Inevitable and Only(60)
My stomach twisted a little, and I set down my half-finished milk shake.
“Presents!” said Micayla, reaching into her giant tote bag and pulling out a wrapped package.
I blocked out thoughts of the family celebration I’d refused, and ripped the paper off Micayla’s present. It was a new thrift store painting—this one was a scene with three little blond-haired, blue-eyed girls at a ballet lesson. She’d painted in a T. rex, also in a pink tutu, trying to do a pirouette.
Raven pulled out two smaller packages. One was a gorgeous pair of turquoise earrings she’d found at a craft fair, and the other was a T-shirt that said, A world without adjectives would be, which made me laugh.
“You are the best,” I told them. “Thank you. I really, really needed this.”
Raven put an arm around my shoulders, and Micayla reached across the table to squeeze my hands.
“Of course,” said Raven, “we’re just getting started. Tomorrow, we’re taking you downtown.”
I tried to protest. “I have to work on my lines this weekend.”
But Micayla said, “Dude, you only turn sixteen once,” and Raven said, “Seriously. Plus, you need to stop thinking about that play for a few hours.”
A distraction did sound great. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to take my mind off sushi nights, too—or the lack thereof.
I hadn’t told Zephyr it was my birthday. I didn’t want him to feel like he had to do something special. Besides, what would I even want him to do?
When Raven and Micayla dropped me off at home, the house smelled like chocolate.
“How was your dinner?” Mom asked, her voice a little higher than usual. “So nice of your friends to take you out.”
“It was fun,” I said.
“Fun? Just fun?” said Dad, coming in from the kitchen.
I shrugged.
“Well, I seem to have found a cake in the oven—still hungry?”
“Dad … I said I didn’t want to do anything.”
“I know, but I like baking,” he said. Then, switching to Robot Voice: “Besides—programmed I am—to bake a cake—on birth date of daughter.”
I gave him a weak smile. “Okay … well, I’ll have some tomorrow. I’m pretty full right now.”
Dad’s face sagged. Just for a moment. Then he squared his shoulders and said, “All right, but we aren’t going to let you get away without some birthday presents!”
So we all sat in the living room, and I opened presents. Mom gave me a matching knitted hat-and-scarf set that I couldn’t imagine ever wearing, but she’d helped Josh with his present, too—an awesome new pair of noise-canceling headphones. Elizabeth gave me a gift card for a clothing store at the mall. “I didn’t know what you’d like,” she said. “I hope you can use it.”
“I shop there all the time,” I lied. “It’s perfect.”
Dad presented me with his gift last, a heavy book-shaped package. I peeled the paper away slowly. It was a brand-new, leather-bound Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The pages were onion-skin thin and edged in gold, and there were two silk ribbon bookmarks sewn into the binding. I traced the engraved lettering on the cover, remembering how I still hadn’t even made it through the introduction in the paperback Much Ado he’d given me.
“Thanks, Dad,” I managed. “It’s beautiful.”
Mom was already cleaning up the wrapping paper and Josh was yawning, so I said, “Well, I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll get ready for bed.”
Elizabeth followed me up to our room, and Mom poked her head in to say good night a while later.
I lay awake for what felt like hours, but I didn’t hear Dad come upstairs—he must’ve gone to sleep on the couch again.
I closed my eyes and imagined playing my future self on a dark stage, with a single spotlight shining on me. Doing a dramatic monologue about my stressful teenage years.
So that was my sixteenth birthday, my character told the dark theater. I lay in bed and said to myself, “At least it was finally over.”
The next day, Raven and Micayla and I wandered around the Inner Harbor. It was sunny and windy out, warm enough that I only needed a denim jacket—but that’s not unusual for November in Baltimore. We did a little shopping, listened to a few street musicians, watched an impromptu poetry slam. Then Micayla convinced us to go to the American Visionary Art Museum.
I’d never been there before, and my first thought was that whoever ran this place probably designed Papermoon, too. The walls were filled with enormous mosaics created by street people; psychedelic paintings by mental hospital patients; trash sculptures, life-size statues of invented saints, and intricate carvings on the tips of lead pencils so tiny you had to use a magnifying glass to see them. Artwork by factory workers and grandmothers and hermits.
“Visionary art,” Micayla lectured us, “means artwork produced by self-taught artists. No training. No schools of thought. Raw, spontaneous, outside the rules. Anti-academic.” She groaned. “Maybe I shouldn’t be applying to art school. Maybe I should go work in—in a steel factory, or—”
“Working in a steel factory,” said Raven, “would be very hipster.”
I wandered off to look at an exhibit called Madonna. Paintings of the Virgin Mary hung side by side with photo montages of the singer Madonna. The way the pieces were arranged showed “the way our pop culture conflates or contrasts the divine with the deeply flawed, immortality with fame, purity with desire”—or at least, that’s what the exhibit placard said. I wondered what Elizabeth would think of it.