“Apocalypse,” she says, eyes dancing.
“No, Mom. No way. I can’t give that to you.”
“Yes,” is all she says.
“Mom, you need an extra A. No way.”
“Pokalips,” she says for effect, gesturing at the letters. “It totally works.”
I shake my head.
“P O K A L I P S,” she insists, slowly dragging out the word.
“Oh my God, you’re relentless,” I say, throwing my hands up. “OK, OK, I’ll allow it.”
“Yesssss.” She pumps her fist and laughs at me and marks down her now-insurmountable score. “You’ve never really understood this game,” she says. “It’s a game of persuasion.”
I slice myself another piece of cake. “That was not persuasion,” I say. “That was cheating.”
“Same same,” she says, and we both laugh.
“You can beat me at Honor Pictionary tomorrow,” she says.
After I lose, we go to the couch and watch our favorite movie, Young Frankenstein. Watching it is also part of our birthday ritual. I put my head in her lap, and she strokes my hair, and we laugh at the same jokes in the same way that we’ve been laughing at them for years. All in all, not a bad way to spend your eighteenth birthday.
STAYS THE SAME
I’M READING ON my white couch when Carla comes in the next morning.
“Feliz cumplea?os,” she sings out.
I lower my book. “Gracias.”
“How was the birthday?” She begins unpacking her medical bag.
“We had fun.”
“Vanilla cake and vanilla frosting?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“Young Frankenstein?”
“Yes.”
“And you lost at that game?” she asks.
“We’re pretty predictable, huh?”
“Don’t mind me,” she says, laughing. “I’m just jealous of how sweet you and your mama are.”
She picks up my health log from yesterday, quickly reviews my mom’s measurements and adds a new sheet to the clipboard. “These days Rosa can’t even be bothered to give me the time of day.”
Rosa is Carla’s seventeen-year-old daughter. According to Carla they were really close until hormones and boys took over. I can’t imagine that happening to my mom and me.
Carla sits next to me on the couch, and I hold out my hand for the blood pressure cuff. Her eyes drop to my book.
“Flowers for Algernon again?” she asks. “Doesn’t that book always make you cry?”
“One day it won’t,” I say. “I want to be sure to be reading it on that day.”
She rolls her eyes at me and takes my hand.
It is kind of a flip answer, but then I wonder if it’s true.
Maybe I’m holding out hope that one day, someday, things will change.
LIFE IS SHORT?
SPOILER REVIEWS BY MADELINE
FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON BY DANIEL KEYES
Spoiler alert: Algernon is a mouse. The mouse dies.
ALIEN INVASION, PART 2
I’M UP TO the part where Charlie realizes that the mouse’s fate may be his own when I hear a loud rumbling noise outside. Immediately my mind goes to outer space. I picture a giant mother ship hovering in the skies above us.
The house trembles and my books vibrate on the shelves. A steady beeping joins the rumbling and I know what it is. A truck. Probably just lost, I tell myself, to stave off disappointment. Probably just made a wrong turn on their way to someplace else.
But then the engine cuts off. Doors open and close. A moment passes, and then another, and then a woman’s voice sings out, “Welcome to our new home, everybody!”
Carla stares at me hard for a few seconds. I know what she’s thinking.
It’s happening again.
MADELINE’S DIARY
THE WELCOME COMMITTEE
“CARLA,” I SAY, “it won’t be like last time.” I’m not eight years old anymore.
“I want you to promise—” she begins, but I’m already at the window, sweeping the curtains aside.