Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (13 page)

“Living a lie for a few days is just fine
by me,” Yolanda said to herself, pulling into the carpool lane and speeding
upward of 100 MPH. She glanced at her face in the rearview mirror. “Anything
for Mother.”

8.

“Cameron… Cam…”

The voices were fading in and out. I
could hear Liesel and her sister Yolanda talking to me, but the words were
echoing through one ear and out the other. Worst of all, I still could only see
black.

It was when I felt a sharp pain against
my right cheek that I opened my eyes, finally able to see again.

“Cam! Are you awake?” Liesel was
straddling me, not so much like she wanted to have sex, but out of concern over
whether I was dead or alive.

“I’m… I’m fine…” I blinked about twenty
times,
then
looked forward to see my wife slap me in
the face, again. “Oww! Hey! Why’d you do that?”

“Just checking,” she said, standing up
and shaking the dirt off her hands.

“Did I grow any older?” I asked. “Older?
Younger? Fatter? Balder?”

“Nope. You still look the same.”

I stood up and looked at the sisters, who
had inexplicable smiles plastered on their faces. “What are you two so happy
about?”

“Your hair is a mess,” Liesel said,
taking a step forward and brushing her hand through my dirty mane. I shook my
head for a few seconds, allowing the brown wall of dirt to fall toward the
ground.

“Well I’m glad it’s hilarious you think
my hair looks goofy,” I said. “I just had the worst nightmare. I imagined you
said I was a witch, Liesel. A witch just like you!”

“That wasn’t a nightmare. I said that.”
She paused. “And please don’t faint again.”

I stepped forward and grabbed Liesel’s
shoulders. “Leese, what is this? Some kind of joke?”

“Of course not.”

I never struck my wife, not ever. But I
was mad now. “Why would you say that to me? You and I both know I don’t have
any powers!”

“You do, Cameron.”

“No I don’t!”

I wanted to slap her, but I didn’t. I
just turned around and started marching with anger in the other direction.

“Cameron, listen to me!” Liesel shouted.

“You know what? I’m not in the mood to
listen to you ever again, you understand me?” Halfway to my Toyota 4Runner, I
turned around, and screamed, “I am sick and tired of these lies!” I leaned down,
grabbed a heavy rock, and brought my arm back to throw it. “You understand me?
No more l—”
 

When the rock exited my hand, a harsh
green light shot forth from my palm and smashed the rock into a dozen pieces
against the wall before me. Electric sparks darted off the wall like fireworks
and fell to the ground just inches from my feet.

I immediately fell down on my ass and
turned to the sisters. They were staring at me in awe.

I couldn’t say anything for a moment. I
also found it hard to breathe.

What
the hell…

“Now
that
was a neat trick!” I shouted. “Was it you, Leese? I guess you haven’t
lost your powers, after all.”

“No, Cam, I—”

“You just did that to make me believe I
was capable of shooting a lime-colored firework out of my goddamn hand!”

“Cam, I swear—”

I stood up and ran back toward the two of
them. My eyes darted toward the mysterious, little-known Yolanda. “Or maybe it
was Yolanda? You said she didn’t have powers, being adopted and all, but a big
chunk of me’s thinking that’s a load of bullshit, am I right?”

“No, Cameron,” Yolanda said. “I’m able to
help others develop their powers, and that’s why I’m here. What just happened
was
you, and all you.”

“But I’ve never been able to do it
bef—”

“Yes, you have,” Yolanda added. “They’ve
probably just been too minor for you to ever notice. This canyon brings the
power out of you. That’s why Alicia and Hannah trained here for so many years.”

“I don’t buy it,” I said. I didn’t. I
still didn’t believe it. “In nineteen years, I’ve never cursed anyone, made
anything levitate, done anything to ever suspect—”

“How do you think you’re still
alive
, Cam?” Liesel asked, stepping in
front of Yolanda and getting up in my face. “When you were aging, when you were
eighty-five, do you think it was
only
my
powers that saved you that night in the hospital? I helped you,
that’s
for sure. But it was your powers, hidden deep down in
your body and soul, that wouldn’t let you die. If you didn’t have these powers,
that curse would’ve killed you. It would’ve killed any normal human being.”

“As it’s doing so to millions of people
around the world right now,” Yolanda added.

“And then last April,” Liesel continued,
“when you survived yet again, a one-year-old, up top that mountain, with Hannah
wanting you dead. You only survived, again, not because I saved you, but
because your powers wouldn’t give up on you.”

I sighed, and shrugged. “Well, what about
your mom? She had powers. And she died.”

“Yeah, from cancer,” Liesel said. “That
disease wasn’t caused by a magic spell. There was nothing anybody could do
about that. We’re not immortal.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stared down
at my palms, which looked as normal as ever. “So what are we doing here, Leese?
What are we really doing here?”

Liesel looked at Yolanda, then back at
me. “Neither of us have any powers, Cam. But we have many, many years of
training, and helping other witches reach their potential.”

When I looked down at my palms again, I
witnessed something extraordinary. A small ball of green fire started elevating
from my right hand. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I tried not to cry.

Liesel pursed her lips and took hold of
my shoulders. “Cameron, you might not believe this. Not yet anyway. But you’re
our last hope to defeat Hannah.”

She grabbed my hand and brought it up to her
face. The green ball of light started reflecting off her cheek.

“Me?” I asked, my voice sounding like a
whiny child. “The weight of the world… it’s resting on
me
?”

“No pressure,” Yolanda said.

Liesel kneeled down, kissed me tenderly
on the mouth and said, “We’re going to train you, Cam. We’re going to get you
to be the witch you never thought you could be.”

I sighed, loudly. “And then?”

“And then… you’re going to kill our
sister.”

NURSE NEWT

“It’s the end of days.”

Aurora Newt stared at the bearded homeless
man at the corner of 4
^th
and Sierra Street and shook her head in
amazement. After just a few days of these stories of young kids looking older
than their ages, total mayhem throughout Reno had already begun. Her trip to
the local supermarket, which she assumed would take thirty minutes max, ended
up lasting over an hour, due to the long lines of frantic people buying
everything in the store, as if Y2K or, as this madman on the sidewalk was
saying, the ‘end of days,’ was arriving sooner rather than later.

Aurora lived on Kirman Street in not
exactly the safest neighborhood in downtown Reno. She liked to think of her
charming little apartment near the main road as a temporary residence, even
though she’d lived there for nearly three years now. She didn’t make a lot of
money—when she transferred at her middle school from the librarian
position to that of the school nurse, her weekly paycheck had gone up, but not
by much—and without a husband or rich boyfriend in tow, she couldn’t
exactly afford to move at the moment.

“But I’ll have money soon enough,” she
said to herself, making her final left turn on Kirman and heading down a few
blocks toward her apartment. “Soon I’ll have more money than I’ll know what to
do with.”

Aurora yawned. She was more tired than
she’d been in weeks, and she didn’t know why. She hadn’t woken up early and
hadn’t worked out in days. She attributed it to the stress of the supermarket
excursion and hoped that a late afternoon nap would help her get through the
day.

But she didn’t have time for a nap right
now. She unlocked her door, stormed into her living room, sat down at her
typewriter, and prepared the final chapter of her non-fiction book, titled
The Strange Happenings of Cameron Martin
.
She had tried her hand at writing fiction for over ten years—she
originally became a librarian merely to get inspired by all the books that
surrounded her on a daily basis—but decided, upon hearing of an odd
occurrence at nearby Caughlin Ranch High of two graduating seniors floating in
the air, that non-fiction would be more up her alley.

Over the next year she tried to learn
everything she could about Cameron Martin, and everything that happened to him
between March and June of the previous year. It was one of those crazy stories
that people whispered to each other all around Northern Nevada, but few
believed to be real. Aurora eventually believed the story, however, and his
aging disease was finally confirmed two months back when she encountered
Cameron roaming the halls of her middle school, not seventeen, not eighteen,
and not eighty, but thirteen or younger. She had been looking for material for
a second book, since her treatment of her first book had drawn attention from a
New York literary agent who had apparently watched the infamous Youtube video
of the CRHS floating incident.

And now, here she was, sitting at her
wooden desk, typing away at the final words of her manuscript. She hadn’t known
how to end it for a while, until that last chapter came clear to her. She would
begin and end the story by discussing the two floating teenagers, and then try
to get to the heart of the part nonfiction, part fantasy,
part
science fiction epic in the middle. It wasn’t a long book by any means—it
only ran about 55,000 words—but Aurora thought she had something here,
and she even left the first book open for a sequel, signifying that Cameron
might start aging backward in the second one, just in case the first
installment was to be a success.

When she typed ‘The End’ on that final
page, adding a goofy question mark for good measure, she leaned back in her
chair and felt a sense of relief. This story had haunted her for the better
part of eleven months, and she was thrilled to finally have a complete
manuscript to show the New York agent. She knew what she needed to do now. She
needed to go to the nearby Kinko’s on South Virginia Street, make about a dozen
copies of her work, and get a copy mailed to the agent first thing tomorrow
morning. Aurora didn’t believe in computers—she always had an old soul
and didn’t find it particularly fitting to her character to ever purchase
something as degrading as an electronic light box—and enjoyed the slower
but more richly rewarding process of using an old-fashioned typewriter. Her
father had given it to her as a teenager, and now, in her late thirties, she
was finally able to call it her own.

“Now,” Aurora said to
herself
,
“we celebrate.”

She headed into her kitchen to see the
two bottles of wine she had purchased at the store still in their big brown
paper bag. She couldn’t decide on the Cabernet or the Zin, but decided to go
with the Zin because she knew it would have a sweeter, fruitier taste to it.
She poured herself a glass, smiled to herself, and took a sip. It wasn’t
perfect, but the taste fit the moment.

It only took her another minute to finish
the glass before she returned to her living room to grab her manuscript and
start organizing all the pages together before heading down to Kinko’s. She was
stunned to see so many pages out of place—she found, for example, page 56
after page 30, and page 112 after page 12—and she spent close to an hour
making sure everything was in its right place.

She dropped her manuscript in the same
paper bag that had held the wine and set it on the kitchen table. She decided
to have one more glass before heading down to Kinko’s. She heard police and
ambulance sirens in the distance but tried to tune them out. This was a time
for peace and quiet, a time to listen to her inner thoughts and try to imagine
a future where she wouldn’t be shackled to this apartment and street but free
to go wherever she wanted. She’d been getting a little sick of the students at
her school, no pun intended, and she’d been thinking about leaving Reno for
months. This manuscript, featuring interviews and research and plenty of
theories about Cameron Martin’s extraordinary transformation from a
seventeen-year-old basketball player to an eighty-five-year-old curmudgeon,
would not only make Aurora rich but also win her the freaking Pulitzer Prize.

When she heard a soft tap at her front
door, she didn’t even bother to see if someone was standing outside of it. She
figured it had been a bird or a gust of wind. But when the knocking became
louder the second time around, Aurora sat up from her spinning bar chair and
headed to the front door. Still with her second glass of wine in her hand, she
opened the door to see nobody standing there.