Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2) (17 page)

I
just have to avoid the main evil trio—Priss, Newt, and Gordon’s demon
child.

I still couldn’t believe Mrs. Newt. She
seemed so on top of everything I’d been through in the last year that I
wouldn’t have been surprised if she knew Liesel was a witch, too; hell, it
wouldn’t surprise me if she were the culprit behind Liesel’s disappearance.

Maybe
she is really trying to write a sequel to her book, trying to fake drama so
that she can get a major publishing deal. Maybe she’ll write a third book, too,
and make it a goddamn trilogy!
 

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” a girl
asked, standing on the left side of two others who I assumed were her friends,
or maybe her subordinates.

“Uhh… yeah…”

“You’re
cute
,” one of the other girls said.

“Thanks.” I took the compliment, even
though at eighteen years old I knew looking at these girls below the neck was a
major no-no. “Would any of you happen to know Kimber Martin?”

“
Kimber
?”
the girl in the center said. “We call her Kimmie.”

“Uhh… whatever.”

“Actually, some of us call her Kim. But
she prefers Kimmie. None of us know why. You looking for her?”

“Yes. Do you know if she’s inside or
outside—”

“She’s
definitely
inside,” the girl to the left said. She laughed and her
friends joined in. I was dumbfounded.

“Can you tell me where she is?”

“He’ll do,” the girl in the center said. It
was hard telling them apart. All three had blonde hair, wore the same clothes,
and stood about the same height. They were indistinguishable from each other.

“I’ll do… what?”

“Come here.”

I just stared at her. “Huh?”

“You wanna know where Kimmie… err, Kimber…
is, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Come here!” The girl in the center, the
one with the clearest skin of the three—I figured they argued about their
complexions constantly amongst themselves—motioned for me with her index
finger to come toward her.

I decided to comply. I took a few steps
forward, ready to be swallowed by perfume overload.

“Come here,” she said again, and her
friends looked on with giant grins on their faces.

This
is where it ends,
I
thought.
It all ends with this blonde
chick swallowing me whole and spitting my skeleton back out.

I stepped even closer, all the way up to
her face, ready to kiss, lick, or fondle her puffy cheeks.

She brought her mouth up to my ear. I
prayed she wouldn’t stick her tongue in it. “Seven minutes,” she said softly.
Then she shouted, “ENJOY!”

Before I knew what was happening, I
watched as the girl on the left opened a miniscule closet door to the right of
me, and the other two girls pushed me inside, closing the door behind me. I was
suddenly in total blackness, completely blind.
 
I started banging on the closet door.

“Hey! Let me
out!”

I heard the girls giggling outside, but
it was faint.

“Open the
door! Now!”

I pounded on the door five more times,
but then I stopped. I had to keep myself from screaming.

I felt the warm touch of a body behind
me.

“What the…”

“Shhh…” was all I heard before I felt two
hands touch my shoulders.

I frantically tried to find a light
switch, but all I could feel were boxes and tools on the left side of the
closet. My fingers touched a shovel. I figured, worst case scenario, I could
hit this mystery girl over the head with it.

“I don’t know what—” I started.

I felt one of the girl’s fingers brush
against my lips. “We have seven minutes,” she whispered. “Let’s make them
count.”

The girl kissed me, hard, on the lips,
her whole body tilted against mine. My back slammed against the door, and I
tried to push her away. I couldn’t. She was too strong.

“Hey… what…”

“Shhh,” she said again, kissing my cheeks
as I fell to the hardwood floor, the back of my head smashing against the
shovel.

“Stop,” I said. “Stop!” I brought my
hands back and grasped the shovel.

“You little pussy,” the girl said. “What
wuss did those girls stick me with this time?”

“Oh… Oh God…”
Oh no. No no no.

“I’m gonna kick your scrawny ass, if it’s
the last thing I do,” she said.

I pulled the shovel out from behind me,
all the way up to my lap. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to use it on—me, or
my sister!

Kimber turned the dim light on in the
closet and stared down at me. She didn’t recognize who I was at first. “You
see, the whole point of this game is to have a few minutes of fun, not to freak
out and whine and—”

“Kimber…”

“Call me Kimmie… are you new here, or…?”

I just shook my head. I could see
lipstick smeared all over my sister’s face. I could feel the puke racing up my
throat.

First
my mom. Then Mrs. Gordon. Now my sister! Who’s my next make-out session gonna
be with? My damn dog?

“Are you all right? You look like you’re
gonna be sick—”

She reached her hand out. And then she
started screaming.

I screamed right along with her.

“Cameron?”

“Don’t hurt me!” I shouted back, using
the shovel to shield my face from hers.

“Cameron? What
are you doing here?”

“I should ask you the same thing,” I said
softly, swallowing as fast as possible to keep the vomit down.

“And why do
you look like… like…”

“…I’m
your
age?” I said, finishing her sentence.

She brought her hands to her mouth. “Oh
God… Oh God, we
kissed
. We were just
kissing. Oh God…”

“I know…”

“I stuck my tongue in your
mouth
!” Kimber turned to her right and
spewed all over the cabinets on the right side of the closet, the chunky yellow
vomit, mixed with the putrid, head-spinning stench, causing me to lose control
of my body, too.

“Oh God…” I said before puking straight
up at my sister, my vomit splashing against her legs and shoes.

“Oh no… Oh Cam…” She turned to me, both
her arms covering her stomach in pain, as she projectile vomited up at the
shelves above me, the puke flying over my head, landing on a ledge behind me.

But the worst was yet to come. I looked
up to see her vomit start dripping down to the top of my head.

“No… this isn’t happening…” I said.

Kimber just started shaking her head,
holding her hand over her mouth, trying not to upchuck again, as she opened the
door and started running down the hallway, past her three friends, who were
standing in front of the closet nonchalantly.

The three girls took a step forward and
looked inside to see the nasty yellow carnage.

“Oh my God!” the center girl shouted.
“Run the other way!”

They sprinted down the hallway in the
same direction as Kimber, and I was left all by lonesome in the gross,
pitch-black closet.

“This… this didn’t… go… the way… I
planned…”

I threw up one more time, this time on my
lap, before I hoisted the shovel up and slammed it down against my head. I was
knocked unconscious instantly with one painful, perfect blow.

---

“Cameron… Cam…”

I felt a hand slap my cheeks way too hard
to suggest it might be Mrs. Newt, or another student at Mope Middle School I
didn’t know. I knew this had to be my sister.

I blinked and looked to my left. I was
sitting in the deserted track field toward the back of the school. Kimber
leaned over me but rose to her feet when she realized I was waking up.

I felt woozy, but, thankfully, not
nauseous. I sat up and brought my hands to the top of my head. I looked down to
see my clothes virtually spotless, as if Kimber had spent an hour or two
rubbing all the vomit out.

“You’ll be OK,” she said. “You didn’t hit
it that hard.”

“How would you know?”

She didn’t answer my question. Instead
she asked, “Cam, what’s going on with you?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said, attempting to
stand up so I could face her, but I didn’t have the energy yet. “If anyone’s
going to be asking questions right now, it’s
me
, missy. You have
lots
of explaining to do.”

“
I
have a lot of explaining to do? Cameron, you’ve shrunk nearly a
foot
!”

“I… I know.”

“You look as young as I do!”

“I know!”

“So, again I
stress
…”
she said. “What. The hell. Is going on.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Is it happening again?”

I didn’t want to lie. “Yes.”

She shook her head and started crying. I
was surprised it took her this long. She turned away from me and started
weeping into her hands.

“What were you doing in that closet,
Kimber?” I asked, changing the subject. “You’re fourteen years old. What the
hell were you doing in there waiting for some guy to come inside and have his
way with you?”

She brought her hands to her hips and
started smiling through her tears. “You really want to get into this now?”

“Yes.”

“Cam, are you
dying?
Again
?”

“No, Kimber, I’m not dying.”

“You almost died last year. I can’t take
this again. I can’t!”

“Don’t worry. I know what to do now. Will
you please just answer my question?”

“You’re aging
backward
now?”

The two of us were on completely
different wavelengths. I didn’t know how I was going to get her to calm down.
“Kimber…”

“Do Mom and Dad know?”

“Kimber, I—”

“Oh my God, if you’re aging backward, that
means…”

“I’m going to be OK—”

“That means we have less time than
before!”

I finally jumped up to my feet and pulled
Kimber close to me, slamming her forehead against the side of my chin. “Kimber!
Listen to me!”

“What?”

“Listen to me!
I’m going to be OK!”

“How do you
know?”

I took a step back. I had to tell her.
“If you answer my questions, Kimber, I promise to tell you everything.”

“Everything? About what?”

“There’s things you don’t know about what
happened last year.”

“What do you mean?”

I sighed. “Don’t you think it was odd how
I survived at the last possible second?”

“Well…”

“Didn’t you find it weird at my
graduation how I floated up in the air with Liesel?”

“You said that was a trick… I thought…”

“Kimber, I’m going to tell you
everything. But you have to promise me to tell me the truth about what happened
here today.”

She wiped a tear away from her eyes.
“OK.”

---

My sister and I sat on the sidewalk
behind the gates of the school, now even further from the school grounds,
trying to remain inconspicuous as the final bells of the day rang behind us,
letting out hundreds of students. Kimber had her arm wrapped around mine, but
this time, it wasn’t, thankfully, in a romantic fashion.

“I’ve been really hurting since Tommy
dumped me,” she said. “He was so cute and he liked me, and he wanted to be with
me, and I wanted to re-create that feeling again. But no other guys asked me
out. So me and my friends came up with doing Seven Minutes in Heaven, capturing
cute boys at school and throwing them in the dark with us. Today just happened
to be my day. I haven’t done it that much. It was only my third time.”

“
Third
time?” I breathed in through my nose and tried not to scream. “Kimber, look,
you can’t turn yourself into someone who just throws herself at any guy who
comes your way. These eighth grade boys should have to
fight
for you.”

“Look, this is all easy for you to say,”
she said. “You have Liesel.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know if I do
anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me just finish my thought. Promise
me, Kimber. I want you to promise me you’ll stop these games and end this
desperation to feel something with just
anyone
.
I know it seems like the end of the world, but give it time. You’ve got high
school coming up. Playing these games in middle school is one thing, but high
school guys are different. They can take advantage. They can cause real,
serious problems. Trust me, I would know. You need to be careful, Kimber. I
want only the best for you.”