The Big One-Oh

by Dean Pitchford

  “I didn’t know that about cakes,” Lorena whimpered as we stood over my flat pastries.

  “You don’t know anything about food!” I fumed.

  “Don’t you have frosting? Frosting will make them tall.”

  “Yeah! About two inches tall!” I snapped. “Great. Just great! Instead of a birthday cake, I’ve got a birthday cookie.”

  “Can’t you make another one?” Lorena asked.

  I slowly sat down at the kitchen table and shook my head, finally overwhelmed and defeated by the events of the last four weeks.

  “No,” I mumbled in despair. “I can’t make another one.”

  And then the doorbell rang.

  We looked at each other.

  “What time are your guests coming?” Lorena asked.

  “Not for hours,” I gulped. “Oh, no.”

  Lorena opened the front door in case one of my party guests was early and had to be sent home for a while. But that’s not who was there.

  A man in a silly polka-dotted orange jacket was standing on our porch holding on to a giant bunch of colored balloons that were swaying in the growing wind.

  Boing Boing growled real low, but I wasn’t sure if he was growling at the balloons or the Balloon Man’s jacket.

  “Charley Mapleweed?” the Balloon Man read from his clipboard.

  “Maplewood,” I said.

  He reread his paper. “Oh, yeah. Maplewood.”

  He looked up, cleared his throat, and began to sing:

  Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday, Charley!

  Celebrate cuz now you’re ten!

  You’ll never be this age again

  So Happy Happy Birthday, kid!

  Then he stuck the clipboard in my face and said, “Sign here, dude.”

  Lorena grabbed the balloons and gushed: “Cool! These’ll brighten up the house!” I wanted to scream at her that I didn’t want to brighten up the house!, but instead, I scratched my name on the Balloon Man’s pad, and he left.

  That’s when, across the street, I saw Garry in his driveway. He was loading boxes into his car, and I remembered what he was heading off to. Without even thinking, I waved and shouted, “Good luck, Garry!”

  He looked up. He didn’t smile or anything. He just waved back, got into his car and drove off.

  He was still mad. I could tell.

  Lorena was inspecting the balloons, and when she found a gift card taped to one of the ribbons, she snatched it off and handed it to me.

  “Read the card! Read the card!” Lorena had already forgotten that, only three minutes earlier, she had destroyed my birthday cake. But she always gets excited by things made of bright colors; I don’t get it.

  I opened the card, and when I saw what it said, I snorted, “Yeah. I bet.”

  “What? Who’s it from? Who who who?” Lorena chanted.

  I held up the card and read: “Dear Charley, Sorry about the mix-up. Your mom wrote me with the right date. Have a great Tenth Birthday. Love, Dad.”

  “No way! He finally got the day right,” Lorena laughed.

  I snarled at her: “He didn’t get it right! Mom told him!”

  She could see I was getting upset. “So what? At least you got balloons.”

  “Big deal!”

  “You know, you can be such an ungrateful jerk,” she exploded. “After all the crap that you’ve pulled, you should just be happy you’re having a party!”

  And that’s when I lost it. All the frustrations and hopes and disappointments and sleepless nights of the last month came bubbling up, and I went absolutely berserk!

  I leapt at the balloons in Lorena’s hand, yanked them down and started punching them and kicking them and stomping and screaming, “I DON’T WANT A PARTY! I DON’T! I DON’T! I DON’T!!!”

  My outburst freaked out Lorena, who yelled, “Charley!? What’re you doing? Stop it!”

  But I couldn’t stop! And then, to make matters worse, I started to cry. “Send back the balloons! Send everybody home! I don’t want a party ever, ever!” I wailed.

  Lorena dropped to her knees and pinned my arms by my side.

  “Charley! Charley! What’s wrong? Tell me!” she said.

  “A birthday . . . ,” I choked out, “. . . a birthday is when you’re special, and it’s your day, and people come to see you.”

  “That’s right,” she nodded. “So?”

  “But everybody’s leaving! Or they’re already gone,” I cried.

  “Who? Who’s leaving?”

  I pointed down the street. “Garry! I made him mad and he went away! And Mom’s not here! And Dad doesn’t remember unless somebody tells him to. They’re all gone!”

  By now, my whole body was shaking with sobs.

  And that’s when Lorena did something she hasn’t done since I was about five.

  She hugged me.

  “I’m here, Charley!” she said. “I’m here.”

  “But you’re my sister. You don’t count.”

  That made Lorena laugh.

  “Listen,” she said, looking me in the face. “I owe you.”

  “For what?”

  “You came running when Brad’s hand got caught in my hair.”

  “But that’s when I set the garage on fire,” I reminded her, wiping the snot from my nose.

  “It was the thought that counts,” she said. “You did something nice for me.”

  I blinked at her. I had never heard my big sister talk to me like she cared. Not ever.

  “So?” I shrugged.

  “So. What can I do for your birthday?”

  31

  Dad’s balloons hovered in a high corner of the kitchen ceiling as I raced around making final preparations.

  By the time I spread the two cake layers with frosting and stacked them up, my cake was the thickness of a school-book. I made it a little more interesting by creating a little scene on top; I took the bag of plastic cowboys and horses that Mom had bought, and, with some of Lorena’s red nail polish, I bloodied up a few of the cowboys, as if they had been in a shoot-out and had lost. Then I sawed a leg or a head off a few of the horses and scattered the body parts over the chocolate icing. I was going to have to warn people not to choke on them.

  “How’s this?” Lorena asked from the door.

  I looked up, and I almost swallowed my tongue.

  Lorena was wearing one of Mom’s nicer dresses—Mom calls it a cocktail dress; she had on a blond wig that she once bought for a costume party, and she had on so much makeup that, at first, I thought she was wearing a mask.

  “You don’t look like Mom!” I cried.

  “Your classmates don’t know what Mom looks like.”

  “But you’ve gotta convince the parents! Or else they won’t leave their kids here.”

  “And you only thought of that today?” Lorena was already sounding like Mom.

  “You didn’t offer until twenty minutes ago.”

  “Well, if I had more than twenty minutes, maybe I could make a convincing Mom. But as it is . . .”

  The doorbell rang.

  We froze.

  It rang again.

  I panicked.

  “Go!” I pushed Lorena toward the stairs, hissing at her, “I can’t have anybody see you!”

  “Fine!” she hissed right back. “I don’t want to be a part of your big fat lie anyway!”

  And up the stairs she stomped.

  The doorbell rang a third time, so I rushed to the front door. I heard a woman’s voice on the other side asking, “Darryl? Are you sure the invitation said today?”

  I was all ready to turn the knob and welcome my first guest when I realized that I didn’t have any pants on. That’s because I had almost completely changed into my nicer clothes after the balloons arrived, but—to keep my pants clean—I had laid them over the back of a chair until after I frosted the cake.

  “How rude, Darryl. I don’t think there’s anyone at home,” Darryl’s mom was now saying.

  I raced back in the kitchen, tr
ipping over Boing Boing on the way, and yanked my pants off the kitchen chair. Hopping on one leg and then the other, I pulled them on as I lurched toward the front door, yelling, “Coming! I’m coming!”

  I tucked in my shirt, zipped up my zipper, reached for the knob, jerked the front door open and shouted, “Darryl! You came!”

  Darryl blinked. “Well. Yeah.”

  Darryl’s mom was as thin and white as a sheet of paper. Her hair was tied back in a tight bun, and it seemed to pull her lips back along with it.

  “You must be the Birthday Boy,” she said. The way she smiled made smiling look like a lot of work.

  “Yeah. I’m Charley. Charley Maplewood,” I rattled nervously.

  “We’ve been ringing this bell for ages,” Darryl’s mom said.

  “Yeah. Sorry about that,” I shrugged.

  I noticed that she was looking over my head and into the house.

  “Are we the first?” she asked.

  “You sure are! Right on time. Come on in, Darryl!” I was anxious to get him in the house and close the door.

  “One moment, Charley,” Darryl’s mom said, and I knew what was coming. “Where’s your mother?”

  “My mother?” I stalled, while my brain raced around in my skull yelling, “Doomed! You’re doomed!”

  “I assume there’s going to be an adult at this party,” Darryl’s mom said.

  “Sure is!” I smiled like a lunatic. “And there is an adult here. But she’s . . . she’s upstairs.” I leaned toward Darryl’s mom and whispered, “She’s putting on her panty hose.” Then I winked and added, “I’ll tell her you said ‘hi.’ ”

  I took Darryl by the arm but Darryl’s mom grabbed his other arm and, still smiling, said firmly, “I’d like to meet her.”

  “Oh! I bet you would!” I boomed.

  “So?”

  “And I bet she’d love to meet you.”

  “But?”

  “But . . . she’s shy.”

  “Oh,” Darryl’s mom was nodding now, not very happy about how this conversation was going. “You know, if there’s some reason that your mother doesn’t want to meet me, I’m not sure that I want to leave Darryl in these circumstances.”

  I was about to crack like a walnut, throw my hands up and confess, “You’re right! You got me! There’s no adult here! This whole thing’s a sham!” But that’s when I heard Lorena’s voice calling from a window upstairs.

  “Hello? Charley? Who’s here?” Lorena was dropping her voice way down low, like she had been up all night screaming at a rock concert.

  I ran out onto the front lawn, and Darryl and his mom followed me. We all turned to look up at Mom’s bedroom window. There, behind one of Mom’s lacy curtains, Lorena was waving like a beauty queen.

  I was never so happy to see my sister in my life.

  “Mrs. Maplewood!” I called up to her.

  Darryl’s mother turned to me. “You call your mother ‘Mrs. Maplewood’?”

  In a blind panic, I turned to Darryl. “What do you call yours?”

  “Mom,” he answered.

  “MOM!” I called to the Creature in the Upstairs Window.

  “Hello!” Lorena waved. “I’m Mrs. Karen Maplewood. Mother of Charley Maplewood. The Birthday Boy.”

  Darryl’s mother squinted up and waved back. “Hello.” Out of the corner of her mouth, though, she muttered to Darryl, “Awful lot of makeup for this early in the day.”

  She caught me looking at her, and she knew she’d been overheard. So she patted her hair into place, pulled her car keys out of her purse and said, “Well . . . okay, then. I’ll be back later, Darryl. You be a good boy.”

  She waved once more to Lorena and called, “Nice to meet you.”

  Lorena waved and smiled down like the Queen of England as she gushed, “Nooooo. The pleasure was entirely mine.”

  Once Darryl’s mom walked away, he and I stood on my lawn for an embarrassed moment. I think that if there were a contest to decide who had the weirder mom, it would have been a toss-up.

  Darryl thrust a colorfully wrapped present at me and said, “Ooops. Forgot. Happy Birthday.”

  He forgot? I’m the one who forgot! Because I’d been so crazy lately—and because this was my first party ever—it had completely slipped my mind that people would be bringing ME presents!

  How cool is that?!

  Just then a bolt of lightning crackled across the sky, and a booming thunderclap chased me and Darryl indoors.

  It was like the sky was saying, Oh, you’re happy now, are you?

  Just wait.

  32

  Once it started to rain, it got a lot easier to fool everybody’s parents.

  They’d drive up, squint through their windshields at the house, and when they’d see Lorena waving from the upstairs window, that was enough to persuade them to release their child.

  Dina, Donna and Dana arrived together. Then Jennifer pulled up right after Leo did, so she was able to hold an umbrella over his head as he hobbled on his crutches to the front porch.

  Unfortunately, with every new arrival, it became more and more apparent how little I had to offer in the way of entertainment.

  I tried to get people talking by pointing out Monsters & Maniacs covers and asking things like: “Do you think vampires are lucky to live forever?” and “I wonder if two-headed people go on double dates.”

  Jennifer jumped in with a few opinions, but nobody else responded. Instead, they stared gloomily from around the room, and, if not for the sound of thunder and rain outside, things would have been as quiet as a tomb.

  “I thought this was gonna be scary,” Darryl grumbled.

  “I think that’s coming,” Jennifer burbled. She had managed to get her red hair under control by clipping it with about fifty bobby pins.

  “I’m sure that something’s coming,” Leo added, sounding like the Class President that he is. But, because he was leaning on his crutches against a wall, he looked like he could just as easily walk out at a moment’s notice.

  “How come your birthday cake’s so flat?” Donna asked from her spot at the dining table. Then she suddenly exclaimed, “Ew! Puke! There’s headless horses in the frosting!”

  That got a few people to rush over, asking, “Where?” But once they saw the teensy animal parts and the bloodied cowboys, they lost interest.

  “I thought there was gonna be a movie,” Dana said.

  “What happened to the movie?” whined Dina.

  “Yeah, Charley?” Leo tried to sound positive. “Let’s see that movie, Buddy. Movie! Movie!”

  The others picked up his chant, getting louder and louder, stomping and clapping, “Movie! Movie! MOVIE! MOVIE!”

  “Oh, will you shut up!”

  Lorena’s bark made everyone spin around. I had forgotten that, without the benefit of the lace drapes, bad lighting and a distance of at least twenty feet, she looked pretty terrifying.

  A few people gasped and turned away from the sight.

  “You’re not Mrs. Maplewood,” Darryl guessed immediately.

  “Give that boy a prize!” Lorena sneered. “No, I’m not Mrs. Maplewood, but I am bigger and meaner than any of you, so you do NOT want to mess with me.” And as she said that last part, she yanked off her wig, releasing her wild hair.

  “Are your parents not here?” Leo asked me.

  “Uh . . . well . . . our Dad lives in Scotland . . . ,” I started.

  “Your mom, then! Is your real mom here?” Dina demanded.

  “She, uh . . . she lives with us. Is that what you mean?”

  Still inspecting the cake, Donna called, “Did an adult make this cake? Cuz it looks like it’s poison.”

  “I’d better call my mom,” Darryl said as he slid off the couch.

  “Me, too.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’m next!”

  My party wasn’t fifteen minutes old, and already the guests were fleeing. They rushed for the phone, where they wrestled for control of th
e handset, yelling and pushing.

  The only one not in the crush was Jennifer, who stood in the middle of the room, soaking up everything that was happening.

  “I’m having the time of my life, Charley,” she shouted above all the noise.

  Then an earsplitting whistle made everyone whip around to the doorway.

  Cougar had arrived.

  He dropped his whistling fingers from his lips and snickered, “Who invited all these losers?”

  Behind him, Scottie shook off raindrops. “Yeah. Losers.”

  “Who invited you?” Lorena asked.

  Cougar pointed to me. “Your idiot brother.” He looked up and down at my sister in Mom’s cocktail dress and said, “Whatever it is you’re running for, sweetheart, I sure hope you win.” He and Scottie hooted at that, but nobody else did.

  “Y’know what? I don’t need this,” Lorena huffed. “Kill each other for all I care.” And with a flick of her hand, she turned and went back upstairs.

  “Why are they here?” Jennifer whispered worriedly, nodding toward Cougar and Scottie.

  “I . . . I sort of invited them,” I stammered.

  “After what they did?” she whimpered, and I watched the light fade from her eyes.

  “Whoa, Jennifer!” Cougar strutted across the room. “What have you done to your hair?” She glared at him as he spun around to everybody else and demanded, “And what’re the rest of you buttwipes doing?”

  They all shrugged and mumbled, intimidated by Cougar’s loud mouth.

  “He doesn’t have a scary movie,” Dana said.

  “I haven’t been scared once,” Dina added.

  “I’ve been to bar mitzvahs that were scarier,” Darryl snorted.

  “Although this cake is scary,” Donna said, pointing at it nervously.

  Cougar pulled a balloon down, bit its neck off and inhaled the helium inside. Then, in a very, very high voice, he peeped, “You guys are all such weenies!”

  That got people laughing.

  “And he . . .” Cougar tweeted, pointing at me, “. . . he’s the birthday weenie! The biggest weenie of all!”

  That’s when things started to fall apart. Suddenly everybody forgot about calling their parents; instead, they wanted to bite their own balloon and talk in a funny voice, too. They grabbed the balloon ribbons and leapt up at the ceiling. They stood on chairs, walked across the sofa, and climbed on the dining room table.