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

by Rowe, Brian

  I leaned myself forward against the sink and tossed aside all my cosmetics to allow my arms to rest on the counter. I closed my eyes again, but I didn’t know why. There was no hiding from the truth now. There was no denying that Liesel had gone against her so-called magic sabbatical and cast a spell on me Saturday night.

  At least she’s not repeating herself, I thought. At least she keeps things original.

  I didn’t laugh. Instead, I opened my eyes, revealing a face I hadn’t seen in years. It was the face of someone I had tried to forget.

  My face sported nearly a dozen pimples, ranging in size from a grain of salt toward the bottom of my chin to the size of a blueberry on the edge of my right cheek. My jaw dropped, and I started to breathe erratically, as if I were suffering a panic attack.

  I’d had an acne problem for six months during my freshman year of high school, until my dad fixed me right up with a set of acne-fighting herbal cleansers.

  The revolting pimples had been a daily problem. But just for a short while.

  Back when I was a freshman, in high school.

  When I was fifteen years old.

  “I’m fifteen again,” I said out loud. “I’m fif—”

  I collapsed to the floor and threw up in the toilet.

  Then I called Liesel.

  ---

  It took ten minutes to find a shirt and pair of shorts that would actually fit my new, tinier, slender body, and then I had to spend another full minute in the car moving the driver’s seat as far up as it would go. A lot of changes were taking place, and I knew the only happy truth to get me through the day was that Liesel would fix me and my newfound problem by the end of her extended lunch break.

  I wonder what she’ll do to fix me this time…

  I already called Liesel once from the bathroom. She said it was near impossible to get away from her shift until noon, but I begged her, telling her something catastrophic was again happening to my body, and she told me she’d figure out a way to meet me. Idlewild Park, near the hospital, and just five blocks from Uncle Tony’s, seemed the ideal place. She said to meet at the swings. Again.

  The swings…

  I pulled off California Avenue and started speeding through a school zone. Taking a short cut to the park, I realized I was passing my sister’s middle school. There were no kids outside, and I was confused why the 15 M.P.H. sign was blinking. I made it to the end of the street, and then took two more rights, until I could see the park up ahead.

  I picked up my phone and tried Liesel again, just to make sure she was already there or, at least, on her way.

  She picked up after the first ring. “Cam?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “OK, I’m walking to the swings,” she said. “My boss doesn’t know I’m here. I could get in real trouble for this—”

  “Forget about your job, Leese!” I shouted, frantic, terrified. “I’m having a major problem here!”

  “I’ll fix it, Cam. Whatever it is, I’ll fix it. Relax. I’m here now.”

  “Thank God for that. OK. I’m a minute away. I’ll meet you at the swings.”

  “OK.”

  I tossed the phone on the passenger seat and entered one of the many entrances to the park. I passed a large, public swimming pool, which looked closed due to the chilly weather. I passed two tennis courts, and an abandoned mini amusement park that was only operational in the summer. I sped up a little as I started driving alongside the Truckee River, which was roaring with violent life like I’d never seen it before. I could see the baseball stadium up ahead. The jungle gym, slide, and swings, were just past it.

  Almost there, Leese. Oh God, please fix me. Please fix me.

  I sped past the stadium and then made a left turn into a large parking lot, which only housed two cars at the moment. The blue car on the left was Liesel’s.

  I pulled up next to her car, turned off the ignition, and looked through the windshield.

  There she was, not swinging happily on any one of the four swings, but standing next to them, her arms crossed, wearing her dorky green restaurant garb, tapping her feet against the dirt like she was getting impatient.

  I looked down, grabbed my phone, and took a deep breath. Let’s do this.

  I opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel pavement, taken by surprise by not only the fierce winds but the cold temperatures, particularly freezing for mid April.

  I locked my car and started walking up to the swings, looking down at the ground for a moment, trying to move my eyes away from the increasingly growing winds.

  What the hell is going on?

  It started to feel like I was in the center of a tornado, with the dirt shooting up in the air like God above was blowing wind against the ground.

  What the—

  And then, faster than I could snap my fingers, the wind stopped. I found my balance, blinked a few times, and stared forward.

  Liesel was gone.

  I thought maybe she had moved places, but the closer I got to the swings area, the more I realized she was nowhere to be found.

  “Leese? Where’d you go?”

  I darted my eyes left and right, upward and downward. I didn’t see her. Worse, she wasn’t answering me back.

  “Liesel?”

  I made my way to the swings. All four of them were moving up and down, like busy little kids had just been using them. I turned around to look at where I had walked from. My car was still there. Liesel’s car was still there.

  That third car wasn’t there.

  Instead, someone was driving it out of the parking lot.

  “Hey!”

  I started sprinting across the dirt, then the field, all the way to the left side of the parking lot. The vehicle was a big brown van. I hadn’t thought anything of it when I pulled up. But now I needed to see who was inside of it.

  “Hey! Stop!”

  I raced past Liesel’s car and surprised even myself at not tiring at all from my running—one of the pluses of time traveling back to age fifteen—but I still wasn’t fast enough to catch up to the speeding van.

  “Stop! Stop, goddammit!”

  I made my way to the street to see the van veer onto California Avenue and make a right, disappearing around the corner.

  That wasn’t a coincidence, I thought. Liesel disappears from sight and a strange car just takes off.

  I started rushing back to my car, wanting to follow after the van.

  But as I pulled out of Idlewild Park and drove up and down California Avenue for the next thirty minutes, I realized that there was no way in hell I was going to find it. I dialed Liesel ten times, then another twenty, but she didn’t answer her phone. Every call went straight to voice-mail.

  I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go to the police. I didn’t have any proof that she was actually kidnapped.

  Plus I’m an eighteen-year-old in a fifteen-year-old’s body. Probably shouldn’t draw too much attention to myself.

  But I wasn’t able to just let Liesel go for the day. I needed to keep calling her, keep trying to locate her.

  And despite the old man’s awkwardness, I knew there was one person I needed to see.

  ---

  I knocked for the third time. It was a natural feeling. I was used to knocking on this door time and time again, only to be ignored for a while.

  I stood in the middle of the apartment complex at Vista and Arbor Way, on the third floor and in front of room 336. When I first visited Liesel here a year ago to take her to the prom, the place had been deserted, and I had thought for a short time she had sent me to an abandoned apartment complex. It was satisfying, to say the least, that every time I returned to her apartment, I could see the occasional person traipsing down one of the many hallways. Most everybody who lived in the complex was old. I did see the occasional troubled teenagers from time to time, but most everyone here, including Liesel’s grandfather, was sixty and over.

  Liesel didn’t like me coming around here very much. She
always came to my house, or we met in public somewhere. I was never sure if she was ashamed of her home life, or humiliated by her wacky grandpa, who either had dementia or was just plain crazy, I wasn’t really sure. I always felt that Liesel was hiding something in this apartment, something she didn’t want me to find out about, something about her past she was trying to keep from me until after we were married. In our ten months of dating, I had spent maybe an hour or so in this apartment, and whenever I arrived to pick her up, she’d rarely want me to go inside. Lately she would just meet me in the parking lot if I were taking her somewhere, the way she did on Saturday night for her birthday dinner.

  And now was the first time I had arrived to the apartment without the intention of actually seeing Liesel. Something scary had happened to her today, this I knew. And I figured she wouldn’t be here. But this was her home. This is where she’d go if she escaped. I needed to see if her grandfather knew anything. And I needed to wait here to see if she’d return.

  “Mr. Maupin! Dom! Are you home?” I knocked again, this time with five incredibly loud bangs. “Mr. Maupin?”

  I tried to turn the knob but the door was locked. Part of me wondered if maybe he had been kidnapped, too, when I heard the sounds of footsteps coming toward the door. I knew just in the way the footsteps were slowing down that this person definitely wasn’t Liesel.

  “Who’s there?”

  It was Mr. Maupin, in all his high-pitched glory. I wondered if he’d remember me. “Mr. Maupin! It’s Cameron Martin!”

  “Who?”

  “Liesel’s fiancée! Cameron!”

  “Oh, Cameron! I thought you said Kindle! I gotta get me one of those.”

  He unlocked the door, which had three locks and a chain on it. It took nearly a full minute for the door to be opened, revealing a short, portly man with big glasses and a bad comb-over.

  “Hello, Cameron. What can I do ya for?”

  “Hi Dom. I’m sorry. Can I come in?”

  “Sure you can. Do you want a waffle?”

  I stepped inside, and Liesel’s eighty-four-year-old grandfather Dom shut the door and sealed it back up again. Wearing an extra large golf shirt and a pair of blue plaid shorts, I couldn’t help but notice, again, that this man had the biggest rear end in the world.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “But thank you.”

  “I made myself a waffle. I think I’m gonna eat it.”

  “Oh… OK.”

  He sat down at the tiny kitchen table on the left side of the apartment. The place was always kept extremely neat and tidy, with little furnishing. The apartment featured no television set, but three giant shelves of books. Dom’s bedroom was in the back left; Liesel’s, in the back right.

  I watched as Dom took a bite of his waffle. He was eating it dry. “You don’t want syrup or anything on it?” I asked.

  “Out of syrup!” he shouted. “So what can I do ya for?”

  “I’m looking for Liesel.”

  “I don’t think she’s here,” he said. “I haven’t seen her since Monday.”

  “You mean yesterday?”

  “That’s what I said.” He looked down and sighed. “This waffle needs syrup.”

  “You see, she’s not picking up her phone, and she’s not at work, so I was just trying to…”

  “She’s not at her work? Doesn’t she know we’re in a recession!”

  “No, I…”

  “Cameron, can I ask you a question?”

  This guy was exhausting. “Uhh… sure.”

  “Did you always look so…”

  “So…”

  “Dinky? Is that the word?”

  I needed to get away. “I’m just gonna go look in her room for a moment, if that’s OK. Her cell phone might be in there.”

  He pushed the sides of his waffle up to make it look like a taco, and he started nibbling on it. “OK. All right. Just don’t sniff her underwear, OK? I’m watching you.”

  Dom kept talking as I stepped into Liesel’s bedroom, and I tried to tune out his inanities behind me. I had never believed that ancient freak was related to Liesel, but I figured it rude to ever bring that topic up around her.

  I shut the door and turned around. I had to keep from screaming.

  The majority of the apartment had been as neat as always. But Liesel’s room had been ransacked, completely destroyed from the inside out. The bed covers were sprawled on the carpet, and the mattress was tilted up against the sole window in the room. All the dresser drawers were wide open, and clothes were piled up in nearly every free spot on the ground. It looked like a large bomb had gone off.

  “Oh my God…”

  What is happening? What is going on? Who did this? Where’s Liesel?

  “DOM!”

  I took a step back and looked in the kitchen to see Liesel’s grandfather playing with his waffle, twirling it in the air with his fingers as if it were a kids’ action figure.

  “Dom, can you come over here?”

  He stood up and waddled over to the bedroom like a penguin, stuffing the waffle into his mouth and chewing ravenously as he stopped in front of me. “What?”

  “Can you explain this?” I pointed into the room.

  Dom looked inside with a brief glance. “Don’t even get me started! You’d think a girl would tidy up her room once in a while! Sheesh!”

  He made his way into his bedroom and lightly closed the door behind him. I knew for sure he wasn’t going to be any help in this matter.

  I shook my head and whispered, “Liesel, what the hell is going on…”

  ---

  I called Liesel probably 200 more times by the end of the day, waiting for hours on end in the front part of her complex, just to see if she’d return. Of course she didn’t. I didn’t think she was going to. I made a little more conversation with crazy Dom, but he stayed in his bedroom most of the day, reading nonfiction books about World War II, which he told me took him back to a simpler time. I finally left the complex, grabbed a quick bite at a nearby drive thru, and headed home.

  I was still so immersed in the strange case of Liesel’s disappearance that I stepped inside my house forgetting about my own problems.

  “Hey Cam!” my dad shouted from the kitchen, wearing his purple scrubs. He must’ve just arrived home, too, because I could see him preparing his typical TV dinner. “Is that you?”

  Oh shit. My face.

  The only place to run was down the hallway to the left, which housed the guest bedroom and bathroom.

  “Uhh, yeah, it’s me, Dad! Hold on a minute!”

  I couldn’t let either of my parents see me this way. They’d barely survived the stress last year watching me rapidly age into an old man. Seeing me in a similar condition again would kill them. I had to find Liesel soon. I couldn’t let this go on another day.

  “Cam, is everything all right?” My dad approached the hallway, giving me nowhere to hide but the bathroom.

  “Just… uhh… had some bad sushi!”

  I stepped into the bathroom and locked it. I sat down on the toilet, still with my pants up, pretending I had some dirty business to attend to.

  My dad still wasn’t taking a hint. He started knocking on the door. “Cam?”

  “What?”

  “Are you OK?”

  “I’ll be fine, Dad!”

  “I just wanted to…”

  “Will you leave me alone, Dad!”

  I didn’t mean for my yell to come out so harsh, but it definitely did, because my dad didn’t utter another syllable. He just started walking back down the hall and into the kitchen.

  Sorry, Dad.

  I stayed in the bathroom for another five minutes, until I flushed the toilet and washed my hands. I needed to be super careful walking toward my bedroom without getting caught. All it took was for my dad, mom, sister, or the dog, to notice my odd new young appearance, for my night to get really awkward. I needed to get to sleep and continue pursuing Liesel bright and early in the morning. I had to find
her. She was the only one who could stop this.

  Will I really be another year younger in the morning?

  I passed by the back of my dad in the living room, where he was watching the tail end of one of those medical soap operas. He was eating his TV dinner slowly, with little interest, like he was trying to hold back tears.

  “Good night, Cameron,” he said.

  I wanted to cry. All I wanted to do was hug my father and ask him to help me. But I just couldn’t let him see me this way.

  “Nite, Dad,” I said, almost in a whisper.

  I made my way into the entrance hall, still on high alert. I could see my parents’ bedroom upstairs, my mom not inside of it. But I didn’t hear any footsteps around me. I walked downstairs and started heading into the hallway toward my bedroom, when I heard the laundry room light turn off behind me.

  “Cam, hey,” my mom said, “I’ve got some clothes for you.”

  “Oh… great…” I didn’t turn around.

  “Here you go.”

  I could see her in the corner of my eye reaching the clothes out to me.

  No…

  “Oh, could you bring them to my room—”

  “Come on, you lazy bum!” she shouted. “Take them!”

  I took a step back. Then another. I was three feet away from my mom.

  Finally I turned around, purposefully knocked some socks down to the ground from the top of her pile, and jumped to my knees. “Oh,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  I kept my head down, just enough so that she couldn’t see my face. My mom, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice my bizarre behavior. “Whatever. Here.” She set the rest of the clothes down next to me, and I watched as Cinder, wagging her tail, looking straight at me but not really caring about my different appearance, followed my mom upstairs.

  “Goodnight!” I shouted.

  “Goodnight, Cam!” she shouted back before heading up to her bedroom.

  Phew.

  I picked up all the clothes, made it to my bedroom, and closed the door, just in time to hear Kimber start to play some more of her violin. And this time, it didn’t sound like hardcore rap. This time, it sounded perfect.

  I kept my door open a hair so I could listen to her playing as I put the clothes away and got ready for bed. I had a long day ahead of me tomorrow. And I knew I needed to get some sleep.