Chapter #2Birthdays & Beginnings by: rugal b.   (With assistance from Seuzz)
"Zach!"
T'is the voice your mother, calling from downstairs. Instinctively you curl up a little tighter on your bed, burrowing around the phone whose screen you are studying intensely. "What?" you scream back.
Footsteps sound. You brace yourself as they approach your door, and without even knocking first your mother throws it open.
"Zachary Jeremiah Dillon! When I call you," she says, "you don't 'What?' me back."
"Sorry," you lie. "I thought you were Leila."
She ignores the excuse and holds out a set of keys. "You need to go take care of Dalton."
You only just restrain yourself from rolling your eyes. "Can't we just wait until Alisha gets back? She's the one who's all into animals and sh— Veterinary stuff."
"You're not doing anything now, are you? And I've got the cake to finish, and I don't know when Alisha'll be back. Hop to!" she adds as you reluctantly start to unbend yourself. She tosses the keys onto your bed, but you ignore them to glower at your stockinged feet.
It's a late Saturday afternoon: a day and a time when you ought to be out having fun. Other people surely are. Your friends, for instance, and you know they are because both Tyler and Matt texted you separately to ask if you were going to join them up at the movie theater.
But no, here you are at home, and if you've got nothing to do it's because your mother has forced you to stay in so you'll be on hand for the really important thing that's supposed to happen later.
Your sister Leila's birthday party.
With a groan at the thought, you topple onto your side; only when the pain is passed do you get up and scrounge around for your shoes.
The only thing worse than contemplating your younger sister's fifteenth birthday is contemplating her sixteenth. With luck, though, you will be out of the house, out of town, and maybe even out of the country by then. You will be graduating high school in just a few months, and the dread of having to attend a "sweet sixteen" party for your sister is just the thing to motivate you for the college application process.
Or, it would be if you weren't such a procrastinator.
Shoes on, you trudge downstairs and out the side door, to cross the yard for the side gate that separates your parents' property from Mark Taylor's.
Now, it isn't so much that you mind your sister having a birthday. Though you like to give her grief, there's really no bad blood between you. It's the heavy-handed way that your mom insists on all three of her children—you and Leila, and your older sister Alisha—must celebrate each other's birthdays with enthusiasm. Your preference would be to give her your gift, watch as she blows out the candles, eat your slice of cake while she opens her presents, then wish her the best before going upstairs to cut your toenails or something like that.
But your mom wants the birthdays to be parties, and parties mean fun, and you will ruin your little sister's birthday if you're not on hand to have fun with her and her friends.
Oh yeah. Her friends. You wince as you open the patio door to Mark's house. The alarm starts shrieking, and you hurry for the laundry room to turn it off. It is almost as piercing as the voice of Carrie Carmichael.
Then, from another room, the cat starts yelling. That reminds you of Belinda Harrison, another one of Leila's friends who might be staying over for the sleepover. You shudder.
"Dalton!" you yell back at the cat. "I know you can hear me! Stay out of my way and I'll stay out of yours!"
No such luck. As you are pouring food into his bowl, the striped tabby comes trotting in. He swipes your hand with a claw before you can finish pouring. "Dick," you mutter at him.
Mark Taylor is a young, good-looking man that your mother dotes on, and so you got volunteered for cat-feeding duties when he told her that he and his girlfriend were taking a week-long vacation. Your dad likes Mark too, and has been pressuring you to take Mark up on the offer of a weekend internship at his work. Neither this job nor that one excite you much.
Maybe it's spite, maybe it's boredom, maybe it's just an impulse that gets the better of you, but instead of turning the alarm back on and going home, you decide to snoop a little.
It's a nice house, you quickly decide. A lot nicer than yours, maybe because it belongs to a bachelor and not to a smothering mother of three. The floors are hardwood and the furniture is spare with lots of open areas that feel spacious rather than empty. What you notice most, of course, are the electronics: He's got a giant flat-screen TV in the living room, a separate gaming set-up in a den, and a laptop hooked up to two giant monitors in his office. But there are also bookshelves and even a table stacked with old-fashioned board games.
You don't dare go upstairs, but you do follow a set of steps down into what you suppose will be a basement. It puzzles you to find the door at the bottom locked. Almost you turn away. But you try the other keys on the key ring Mark gave to your mother, and one of them opens it. And on the other side, to your mild surprise, is a laboratory.
Oh, it's not a lab like something out of a movie, with test tubes and burners and simmering liquids set over open flames. Just some clean countertops and sinks with glassware and tools laid out neatly to the side. The cabinet doors are all locked, and none of the keys on the ring work on them, save for one which does open one drawer, and it is inside this one drawer that you find another key ring.
Yes, you are not really "snooping" now so much as you are investigating. Pilfering, almost.
With that key ring you open and glance through the cabinets, most of which are stuffed with notebooks and binders, or with the burners and test tubes that you would have expected to fit the stereotypical "chemistry lab."
But in one of them, by itself, is a large glass battle containing what looks like blue Jell-O. You take it out and examine it.
It looks less like Jell-O once you've got it into the light, for it glitters with an iridescent light, and it is only semi-gelatinous for it will slowly ooze when you turn the bottle from side to side. Curiously, it doesn't stop oozing even after you are holding the bottle still, but will climb up and then slip down the sides of the bottle, as though bubbling and boiling with an internal heat. You frown at it, wondering what kind of chemical properties it must have to account for this behavior, and the bottle seems to shiver in your hand as a hard tremble runs through the goop.
Some kind of fit must be upon you, for it is sheer recklessness to pull the rubber stopper from the top.
From upstairs, it sounds like, comes a sound like shattering crockery, and you jump. Something hot and sticky hits your face, and you blink to see the goop has expanded to fill the bottle almost to the top, but as you watch it streams down the inner sides to settle again at the bottom. With the back of your hand you wipe your face, but nothing shows when you look at it, and when you touch the spot with your fingertips you only feel your own skin. But you're sufficiently unnerved that you quickly shove the stopper back in the bottle, put the bottle away, lock it and the other cabinets back up again, and lock the lab door behind you after you've reascended the stairs.
Up on the main floor, you search for the source of that shattering sound, assuming that the cat must have knocked something over. But you find nothing out of place. Having finished his dinner, Dalton has perched on the living room sofa, where he watches you through slit-like eyes with his ears back. He hisses.
"Well, fuck you too," you mutter at him. "If you don't like people doing you favors." You reset the alarm, lock up the house, and return home.
* * * * *
"Happy birthday!" the girls all sing in a rousing tutti. "To ... yoouuuuu!"
Then they all erupt in shrieks and giggles as Leila blows out the candles. You guess that makes her officially fifteen years old now.
"So, what did you wish for?" Sarah Pak asks her with a giggle.
"I'd wish for a date with Liam Mahon!" Carrie Carmichael exclaims before Leila can answer.
"I wish you'd shut up!" Belinda Harrison tells her.
I wish you all were in Antarctica, you think. Then you catch sight of your mother's expression and force the glower off your face. But you can't force a smile there, so you run for the kitchen instead.
"It's not that bad out there, is it?" a voice sounds behind you as you're rooting through the refrigerator.
You turn. The attendance of Dana, Sarah's sister, makes your sister's party almost worth it.
The Paks live a couple of blocks over, and your family have known hers for years. Still, it was a surprise when Dana showed up with Sarah, and stayed.
"It's not what's out there, it's what's coming," you tell her as you shut the icebox door. "The sleepover."
Dana smiles. Grins, almost. "I can rescue you from that, you know?"
Hope—and something more physical, way down low—rises and throbs a little. "Yeah?"
"There's a party at Amanda's tonight," she says. "I was hoping you would ask me to go."
"No one asked me," you reply.
"My mom doesn't need to know that. My real problem is that she doesn't know Amanda, so she's all, you know—"
Yes, you know. Hyper-protective.
"But if you said you were going, I know she'd let me." Her smile widens.
And your heart sinks.
Though you have a crush on Dana, you know she's got a crush on Shawn Gregory, and that's surely the reason she wants to go out there.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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