Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (10 page)

It had been at least a minute since I’d
asked Liesel where we were going. She hadn’t answered me. I decided not to
press the matter any further. I knew that in a short amount of time I’d
discover the secret destination.
 

I tried to forget about all of our
problems for a moment, and I instead analyzed Liesel from head to toe.
Considering the enormous amount of pressure she’d been under in the last few
days, I was surprised to note just how pretty she looked, particularly with the
sun hitting her the way it was. Her red hair was messy and dangling below her
shoulders, the cute little freckles on her face were exposed for the whole world
to see, and a light shade of pink lipstick covered her thin, somewhat dry lips.
Her eyes finally made their way toward mine.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Just you.”

“Really?” she asked with a chuckle. “The
world’s about to end, and you’re thinking about
sex
?”

“
What
?”
I shouted with a smile, as Liesel picked up even more speed and started heading
toward Palmdale. “Just because I’m admiring you doesn’t mean I want to have
sex
with you!”

“Of course it does.”

“Sex entered my mind only, like, ten or twelve
times in the last few seconds.”

“Ha. I rest my case.”

“I’m allowed to want to have sex with
you. You’re my wife.”

“I know.”

“My pregnant wife.”

It was funny. Throughout all this
madness, the fact that Liesel was pregnant seemed to be the furthest thing from
my mind. It had startled me on Friday night in Washington D.C. when Liesel
threw the factoid out there like it was a minor afterthought. But it occurred
to me that I hadn’t even thought about her pregnancy once all day. I looked
down at her belly to see it flat as ever. It didn’t look like she had a baby in
there.

“Speaking of you being pregnant…” I
started.

“This outta be good,” she said.

“Umm… we haven’t really discussed…”

“What?”

“You know… you being a witch and all.
Does that alter the whole
nine month
process? Do you
give birth really fast? Or…”

“I’m not a witch anymore,” she said.
“Remember? I have no powers.”

“But you’re still you.”

“The powers are gone, Cam. For all
intensive purposes, I’m now just like any other normal human being.”

“So you won’t be giving birth for a
while.”

“Not for many, many months to come. I’m
only six and a half weeks along.”

“But say you
did
have your powers.”

She turned to me and didn’t say a word.

“Say you could somehow get your powers
back from Hannah,” I continued. “Would that affect the pregnancy?”

She shook her head. “Cam, I’d love to
tell you this magical story about how my mother gave birth to me after being
inseminated just three days prior, but such wasn’t the case. As far as I know,
having powers doesn’t change a thing when it comes to having children.”

I nodded, and then asked the most
important question of all: “Would our kid have powers?”

“Possibly,” she said. “Don’t worry about
it so much.”

I sat there for a minute, trying not to
freak out. I needed to close my eyes and calm my head, which, surprisingly,
hadn’t exploded by now. “Don’t worry about it so much? Leese, we could
potentially be bringing a child into a world that has been completely
destroyed! We could have a little mini witch! We could be having a baby who
shoots lightning bolts out of his ass when he needs to take a dump!”

Liesel put her hand up in the air. “Stop.
First of all,
we
wouldn’t be having
anybody.
I
would. Second of all,
we’re not going to bring our child into a decimated world, OK? How many times
do I have to tell you? We are going to stop this, all of this, and our child
will be born into a world filled with love and hope and two of the most bad-ass
parents of all time. Think of it, Cam. Our son or daughter will be only twenty
years younger than us. When she’s graduating high school, we’ll still be in our
thirties
! The three of us will be
best friends!”

“Yeah, or the kid will hate us even more.
My parents are pretty young, and I’ve always had issues with my dad.” I put my
feet up on the dash and turned toward Liesel again. “You just referred to our
child as ‘she.’”

“Huh?”

“A minute ago. You said ‘she.’ Do you
know something I don’t?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom had
three girls. Her mom had four girls. I just naturally assumed I’m going to have
a daughter. Why? Do you not want a girl? Do you think two girls in your family
may be too much for you to handle?”

Liesel just kept on talking, and I kept
right on not listening. Something she had just said made me want to strangle
her. She had slipped out
another
secret. I was getting tired of all these secrets.

What
else about Liesel don’t I know? I’ve probably only scratched the surface.
There’s
probably a hundred things about her that would
surprise me. When will she come clean with me?
For good?

“Leese?”

“What?”

I stared at her for a moment. “You just
said your mom had
three
girls.”

“Huh?”

“Just now. You said three. Not two.
Three!”

“Cameron, there’s a cop up ahead. Damn
it! I told you to keep an eye out for any cops!”

Liesel promptly slowed down, from
eighty-five to sixty-five, right before we passed a cop on a motorcycle
who
appeared to be itching to ticket the next passers-by.
Thankfully the cop didn’t come after us.

“Please, Cam. We can’t get pulled over.
We can’t let anything wreck the plan.”

“Will you please answer my question?” I
was trying not to yell.

“What? Oh, I meant two.”

“Do you have another sister I don’t know
about?”

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

“Yes.”

I leaned forward and started rubbing my fingertips
against my aching forehead. “There’s another witch?”

“She’s not a witch.”

“What? Why not?”

“You’ll see.”

“I’ll see?”

“Yeah. We’re meeting her in twenty
minutes.”

I didn’t know whether to be mad about
Liesel keeping this from me, or sad that she felt she needed to, or ecstatic
that I had a new sister-in-law I didn’t even know existed.

“Can you at least tell me her name?” I
asked.

“It’s…”

“Yes?”

“Yolanda.”

I had to take that one in for a moment. “
Yolanda
?”

MRS. GORDON

Walking through the quiet, eerie halls of
Caughlin Ranch High didn’t fill Lolita Gordon with the positive energy she had
been hoping for. Passing by the desecrated lockers and classroom doors didn’t
make her nostalgic for a time when life’s outlook wasn’t so damn bleak. Mrs.
Gordon had never liked the majority of the students. There were always the
major troublemakers, like Reese Wilkins back in the 80’s, or prissy little
Brandon Reed in the late 90’s, or, worst of all, Cameron Martin, who thankfully
graduated a year ago, leaving her and her library in peace. But lately, most,
not some, of the students had been grating on her nerves, asking ignorant
question after ignorant question, talking above the appropriate level,
returning books super late, causing her headaches on an almost daily basis.

No, she wouldn’t miss Caughlin Ranch High
as much as the teachers and superintendents. But she knew, on this June
afternoon, she needed to say a proper good-bye to the place she had called her
second home for the last thirty-six years.

Mrs. Gordon took out the silver plated
key from her purse and opened up the library front doors. As she made her way
inside, she detected the wonderful smell of old, dusty books wafting through
the air. It was so deathly quiet she could hear each of her footsteps. She
looked at the various desks and computer center, but decided she wouldn’t be
taking the time to sit down. She wanted to remain standing, and take a tour of
her beloved library one last time.

She passed through the aisles, running
her paper-thin hands along all the great works of literature in the Classics
section. Soon she found herself in the back left corner of the library, the
most hidden spot in the whole room, the area that gave Mrs. Gordon the most
problems when it came to her more sexually active students. She backed up
against the Greek mythology books and closed her eyes, remembering with a loud
chuckle all those times she had run into Cameron Martin here during his four
years at CRHS. He had been her most memorable bad student for sure, memorable
because she had gone from hating him for three and a half years to seducing him
into having sex with her at the end of his senior year.

“He was old,” she often told herself. “He
was the most handsome sixty-four-year-old I’d ever seen!”

Mrs. Gordon had never told anyone of the
controversial incident, and she was happy as hell that Cameron never did
either, especially after he recovered from his horrific condition and could
have easily gone straight to Principal Reeves with news that would have rocked
Reno, if not the entire United States.

What would have been her argument? “I was
not, I repeat, not, Mary Kay Letourneau! I would have never touched him if he
was
physically
seventeen years old! But the rules didn’t apply to me here. He looked old…
older than me. You’re not pressing charges! I forbid it!”

Before being whisked away to jail for the
rest of her life, she would’ve kicked and screamed, knowing she now had years
and years to spend wasting away in some dump of a jail when she had a better
life waiting for her outside those cold metal bars.

But on this day in June, Mrs. Gordon
realized she’d take that life sentence in jail any day. The woman was only
fifty-nine years old and still had a good thirty years before she’d kick the
bucket. Even when Cameron Martin had been going through that aging disease, the
thought of rapidly aging had never really entered her head.

But now it wasn’t a hypothetical
situation anymore; it was a reality. Nobody believed it for the first few days,
but now, even though the world hadn’t erupted into total chaos yet, Mrs. Gordon
knew that it was happening… to everyone. She didn’t want to wait until the
madness began, until all the horrors of what mankind was capable of would
inevitably rise to the surface. She wanted to get out while there was still
peace. She knew what she had to do.

As she walked over to her miniscule
office on the other side of the library, she thought about her first year as a
librarian here at CHRS, a young new mom who had a simple but fruitful future ahead
of her. She was never all that successful in love—she only married once,
keeping the last name Gordon after her husband Henry died in a car accident in
1982—and found solace after a while raising her daughter all by herself.
Mrs. Gordon loved her first ten years as a librarian, but lately the job had
come to be more of a chore than anything else. She found the kids these days to
not appreciate the quiet, and a good book, any longer. They were all busy
playing with Twitter and Facebook on their iPhones and Blackberries, all
riddled with ADD, all obsessed with their petty little problems. Anyone with a
brain had to know that the world would be going to shit soon, anyway. What was
there to look forward to? Absolutely nothing.

She unlocked her office and opened all of
her desk drawers just to make sure there wasn’t anything incriminatory she’d be
leaving behind. There was next to nothing—just some old newspapers and a
calendar from last year. She analyzed her three dying plants and realized she
probably should have removed them from the room before the school year ended
two weeks back.

“It’ll be fitting,” she said to herself,
standing up straight and walking over to the mirror.

Mrs. Gordon brought her warm, sweaty
hands to her cheeks. She could feel her heart beating faster than normal. She
could feel the air already starting to leave her body. She leaned her head back
just a smidge and analyzed her facial features in her tiny wall mirror. She had
tried in the last year to doll herself up a bit more, ever since that night of
forbidden love with Cameron when she remembered how fun it was to be a sexual
being. She had one quick fling with Coach Welsh last summer, but other than
that, she had been unsuccessful in her dating life.

She was aware that students didn’t know
her age, and that many of them assumed her to be much older than she really
was. She remembered when a freshman named Jake asked her if she was in her
nineties. She slapped him hard in the face and never saw him again. But it had
started her thinking that she needed to change up her wardrobe and make-up
activities, and she found herself looking better than ever these past few
months.