by Rowe, Brian
Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2)
by
Brian Rowe
Kindle Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Brian Rowe
http://mrbrianrowe.blogspot.com
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
1. One
The nightmare was real. Again.
I crawled up the steep, scary mountain, trying to keep breathing, trying to keep my eyes open, the rain pelting down against the ground and splashing wet mud against my terrified face. I could hear the thunder exploding with fury above me, the lights in the sky signifying an impending apocalypse.
Worst of all, my diaper was giving me serious irritation on my butt cheeks.
My name is Cameron Martin. It’s Wednesday, April nineteenth.
And I’m a one-year-old.
Last year an unimaginable curse took hold of my body, causing me to age an entire year of my life with each passing day. For the last three months of my senior year of high school, I aged from seventeen to eighty-five, turning back to normal magically, and thankfully, just in time to see my high school graduation. In March of last year, I thought I had all the time in the world. In June I realized how precious life can be, and from then on I made a promise to myself to not waste a single second.
To make matters more complicated, the girl I fell in love with during those tumultuous three months turned out to be the girl who inflicted the evil curse upon me in the first place. My girlfriend is a witch, and a vastly powerful one at that. I knew by the time I started dating her that she had otherworldly powers, but I didn’t find out until nearly a year later just what this girlfriend of mine was capable of. Her name’s Liesel. And she’s the best, worst thing that ever happened to me.
It’s been nearly a year since Liesel cured me in that dark, depressing hospital room, nearly a year since I saw my whole life flash before my eyes. There I was, seventeen years old on the inside, eighty-five and rotting on the outside, waiting to die. But something extraordinary happened to me that night. I didn’t die; I got better. And in June I was finally able to put that horrific episode behind me.
But now, here I am, in the pouring rain, crawling through mud, nearly naked, once again counting the seconds to my death. And unlike last time, when the tiniest bit of hope carried me through to my final moments, tonight, I have no hope. None. There’s nothing she can do for me. There’s nothing he can do for me. And there’s nothing that demonic sorceress above wants more than to see me erased from this planet forever.
I knew tonight was the night I was going to die. But still, I couldn’t give up.
You have to keep going, I told myself. There was a miracle before. Maybe there can be a miracle again. Come on, Cameron. Move your scrawny little ass.
“Move!” I shouted, although something more like “Mooo” came out of my infant mouth.
I tried to push through the mud faster, but I kept sliding. I tried to kick up with my feet, but that wasn’t helping either. I always wondered why memories from our first few years of life were typically suppressed by the time we hit puberty. I realized now it was because the helplessness we feel under the age of three is the most terrifying feeling in the whole world, more so than loss, more so than pain. The helplessness I’ve felt in the last few hours has been nothing short of debilitating. I feel thankful that my eighteen-year-old mind has stayed in tact these last two weeks, no matter how young I become, but I’m also not happy having these teenaged thoughts in a body reserved for someone whose main concern in life is to cry a lot and crap a lot.
Must keep going…
I was halfway up the mountain by now. It had been mere minutes since she had cast me down the mountain, mere minutes since she assumed I was to be a dead, rotting carcass. But one thing she didn’t know about me is that I fight until the very end. As long as my pudgy, thirty-inch-body kept moving, and as long as oxygen still found its way into my pink, spotless lungs, I knew I’d try my best to stay alive. Kill me now and I’ll stop. Let me keep breathing, and I’ll get to the top of this mountain if it’s the last thing I do.
I figured by the time I reached the peak of the mountain that the rain would start calming down. But it didn’t. The further I climbed, the worse it became; the heavy rain smashed against my head like a tidal wave from Hell. As much I didn’t love the snow in those freezing Reno winter months, I would’ve welcomed a five-minute blizzard recess from this calamitous downpour.
Thankfully, though, the incessant rain only meant one thing: I’m not the only one who’s still putting up a fight.
I puckered my lips and blinked a few times, noticing that my eyesight was going blurry. I could see flashing lights at the top of the mountain, bolts of lightning crashing down from the black, angry sky. I wanted to reach the top, but with every inch further I climbed, the further away the peak of the mountain seemed to get.
I stopped and turned around, glancing down below to see a flash flood overtaking the adjacent park and parking lot. A lone Volkswagon Beetle drifted down the nature-made river toward the crowded I-5 freeway. It was understandable, and understood, that nobody in Los Angeles would be taking a midnight hike tonight. But here I was, on my hands and knees, crawling up the world’s largest mud pile to see if my beloved was still alive.
If she goes, I go.
“Cameron!”
It was faint, but noticeable in the distance. I heard my name shouted again, this time more clearly. Most remarkable of all, it wasn’t Liesel.
It can’t be.
I crawled as fast as my puny arms and legs would let me, bypassing the wettest parts of the mud, which by now were slowly forming into a nearly unavoidable mudslide. I wanted to jump up to my feet and run faster than the speed of sound, just bolt with all my might until I reached the top to see once and for all the aftermath of what had been the longest, most unusual, most haunting two weeks of my life.
This from someone who spent three months last year aging into an eighty-five-year-old man.
“Cam!” he shouted. “I’m here! I’m here!”
“I can hear you!” I shouted back, but what came out of my mouth was “Ikearu!”
Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Thirty. I didn’t hear him. He stopped shouting. I wondered for a moment if all the screaming from the other side of the mountain had been a product of my child-like imagination.
I was almost at the top. I could feel the top. I reached my arms out and prepared myself for the final pull.
He finally said something again.
“Cameron!” he shouted. “Where are y—”
A flash of lightning crashed against the mountain just yards in front of me, and the land beneath me started to shake. My legs slipped out from under me, and I lost my grip.
The entire mountainside transformed into a gigantic, terrifying mudslide.
“Oh shit!” I shouted. That phrase came out normal.
I kicked my feet against the ground, clawed through the mu
d with my small, pathetic hands, and rolled myself up to the top of the mountain, just in time to see a massive, jaw-dropping mudslide crash down the mountain like an avalanche of destructive chocolate milk.
I took the deepest breath I could, laid back against the top of the mountain, and looked up to see a bolt of lightning headed right for me.
This night’s just gone from worse to a lot worse, I thought.
A few days ago I was eighteen years old. Currently, I’m one. And in a few minutes, I’ll be gone.
Throughout the month of April, I have been de-aging a whole year of my life with each passing day. Last year I had three months to tackle my embarrassing, inexplicable curse. This year, I’ve had less than three weeks. There just hasn’t been enough time.
Time’s all but run out.
“Liesel! I love you!”
I have no idea what escaped my mouth in those final, fleeting moments of my young adult life, but I hoped she could hear me. She had to hear me. After all, what more could I have hoped for in those final breaths than to know that Liesel, in all her glory, would go on, and feel my love… forever.
I exhaled one last time, closed my eyes, and focused my final thought on an image of happier times: Liesel on the mountain bike. She was so fast. So very fast.
In a brief, exhilarating moment, I was transferred back four months to a chilly Christmas Eve, when all was right in the world.
2. Eighteen
“Hey! No magic! No magic!”
“That’s your excuse for everything,” Liesel said with a laugh as she breezed by me on her mountain bike, her red hair blowing in the ferocious winds of the deserted Reno mountains.
We had been racing along the Steamboat Ditch Trail up in the Caughlin Ranch area of Reno for nearly an hour on this crisp Wednesday morning, one that started like any other, but one that was to end like no other in the history of my brief but eventful life.
“Now you’re just showing off!” I shouted as Liesel for the first time pulled out so far in front of me I could barely make out her bike in the distance. I hadn’t kept up with my athletic training since my basketball days ended last May, and even though Liesel and I frequented this bike trail a lot lately, my stamina and strength certainly weren’t what they used to be.
I looked forward. Now I couldn’t see her at all.
“Leese! Where—”
I turned a corner, leading me to a cliff that looked out over all of Reno. I could see casinos in the distance, the Truckee River, three golf courses, a plane taking off from the Reno-Tahoe International Airport. I had spent eighteen years trying to get out of this place, but now, I felt proud to call it my home.
Liesel appeared in the distance, sitting backward on her bike, her arms crossed, disappointed in my lackluster biking skills.
“You’re pathetic,” she said. “I expected more from the star basketball player!”
“Umm… do you see a basketball hoop out here?”
I almost knocked my bike into Liesel’s as I raced past her at the speed of lightning, taking her by surprise as I sped down the trail, less than a mile away from the street we liked to think of as the imaginary finish line.
“Not fair!” she shouted from way back.
“You shouldn’t have stopped!” I shouted into the wind, but I wasn’t sure if she could hear me.
Of course she heard me, I thought. The girl can float thirty feet up in the air. She can hear me. She can probably hear my thoughts, too!
That final theory of Liesel’s powers left me so terrified that I nearly crashed my bike into the large dirt mound beside me.
“I’m catching up!” Liesel shouted. “Don’t look back! I’m gaining, Cam!”
“No magic!” I shouted back.
I could hear her laughing, the echoes of her bike tires approaching closer by the second. “Oh, shut up!”
I turned the bend, and then another. The street was fifteen seconds away, ten seconds. The finish line was in my reach.
“I’m gonna win!” I shouted. “You don’t stand a—”
Liesel’s bike blew past mine in the final few yards, her back wheel kicking up dirt in my face, making me lose my balance and tip my body, and the bike, to the right.
Uh, oh.
“Liesel, what—”
I crashed to the ground on my right side and watched as my bike spun into the air and over the cliff. I stopped myself from falling, just in time to look over the edge to see my precious mountain bike smash against the steep slope, flipping time and time again until it finally stopped against the big, sharp rocks at the bottom of the cliff.
“Oh my God…”
“Oh my God!” Liesel shouted, running over to me. “Cam, are you OK?”
Liesel helped me back up to my feet. I looked down to see that I was covered head to toe with dirt, and my right arm had a nasty scrape that ran all the way down to my elbow.
I shook a ton of dirt out of my hair and coughed a few times. “I’m fine.”
“You got a nasty cut there,” Liesel said, analyzing the small wound on my arm. “Come on, let’s go. You need a band-aide.”
She tugged on my left shoulder, but I didn’t budge. I just stared at her. “Seriously?”
I watched as her eyes met mine. She didn’t seem to know what I was referring to. “What?”
“A band-aide?” I brought my hands to my hips.
She smiled and took a step closer to me. She looked like she wanted to make out with me for the second time this morning, even though my lips were browned with dirt.
“Cam, I’m sorry I beat you, but come on, seriously, you had it coming—”
I started shaking my head so fast it looked like I was having a seizure. “That’s not what I’m mad about. I’m mad that you’re telling me you need to put a band-aide on this.” I raised my bloody arm for Liesel and the rest of Reno to see.
She just shrugged.
I opened my eyes wide. “Can’t you just… I don’t know… flick your wrist and say a quick spell to make this scrape go away?”
She smiled again, knowing where I was going with this.
“And you could’ve stopped me from hitting the ground in the first place,” I said. “And!” I took a step forward and kicked a rock off the top of the cliff. “You could’ve saved my bike! Look at it! It’s ruined!”
Liesel and I peered down to see the bike upside down, both its tires slashed from all the sharp rocks.
“I’m sorry, Cam, but you know—”
“You made a frog float in the air. A frog! Why not the bike?”
“Cam—”
“You’re a witch for Christ’s sake!”
Liesel lunged forward and pushed me down to the ground. She straddled herself on top of me, and not in a good way.
“Cam, you promised me you’d never use that word.”
“I know but—”
“And we’re never to discuss this in the open. What the hell is wrong with you?”
I looked to my left. We weren’t in the middle of nowhere that I originally thought. The street was just yards away, with the backyard of a house facing us.
“Do you know what could happen if I slip up again?” she asked.
“I… I know.”
“We could be torn apart forever. Do you want that?”
I shook my head. No. Absolutely not.
“OK,” she said, jumping to her feet and pulling me up. I now had dirt falling down into my butt crack.
“You’re amazing, you know,” I said, trying to get back on her good side again.
“I know I am,” she said with a laugh. “Maybe not as amazing as you’d like me to be…” She kissed me on the tiny part of my cheek that lacked any remnants of dirt. “But amazing nonetheless.”
“So then… a band-aide?”
“Yes, a band-aide. Come on, let’s move it. We’ve got a big day ahead of us.”
You have no idea, I thought, as I followed Liesel toward the street.
I turned the corner and lost sight
of her for a moment. I saw her bike near the street, but I didn’t see her. I thought she said she wasn’t going to use magic. Did she just make herself disappear?
When I finally reached her bike near the end of the dirt trail, I turned to my right to hear footsteps coming my way. Scared that the approaching figure would be a tiger, a bear, or—yikes—Mrs. Gordon on a morning jog, I took a deep, satisfying breath when I saw Liesel walking my sad, wounded bike up the side of the hill.
“It’s not that bad,” she said. “Your dad can probably fix this, right?”
“I can do it,” I said, proudly. “I’m good with bikes.”
She chuckled and started walking the bike toward the street. “Yeah. Sure you are.”
She turned the corner and waved for me to follow her. “You want to ride your bike?” I asked.
“You ride it,” she said. “I’ll walk.”
I shook my head, enamored by her big heart and never-ending kindness. And after I ignored her year after year after…
I started following her, smiling to myself, trying not to shout what I’d been thinking for the past few weeks and ruining the big surprise.
Today’s going to be a big day, I thought. Oh yes. A very big day.
---
My sister Kimber was munching on a Kit Kat bar when I stormed into her bedroom unannounced. It was 5:30 P.M. and already starting to get dark outside.
“Have you seen my shirt?” I asked. “My long-sleeved, dark blue shirt?”
I raced over to Kimber’s dresser drawer and started fumbling through her underwear.
“HEY!” she shouted, jumping to her feet and slamming the underwear drawer shut. “You pervert!”
I pulled open her bottom drawer before she could stop me. “It’s not in my room, Kimber. I want to wear it tonight.”
The annoyed little girl, now not that little anymore at nearly fourteen years old, stomped her feet against the ground and crossed her arms, like her body language would somehow get me to vacate her room. Kimber was in the eighth grade now, and she had shot up a few inches since last summer. She’d lost some weight, too, even though her eating habits stayed exactly the same.
