Chapter 1 Birthday #4
Wally throws the tennis ball into the night, and they all strain their eyes to watch Clay catch it with a triumphant whoop.
“All right, man, come on,” Wally yells.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Clay says as he hustles back to the yard. He tosses the tennis ball to Hannah. “Are you gonna hug me, or what?”
She grins and allows him to sweep her up in a bear hug. “Awesome game,” she says, yanking his hair just to mess with him.
“Best we’ve ever seen you play,” Wally says, clapping Clay’s shoulder.
“Thanks,” Clay says, his smile as wide as the football field.
“Okay, and now…,” Hannah says, turning to Baker, “cake time! Ready, Birthday Girl?”
“I was born ready,” Baker says with a wink.
“I see what you did there. Ten out of ten.”
Hannah leads everyone toward the carport and in through the back door. She can hear Clay and Wally lagging behind them, their voices joining in laughter with Luke’s and Joanie’s.
“I’m going to cut them small pieces for making us wait,” Hannah whispers.
“Tiny slivers,” Baker says, playing along.
“Maybe we can throw Clay’s to him.”
“He would probably go for that.”
“And then you and I can have all the leftovers for breakfast.”
Baker’s eyes brighten just before the boys run in and wrap her in a hug. “Deal!” she says, grinning at Hannah over Clay’s shoulder.
Hannah’s mom walks in from the family room to say hi to them all, and Baker and the boys hug her while Hannah and Joanie gather everyone’s jackets.
“So, how’s the birthday girl?” Hannah’s mom asks, her voice tired but warm, and Baker leans on the kitchen counter and tells Hannah’s mom all about her day at school and her dinner with her family.
Luke, Wally, and Clay step around her to the family room, where Hannah can just see her dad’s bristly gray hair poking out from his armchair. She watches out of the corner of her eye as the boys shake hands with her dad.
“Heard you gave ’em quite a show tonight,” Hannah’s dad says.
“Yes, sir,” Clay says, his deep voice vibrating with pride.
“That’s great,” Hannah’s dad says, and then he falls quiet in his usual shy way. Hannah strains her ears past Baker and her mom’s conversation to listen to the pocket of silence in the family room.
“We’d better get back in there for cake,” Wally says, his voice more robust than normal. “Good to see you, Mr. Eaden.”
“See you later, Mr. Eaden,” Luke and Clay say.
The boys come back into the kitchen and there’s a spike in volume from the TV in the family room. Hannah looks automatically to Wally, who smiles easily at her, never put off by her dad’s introversion.
Remnants of Christmas are littered throughout the kitchen: a plate of stale gingerbread cookies that Joanie never finished decorating; a collage of holiday greeting cards tacked up with magnets on the fridge; a dying poinsettia in the middle of the table, its bloodred petals withering right in front of them.
Hannah gathers the silverware and her mom’s mint-green dessert plates from the cabinet above the coffee maker, and all the while she feels a beating thrill in her stomach, that same thrill she feels every year at the start of Carnival season, when the King Cakes first appear on the market shelves and her classmates start talking about which Mardi Gras balls their older siblings are attending this year.
“It’s the best damn time to be a Louisianan,” Clay always says, and Hannah, glancing at her friends, agrees.
“How can I help?” Baker asks, appearing at Hannah’s side.
“You can go enjoy your unofficial birthday party.”
“I am enjoying it, but let me help you.”
“I’m pretending to be a domestic goddess right now,” Hannah says. “Just let me have my moment.”
“What kind of cake did you get?”
Hannah slides the box toward her, opening it for Baker to see.
“You got a King Cake?” Baker exclaims, looking down at the icing-coated cake ring.
“Are you surprised?” Luke calls from the table. “We’re obviously going to use your Epiphany birthday to kill two birds with one stone. What kinds of friends would we be otherwise?”
“I can’t wait to eat it,” Clay says, reaching his hand out.
Hannah slaps his hand away. “I will punch you if you try to eat this before we sing.”
“Sorry, Mom,” he says, licking his finger and sticking it in her ear.
“Stop! Stop! Oh my god, just go make sure everyone has their drinks!”
“Did we get candles?” Luke asks. “Or are we gonna sing without them, hard-ass style?”
“We got some,” Wally says, fishing them out of the grocery bag.
He places them carefully into the King Cake, spacing them equidistant from each other and taking pains not to mess up the icing more than he has to, and Hannah imagines him doing this for his mom or his little brothers with the same deliberate care.
“You really didn’t have to do this for me,” Baker says, resting her eyes on the cake, then glancing up at Hannah.
“Of course we did, goober,” Hannah says, taking Baker’s glass from the table and refilling it with sweet tea. “This is actually probably the worst birthday party we’ve ever had for you.”
“Well, nothing tops the one at California Pizza Kitchen,” Luke says.
“When you and Clay got her that Hannah Montana card and walked around the restaurant asking everyone to sign it?” Joanie asks.
“And then we went over to Urban Outfitters and Wally and I got her that book about hamsters dressed as Renaissance painters?” Hannah says.
“I still have that book,” Baker says. “And that card. My mom keeps trying to steal it off my dresser and throw it away, but I always catch her.”
“How could she want to throw away such a treasure?” Joanie says.
They light the candles and gather around the cake, each of them leaning in on their elbows and yelling at each other not to breathe too hard over the eighteen tiny flames.
“Ready?” Hannah says in a hushed, excited voice, and then the five of them start to sing, with Clay and Luke affecting bullfrog voices and Wally pretending to conduct them, and Joanie laughing at Luke across the top of the cake, and Hannah watching Baker the whole time, watching her eyes get softer and her smile get shyer, and how she tucks her hair self-consciously behind her ear when they sing her name.
“Make a wish!” Hannah reminds her, and Baker glances at her for a lightning-quick second before she blows out the candles.
“How has nobody found the baby yet?” Joanie says, stabbing her fork back into her cake. “Someone always finds the baby during the first cut.”
“This Baby Jesus is holding out on us,” Hannah answers around a cream cheese–filled bite. “Playing hard to get.”
“I’m cutting seconds,” Clay says with his mouth full. “I want that baby.”
“I want that baby,” Hannah says.
“Careful, Clay,” Joanie says. “Hannah gets really competitive about finding the Baby Jesus. She once pushed our cousin Warren into the refrigerator just to beat him to seconds. He had a bruise on his chest for a month.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
“Not so much. And I bet everyone here can believe it.”
“I can absolutely believe that,” Baker says, catching Hannah’s eye.
Wally ends up cutting seconds for everyone—“We need a fair judge,” he says, elbowing Clay out of the way—and they all eat eagerly, watching each other’s plates to see who unearths the plastic pink Christ child hidden within the cake.
“Bam!” Hannah says, digging the Baby Jesus out from beneath layers of bread and cream cheese. She holds the inch-long plastic figurine up for the others to see. “I got him!”
“Goddamn it,” Clay says.
“Well, how does he look?” Luke asks. “Do we have ourselves a bouncing baby boy?”
“Does he look like the Messiah?” Wally adds. “Think he’s got the potential to save us all from our sins?”
“Doubtful,” Hannah says. “But you know, this is probably the best Baby Jesus I’ve ever found in a King Cake. The plastic is just to die for.”
“Better than that one we found last year?” Baker asks.
“Are you referring to the one you ‘accidentally’ threw away?”
“Don’t bring that up,” Baker laughs, lowering her eyes back to her cake. “I still feel bad about that.”
“You know who else feels bad about that? Jesus. Because you denied him.”
They finish their cake slices—Clay finishes Hannah’s and Baker’s second pieces for them—and sit around the table for another hour, long after Hannah and Joanie’s parents have gone up to bed, just talking and making fun of each other, and asking Luke to do impressions of their teachers, and asking Baker to tell the story about the time she walked into Mrs. Shackleford’s office to find her talking aloud to the curtains, and indulging Clay with his questions about how the St. Mary’s crowd reacted to the game tonight (“A couple of old women started speaking in tongues every time you got the ball,” Luke says; “It’s true,” Joanie says, “I sold them a nacho with your face imprinted on it”).
Wally pushes discarded sprinkles around his plate while he listens to the conversation, and Joanie leans her head against Luke’s shoulder and starts to doze off, and Hannah stands the plastic Baby Jesus on the table and dances him over to Baker’s plate until Baker, her eyes swinging sideways to meet Hannah’s, tugs him out of Hannah’s hand and pretends to tuck him in for bed with a napkin.
“We should probably go,” Luke says, his voice uncharacteristically hushed as he watches Joanie doze against his side.
“Yeah,” Wally says, rising gently from the table. “Here, everyone give me your plates.”
The boys leave just after midnight. Hannah stands at the sink and rinses the plates and forks, watching Baker hug everyone good night. Clay’s hand lingers at the small of Baker’s back, and Hannah concentrates on scraping a stubborn piece of icing off one of the plates.
Then the boys have gone, and Joanie has lumbered upstairs in a half sleep, and now the only thing in the room seems to be the water pouring forth from the sink.
Baker turns where she stands and casts Hannah a gentle, sleepy smile before she wordlessly walks to the sink, takes the other sponge, and starts to wipe down the table.
“You don’t have to,” Hannah says, more out of polite habit than anything else, but Baker just sends her a look—Don’t be ridiculous—and continues to clean.
They walk up the wooden stairs in silence, their feet tracing the familiar path to Hannah’s room, and Hannah feels content just to be together, just to have another Friday night sleepover in which Baker will borrow one of Hannah’s old T-shirts, and Hannah will turn the ceiling fan on high because Baker likes it that way, and they’ll fall asleep with some sitcom episode playing on Hannah’s laptop.
“Do you want your birthday present?” Hannah asks when Baker pulls the bedsheets back.
Baker stills. “I thought this impromptu party was my present?”
Hannah smiles. She walks to her desk and retrieves the carefully wrapped gift from her drawer, and in some part of her mind, she thinks about how she’s opened this drawer to check on this present every day for the last two weeks.
Baker removes the daffodil-yellow wrapping paper very gingerly, her slender fingers working under the tape with an easy grace. When she finds the book, her face alights with an expression Hannah cannot name.
“Han,” she says as she trails her fingers across the cover of The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
“I know you lost your copy,” Hannah says, stepping nearer to her. “And I thought you might want a hardcover edition.”
“I love it,” Baker breathes. She opens the book and flips to a random page, sliding her fingertips down the paper, and in the dim light of the room, with the fan guiding currents of air across the leaves of the book and the phantom taste of King Cake on her tongue, Hannah is wrapped in magic.
“Think it’ll make it onto the sacred shelf?” Hannah asks.
Baker shifts her footing to face Hannah. “Front and center. But will you sign it first?”
Hannah finds a pen while Baker changes into her pajamas, and then they crawl into bed and prop up Hannah’s laptop to watch an episode of Parks and Recreation with the volume on low.
Baker rolls onto her side and nestles her head into Hannah’s shoulder, and Hannah falls asleep to the rhythm of Baker’s breathing and the smell of her hair.