by Lola Gabriel
“Okay, okay!” Aubrey said. Chelsea had always been really bad at keeping secrets, so it was a bit of a shock that Savannah and Dana had told her about it in the first place. “I won’t say anything, and I’ll pretend to be surprised when you tell me, all right?”
“Yes, please,” Chelsea begged. “I promise we chose a really cool club. You’re gonna have a blast, I swear.”
“I’d better! And I also expect a cake in that huge pile of food you bought,” Aubrey teased her, and Chelsea snorted.
“Girl, of course we got a cake for you, who do you think we are?” she demanded.
Aubrey had had no doubt. Her friends were amazing, and she was incredibly lucky to have them.
“Very unpredictable people,” she joked, and Chelsea laughed loudly at her answer. “Hey, I gotta go finish getting ready, but I’ll see you guys later.”
“You bet your ass you will,” Chelsea assured her. “All right, birthday girl, see you later! And don’t be late!”
“I won’t!” Aubrey promised before hanging up the phone. Looking at the time on her cell’s display, she figured she had enough time to get dressed and do something semi-fancy with her hair. She usually just let her hair down or tied it into either a bun or a ponytail, but since it was a special occasion, she had been looking at different hairstyles to look her best, if only for herself and her girls.
Maybe I’ll try one of those braid crowns, Aubrey thought. She’d always found those to be elegant, but not too pretentious or tacky. Besides, even if the hairstyle was a little too much, she deserved to look pretentious for once in her life. Her friends were right—she was only going to turn twenty-one the one time, and she couldn’t just let the day pass her by, gut feelings be damned.
Aubrey was suddenly glad that her friends had decided to throw her a birthday celebration. She couldn’t imagine spending today cooped up in her apartment, not when she had a beautiful dress and a fancy hairstyle to try on.
Smiling to herself, she searched for the braid crown tutorial on her phone and got to work.
---
Aubrey hurried along the busy streets of New York City, glad to have picked a pair of heels that weren’t high enough to be uncomfortable when one was almost trotting along the sidewalk. She had struggled with her hair so much longer than she had thought, and by the time she was finished, she’d had barely enough time to put on her makeup, her turquoise summer dress, and her shoes. She’d run out of her apartment so quickly that she had completely forgotten to check if the miraculous cup of coffee had still been on the kitchen counter, though she doubted it. She still believed it’d been some sort of hallucination. It was a miracle she’d remembered to grab her purse on her way out.
This is what I get for trying to look fancy when I’m anything but. She was nearly panting, out of breath thanks to her quick pace. She tried to get to the crosswalk before the pedestrian signal changed from white to red, but the faster she trotted, the faster the little white figure seemed to flash, signaling that the light was about to switch.
“C’mon, c’mon!” Aubrey pleaded under her breath, watching the flashing white figure. She just needed it to last a few more seconds, only long enough to let her cross the street and arrive at Central Park, yet it didn’t seem like luck was on her side at the moment.
Right when Aubrey had lost all hope of getting to her birthday picnic on time, something unbelievable happened: the white image of the pedestrian walking stopped flashing and stayed still, as though it were a movie and someone had pressed pause on it because they needed a quick trip to the bathroom.
The people running to cross the street seemed just as befuddled as Aubrey felt, slowing down to a less hurried walk now that they had more time. Aubrey rushed alongside them, thanking her lucky stars that something had gone right today for once.
I need to stop thinking so negatively, she told herself. Dana is always saying that we put our thoughts and energy out into the universe. Maybe she’s right, and I have to ignore this damn gut feeling and think that everything will be okay today. At the very least, it would help her stop her paranoia.
Aubrey glanced at the time on her phone. If she picked up the pace, she would get to the place her friends had chosen for her picnic right on the dot. The last thing she wanted was to be late for her own birthday celebration, even more so after she’d told Chelsea that she wouldn’t be.
Her phone dinged with a text message from Savannah.
Hey, birthday girl! We’re all set up here, it said. Aubrey knew the text wasn’t meant to pressure her, it was just to tell her that her friends were ready and were now just waiting for her arrival, but she still moved her legs a little faster, trying not to crash into any other pedestrians or trees or bushes as she quickly typed out a response.
OMW, Aubrey texted back. I’m almost there!
And she was, indeed, almost there—less than two minutes away, if she kept her pace. She only needed to keep walking, make a few turns, and then she would arrive.
Aubrey was actually two turns and a couple of steps away from the location of her birthday picnic when she noticed a sort of glimmer coming from a thicket close to her. She stopped in her tracks, thinking that whatever had caught her attention was simply a sun flare, but upon closer inspection, she realized it wasn’t. It seemed to be almost a sparkle, as if she were in a cartoon and her fairy godmother were about to show up and tell her that she could go to the ball, she would give Aubrey a beautiful puffy dress with a flicker of her wand, and send her on her way.
Is this some sort of trick of the light? Aubrey asked herself, carefully rubbing her eyes so that she wouldn’t smear her mascara. She blinked once, twice, and the sparkles seemed to magically vanish like they had never been there to begin with.
Aubrey shook her head before she kept walking. The stress of the morning had clearly taken its toll on her. What she had to do was clear her mind and focus on her birthday celebration, from which she was only a few steps away now.
As she approached the area her friends had chosen, a bit away from the main path of Central Park, the first thing she saw was that they had hung a HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner between two trees, and beneath it, they had hung a banner spelling her name, except that Aubrey could tell they had strung it together using different banners, since the letters were all different colors. She almost liked that one better than the HAPPY BIRTHDAY one, because it showed the effort her friends had put into decorating a space in the middle of Central Park for her.
Savannah, Chelsea, and Dana were all sitting on top of a checkered picnic blanket, around a wicker, oval-shaped picnic basket with both lids down. Aubrey couldn’t believe that they had actually gotten the stereotypical blanket and the basket—she had expected to find them sitting around the ton of food Chelsea had mentioned during her call earlier, but she had never imagined this much attention to these little, incredible details.
The first one to see her was Chelsea, who immediately stood up with a joyous scream.
“Aubrey, hi!” she cried, rushing to hug Aubrey, nearly making her trip. “Hey, sweetheart, happy birthday!”
“Thank you, Chels!” Aubrey said, letting Chelsea sway them a little bit from how tightly she was embracing her. Savannah and Dana had stood up by the time Chelsea finally let go of her, and Aubrey let herself be pulled into another hug by each of her friends.
“Welcome, at long last, to your twenties!” said Dana, stepping in to pull Aubrey into her arms after Savannah was done. “You’re going to love them, and you’re going to hate them.”
“Oh, good, just what I was hoping I’d hear,” Aubrey joked, pulling away from her.
“The good thing,” Savannah said, “is that we’ve all gotten ahead of the game. Just a bit. So you’ve got us to help you out!”
“You’re all older than me by less than a year,” Aubrey pointed out with a raised eyebrow and a cautious smile. Chelsea wrapped an arm around her neck, and for a second, Aubrey thought she was going to ruffle her hair. She didn’t mind
as long as Chelsea didn’t touch the braid crown she had taken so long to finally pull off. To her relief, Chelsea only pulled her close.
“And therefore smarter than you,” she said.
“By less than a year,” Dana added, winking at Aubrey.
Aubrey looked over at the picnic her friends had arranged for her, and she was suddenly overwhelmed by how much she loved them, thinking of them almost as her older sisters, looking out for her and offering to be there for her if she ever needed anything.
“You guys,” she said, and she swallowed to clear the wobbliness of her tone. “You guys didn’t have to do this for me. You brought an actual picnic blanket and basket, for crying out loud!”
“Well, we couldn’t have a proper picnic without them, could we?” Savannah asked, her hands on her hips.
Aubrey somehow managed to hug all three of her friends at the same time, with them putting a little effort into huddling closer and wrapping their arms around each other so she was in the middle, surrounded by three of the people she loved most in the world.
“You girls are amazing,” she mumbled into someone’s hair, unaware of whose it was. “Thank you so much for doing this for me.”
“Oh, and just you wait, honey,” she heard Savannah say. “This is just your first birthday present!”
“What!” Aubrey broke away from the group hug and stared at them in surprise. “There’s still more?”
“Of course there’s more, are you kidding?” Dana rolled her eyes. “You’re turning twenty-one! This is a special birthday!”
“I told you guys you didn’t have to do anything big!” Aubrey exclaimed, wondering what else her friends had planned for her today. Then she turned to look at Chelsea, who hadn’t said anything, and noticed she had gone slightly pale. She recalled their phone call earlier, when Chelsea had accidentally spilled their plans of taking her to a dance club at some point during the evening.
“It’s nothing outrageous,” Savannah told her, probably anticipating that Aubrey was expecting them to reveal some huge after-picnic celebration or something. “But we thought that, since your birthday picnic is more similar to a birthday lunch than it is to a party, we would also take you to a dance club to end the night!”
Savannah, Dana, and Chelsea all made a ta-da! motion with their hands.
Although Aubrey had never been a particularly good liar, much less good enough to convince her best friends that she was not trying to pull the wool over their eyes, she put on her best surprised face, actually sneaking in a gasp that sounded surprisingly genuine to her own ears.
“Are you serious?” she nearly shrieked. “Oh, my god, you guys!”
Chelsea let out a tiny breath of relief. Both Savannah and Dana seemed to truly believe that Aubrey had not been aware of this beforehand, and they appeared to be incredibly glad that she liked their plan.
Now that she was thinking about it, Aubrey was actually fully on board to go dancing. She hadn’t been too fond of the idea when Chelsea had first told her about it, but when she imagined how her twenty-first birthday might end, there was no better way than spending it at a dance club with her girls.
“Okay!” Chelsea clapped her hands together. “Now that we’ve gotten all of Aubrey’s birthday surprises out of the way, who’s ready for a picnic?”
2
Aubrey had to admit that this might be one of her best birthdays ever.
Chelsea hadn’t been kidding when she’d said that they had bought a ton of food, though Aubrey thought that they had probably made some of it themselves. There had been fancy triangle sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, mashed potatoes, pasta, a plate with Aubrey’s favorite fruits, and little cups with cooked carrots and celery. Plus, Dana had baked cookies, Chelsea had made brownies, and Savannah had bought chocolate chip mini-muffins.
Aubrey didn’t know how they had managed to fit so much food in such a small-looking picnic basket, and yet her friends had carefully pulled out dish after dish before joining forces to bring out her birthday cake: vanilla bread with strawberry filling and frosting, with three Oreo cookies arranged in a neat little cone on top.
“Guys, seriously, I don’t know if I can have another bite!” Aubrey said, her stomach twisting with everything she had already eaten.
“Nonsense!” Chelsea took out a package of two candles shaped like the numbers 1 and 2 and a lighter from her purse. “No birthday is complete without the birthday person making a wish, blowing out the candles on their birthday cake, and then eating said cake! It’s the birthday ritual!”
“Please stop saying the word ‘birthday,’” Savannah pleaded with a pained look.
“It doesn’t have to be a huge bite, okay?” Dana bumped her shoulder against Aubrey’s. “Honestly, it’s fine if you just eat one of the cookies. Or lick the icing off your piece.”
“Totally your call,” Chelsea agreed, nodding her head.
Aubrey let out a deep sigh. She supposed she could try to take a bite out of the cake set before her on the picnic blanket. Chelsea had placed the candles to display the number twenty-one and lit them, so all that remained was for Aubrey to complete the so-called birthday ritual.
“Fine,” she ended up saying. “Fine, fine. If you really want me to do it, I guess I have no choice.”
She thought about what she could wish for. She still hadn’t forgotten about her gut feeling telling her that today would go from bad to worse, but so far, she’d mostly had a wonderful time. Hanging out with her friends was always good to soothe her worries and stop her from thinking about her troubles for a while, and she was not going to take this for granted.
Aubrey closed her eyes.
Let my gut feeling be wrong, she wished. Let today be the best day of my life. And let things go right for my friends. They deserve all the success and happiness in the world.
She opened her eyes and blew out the candles on her birthday cake, listening to Savannah, Chelsea, and Dana clapping and cheering for her.
“Welcome to the twenty-one club!” cried Dana, wrapping her arms around Aubrey’s shoulders to give her a side hug. “You’re officially legal now!”
“What did you wish for?” Savannah asked.
“Hey now, come on, you can’t ask her that!” Chelsea interrupted. “Rules of the birthday wish! If you say what you wished for, it won’t come true!”
“She’s right, you know,” Aubrey said and laughed at the expressions of disappointment from Dana and Savannah.
“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a birthday ritual,” Dana argued. “It’s something you made up!”
“Made up or not,” Aubrey told her, “I’m not risking my wish not coming true. I think it was a really good one, probably one of the best I’ve ever made.”
Savannah groaned out loud. “Come on, Aubrey! Not even a little hint?”
“Oh, fine.” Aubrey cocked her head to the side and smiled. “I love you girls so much.”
“Aw, Aubrey!” Chelsea put a hand to her chest. “We love you too!”
Aubrey raised an eyebrow. Her friends all stared at her, expecting her to give them a hint or say something other than her cryptic declaration of affection. When she didn’t add anything and only kept smiling, Dana was the first one to crack.
“Wait, that was the hint?”
Aubrey nodded her head. “That was it.”
“Seriously? That’s the only hint you’re giving us?”
“That’s the only hint I’m giving you,” Aubrey confirmed. To be honest, she didn’t really believe in birthday wishes, or that they wouldn’t come true if you said them out loud, but she liked the idea of this being some sort of ritual in which certain rules needed to be followed. Besides, if there was any chance for her wish to come true, she didn’t want to accidentally screw it up.
“You’re no fun,” Savannah pouted.
“Say that again and you’re not getting any birthday cake,” Aubrey warned her. Savannah raised her hands in mock surrender, and Dana pulled out a knife from
the picnic basket and handed it to Aubrey so she could cut everyone a piece.
The cake tasted even better than it looked, which was already saying a lot. Aubrey didn’t finish her piece—she had eaten a lot of the other dishes her friends had made and brought to the picnic—but she wanted to later, perhaps as dinner. She was legally an adult now and could make her own choices, and if she wanted to have birthday cake as dinner, she very well could.
As soon as everyone else had eaten their slice of Aubrey’s cake, they all started putting their plates back inside the wicker basket. Aubrey was about to start helping them when Chelsea held up a hand and told her to let them do it.
“You’re the birthday girl,” she said. “You just sit back and relax.”
Aubrey rolled her eyes but sat back on the ground, watching her friends clean up their picnic.
“We’re not taking the basket to the dance club, are we?” she asked.
“Of course not,” Dana said. “We’ll drop it off at my place, and then we’ll take what’s left of your birthday cake to yours tomorrow morning.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Aubrey.
“Okay!” Savannah picked up the wicker basket while Dana and Chelsea folded the picnic blanket and then put it inside. “We’ll go to Dana’s to drop off the food, and then, are you ready to party?”
“Girl,” Aubrey said, “I’m always ready to party.” Which was, technically, a lie, as Aubrey usually didn’t party because she had a job that barely managed to pay her bills and little to no time to herself on a daily basis, but today was all hers, and she was going to grab it by the horns.
Her friends cheered and patted her on the back, and they all set off the way Aubrey had come, to Dana’s car, laughing amongst themselves.
“What dance club are we going to, by the way?” Aubrey asked the girls. Then she grimaced to herself. “It’s not going to be that really tacky one by Chels’ apartment, is it?”
“Hey, I like that place!” Dana exclaimed, walking a little in front to guide them to her car.
