Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2)

by Rowe, Brian

  “Why would I have your shirt?”

  “Because. You know Mom. Half the time she gives me your clothes, and other times she gives you mine.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I never get your clothes. I’m a girl, Cam! Mom’s not stupid.”

  I stopped, and grinned ear to ear. I bit down on my bottom lip and shook my head as I pulled the long-sleeved blue shirt I was looking for out from the top drawer. I presented it to Kimber, like I was on The Price is Right and trying to get her to guess how much money it’d go for at the local Macy’s.

  “I don’t know how that got in there,” she said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I swear, I don’t—”

  “You know I love this shirt. Why would you keep it buried in all your clothes? Do you hate me that much?”

  “Hate you?” Kimber rushed up to me unexpectedly and hugged me around my waist. “Don’t say that! Don’t even think it! You know I love you. We almost lost you last summer for God’s sakes. Give me a little credit, please.”

  “I love you, too,” I said, patting her on the top of her head like she was a dog.

  “I mean, I can’t believe it,” she continued. “This time last May I never in a million years thought I’d be celebrating another Christmas with you. I thought you were a goner for sure.”

  “Well I’m here, Kimber. And I’m not going anywhere.”

  She grinned at me, her teeth now shining with a mouthful of braces. “You better not, Cam. I’m not letting go of you this time.”

  She brought her face back against my white shirt, her arms still wrapped around me. I thought we were reaching the end of our never-ending daily hug, but she didn’t budge. Making things more awkward, neither of us said anything for another ten seconds.

  Finally: “Uhh… Kimber?”

  “Mmm hmm?”

  “You can let go now.”

  She laughed and stepped back, running a hand through her hair, which had grown longer in the last few months and had started turning from brown to dirty blonde. “Of course. Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  I turned to leave the room, when she started jumping up and down so fast I thought a live mouse had raced past her feet. “Wait, before you go, you have to see this!”

  Kimber rushed over to her computer and powered it up with a touch of the keyboard.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Just look at this. Speaking of last summer…”

  She pulled up the Firefox Internet browser and clicked on a link she had saved in her Favorites folder. Obviously whatever she was going to show me was a website she had been visiting a lot lately.

  I reluctantly tiptoed over to her computer, knowing full well what she was going to show me, but hoping deep down that she was just excited about some cheesecake recipe, or a Christmas gift she had bought for mom online. I took a few steps closer and peered over her shoulder to see what I thought I was going to see.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t play it.”

  “I have to,” she said. “Cam, I’ve watched it a thousand times. And I still can’t get over it.”

  “I’ve explained to you, Kimber. As well as everyone else. It was a stunt—”

  “Whatever it is, it’s freaking cool!”

  She pulled up the infamous Youtube video and paused it before it started automatically playing. She scrolled down and started tapping her finger against the screen.

  “Anyway, this is what I wanted to show you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  She pointed at a number on the screen. I squinted and tilted my head forward, trying not to believe the number was real.

  “Is that?”

  “Mmm hmm,” Kimber said. “Only took six months.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “It’s true. Your little sky dance with your girlfriend just passed ten million hits on Youtube!”

  I shook my head some more, and then started moving it around in a circular motion, as if I was preparing myself for a long workout at the gym. I knew what happened to me last spring was difficult for the rest of Reno to believe. An accelerated aging disease? It took a lot for people, especially the students and teachers of Caughlin Ranch High, to understand the bizarre condition. For weeks on end I figured it was a hellacious disease, just some cancerous parasite ferociously dining on every cell in my body by the minute.

  But then after all my physical transformations, and emotional heartache, it turned out that my three months in purgatory weren’t caused by a disease at all. Those terrifying two and a half months turned out to be instigated by a mean-spirited curse, performed by Liesel back in the days when I wasn’t paying any attention to her. And after seeing the errors of my ways, not to mention, actually falling for the mysterious, strikingly beautiful redhead, she was able to miraculously save my life in my final, horrific moments at the ripe old age of eighty-five. Liesel let loose some crazy magic that night when she erased the curse by literally lifting me and everything else in the hospital room off the ground with only her mind. I’m still shocked to this day that nobody at the hospital recognized what was going on in room 416 at Washoe County Medical Center—all it took was for one late-night nurse to come prancing inside to investigate the loud noises to completely annihilate Liesel’s last-ditch effort to reverse my condition. I still pinch myself to this day that I lived through it, honestly. And to think, we were able to make it through those torturous weeks and months without anyone discovering just how powerful the wallflower really was.

  But that all changed on June tenth, my eighteenth birthday. My birthday happened to coincide with my high school graduation, and let’s just say I was the happiest I had ever been that night. During my unthinkable condition, all I wanted to do was make it through senior year and walk up the podium on graduation night to receive my high school diploma. But I never in a million years thought it was going to happen, especially when I turned really old, hitting my seventies, and suffering a heart attack at our state championship basketball game. It was over—kaput. There was no way I was going to make it to graduation. But somehow, I did. And not only was I alive on that warm June night, but I had a girlfriend, one I had just started dating, one that turned out to be the person who both started and stopped the maniacal curse. And I was in love, more so than I’d ever been with Charisma, more so than I’d been with all the girlfriends I’d had in middle school and early high school. There was something special about Liesel, something sweet, and certainly something dangerous. I knew this was a girl I wanted to get to know better, but I also knew her magical powers, so extraordinary, would probably rear their ugly heads sooner rather than later.

  I just didn’t know they would make an appearance to the entire auditorium that night.

  “Still?” I asked. “It’s been months.”

  “I still watch it from time to time. It looks so real. It looks like you and Liesel are literally floating through the air! I’m still mad you turned down that interview on Inside Edition. You and Liesel could’ve been more than just Youtube stars!”

  I rolled my eyes and tried not to panic.

  Liesel lifted me up thirty feet in the air that night for the entire auditorium to see, and nobody, including my own parents and sister, could believe his or her eyes. And of course, as Liesel and I floated back down to the gym floor and proceeded to charge out of the auditorium, half laughing, half scared out of our wits, it didn’t occur to either of us that many in that audience had video cameras equipped in their hands.

  I guess I should be lucky that only three videos of us flying were actually posted online, two of them shaky and grainy, with only one really showing us pull a Superman and Lois Lane in decent light and focus.

  But it had been a nightmare, first explaining to everyone that our realistic-looking floating had been an illusion, brought to life by invisible wires. And then the Youtube video went up three days later, going viral within forty-eight hours, showing the world the bizarre graduation stu
nt performed at Krueger Stadium in Reno, Nevada. All of the commenters believed the video to be a fake, thankfully, but nearly seven months later, people all over were still intrigued by our out-of-nowhere show spectacular. Liesel and I were asked to be on the local news, as well as Inside Edition, but we turned down all interviews, much to the dismay of my sister.

  What was I supposed to say? “Yes, we were actually floating. Because my girlfriend’s a witch. She can do that.”

  “There has to be a way to delete this stupid video, right?” I asked Kimber, who was more a know-it-all when it came to current technology than I was.

  “No can do. The user who posted the video is the only one who can.”

  I shook my head and turned away from the computer. I had to forget about it. Nobody had come for Liesel in all this time. And nobody was ever going to. Nobody can know her powers, I had told myself in those early days. And I still had to make sure nobody ever would, or could. Even with this video taking up all that web space.

  I can’t lose Liesel. If I lose her, I’ll have nothing.

  As I made my way toward the bedroom door, I turned around to see Kimber jump on her bed and throw half of another Kit Kat bar in her mouth.

  “Are you putting a dress or something on?” I asked. “Everyone’s gonna be here in a few minutes.”

  She sighed and gave me the evil eye. “I can’t just wear this?” She pointed down at a sweater and jeans.

  “Put on a dress, Kimber. It’s Christmas Eve.”

  “Uhh, OK, thanks Dad.” She stood up from the bed and headed over to her closet as I stepped out of the room. “Hey, you’re gonna put my underwear back, right?” At least twenty pairs were scattered all over the floor.

  I shrugged. “You told me not to touch them,” I said with a grin, shutting the door behind me.

  “You ass!” she shouted.

  The doorbell rang. I quickly sprinted into my bedroom to finish getting ready for the night’s festivities… and the big announcement.

  ---

  “Is this Cameron?”

  I had barely made my way into the hallway when I heard the high-pitched squeal of what I assumed to be a human being. I caught my dad’s parents to my right, when I saw the arms flailing toward me from my left.

  “Cameron? Is that really you?”

  I had a plump pair of lips plastered against my left cheek before I could tell for sure who the culprit of this mega smooch was. I took a step back and immediately brought my hands to my slicked back hair, which I had just sauced with a layer of gel.

  “Aunt… Aunt Margaret.”

  The woman before me was related to my mother, but I didn’t see it; I never could. Gray-haired, big boned, with a face only my mom’s dear-departed parents could love, she threw her flabby arms out in the air and demanded more public affection. When the doorbell rang behind me, I had never been so happy to hear the loud, echoing chime in my life.

  Liesel…

  I took five steps backward, watching in horror as my mom’s (much) older sister continued to stare at me like a hungry coyote, and I opened the front door. I happily sighed as two arms wrapped around me, and I figured they were the comforting arms of my beloved.

  But they weren’t.

  “Is this thee Cameron?” The voice sounded similar to Aunt Margaret’s, except even more excited. “Oh baby, baby, baby, come and let me take a good look at you!”

  I was spun around, at this point feeling like an inanimate ragdoll, and came face to face with a tall, manly African American woman who’d I’d never seen before, her lips pressed against mine before I was able to stop her. And this wasn’t just a smack. This was the kind of intimate smooch I normally reserved for Liesel, or my dear old librarian Mrs. Gordon, when I was too drunk to know the difference. Finally, the strong woman patted me down like I was at the airport, and smiled at me with a giant pair of slightly yellow teeth.

  “You’re as handsome as I imagined. So happy to finally meet you, baby!”

  She hugged me again, and I still had no idea who this person was. For all I knew, she had the wrong house, and I was spending this valuable time with a complete stranger.

  “Uhh, thank you, uhh, ma’am,” I said in a confused tone.

  She shook her head and took a few steps forward. “Where are my manners? You probably don’t have a clue who I am, do you?”

  I thought about lying. “I have no clue,” ended up escaping my mouth.

  I readied the reveal for who this strange woman was. But she didn’t tell me through words—she told me through her actions. I watched in amazement as she rushed across the room, wrapped her arms around Aunt Margaret, and kissed her so passionately on the lips I thought the two were going to start going at it right there in front of me.

  “Is that Darlene?” my mom Shari asked from the hallway, sporting a glass of wine in one hand and a spatula in the other. Finally taking in a moment without someone badgering me, I was able to make out old-timey Christmas music blaring over the speakers, and the smells of delicious treats cooking in the kitchen. “I’m so excited you decided to join us!”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!”

  The African-American woman hugged my mom, and I noticed for the first time she had a bag of presents in her right hand. My mom took it from her and handed the bag to me. “Cam, can you take this to the living room and put the packers under the tree?”

  Packers? What is this, 1959? “Uhh, sure. But can I ask what… umm…” I still was naïve, not entirely sure what this Darlene woman was doing here.

  Darlene laughed and pulled my mom’s sister close to her enormous bosom. She kissed her on the cheek and stared into her giant blue eyes. “Do you want me to tell him or should I?”

  Aunt Margaret squeezed the woman tight. “Cameron, this is my new beautiful bride, Darlene Waters.”

  Even though for years I had questioned why my mom’s fifty-five-year-old sister hadn’t married, it never occurred to me that she was a lesbian. I only saw her once a year, if that—she lives across the country near Hartford, Connecticut, where I was supposed to attend Yale this fall—and didn’t often think about the woman’s sexual preference. It took me a moment to warm up to the idea, but when I did, I embraced it.

  “That’s so cool. It’s nice to meet you, Darlene.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, too, Cameron. Where’s your baby sister?”

  “I think she’s still getting ready.” I nodded and watched with amazement as the two started kissing again, like they wanted to profess to the entire household their undying love for each other. I wonder what my dad would think about this, I thought to myself as I hauled the surprisingly heavy bag of gifts downstairs into the living room, which housed the six-foot-tall Christmas tree.

  The tree stood up straight in the back left of the room, next to our grand piano, which for at least a decade had sat unused. I dumped nine presents from the bag all around the tree, seven of which were for Margaret, none for me or Kimber, and took a step back to admire the simple but elegant job my mom did in decorating the tree. It seemed bigger every year. I felt so relieved that my mom still picked out real Christmas trees, as opposed to the more convenient, not at all the same, fake trees one could store year-round in the basement. This tree was perfect.

  “What do you think?” someone asked behind me, and I was happy to note it was the voice of a male. “Your mom pulled all the stops this year.”

  I turned around to see my dad Stephen. Reno’s most successful plastic surgeon, he looked especially happy and grateful tonight, like he was getting a chance to spend this special holiday with somebody he never thought he’d get to spend it with again. And it’s definitely not Margaret I’m thinking of.

  “Hey dad. Yeah, it’s really something.”

  “I keep telling her she can buy a fake one. It’d save her time every year, and definitely save us some money. But she says it’s just not the same, and I guess I have to agree with her.”

  He put a hand on my rig
ht shoulder and took a sip of egg nog.

  “Yeah I know what you mean,” I said.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Me? Fine.”

  “No problems?”

  “No. I’ve been good.”

  “You haven’t… you know… been feeling like you might start aging a few decades again?”

  I laughed. “No. I promise.”

  “Good.”

  I heard a sniffle coming from upstairs, and I turned around to see my mom snapping a few photos of us with her digital camera. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  “Mom…”

  She stepped into the living room, trying to control her emotions. Aunt Margaret and her new wife Darlene watched with big grins from the entrance hallway as my mom wrapped her arms around me.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever get to spend Christmas with you again, Cameron. I feel so lucky right now… so proud… so…”

  “I know, Mom.” I patted her on the back and smiled up at my dad, who I could tell was trying not to cry. “Don’t worry you guys. I’m fine now. You have nothing to worry about. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Just when I needed a break from the awkward introductions and emotional outbursts from my parents, the doorbell rang again, on cue. This time, I knew, it was bound to be someone really special.

  I made my way up the stairs, just in time to see my grandfather Bob walking across the entrance hallway to answer the door. “I got this,” I said.

  “Who is it, Cam?” The voice caught me off guard. I turned to my right to see Kimber standing on the staircase, looking glamorous in a skimpy pink dress that appeared more suitable for the prom than for Christmas Eve dinner.

  The prom… how could I forget?

  “What? Are you expecting a friend or something?”

  “No… well… maybe…”

  The doorbell rang again, and I heard my mom from the living room clearly shout, “Cameron! Open the door!”

  I did as she screamed, and expected to see Liesel. Instead, I was met with a young man I’d never laid eyes on before.

  “May I help you?”