The Big One-Oh (15 page)

She was right. We didn't own our DVD player. Or our TV. Or our stereo. They were all on loan from Fittipaldi's Appliances.

“Well, I'll take it in and have the repair department take a look,”
Mom sighed, and that's when I lunged into the living room.

“YOU CAN'T!”

“Oh, Charley!” Mom gasped. “You scared me!”

“You can't take the DVD player back to the store. Not now!”

“I don't know why you care,” Lorena sniffed. “It ate
my
DVD.”

“Don't worry,” Mom said as she unplugged the machine and wrapped up its cord. “I'll have it back by Tuesday.” She patted me on the head as she exited, carrying with her the last hope of my salvation. Lorena followed her out.

Alone in the living room, I raised my fists over my head and shook them at heaven.

“Why?”
I wanted to wail.
“Why me?”

 

 

That evening I didn't want to arouse suspicion or draw attention to myself, so I made a simple spaghetti with meat sauce. See? Nothing special.

I thought I had succeeded in deceiving Lorena and Mom, but just before bedtime I turned and found Lorena leaning against my bedroom door with her arms crossed.

“You don't fool me for one second,” she whispered with a sneer.

“Huh?”

“I hear things. I know what you're planning tomorrow.”

“What?” I gasped, with my biggest, wide-eyed look. But I could tell that she wasn't buying it.

“Are you out of your mind, Charley? After what you did to the garage, you're gonna throw a party without Mom here?”

“But it's my Big One-Oh!” I pleaded.

“Do you know that Marci Liroff threw a pool party when her parents went to Las Vegas, and three hundred kids showed up? They broke the windows and threw the living room furniture into the pool!”

Under the circumstances, I would have voted for that kind of party, but who was I kidding? My friends could never lift our living room furniture.

“It won't be that kind of party,” I insisted, struggling to keep my voice down so Mom wouldn't hear. “There's only eight people—nine, if you count me. We're just gonna talk and eat cake. I swear!”

“Yeeeesh!” Lorena snorted. “Boring.”

“We'll have fun. You watch.”

“Well, don't expect me to have anything to do with it. You are on your own.”

She started to go, but then she leaned back in to add: “And Mom is
really
gonna kill you this time.”

I had bad dreams all night. I'd see visions of my classmates destroying our house, while my mom fell to her knees in the driveway, weeping wildly and tearing at her hair.

When Mom came in the next morning, I had to pretend that I was asleep. She kissed me on the forehead and whispered, “Hey, Birthday Boy,” and I opened one eye.

“I'm sorry I've got to work today,” Mom said.

In my best sleepy voice, I said, “How come you're sorry?”

“Because!” she laughed. “It's your special day.”

“Oh. Yeah. I forgot,” I croaked as I pulled the sheet up against my chin.

“When I'm home from work, we'll go out for burgers. Or maybe something fancier. You pick.”

“We don't have to.”

“Don't be silly,” she said as she kissed my forehead again. “You're ten!”

She left my bedroom and shut the door. I listened as she descended the stairs. Listened as she made a quick inspection of the light switches and stove knobs in the kitchen. Listened as she went out the front door, started her car and drove away.

And then I sprang into action.

I threw back the bedsheets and jumped up, ready for battle. The night before, I had dressed in my street clothes so that I wouldn't waste a minute changing into them. I zipped into the bathroom and threw water on my face, and then I zoomed for the stairs, passing Lorena on the way.

“You're really gonna do this?” she asked sleepily.

“Try and stop me!” I yelled as I flew down to the kitchen.

 

 

The first thing I had to do was get the cake in the oven. I whizzed through the instructions on the box and poured the layers into two pans before it was even nine o'clock.

Because I wasn't going to be able to show
My Principal Is a Maniac!
, and I had no party games to play, I decided that I should turn my attention to decorating the house. I had kept a notepad under the covers in bed with me, and during the night I had written down every idea that popped into my mind, no matter how stupid it sounded.

First, I pulled out about twenty issues of
Monsters & Maniacs
and scattered them around the living room and dining room. I hoped they might spark conversations about gruesome and frightening topics:

See? Something like that.

I kept popping into the kitchen, flicking on the light in the oven and looking through the hot little window to see how my cakes were doing. They were rising nicely, so I went back to “frightening-up” the house.

I hung a raincoat on a hanger and hooked it to the head of a floor mop. Then I floated them—facedown—in a tub full of water in the downstairs bathroom. Through the shower curtain it looked like somebody was drowning, with their hair floating around their head.

I hoped.

I tied a white bedsheet to a string which I led through a hook on the ceiling and tied to the bathroom doorknob. That way, when anybody pulled the door open, the string on the doorknob would make the sheet rise, and it would dance in front of them like a ghost.

Sort of.

I made devil's horns out of aluminum foil and tried to attach them to Boing Boing's head, but, after he shook them off eight times, I figured that he didn't want to be part of the decorations.

While I was racing around, I started to notice that, outside, the sky was darkening; black clouds were rolling in and blotting out the sun. I was beginning to worry that it might give my classmates an excuse to call and cancel. But then I walked into the kitchen, and I forgot all about the weather.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” I screamed at Lorena.

She had opened the oven and was sniffing my cakes.

“I'm just smelling them! Jeez. Don't split a gut.”

“You opened the oven! The cakes could fall! What were you thinking . . . ?!”

But it was already too late.

As I got to Lorena's side, the two layers—puffy and perky one moment—suddenly sighed and collapsed to the bottoms of their pans, like they had lost all hope and had exhaled for the last time.

“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.

“Maple
wood,
” I said.

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

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

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.