Read Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) Online
Authors: Brian Rowe
She had one foot
out of the car when she darted me an annoyed look. “Killing my sister with the
silver paint is a more humane way to put her down.”
“Put her down?”
I asked. “Like a dog?”
“No, but—”
“She’s killing
everyone we know!
Humane
?”
“This will be
faster,” Liesel said. “Just trust me.”
“There you go
again with the ‘trust me.’ I swear, Leese. I’m putting a lot of faith in you.”
“I’m the best
chance you’ve got to see your family again, Cam. Come on. Let’s go.”
I shook my head
and stepped out of the car. I caught my face reflected off the window. I looked
so… normal.
Normal and attractive.
No rapid aging,
forward or backward. While everyone in Los Angeles was suffering with the
fastest aging of his or her life, I had somehow obtained a free pass this time
around. I didn’t want to tell Liesel, of course, but I was ecstatic we could go
about trying to solve this third magical mystery without the two of us having
to age along with everyone else. I knew, in the end, no matter what, Liesel and
I wouldn’t have to perish. It was a tiny luxury in an otherwise gargantuan mess
of a situation, but it was something.
“Shit,” Liesel
said up ahead, near the front of the building.
“What?”
“It’s closed.
They’re closed on Mondays. Isn’t that nice?”
“Are there any
other stores in the area? Maybe I can look—”
“No. Not enough
time. Come on.”
Liesel walked
around the left side of the building, and I hurried up to follow her. I had no
idea what she was planning to do.
The back of the
building faced a giant cement wall. Nobody was around. We could barely even
hear the loud traffic in the distance.
“What are you
gonna do?” I asked.
“We need those
paintball guns, Cam,” Liesel said, before fiddling with the knob on the back
door.
“Leese, it’s
locked.”
“I know,” she
said, taking three steps back.
“So? What
are—
”
Before I could
finish my sentence, Liesel brought her right leg out and slammed it against the
door, twice, three times. The fourth time was the charm, the door flinging back
against some lockers.
Liesel took a
deep breath, then smiled, and turned to me.
I just shook my
head. “Who… are you?”
“Come on.”
I followed her
inside. She turned on some of the lights. It was dead silent inside.
I was far more
nervous about this breaking-and-entering than Liesel was. “Jesus, Leese, what
if someone comes in here?”
“They won’t.”
“But what if
they do?”
“I married a
man
, right?” she asked, without even
looking at me.
I decided to
shut up as she stepped toward the shelf in the back that housed various
paintball guns.
“Cam, can you step
on this table here to grab that gun?” She pointed up high and at first I
thought there’d be no way to reach it. But once I hesitantly stepped up onto
the glass table, I realized I could’ve reached a whole other ledge higher than
this one if I needed to. I grabbed the heavy black gun and dropped it down onto
Liesel’s hands.
“A Tippmann
A-5,” Liesel said with a smile. “These things run for like three hundred bucks!
Maybe it was a good thing this place was closed. Here, grab me the one just to
the right up there.”
I threw her down
another gun, then two more. One Liesel said had sniper capabilities, and
another was a cheaper but lighter paintball pistol gun.
By the time I
stepped foot on the carpet again, we had five weapons in our inventory. We
grabbed the necessary accessories—barrels, loads, markers, and
paintballs—and threw it all in a large black bag. Liesel didn’t seem to
be having a problem stealing all of this equipment. Part of me expected her to
clean out the cash register before we left, too. Thankfully she didn’t.
“OK, I think
we’re good,” Liesel said. “Do you want to grab anything else from here?”
“No!” I shouted
louder than I expected to. “Were you a shoplifter or something before I met
you?”
She shook her
head. “Just a witch, that’s it. I promise.”
“Oh great. That
makes me feel much better.”
Before I turned
around to face the exit, a door slammed shut in the back. I thought it might
have just been the wind, but the sounds of footsteps instantly dropped Liesel
and me to our stomachs.
“Oh no,” she
said.
“Oh shit!” I
said. “What do we do?”
“Just stay calm.
And shut up.”
She joked about
it a lot, but sometimes Liesel did wear the pants in this relationship. While
in high school I was the stud of the senior class, and Liesel was practically
unrecognized by the entire student body, here I was being bossed around by my
wife like I was a cockroach beneath her feet ready to be squashed.
We stayed low to
the ground, bumping our shoulders up against each other behind a rack of
multi-colored paintballs. We heard the sound of whistling—it seemed to be
coming from an older man—before the whistling stopped abruptly.
“What the hell?”
the man shouted.
I moved my head
up to see the full white beard of a security guard. The guy looked sixty, at
least, but muscular and lean. He had a scowl on his face as he looked up to see
the missing paintball guns. He darted behind the desk, hit the gratingly loud
ALARM button, and started running to the back hallway of the building we had
entered in.
“Now!” Liesel
shouted.
She jumped up
and ran for the front door. I made my way up and followed her, slowly because
the guns and accessories were so damn heavy. But as soon as I reached the door,
I knew we had a problem.
The door was
locked.
Uh-oh.
“Hey! You there!
I see you!”
I tried to make
a run for it, but the security guard rushed up toward me, grabbed my bag, and
threw it to the ground.
“The cops are on
their way,” he said, rubbing his hand against the snot under his nose. “Don’t
you even think about going anywhere!
”
Wait,
I thought.
Where’s
Liesel?
As an answer to
my question, I saw the top half of Liesel’s
face appear
behind the security guard’s shoulder. She tapped on his shoulder, and as he
turned around, Liesel
drop kicked
him right in the
face. The security guard stumbled back a few steps but maintained his
composure.
He rushed up to
Liesel and tried to hit her in the face, but she dodged the hit and punched him
in the center of his back. She must have hit him somewhere sensitive, because
the man screamed and tumbled down to the hardwood floor.
I watched in
amazement, my jaw dropped, as Liesel disappeared for a moment, and the guard
made his way back up to his feet. As soon as he turned around, Liesel
approached him again, this time with one of the paintball guns in her hands.
Before he could grab for one of his weapons strapped to his belt, Liesel
slammed the back tip of the gun against his face, knocking him out clean. The
security guard swayed forward, then backward, then slammed his face against the
floor, again.
Liesel took a
deep breath and reached her hand out for me. “OK. Let’s go.”
I couldn’t move
for a second. “How… what…”
“Cam! The alarm!
Let’s go!”
She helped me
up, threw her two paintball guns at me, and grabbed the heavier bag. The two of
us raced out the back of the building.
When we reached
the car, I could hear sirens in the distance.
“Cam, throw me
the keys!”
“What?”
“Now!”
I did as I was
told.
After throwing
the guns and the bag in the trunk, we jumped into the car, and Liesel drove us
out to the 101
freeway
and back on our way to our next
destination.
For the next few
minutes, I couldn’t help but think it, time and time again.
Yep. Liesel definitely wears the pants.
CHARISMA
She’d never seen
the L.A. traffic this bad. Even though she had one eye on the 405
freeway
and the other eye focused on her eye shadow in the
rearview mirror, she preferred the cars in front of her to move a little faster
than
this
. She always left for her
auditions at least an hour early, just to be sure. But she was worried this
afternoon, for the first
time, that
she might be late.
She was just passing Westwood, after all, and she still needed to get all the
way to Santa Monica.
She finally
honked at the large truck in front of her, trying her best to control her
increasingly hostile road rage. “Let’s go!” she shouted out her side window.
She honked again. “Move it, you redneck son of a bitch!”
None of the cars
ahead of her moved, and the guy in the truck up ahead didn’t acknowledge her
screaming. The only activity that took place in that next minute was an old guy
in the car behind her rolling his window down and spitting a lougee on the
pavement.
She planted her
head against the steering wheel and said, softly, “That’s the one and only
thing I miss about Reno. The lack of goddamn traffic.”
Charisma Kellog,
wearing a tight, bright orange dress, her long, straight blonde hair falling
beside her shoulders, had been living in Los Angeles for exactly one year, and
had enjoyed every minute of it, even if she hadn’t become a major movie star
overnight. When she left Reno last June for the glitz and glamor of Hollywood,
she barely made time to say goodbye to her family and friends. She’d wanted to
get out of there, just leave that nasty desert behind for something bigger and
better. She knew she wouldn’t miss her on-and-off again boyfriend Ryan, or her
exes Lyle, Tim, Fred, John, Justin, Wyatt, Chris, Christopher, Peter, and
Stevie. Or Scarlett, whose little fling with she enjoyed but didn’t mention to
anyone.
And then there
was Cameron Martin, her boyfriend for most of senior year who she had gone out
with to make one hundred percent sure she’d be on the top of the social status
at Caughlin Ranch High, where she liked to think of herself as popular as far
back as her eventful and promiscuous freshman year. Charisma had found him
cute, to be sure—she wouldn’t date a guy who looked like a dog, even if
he was the star player of the basketball team. They had their fun together,
even if Cameron had kept insisting on having sex, which was something that
didn’t interest Charisma in the least. She had slept with multiple guys
throughout her freshman and sophomore years, but by the time senior year rolled
around, she wanted to save herself for all the older, powerful men in Los
Angeles who could help her slide through the ranks in the entertainment world.
She had enjoyed watching Cameron suffer with blue balls all those months,
begging her to sleep with him. She had liked to torment him for sure, and she
was sad when it all came to a screeching halt.
It still gave
Charisma goosebumps when she thought about what happened to Cameron during
those last three months of senior year. She had made out with the guy hundreds
of times, let the guy touch her breasts. And then, there he was, showing up to
school every day, a year older, a year
uglier
, soon
looking like her father, and soon after that, her great-great-grandfather. Even
though she saw him turned back to normal at high school graduation, she was
done with that chapter in her life. She had moved on to a time and place where
time moved fast, traffic moved
slow
, and nothing, and
nobody, would get in the way of her acting career.
The problem was
that breaking into the movie and TV industry had been a much tougher beast to
tame than Charisma ever expected. It had been twelve months, and she still
hadn’t secured a theatrical agent yet, although she did have a commercial
agent, and a manager. She had gone in for multiple auditions, but thus far had
only secured two television show one-liners (one on
House
, the other on an unaired pilot called
The Wonderful Maladys
), four commercials, a couple of PSAs, and a
supporting role on a webisode series that felt beneath her. Her manager kept
telling her that she needed footage for her reel, as much quality footage she
could obtain that showcased decent production values and the quality of her
acting. Charisma never thought of herself as a great actress; she figured her
looks alone would get her places. Unfortunately for her, though, every audition
cattle call she attended featured fifty other girls who were as good looking as
her, if not more so. In little old Reno, she could stand out in a crowd.
But not in L.A.
So Charisma did
the unthinkable, and started taking acting classes, trying her best to improve
on her skills and her God-given talent, hoping that with a lot of hard work,
she could finally start nabbing bigger roles. She still hadn’t been in a movie.
She really wanted to be in a movie, even if it was just some small part. She
had an opportunity one day to go be an extra in an upcoming Zac Efron movie,
but she just couldn’t do it. She was Charisma Kellog, and she was no extra. She
was a
star
.