didn’t spend any significant time on the grander, universal big picture; it had never occurred to him that he should.  Not when things were so pleasant the way they were in the cozy present.

So now, of course, there was the small matter of the packets resting in front of him on his desk, the three slick, white 9x12 envelopes, each with his return address neatly inked in black pen in the corner, each with the smooth, typed address label his mom practically used a ruler to fasten evenly to the front, each smoothed label punctuated with a flip of her neat blonde ponytail.  Done.  Project College for Max.  Mission Accomplished.  After all her colored folders marked with individual schools that she had sorted based on geography and size, after her constantly evolving white board calendar with SAT dates and Hot Word of the Day! updates, after the essay she had stayed up late to type in his words but that he’d somehow never quite read the end of, after all of it they’d come to some sort of finish line.  His mother had mastered the college application process the way she would tackle the crab grass problem in the yard or a particularly tricky new tax law and then suddenly, over a quick sip of coffee before her run that morning, she’d sent him on his way with a cheerful cross-the-finish-line back pat. 

Now Max held this life of his neatly sheathed in white envelopes and he was supposed to drop them in the mail on the way to work at Java Jewel that morning as back-ups to the online applications waiting to be sent at home.  But he hadn’t.  Dropped them in the mail.

Something had stopped him.

Standing there in the dark, cold winter morning, he’d paused, his stomach tightening. There, in front of the old blue mailbox on the corner of Cottage Street in the town he’d lived in his whole life, he’d stopped, slipping the envelopes quickly into his backpack.  Then he hurried toward Java Jewel, its lit storefront warm and welcoming, through the door with the emblem of the white coffee cup with the single red ruby, into the faintly damp, warm coffee-infused air.

Ms. Rossi was saying something now about propriety.  Something about conforming to the standards of the polite world.  Respect.  Decency.  Morality.  Convention.  He tried to move his eyes to her face and not the sway of her chest, tried to write something down in his blank, open notebook. 

Respect, he wrote.  Convention.

Her words dissipating like steam, his eyes found the window, caught site of a figure moving out beyond the edge of the campus, out where the drop-off led to a soccer field, a baseball diamond.

Clara Jane Ramsey. 

Only he didn’t know it at the time.  Had only a faint snag of recognition in his chest.  The girl he’d brushed against at work that morning as he’d refilled the sweeteners, the little packets of pink and blue and yellow.  The girl with the wet curly hair, who’d smelled strangely of wood smoke and river water.

Ms. Rossi? He raised his hand.

She paused, as if noticing, suddenly, that the class before her was made up of individual students.  Yes?

Can I use the pass, please?

And because Max had never asked to use the pass, had never, that Ms. Rossi could remember, raised his hand to ask anything at all, in part because she couldn’t really remember this young man’s name, she nodded, watching as he gathered all his things – the packets on his desk, his notebook, his phone, his backpack – and left the room.

***

By the time he caught up to her, Clara Jane was following the mid-line of the soccer field, her eyes to the ground like a bloodhound. 

Lose something?  Max’s voice stretched out across the yawning field and it occurred to him that he’d never been on this field when it was empty, had spent many a P.E. class loping across it, but had never, ever been alone here.

Clara Jane didn’t look at all surprised to see him, and responded by holding one slender finger to her lips.  Her hair had dried into short, dark curls around her wide dime of a face.  She wore jeans and a large hooded sweatshirt the color of the steel sky above them and had a burgundy messenger bag slug over her shoulder.

Max waited, feeling a little ridiculous.  He had, after all, just left a class to come join her.  He realized, with a growing sense of alarm that felt an awful lot like the wad of nerves before a particularly important baseball game, he’d cut a class he needed for graduation with no intention of returning to it.  He stuffed everything he was holding into his backpack.  And waited.

Watching her, he also realized that for perhaps the first time in his life he had approached a girl who was somehow, inexplicably, separate from a group.  Girls, he had discovered sometime after first or second grade, seemed always to move as part of a  larger organism.  Sure, they skittered away solo at times, managed private conversations, murmured across phone lines that had always felt stealthy and secretive to Max, like he was borrowing them for a hushed moment from their rightful pack.  Their flock, actually.  Because Max had always thought of them as bird creatures, girls.  Part of strange, ornithological flocks.  Some exotic – their feathers, long wings and legs brightly on display, tittering, moving as a fluid, untouchable group.  Others seemed small and directive, like squat flocks of quail or ducks – purposeful and non-descript in their progress around campus.  Some large and Emu-like: athletic, land-based birds that shouldered past him in the halls with great force.  Most though, were swallows – flighty, and graceful, and quick to disappear, tucked away in some hidden place.  A flash out of the corner of his eye.

Here though, suddenly, this blue heron in front of him stilled, watched him back, her pale skin almost iridescent.  Alone against the blank expanse of field. 

My dog.

It took a moment for Max to realize she’d answered him.  Your dog?

Nodding, she made her way toward the baseball diamond, stopping to check inside a metal garbage can. 

You lost your dog? he repeated.

In a manner of speaking.

Max fell into step beside her.  I haven’t seen you around school.

I don’t go here.

Max knew the next closest high school was one county – and 30 miles – away.  Are you out of school?

I’m homeschooled.  She stopped to pull a single sheet of creamy paper from her sweatshirt pocket, unfold it, scan it quickly, fold it back up and jam it back into her pocket.

She may as well have said she was from France or Saturn.  You don’t go to school?  Max asked.

She paused, her eyebrows lifting, but didn’t answer.  Clara Jane was used to this sort of question, had pretty much stopped answering it several years before, happy to take a quick catnap in the silence that usually followed it. 

Max, who didn’t feel one way or another about homeschooling – it had never much crossed his mind or come up in conversation – was more curious