Free Birthdays of a Princess by Helga Zeiner Page A

the kitchen for a long
while, fuming.
    If only she hadn’t told him she’d write down the names of Tiara’s
friends. How could she? There were none.
    Tiara had always been a loner. She had not been close to anybody in
Vancouver, and even growing up in Texas, she had not sought out friends. It
wasn’t for lack of opportunity, she had come in contact with lots of girls her
age down south, at every beauty pageant, but she never started a friendship
with any of them. Once, Tiara had been five or six then, a girl who
participated in the contest had come up to her in the hotel lobby and had
wanted to give her a stuffed teddy. The little girl was hugging the stuffed
toy, it had a heart-shaped pendant dangling over its fluffy tummy, while
approaching Tiara with a wide smile. When she was close enough, she extended
her hand with the teddy in a straight-forward, generous gesture, delivered with
a generous smile. You want to be my friend?
    Tiara had slapped the girl’s hand so hard the teddy sailed over the
runner in the hotel lobby, bounced off a stainless-steel rubbish bin, the
heart-shaped pendant harshly clink-clonking against the metal, and landed on
its tummy next to a suitcase with rollers. The owner of the suitcase, the mother
of another contestant, picked it up and, thinking it was Tiara’s (everybody
always concentrated on Tiara first, she had this air about her), wanted to hand
it back to her. The little giving girl had lost her smile. Children can change
their moods so quickly. She tried to grab the teddy back and at the same time
she tried to hit Tiara. Suddenly those two had a fight, slapping at each other
without targeting properly, but still. The grown-ups had to separate them,
screaming and kicking.
    “What on earth possessed you?” she had asked Tiara once she was calm
again. “You could have just said ‘no, thank you’, the other girl meant well.
She had only wanted to make friends with you.”
    “Mom, you are soooo stupid,” Tiara had said with those airs. “She
probably sneezed on that stupid bear, wanting to give me a cold.”
     
    She could never tell Detective Macintosh about this, of course. He
would only paraphrase it into so, your daughter always had a tendency to
violence! But aside from that long ago and in hindsight rather harmless
incident, Tiara had never been aggressive.That she had now flipped out
in public and attacked a complete stranger in that coffee shop was an isolated,
out-of-character rage thing. Chalk it down to pubescent confusion. It was a
phase, nothing else. Sure, she had been a touch unbalanced when they had left
Texas three years ago. But many people, especially at that age, went through
rough patches and pulled themselves together again and got on with their lives.
Entertainment Tonight often featured young stars who went through difficult
times and then had a fabulous comeback.
    All those dreams, all those hopes for the future, where were they
now? Tiara at eighteen, in a flowing evening gown, with a smile brighter than
the sun, lighting up the auditorium, waiting for the beauty queen crown to be
placed on her proudly-raised head. Her Tiara, Miss America at last!
    Tiara would never get a shot at a comeback if the police knew about
that previous outburst of anger, as young as she’d been then. Tears of frustration
and anger welled up in her again. She should make an official complaint about
this detective. She had seen it in his face, he hated her!
    He had been pushing her to say the wrong things. But she had held
her own! Even when the name came up. Princess Tia. Really. It was none of his
business what Tiara called herself. For the police she was Tiara Brown. Melissa
had taken care to drop the fateful Rodriguez when she had her daughter added to
her own passport.
    She hoped the detective would stop pestering her now. Her explanation
had sounded pretty plausible, but she could do even better than that. She
looked at her watch. It was twelve thirty. She called her boss at