Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2) (15 page)

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.