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

“Oh my God…”

“Oh my God!”
Liesel shouted, running over to me. “Cam, are you OK?”

Liesel helped me
back up to my feet. I looked down to see that I was covered head to toe with
dirt, and my right arm had a nasty scrape that ran all the way down to my
elbow.

I shook a ton of
dirt out of my hair and coughed a few times. “I’m fine.”

“You got a nasty
cut there,” Liesel said, analyzing the small wound on my arm. “Come on, let’s
go. You need a band-aide.”

She tugged on my
left shoulder, but I didn’t budge. I just stared at her. “
Seriously
?”

I watched as her
eyes met mine. She didn’t seem to know what I was referring to. “What?”

“A
band-aide
?” I brought my hands to my
hips.

She smiled and
took a step closer to me. She looked like she wanted to make out with me for
the second time this morning, even though my lips were browned with dirt.

“Cam, I’m sorry
I beat you, but come on, seriously, you had it coming—”

I started
shaking my head so fast it looked like I was having a seizure. “That’s not what
I’m mad about. I’m mad that you’re telling me you need to put a band-aide on
this.” I raised my bloody arm for Liesel and the rest of Reno to see.

She just
shrugged.

I opened my eyes
wide. “Can’t you just… I don’t know… flick your wrist and say a quick spell to
make this scrape go away?”

She smiled
again, knowing where I was going with this.

“And you
could’ve stopped me from hitting the ground in the first place,” I said. “And!”
I took a step forward and kicked a rock off the top of the cliff. “You could’ve
saved my bike! Look at it! It’s ruined!”

Liesel and I
peered down to see the bike upside down, both its tires slashed from all the
sharp rocks.

“I’m sorry, Cam,
but you know—”

“You made a frog
float in the air. A
frog
! Why not the
bike?”

“Cam—”

“You’re a witch
for Christ’s sake!”
 

Liesel lunged
forward and pushed me down to the ground. She straddled herself on top of me, and
not in a good way.

“Cam, you
promised me you’d never use that word.”

“I know
but—”

“And we’re never
to discuss this in the open. What the hell is wrong with you?”

I looked to my
left. We weren’t in the middle of nowhere that I originally thought. The street
was just yards away, with the backyard of a house facing us.

“Do you know
what could happen if I slip up again?” she asked.

“I… I know.”

“We could be
torn apart forever. Do you want that?”

I shook my head.
No. Absolutely not.

“OK,” she said,
jumping to her feet and pulling me up. I now had dirt falling down into my butt
crack.

“You’re amazing,
you know,” I said, trying to get back on her good side again.

“I know I am,”
she said with a laugh. “Maybe not as amazing as you’d like me to be…” She
kissed me on the tiny part of my cheek that lacked any remnants of dirt. “But
amazing nonetheless.”

“So then… a
band-aide?”

“Yes, a
band-aide. Come on, let’s move it. We’ve got a big day ahead of us.”

You have no idea
, I thought, as I followed Liesel toward
the street.

I turned the
corner and lost sight of her for a moment. I saw her bike near the street, but
I didn’t see her.
I thought she said she
wasn’t going to use magic.
Did she
just make herself disappear?

When I finally
reached her bike near the end of the dirt trail, I turned to my right to hear
footsteps coming my way. Scared that the approaching figure would be a tiger, a
bear, or—yikes—Mrs. Gordon on a morning jog, I took a deep, satisfying
breath when I saw Liesel walking my sad, wounded bike up the side of the hill.

“It’s not that
bad,” she said. “Your dad can probably fix this, right?”

“I can do it,” I
said, proudly. “I’m good with bikes.”

She chuckled and
started walking the bike toward the street. “Yeah. Sure you are.”

She turned the
corner and waved for me to follow her. “You want to ride your bike?” I asked.

“You ride it,”
she said. “I’ll walk.”

I shook my head,
enamored by her big heart and never-ending kindness.
And after I ignored her year after year after…

I started
following her, smiling to myself, trying not to shout what I’d been thinking
for the past few weeks and ruining the big surprise.

Today’s going to be a big day,
I thought.
Oh yes.
A very big day.

---

My sister Kimber
was munching on a Kit Kat bar when I stormed into her bedroom unannounced. It
was 5:30 P.M. and already starting to get dark outside.

“Have you seen
my shirt?” I asked. “My long-sleeved, dark blue shirt?”

I raced over to
Kimber’s dresser drawer and started fumbling through her underwear.

“HEY!” she
shouted, jumping to her feet and slamming the underwear drawer shut. “You
pervert!”

I pulled open
her bottom drawer before she could stop me. “It’s not in my room, Kimber. I
want to wear it tonight.”

The annoyed
little girl, now not that little anymore at nearly fourteen years old, stomped
her feet against the ground and crossed her arms, like her body language would
somehow get me to vacate her room. Kimber was in the eighth grade now, and she
had shot up a few inches since last summer. She’d lost some weight, too, even
though her eating habits stayed exactly the same.

“Why would I
have your shirt?”

“Because. You
know Mom. Half the time she gives me your clothes, and other times she gives
you mine.”

“That’s
ridiculous. I never get your clothes. I’m a girl, Cam! Mom’s not stupid.”

I stopped, and
grinned ear to ear. I bit down on my bottom lip and shook my head as I pulled
the long-sleeved blue shirt I was looking for out from the top drawer. I
presented it to Kimber, like I was on
The
Price is Right
and trying to get her to guess how much money it’d go for at
the local Macy’s.

“I don’t know
how that got in there,” she said.

“Don’t you?”

“I swear, I
don’t—”

“You know I love
this shirt. Why would you keep it buried in all your clothes? Do you hate me
that much?”

“
Hate
you?” Kimber rushed up to me
unexpectedly and hugged me around my waist. “Don’t say that! Don’t even think
it! You know I love you. We almost lost you last summer for God’s sakes. Give
me a little credit, please.”

“I love you,
too,” I said, patting her on the top of her head like she was a dog.

“I mean, I can’t
believe it,” she continued. “This time last May I never in a million years
thought I’d be celebrating another Christmas with you. I thought you were a
goner for sure.”

“Well I’m here,
Kimber. And I’m not going anywhere.”

She grinned at
me, her teeth now shining with a mouthful of braces. “You better not, Cam. I’m
not letting go of you this time.”

She brought her
face back against my white shirt, her arms still wrapped around me. I thought
we were reaching the end of our never-ending daily hug, but she didn’t budge.
Making things more awkward, neither of us said anything for another ten
seconds.

Finally: “Uhh…
Kimber?”

“Mmm hmm?”

“You can let go
now.”

She laughed and
stepped back, running a hand through her hair, which had grown longer in the
last few months and had started turning from brown to dirty blonde. “Of course.
Sorry.”

“No problem.”

I turned to
leave the room, when she started jumping up and down so fast I thought a live
mouse had raced past her feet. “Wait, before you go, you have to see this!”

Kimber rushed
over to her computer and powered it up with a touch of the keyboard.

“What?” I asked.

“Just look at
this. Speaking of last summer…”

She pulled up
the Firefox Internet browser and clicked on a link she had saved in her
Favorites folder. Obviously whatever she was going to show me was a website she
had been visiting a lot lately.

I reluctantly
tiptoed over to her computer, knowing full well what she was going to show me,
but hoping deep down that she was just excited about some cheesecake recipe, or
a Christmas gift she had bought for mom online. I took a few steps closer and
peered over her shoulder to see what I thought I was going to see.

“No,” I said.
“Don’t play it.”

“I have to,” she
said. “Cam, I’ve watched it a
thousand
times
. And I still can’t get over it.”

“I’ve explained
to you, Kimber. As well as everyone else. It was a stunt—”

“Whatever it is,
it’s freaking
cool
!”

She pulled up
the infamous Youtube video and paused it before it started automatically
playing. She scrolled down and started tapping her finger against the screen.

“Anyway, this is
what I wanted to show you,” she said.

“What?”

“Look.”

She pointed at a
number on the screen. I squinted and tilted my head forward, trying not to
believe the number was real.

“Is that?”

“Mmm hmm,”
Kimber said. “Only took six months.”

“It can’t be.”

“It’s true. Your
little sky dance with your girlfriend just passed ten million
hits on Youtube!”

I shook my head
some more, and then started moving it around in a circular motion, as if I was
preparing myself for a long workout at the gym. I knew what happened to me last
spring was difficult for the rest of Reno to believe. An accelerated aging
disease? It took a lot for people, especially the students and teachers of
Caughlin Ranch High, to understand the bizarre condition. For weeks on end I
figured it was a hellacious disease, just some cancerous parasite ferociously
dining on every cell in my body by the minute.

But then after
all my physical transformations, and emotional heartache, it turned out that my
three months in purgatory weren’t caused by a disease at all. Those terrifying
two and a half months turned out to be instigated by a mean-spirited curse,
performed by Liesel back in the days when I wasn’t paying any attention to her.
And after seeing the errors of my ways, not to mention, actually
falling
for the mysterious, strikingly
beautiful redhead, she was able to miraculously save my life in my final,
horrific moments at the ripe old age of eighty-five. Liesel let loose some
crazy magic that night when she erased the curse by literally lifting me and
everything else in the hospital room off the ground with only her mind. I’m still
shocked to this day that nobody at the hospital recognized what was going on in
room 416 at Washoe County Medical Center—all it took was for one
late-night nurse to come prancing inside to investigate the loud noises to
completely annihilate Liesel’s last-ditch effort to reverse my condition. I
still pinch myself to this day that I lived through it, honestly. And to think,
we were able to make it through those torturous weeks and months without
anyone
discovering just how powerful the
wallflower really was.

But that all
changed on June tenth, my eighteenth birthday. My birthday happened to coincide
with my high school graduation, and let’s just say I was the happiest I had
ever been that night. During my unthinkable condition, all I wanted to do was
make it through senior year and walk up the podium on graduation night to
receive my high school diploma. But I never in a million years thought it was
going to happen, especially when I turned
really
old, hitting my seventies, and suffering a heart attack at our state
championship basketball game. It was over—kaput. There was no way I was
going to make it to graduation. But somehow, I did. And not only was I alive on
that warm June night, but I had a girlfriend, one I had just started dating,
one that turned out to be the person who both started and stopped the maniacal
curse. And I was in love, more so than I’d ever been with Charisma, more so
than I’d been with all the girlfriends I’d had in middle school and early high
school. There was something special about Liesel, something sweet, and
certainly something dangerous. I knew this was a girl I wanted to get to know
better, but I also knew her magical powers, so extraordinary, would probably
rear their ugly heads sooner rather than later.

I just didn’t
know they would make an appearance to the entire auditorium that night.

“
Still
?” I asked. “It’s been
months
.”

“I still watch
it from time to time. It looks so
real
.
It looks like you and Liesel are literally floating through the air! I’m still
mad you turned down that interview on Inside Edition. You and Liesel could’ve
been more than just Youtube stars!”