One
IF I HAD to pick a birthday to live inside of forever, I think it’d be the one in St. Helena.
We were staying in a rental cottage, the latest stop along a trail of borrowed houses that had been winding its way across the country for years. Before St. Helena, there was the timber-frame cabin in the frozen Minnesota woods. Before that, a historic house in Maine with its windows painted shut and sawdust that trickled down from the ceilings at strange hours. Of all the places we’d lived by the time I turned ten, my big brother, Gabe, and I loved the cottage best. It had wild beach roses in the front yard, bricks painted a pale blue Mom called duck’s egg, and the whole Pacific beyond the back gate.
The morning of my tenth birthday, my mom and Gabe and I went down to the water just as sunrise scratched the dark sky pink. We didn’t leave it until sunset. We ate french fries from the local snack shack for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I remember how they tasted, salty
as the ocean, crunchy with sand. I spent the whole day in nothing but a one-piece bathing suit—it wasn’t until the next summer that I started wearing a T-shirt over my suit to cover what I wanted but didn’t have, and what I had but didn’t want. Over and over, I hurled my scrawny body into the waves, trusting Gabe to carry me back to shore if the water didn’t. I could have spent eternity on that shore. There’s nothing I would change about that birthday, except maybe the fact that I knew, even then, that I wouldn’t have another like it. I hadn’t spent two birthdays in the same town since I was a toddler.
In fact, today’s is my very first.
I would not choose to live in the Gutter Ballroom—the one and only combination karaoke lounge, bowling alley, arcade, and sports bar in Jamaica Plain—for all eternity. Just for the record.
Mom, Gabe, and I wait for our appetizers at a high-top table while a man screams the Limp Bizkit version of “Faith” onstage. Someone in the lanes bowls a strike, and neon-pink lights strobe overhead in tribute.
“Isn’t this place wild?” Mom asks, gazing around in wonder as though we’re trapped inside of an art installation. “I can’t believe we haven’t eaten here yet.”
I’d have been happy with fries at the harbor, but I nod. “It’s cool.”
Gabe grins at my half-hearted declaration. “So when do we take to the stage?”
“Excuse me?”
“Our karaoke duet. How about I take Tegan, and you take Sara?”
“How about you take both?”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time. Just ’cause you refuse to have any fun in public—”
“Inaccurate and unfair,” I shoot back. I don’t think serving as store-brand Fred Durst’s follow-up act or rolling my ball into a neighboring lane should count as fun. The public part . . . maybe that is fair. Last year, I made the grave mistake of wearing my ragged laundry-day bra to school when the washing machine on our apartment hall broke down. Melly Lawrence (who I beat out for vice president of the debate club, easily) caught a peek in the locker room and asked in a voice as sweet as candy corn if it was vintage. Who’s to say Melly isn’t here tonight, skulking behind the neon planter in the corner? The smallest mistake can haunt a girl forever.
I wouldn’t bet against Gabe going solo—we’re talking about the kid who came out by belting “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles in his eighth grade talent show—so I stop this train of thought before it crashes on the track. “It’s time for presents, right? Presents for me?”
“Yes!” he cheers, easily distracted. He pulls the gift bag I’ve been eyeing from beneath the table and pushes it toward me. “Happy birthday eve, Banana!”
Technically, I won’t turn seventeen until midnight (or 4:14 a.m., however you keep track), but my brother’s high school graduation is tomorrow afternoon. When I think about the ceremony and what it means—that this fall, my fifteen-months-older brother is headed to
college all the way across the country in Oakland, California—I don’t feel much like celebrating.
Gabe is practically bouncing in his seat, though, so I dig through glittery tissue paper to find a half dozen paperbacks I specifically requested, Her Body and Other Parties topping the stack. “This is perfect,” I tell him honestly, hugging the books to me.
“There’ll be more later. That’s just your, like, corporeal present.”
“Is this assigned summer reading?” Mom peers over at the pile, tucking a stray slip of blond hair back into her low sloppy bun. Typically found in jeans, Birkenstock clogs, and a men’s button-down, she’s dressed tonight the way she clearly thinks one attires themselves for a karaoke bowling bar . . . which means jeans, Birkenstock clogs, and a men’s Phoenix Suns jersey from two states back.
“It’s not assigned . . . exactly.” I then explain my master plan: how these are books my English teacher at Winthrop Academy, the super-competitive college-prep school that brought us to Boston nearly two years ago, referenced in class this year when she complained about the titles she hadn’t been allowed to put on the syllabus. I’m going to read them all this summer, then bring them up in conversation with her when I see her this fall, cementing myself in her brain as a standout student. The kind worth writing a college recommendation letter for even though she’s swamped with requests from girls she’s known since seventh grade.
“Don’t you already have a perfect grade in English?”
“Yeah, but only a 3.87 overall, because of Cul—”
“Oh, God.” Mom grimaces as the strike lights flash through the bar area again. “We’re not talking about Culinary Arts tonight, are we?”
What happened was this. My take-home final last week was to prepare an ambitious dish, the kind we didn’t have time to execute in class. I spent most of the evening and night baking one cheese soufflé after another—this one too runny, this one dry, all of them collapsed like dying stars. Our small kitchen grew hotter and hotter, my cheeks flushed with effort and shame. In the end, I turned in a ramekin of inedible garbage, and this morning I spent a solid hour hyperventilating over what the final would do to my grade in the class before it came through the portal: B-minus. The first time I’d gotten anything below an A since middle school, and that had been in PE.
“I’m just trying to cheer you up,” Mom says, reaching for the bar menu, though she rarely drinks when the three of us go out. “It’s nothing to be upset about on your birthday.”
I clear my throat and straighten my spine. “Actually, there’s this course through Winthrop’s summer program. Food and Nutrition? Less baking, more memorization. Stuff I’m good at. I talked to my college counselor, and if I take it, I can drop this semester’s grade from my GPA altogether. And there’s an AP French class on the same days that would earn me a college-level language credit if I nailed the exam. My counselor says it’ll look good on applications if I complete it before I’m even a senior.” Plus it will keep me distracted as my countdown to Gabe’s departure nears zero, but I’m not gonna admit that.
Mom peers at me disbelievingly over the top of the menu. “So you’re planning to spend your whole vacation in school?”
“Not the whole summer. They don’t start till July. And my counselor says—”
“Okay, okay.” She holds a hand up in defeat. “No power on earth could stand against you and the college counselor. Do I just need to sign a form?”
Across the table, Gabe tenses, knowing what’s coming.
I clap my hands between my knees to keep from fidgeting. “It costs a little money, is the thing. I guess summer courses aren’t covered by my scholarship.”
Waving to summon the waiter, Mom asks, “How much is a little?”
“Just four hundred. Per class. But if you think about it, it’ll save money when I go to college, since that’s one credit down. So it’s basically an investment in my future—”
“Oh, Hannah . . . honey, I don’t have a lot of freelance work right now, and I lost that extra diner shift when Amber came back from Ohio. We just don’t have money to spend frivolously.”
This stops me cold. “How is my future frivolous?”
“Of course it’s not. But hundreds of dollars because of one meaningless grade, one failed soufflé in your whole lifetime? I promise you, it’s not the end of the world. It won’t even matter by tomorrow.”
Mom and I never fight. Though we’ve both been snappish today—me since checking the portal, and her because who knows why—we’re not locked in some epic, endless mother-
daughter battle. We don’t usually argue about my grades or my clothes. There are no slammed doors between us.
We’re just not . . . close. Not the way she and Gabe are close. By complete coincidence, they look alike, his honey-blond hair enough of a match to Mom’s wheat blond that no one ever guesses he was adopted at birth. Even his upturned amber eyes pair well with her gold-flecked hazel. They’re both artists—Mom is a freelance graphic and website designer, alongside her rotating minimum-wage day jobs, and Gabe is your archetypal theater kid. They have the same habit of throwing themselves passionately into a project one moment, only to lose interest in it the next, trailing half-painted canvases and half-written one-acts and half-hearted romances across the country.
Meanwhile, I’m the blue-eyed, dark-haired, heavily freckled sheep. I don’t have their knack for making friends easily and immediately in every new place, bringing them home like burrs on a dog, shaking them off once we move on. That’s never mattered to me, though, because I have Gabe. It’s always been just the three of us—Dad died when I was a baby, leaving us with very nice and very distant grandparents in his native Canada, and if Mom’s got any family, they might live at the top of Mount Everest or the bottom of the Mariana Trench, for all that we know. But really, it’s been the two of us. My brother has always been there for me. Like when I was nine and had wheezing fits so bad, the doctor diagnosed me with allergy-induced asthma brought on by the high pollen levels of Richmond, Virginia, and he inked fangs in black Sharpie on my pink plastic actuator, which he nicknamed Vlad the Inhaler to make it funny instead of scary. He understands me without even trying. Which ha
s always dulled the stinging feeling that Mom has never tried all that hard.
And I have my grades, meaningless and otherwise. Maybe I’m not charming or effortlessly talented like the rest of my small family, but every perfect grade brings me closer to the future I want, the life I want. And as I spend my birthday in this ridiculous themed bar/restaurant destined to become another distant memory of another borrowed city the moment Mom gets the urge to uproot us, I think: It doesn’t look like this.
I dig my fingers into the spines of my books to stop from slapping the menu out of Mom’s hands so she’ll look at me. “You can’t tell me what I shouldn’t be upset about. It’s gonna matter to me tomorrow, whatever you think about it.”
Now she does look up. “Then you need to grow up, Hannah, and learn to leave the trivial things behind you.”
As we stare each other down, Gabe clicks on beside us like the beam of a flashlight in the dark. “Sooo, subject change? I’m thinking of ordering the surf and turf—”
“Sorry, you two.” Mom drops her gaze to knuckle her forehead. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have . . . I don’t think I’m much fun right now. Maybe it would be better if I let you both enjoy the night? I’m . . . not feeling like myself.” She does look a little pale, I guess, though it’s hard to tell by the pink neon strobing light of yet another strike. “You two should stay. Order whatever you want for dessert, and I’ll meet you back at the apartment. Okay?”
Without waiting for us to protest, Mom rises to kiss my cheek and Gabe’s forehead, leaving him her credit card. Then she’s gone.
My brother blinks after her for a second, bewildered as I am, then rallies. “So what do you think?” he asks brightly, picking up the cocktail menu Mom dropped. “A bottle of Dom ’98 for the table?”
I can’t keep from voicing the fear that’s struck me. “You don’t think she’s getting ready to move again, do you? Like, she’s booked an Airstream in Florida and is just trying to figure out how to tell us?” Mom always seems moodiest right before a move—you’d think she’d be happy, since it’s always her choice to go.
“No way,” my brother says. “She promised, right?”
It’s true. Mom promised me when I was accepted as a scholarship student and transferred to Winthrop that we’d stay put until I graduated. And she never breaks a promise. She’s fanatic about them; that’s probably why I can count every promise Mom’s ever made on one hand. I should be more grateful, more gracious—as long as we’re here, in Boston and at my dream school, aren’t I getting exactly what I wanted? Hasn’t my biggest wish been granted?
“I guess. But—”
“Or maybe we should skip the Dom,” he says over me. “After all, we have to save room for your noncorporeal present.”
“Right after this?” I’m already grinning despite myself.
Of course he’s got something planned; it’s tradition, o
ne of the very few we’ve got. The Williams family doesn’t follow any religion. We’ve never been inside a church or synagogue or mosque. Binge-watching holiday rom-coms indiscriminately and flying up to Ontario to stay with Poppy and Grammy Kowalski for a week every August is as deep as we get into ritual. They’re what Mom calls twice-a-year Catholics, and if Dad believed in anything, he didn’t have time to teach us before his accident. But we believe in the magic of birthdays, as Mom taught us to, and observe them religiously. So twice a year, Gabe and I stay up until dawn the way most kids do on Christmas. We always have.
And though our summer vacation only started last week, the countdown’s already begun. To our last Netflix marathon, and our last lazy day sunbathing in Griggs Park. Our last order of drunken noodles at the Thai Tiger, and our last time trying to buy tequila snow cones at the harbor with his unconvincing fake ID. We won’t be together for Gabe’s nineteenth birthday next April. Who knows whether he’ll even come home next summer? He might find a real boyfriend out west, one worth keeping. He could fall in love with the rich son of a film financier who’ll charter a yacht to cruise them around Fiji for the season. Or, more likely, he’ll spend his school break working at Starbucks with other Hollywood hopefuls, supplementing his financial aid, living on lattes and dreams all the way across the country.
Then it’ll be just Mom and me.
“What about dessert?” I ask, trying not to sink when Gabe’s working so hard to keep me afloat. “Do we need to skip that to save room?”
“Nah.” He fans himself with Mom’s card. “Let’s get three.”
That’s exactly what we do.
After, we skip the T and walk the mile back to our apartment. We pass whole families on bicycles, and hipsters spilling out of specialty ice cream shops and pubs alike. The evening has that early-summer sparkle, the clouds aflame and the breeze warm on my forehead as it ruffles my pixie cut. It’s no St. Helena, but Jamaica Plain feels more like home than most places.
For now, anyway.
Our apartment’s completely dark when we reach it, which I try not to take personally. Heading for my room to drop off my new books, I stop short when I reach the living room, Gabe dancing in behind me.
“When did you do this?” I ask, stunned.
“After work. Before I met you guys at the restaurant.”
I’m staring at the kind of fort my brother and I made when we were kids. A bedsheet draped between the tops of chairs he’s dragged from the kitchenette to the family room, and cushions pried from the couch to prop up as walls. He’s even detangled the fairy lights from our balcony railing, stringing them up beneath the sheet, and he turns them on as I kneel down to peek inside. On top of the quilt that makes up the floor, there are rainbow-colored noisemakers, a package of popcorn waiting to be microwaved, and his open laptop. Also, a six-pack of the canned sangrias he sometimes buys from the corner bodega where he works
—the college guy who works the same shift he does has a crush on him, but won’t let him buy anything stronger.
“I love it. What are we watching?”
“It’s your birthday, Banana. You pick the genre, put on your pajamas, and I’ll start the popcorn. It’s gonna be the all-night birthday binge-watch to rule them all.”
Hours later, as the clock ticks over to midnight, I stretch my stiffened legs inside the blanket fort. One knee sends an unopened sangria can tumbling. There really isn’t much room in here, and the air is too warm with our recycled breaths. The drooping fairy lights illuminate spilled popcorn kernels, crushed noisemakers, and Gabe: curled up on the quilt floor, face loose with sleep.
I nudge my socked foot into his side. I can’t even hear the movie over the truck-stuck-in-gravel sound of him, though that’s not why I’m doing it—I don’t care all that much about the movie. I’d only picked horror to make him happy. It’s that neither of us was supposed to sleep tonight. Driving my heel into his ribs with more force, I cry, “You’re missing it!”
Gabe only flops over onto his right side, face pressed into the green brocade cushion walls. Mumbling, he burrows deeper into the blankets, then snores on.
Defeated, I turn back to the screen just in time to watch a unicorn spear a teenage boy through the chest, apple-red blood spiraling down its iridescent horn. I close the laptop, cutting off the death moans. There’s really no point in watching alone.
I reach over to click off the fairy lights, and it takes a moment f
or my eyes to adjust, thrust suddenly into darkness. Then I see it: a blacker shadow in the living room just outside the entrance to our fort.
My heart freezes.
The shadow heaves a great sigh and slurs, “Bon anniversaire, Hannah Banana.”
I sag with relief. “Sorry, Mom. Did the movie wake you up?”
“Never slept. I was waiting—I just wanted to talk to you.” For some reason, Mom sounds relieved too, and a little unsteady. When I crawl out of the fort, I see her more clearly in the faint glow of the streetlamps through the window. Elbow-length braids unraveling, a robe slipping from her shoulder, she holds a crystal champagne flute in one loosely curled fist. In her other hand, she grasps a bottle of bourbon by the neck, like a little girl dragging her Barbie around by its hair.
I blink at the sight. Mom calls herself a “social drinker” who’ll happily down a glass or three of merlot among friends. But I’ve never known her to drink alone.
She crosses to the couch, perching perilously on the arm, and waves me over. I settle beside her on the bare frame, uncomfortable without its cushions. To my surprise, Mom hugs me as tight as she ever has, then hands me her glass by its delicate stem.
“Seriously?”
Her laughter is quiet but wild. “Trust me, we deserve to celebrate.”
I smile as if I understand what’s happening, then take one sip from the flute and gag—bourbon is worse than sangria.
“Thanks for waiting up just to say happy birthday,” I cough out.
“I also wanted to say I’m sorry. About tonight.”
“It’s okay, Mom. It was nice. The cheesecake was good. And the Baked Alaska. And the lava cake.” I shouldn’t push this. But emboldened by the disgusting drink and her apology, I suggest, “If you’re still looking for a birthday present, you know, there’s that class—”
“Speaking of presents,” she interrupts with a wry smile, just a little sloppy. From the pocket of her robe, Mom pulls a palm-sized box, which she could’ve just given me at the restaurant.
Clamping the flute between my knees, I slip a finger beneath the paper.
When I lift off the lid inside, a silver pendant sits on a cushion of foam. It’s shaped like an open hand, but also a sort of flower—the three middle fingers straight like a stamen, the thumb and pinky shorter, like curled petals. Small turquoise stones set in the palm form a rough almond-shaped eye. At the tip of each finger, a tiny engraved star—the same one that decorates the local synagogues.
“I know it’s not really your style. It . . . wasn’t mine, either, when I was your age.”
“Is this Jewish?”
Mom lifts the bottle of bourbon, sipping straight from it before plucking the hand from the box. “A hamsa. It was from a friend of your grandmother’s—one of my childhood
treasures. We need to get it polished. It’s been sitting in a drawer for a long time. I can take it to the place on Washington Street.” She stares at the pendant, entranced.
“Wait, it was from . . . Grammy’s friend?”
Mom laughs. “No, I meant my mother’s, of course. Someone who meant a lot to me growing up.”
“I . . . oh.”
I’m afraid that anything I say will buckle this fragile bridge between us, so I only stare at her in silence. We’ve never met our grandmother on Mom’s side, never met any of her relatives. Mom rarely talks about the people or place she comes from, or anything that happened to her before Dad, for that matter. I’ve never even seen a picture of her as a kid, though we’ve seen plenty of Dad—we got a whole box of photos from Poppy and Grammy, and hear the same stories about his childhood on the shoreline of Lake Huron every time we visit. Sometimes, it feels like I know more about the father I can’t remember than I do about Mom.
Gabe and I tried to investigate when we were younger, mostly for the thrill of putting on our raincoats and pretending to be detectives. But it was pointless. As surnames go, Williams—the maiden name Mom reclaimed when she gave up Kowalski after Dad’s death—is everywhere. Our Google searching was foiled almost as soon as it started, especially with no hard information to go on, not even a home state. All we have is a small collection of useless facts. Like once, while Gabe and I eavesdropped on her playing “two truths and a lie” with
friends (and after her second glass of social wine), she let slip that she was born in a black farmhouse besieged on all sides by wildflowers. That’s just how she described it—as if she’d spent her childhood there at war with the earth itself. Like battalions of flowers broke themselves against the gutters, pressed their seed heads to the windows, bruised their petals trying to squeeze beneath the doors.
Since she definitely does not have a tramp stamp of a Picasso face, we knew the bit about the farmhouse and the flowers must be true.
Another sip of bourbon, and Mom shivers—whether from the taste of it or to shake herself free of some spell, I don’t know. She drops the hamsa into my palm and says, “It’s a very long story. But we’ll talk. I guess it’s about time we did.”
She runs cool fingertips through my pixie cut, then plucks the near-empty flute from where it’s still clamped between my legs and leaves me alone again.
Though sleep seemed as if it would be impossible after that, it isn’t. I dream about places I’ve never seen—wildflower fields and woods, a towering palace and a dark, fast-moving river—and wake early Saturday morning on the blanket floor of the fort with stale breath and an emotional hangover. The midnight visit from Mom feels at first like part of my dreams, but when I uncurl my fist, I find the pendant, its eye stamped into my skin.
I turn it this way and that, inspecting it again in the dim morning light of our fort. It’s half the size of my thumb, and every detail—the eye, the stars, even the unreadable words etched
across the back of the hand, maybe the jeweler’s signature—is exquisite. When I roll over to show Gabe, he’s no longer beside me. He must’ve woken up early this morning and gone to his own bed, hoping for an hour or two of sleep before his big graduation day.
We never abandon our birthdays early.
Swallowing the storm in my throat, I crawl out into the living room and go to the hallway bathroom to wash up. The charm I set carefully in a paper cup in the dispenser to keep it safe while I scour the night from my breath. I reach for my toothbrush, look up—and freeze with it halfway to my mouth.
Blinking into the mirror, I watch as a girl with cinnamon-colored freckles, impossible golden eyes, and horizontal, knife-slit pupils blinks back.
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