6 Months Earlier

Eyes like the Orion Nebula. They’re looking down at me, past me, to the ground. The ground is far beneath us. Dotted with clusters of hamlets —a rolling countryside. It’s Europe, I tell myself, though I’ve never been. Despite the altitude, I’m warm, we’re both warm. Her hair, the part I can feel under my neck, is crisp and hot. But as I continue to fly, the breeze streaming by us keeps me content.  I can change directions of flight; I can go up, feel the pull of her hands around my shoulders, and side to side as her shoes clip my shins. No matter how low I fly however, the roofs below us feel unattainable. A green screen, something that’s not really there. A mirage. We’re on a hillside. The grass is soft and damp. My hands search the grass around me for hers. They find mine first and we’re lying back on the hill and it’s splendid.

I wake against the side of the couch, a tiny puddle of drool in the shoulder crease of my button up. I rub it beneath my fingers hoping it will dry before dad comes back with wine coolers for my aunts and older cousins. They’re not big on dad’s low calorie beer —nor any kind of beer for that matter. And it’s almost a rule that no legal adult stays sober at a Veira birthday party. Here ye, here ye! Under statute 46 of the Veria family code of conduct: No adult over the age 19 shalt not partake in the consumption of alcohol at any festival of birth —no matter the age of the guest of honour.

“Ready sleepyhead?” My mother coos down at me from behind the couch as she passes with a platter of tortas.

The smell seems to lift both my spirits and my body. I’m up quickly, following the scent down the hall to the back porch. She’s set up all the deck furniture, a last hurrah for her new wicker set before winter, and placed birthday balloons and streamers at each of the deck’s four corners.

“Really?” I ask, directing my attention towards the juvenile decorations.

Let me have this one, she thinks. A boy only turns 18 once.

“Technically my birthday was three days ago,” I remind her.

She raises her brows, sets down the platter, and gives me that ‘don’t be a smart ass’ look.

I throw my hands up in surrender, but she pushes on, still upset that my birthday came after labour day this year.

Like we were going to throw your birthday on a school night, Adrian! She thinks.

She’s given up on a normal conversation with me, something she’s actually been pressing ever since I overheard her thinking about my birthday present two weeks ago.

“What about Morgan and Elise, Mom? You’ll have plenty more kid birthdays to throw for them. Well at least a good amount still.”

She starts to freak out. Her eyes go wide and her breath quickens in short and shallow puffs. She can’t let go of the thought of her kids growing up at all. She has seemed to forget that I am officially an adult now and instead stews on Elise’s first day of grade 7 and the fact that Morgan can cook a pork loin better than dad now.

I rub her shoulders until the protruding thoughts recede from her mind.

“I let Elise cook the main dish,” she snorts, switching the subject.

I throw my nose up in disdain. “What animal feet is she experimenting with this time?”

We both cringe. My mom briefly recalls the event from last year; My friend Elliot never stood a chance as he dug straight into the meaty goodness of Elise’s meal. He’d made it through half the bowl when Elise began to brag about her latest culinary genius and the versatility of cow’s feet in Caldo Verde.  Accustomed to my sister’s odd choice in ingredients, I swallowed down the tasty soup, ignoring the thought of a hoof or two scraping the inside of my throat. Elliot on the other hand, was not. We learned that day how easy it was to turn Caldo Verde into Caldo Rosa with just two glasses of Cherry Kool Aid.

“I think it’s duck,” she says aloud, shrugging.

I kick at the weight holding down one of the silver, helium filled ‘HAPPY 18TH BIRTHDAY’s and watch as its attached balloon follows suit.

“Give her a break,” she adds when I’ve said nothing further.  “It’s an exciting age, 13, you remember it, don’t you?”

I try. I think back to awkward school dances and awkward first crushes and let’s face it, just awkward times all around. But I know what she’s referring to —that time when people get a taste of the shoes they’re growing into. It felt no different to me. In school, I still knew which teachers liked me and which ones didn’t. I knew which girl was a safe bet to ask out and which guys to stick by, the ones I was pretty sure had my back. It was like puberty as a whole was old news before it became news at all. I suppose it helped knowing that Dean from gym also felt short —like everyone around him was growing except him. That Christie Melloni preferred Valentine’s day back in elementary school when everyone got a cheesy card and candy, and that despite how much of a pompous douche Zack Everett pretended to be, he hadn’t actually had sex at 14.

Lately, I’ve been stuck on 18. Not for the perks, which are few and far between, but of how wrong people are when they say they never feel any different on their birthday. My dad had asked me three mornings ago if I felt different. Me sitting at the breakfast bar with a bowl of lukewarm porridge and a glass of milk with a tiny brown fleck in it, probably left over from our crummy dishwasher. Me, his prodigal son, the only Veira since my grandfather to carry the ability to read minds. And here I was without a clue of what he was thinking.

The first taste of silence. It was gone before I had time to hit an existential crisis or check the web for any diseases my hypochondriac body was carrying. But those twenty seconds of pre-meltdown chaos was like a high powered shock to my system.

“No, I’m not getting hitched now that I’m 18,” I’d answered his thought with my best ‘you’re not that funny’ expression. But inside I looked like Munch’s screaming man painting, hollow eyes and all. I waited with trepidation after, hoping he’d thought nothing else I couldn’t hear, but his mind was finished with me and had traveled to his own wedding. I took that signal as my exiting point, knowing it was as good of time as ever to pull out of his thoughts if I still wanted to think of my mother in the same way.