Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2) (11 page)

“Liesel!” I
shouted. “Wait!”

She exited the
front door. I was the only one to see it shoot open without Liesel even
touching it.

Most ominous of
all, it started to pour rain outside, even though there had been not a cloud in
the sky all day.

“
Shit
.” I turned to the waiter. “You have
to let me go after her. Please.”

“Not until you
pay!”

I threw my
wallet on the table and handed him my credit card.

“Will be just a
moment,” he said, walking to the back.

I sat back down
in my chair, completely blindsided by the night’s turn of events. I didn’t
realize Liesel would be that melodramatic about the whole thing. I probably could
have let her down easier about the wedding, but it wasn’t like I was breaking
up with her. I was just reconsidering if marriage was the best path for us to
take at this particular time. It’s not like I wouldn’t want to get married to
her down the road, after I got to know her more, discover all of her hidden
secrets. In three weeks I was supposed to be married. Now I wondered if she was
even going to talk to me again.

And her powers,
I thought.
What if she does something to me? Again?

As I waited for
the waiter to return, I tried to breathe and think positive.

She just over-reacted. She’ll be OK. I’ll
explain everything to her. We’ll be back to the way we used to be in no time.

I managed a pathetic
grin as I looked down at my cell phone to see no missed calls. I tried dialing
Liesel, but the call went to voice-mail.

I started
tapping the bottom of my phone against my chin as my attention veered downward
toward the cake. I hadn’t thought anything of it in the last few minutes, but
now the cake had my undivided attention.

No. Oh no.

The candle,
which Liesel had blown out after that never-ending birthday song, was now
re-lit, like nobody had ever touched it.

I leaned forward
and picked up the candle, examining it from top to bottom.
Maybe it’s a trick candle. Maybe the waiter or someone re-lit it when I
wasn’t looking.
I blew out the flame, and it stayed out. Smoke started
rising into the air, and I could feel every cell in my body quivering in fear.

Please, God.

No.

---

After sitting in
front of Liesel’s apartment complex for the better part of three hours, to no
avail—it was clear she wouldn’t speak to me tonight—I finally
arrived home about a half hour before midnight and entered through the garage
side door. My parents’ room was pitch black, signaling that they were both
asleep. I petted Cinder on my way to my bedroom, and I tried yawning so that I
wouldn’t stay up all night.

She’ll come around. She’s not gone. She
won’t leave me because of this. And she definitely won’t make me start aging
again because of this.

That was my
biggest fear of all. I had just pissed Liesel off in a big, major way for the
first time since we started dating. The knowing that a night like this had to
come sooner or later had plagued me for months. Liesel had a temper, which I
knew going into this relationship. But I never thought she would put a curse on
me again.

It’d be unthinkable,
I thought.

As I started
opening my bedroom door, I heard the sounds of weeping coming from across the
hall. I thought about just letting it be, but I decided to investigate.
Anything to take my mind off tonight’s craziness was a good thing.

“Kimber?” I
asked, knocking on her door. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine.
Please go away.”

“You want to
talk? I could use the company.”

She didn’t
respond. Instead, her door opened. I watched as she returned to her bed and
planted herself face down against her pillows.

“What’s the
matter?” I asked.

She started to
cry into her pillows. She didn’t seem like she really wanted to talk.

“I bet you wish
you had a big sister around now, huh?”

“Yes,” she said
into her pillow. “Guys are
so stupid
!”
She threw the pillow against the wall and sat up, her fists planted against the
sides of her bed. “You know, sometimes I wish I were a lesbian.”

“Really?”

She shook her
head. “No! Sicko!”

“What happened?”

“What do you
think, dumbass? Tommy broke up with me. He broke up with me and then he started
dating that
bitch
Gertrude. I mean,
her name’s
Gertrude
. She sounds like
some creepy old librarian or something!”

I nodded. I had
never heard Kimber use the word ‘bitch’ before. “You know, librarians can be
more frisky than you think.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Go
on.”

She shook her head.
“Guys can be so confusing. They pursue you, they like you, they want to be with
you forever. And then they just rip your heart out… right when you’re least
expecting it.”

I wanted to
defend myself, and my gender. But I decided against it. “Kimber, you’re
fourteen years old. You’re gonna meet and fall in love with many, many more
boys. I know you’re in pain right now, but trust me, in a few days, you’ll be
onto the next one. You’re the prettiest girl at your school. Any guy there
would be lucky to have you.”

I knew I had
just strung some pretty generic sentences together, but Kimber seemed to enjoy
my thoughts on the matter. She stood up and wrapped her arms around me.

“Thanks, Cam,”
she said. “You’re one of the better ones. Liesel’s lucky to have you.”

“Yeah…” I took a
step back and started closing the door. “Well, good night.”
        

As she fell down
toward her pillows again, she turned toward me. “And don’t you dare screw up
what you have with that girl! OK? Don’t be a dumb little boy! Be a
man
!”

“Will do,” I
said.

---

I turned out my
desk light and rolled over in my bed, burying my head between my pillows. I
knew I wasn’t going to get much sleep tonight. I had too much to think about. I
had to fix what just happened with Liesel. I had to figure out a way to get
that Hannah girl out of my life.

And I have to double check in the morning
that I didn’t grow a year older.

To my surprise,
after a few tosses and turns, I drifted to sleep right away, thinking about, of
all things, what Liesel would look like in a wedding dress hovering thirty feet
off the ground…

3.
Seventeen

I started
blinking, drifting back to consciousness, when I started to feel my right leg
vibrating. The bizarre feeling momentarily sent a shiver up not only my spine
but my nose, crotch, and still-to-be-pulled wisdom teeth.

Oh my God she turned me into a robot.

I jerked my body
upward, barely missing slamming my head against my lamp, and dove toward the
end of my bed for the vibrating phone. It was on the fourth ring, maybe the
fifth.

It was Liesel.

“Shit.” I
flipped the phone open, hoping she hadn’t hung up on the other end. “Leese? You
there?”

“Hey…” I could
tell in one word that she was sobbing.
       

“Are you all
right?”

“Yes. I’m fine.
Cam… I’m so sorry.”

“What?”

“I’m so sorry…
for what I did…”

There was that
chill again. “
What
did you do,
Leese?”

I jumped up to
my feet, just to make sure I still even had feet. I immediately started patting
my body down to make sure every body part, particularly the ones where the sun
don’t shine, was still strapped tightly to my body.

“Can I see you,
Cam? Can we meet—”

“Liesel!”

I held the phone
tight to my body as I ran down the hallway and into my bathroom, forgetting to
breathe as I hunted for the first mirror I could find.

She turned me into Shrek. Donald Duck.
Richard Simmons.

I looked at my
arms again. They looked normal, maybe with less hair than I remembered, but
normal. But I couldn’t see my face. I needed to see my face.

Justin Bieber. Donald Trump. Cher.
Elvira.

“Cam? What is
it?”

“Liesel!
You have to tell me what you did—”

I turned on the
light to see myself in the mirror, looking tired, bewildered, and more than a
little frazzled, but completely,
one
hundred percent
normal.

“You know…” she
said, “losing my composure last night…”

I took a deep
breath, successfully swallowing some vomit chunks that had already started
rising into my esophagus, and smiled. “I know. Baby, it’s OK. I’m OK.”

“Can you come
meet me at the park? In an hour? I want to talk about this.”

“The one by the
hospital?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Sure.”

I set down the
phone and analyzed my face in the mirror again. I didn’t notice anything out of
the ordinary. In fact I looked a little better than usual, almost younger in a
way. I slammed my fist against my stomach. It wasn’t the soft vanilla pudding
it’d turned into in the last few months. My abs felt hard again, stunningly
enough.

As I threw my
shirt off and enjoyed the sight of a body that appeared especially healthy and
lean, I nodded to the mirror.

“Thank you Leese,”
I said out loud. “If you cursed me to look like the next comic book superhero…
I’ll take it!”

I jumped in the
shower, humming, ready to take on the promising day ahead of me.
 

---

“You made it,”
she said.

“I made it.”

Idlewild Park,
located just around the corner where I spent my dying days in the hospital, was
mostly desolate on this chilly Sunday morning. A few children were playing on a
jungle gym nearby, and a loud baseball game was taking place across the way,
but all I could see at the center of the park when I arrived was Liesel rocking
her body back and forth on one of the two swings.

She looked
deathly, in a way I had never seen her before. Her hair was a mess, and she
wasn’t wearing any make-up, as if she had rolled out of bed and decided to pass
on the shower before heading over.

On a positive
side, though, as I sat down on the swing next to her, enjoying taking in a few
breaths of the crisp April air, I could tell that Liesel was the calmest and
most relaxed since I popped her the question on Christmas Eve. She looked at
peace, and I knew that meant that she was either ready to break things off with
me entirely or willing to go along with
any
decision I were to make about our future.

“I haven’t been
to this park since I graduated,” I said. “It kind of brings back memories. I
used to come here a lot right after I turned sixteen and got my license. I was
able to finally leave campus and drive over here on my lunch break.”

“I come here
once in a while. It’s quiet here. It lets me think about things.” She pointed
up at the tall hospital in the distance, which I had been trying to avoid by
facing the other direction. I didn’t like to think about the awful time I spent
there. “I also can see from here the hospital room you were in.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I think a
lot about that night. Don’t you?”

I sighed. “I try
not to.”

“It was so
scary. What I did that night was a last ditch effort, in every sense. There was
no plan. I just knew, deep down, I couldn’t lose you. That you were ultimately going
to be a very important person in my life.”

I brought my
hands down to Liesel’s. They were cold and rough, like she had been outside for
hours.

“Cam, you have
to understand something,” she continued. “I’ve liked you a whole lot longer
than you’ve liked me. You first noticed me… what… a year ago? I fell madly in
love with you when I was a freshman. I never thought you’d ever truly see me,
let alone be with me. And I had to put a curse on you to do it, which shames me
more than you know.”

“No, you don’t have
to—”

She shook her
head and let go of my hands for a moment. “Let me finish.”

“OK.”

She turned away
from me, and I wasn’t sure if she was going to start crying. “This last year
has been incredible, with you. The months after you got better… they were just
beyond amazing. I had it rough for a long time, Cameron. Being with you has
been a light in my life like I can’t even explain. So when you proposed to me
at Christmas, I couldn’t have asked for anything more. I didn’t care how young
we were, or how confused we may be about our futures. I just knew I wanted to
be with you. And that’s why I freaked out last night. Because when you said you
didn’t want to get married, I thought what you meant was that you don’t want to
be with me.”