The Big One-Oh (8 page)

She held up a finger for each part of her story: “
First
, we were going to see the show;
second,
we were all going to get souvenir T-shirts;
third,
we were going to go backstage and meet one of the dancers who played a leopard or a parrot or something. And finally . . . !”

Jennifer smiled real wide and shook her red curls out. “Finally, we were going to have birthday cake that had, like, a theater stage drawn on it, with the curtains parting and a picture of me in the frosting, like I was walking out into the spotlight! It was so beautiful!”

She sighed.

“It's such a shame that we never got to do any of that.”

“Why?”

“All because of Jeffrey Stovall.”

“Why? What did Jeffrey Stovall do?” I wondered.

“Well, everybody was having a good time, up until the scene when Simba watches his father get trampled to death by the water buffaloes. That part is so sad, don't you think?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“When that scene happened, Jeffrey Stovall started sobbing. Not just crying.
Sobbing.
Then it was like a flu that gets passed around; one by one, each of my friends started weeping. And they wouldn't stop!

“At intermission, Mom decided we should leave, and I couldn't talk her out of it. So when we all climbed into the van without seeing the second act or getting the T-shirts or going backstage, I couldn't help myself;
I
started to cry.

“And when my mom pulled onto the freeway, things got even worse. She was in such a hurry that she zoomed past a policeman on a motorcycle, so he flipped on his siren and came after us. And when my mom saw his flashing lights and had to pull over, even
she
started to cry.

“So, now my friends were wailing and sobbing, ‘What did we do wrong?' I was still pretty upset about missing Act II of
The Lion King,
so I told them that we were all going to jail because we left the theater early.

“That made them wail even louder.

“Then, as my mom was handing over her driver's license to the cop, Jeffrey Stovall had his accident.”

“What accident?” I couldn't believe that Jennifer had tricked me into caring about how her story ended.

“Well, after crying for so long, Jeffrey had a headache and a stomachache, so that's why he leaned out his window and threw up onto the policeman's boots.”

Jennifer nodded.

“And unfortunately, Jeffrey's vomiting had the same effect on all of us that his crying had in the theater.”

“You don't mean . . .”

“Uh-hunh. Everybody started puking right and left. When the policeman saw all these kids blowing chunks—and even though he had Jeffrey Stovall's breakfast all over his boots—he took pity on my mom. He got on his motorcycle and turned on his siren and gave us a police escort home.”

“A police escort? Really?” I was impressed.

“Yeah. That part was cool, but by then, nobody had an appetite, so we never lit the candles or cut my cake or anything. And when everybody's parents came to pick them up, they were all still crying, so their parents stared at my mom and wondered what she had done to upset their children so terribly.

“Plus, the van smelled for about a year afterward, even after Mom and Dad scrubbed it out with bleach about seven times. So. That was my Backstage Birthday.”

Jennifer sighed real deep and her eyes got a dreamy look in them.

“I'll never forget a single minute of it.”

Then she snapped her head around to me. “Why were you asking?”

“Huh? Oh!” I stammered. “No reason.”

After school, I sat on the bank of the drainage canal behind the school, stared at my Birthday Notebook and shook my head. Time was slipping away. My “big day” was approaching fast, and I hadn't done
anything
on my THINGS TO DO FOR MY BIRTHDAY list. I was desperate.

How desperate? I'll tell you how desperate.

I went to ask my sister for advice.

 

 

“What're you asking me for?” Lorena scowled when I pushed ahead of a long line of people waiting at her cash register in the Chick-A-Dee Restaurant. I figured that it was okay for me to cut in line because I didn't want food. Just a theme.

“
Because
. If I don't get a theme of my own, Mom and Vince are going to make me have a cowboy birthday party.”

“Ugh,” Lorena groaned. “Cowboys are so lame. QUIT IT!”

She didn't say that last thing to me; that was for Brad, her supervisor, who had come up behind her and pinched her fanny. As usual, Brad was wearing his “talk-to-me-People!” headset in a special way so that it wouldn't muss his hair, which he spends about ten hours arranging every day.

“What? My hand slipped,” Brad grinned as he slid a tray toward the guy at the head of the line. “Three pieces white meat. Large fries,” Brad smiled. “Thanks for eating at Chick-A-Dee.”

Then he winked at Lorena and went back into the kitchen, barking into his headset, “People! Where are my onion rings?”

Lorena rolled her eyes. “He's always grabbing my butt.”

“In
Monsters & Maniacs
, y'know, the July issue? This girl sticks a fork in a guy's hand for doing that,” I advised.

Behind me, a lady with a big red purse whined, “Can I order, miss?”

“Charley, beat it,” snapped Lorena. “I gotta work.”

“But what about my theme? For my party? I need a theme!”

“Well, don't come crying to me! I don't have any ideas. You need somebody with ideas.”

And I swear my jaw dropped open. That was one of the few times in her whole life that Lorena actually said something that made sense.

Because I
did
know somebody with ideas.

 

 

“Actually, I'm what people call a consultant,” Garry explained.

“But your card says ‘the Idea Man.' Is that really you or did you just buy cards that said that already?” I asked.

“Well, I have ideas, sure. But they're . . . they're for businesses.”

“But you agree, don't you? There's no way I can do a cowboy theme for my birthday party.”

“No,” Garry shook his head. “Cowboys . . . cowboys are really tired.”

“Thank you!” I yelled.

I looked around at the room we were in. Garry had emptied one of the bedrooms in his house and made an office where he goes to work every morning. It's filled with computers and copy machines and stacks of files and piles of papers. There's a map with little colored pins pushed into cities all over the United States and Asia and Europe, and above that, six different wall clocks are set to the time in Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, London and Rome.

“You work in here all day?” I asked.

“All day.”

“And in your garage all night?”

“Uh-huh. Want something to drink?” Garry led me into the kitchen, where empty TV dinner boxes were scattered all over the countertops.

“Love those TV dinners, huh?” I said.

“Oh. Yeah.” He picked up a few of the boxes, embarrassed that the place was such a mess.

I sat on a high stool at his kitchen counter. “Okay. I won't take up much more of your time, but I need a theme for my party. Fast.”

As he poured glasses of water, Garry shook his head. “No no no. You don't want to rush this.”

“But I gotta! My birthday is only a few weeks away.”

“Ah. But!” He turned to me. “This is no ordinary birthday, huh? This is a big one.” He held up one finger. “The big one . . . ,” and, with the other hand, he made a circle, “. . . oh. The Big One-Oh. Get it?”

I stared at his finger figures for few seconds until I realized what he was making with his fingers. “Ten!” I cried. “
One-Oh.
Yeah. I'm gonna be ten.”

Garry nodded. “Double digits, huh? Life begins.”

The way he said that flooded me with such a feeling of specialness. A feeling of importance. A feeling of . . .

“Now, how in the world did that get there?” Garry suddenly said, squinting at something on the finger he used to make the “one.”

“What?” I said, leaning forward to see.

“Oh, it's just this fingernail. It's . . . it's longer than it should be.” And, as he said that, Garry laid his finger down on a chopping block, picked up a big kitchen knife, and WHAM!, brought it down and
chopped off his finger!

I just about flew backward off my kitchen stool before I realized that there wasn't any blood. As a matter of fact, the knife just kind of bounced off the rubber finger that Garry had substituted at the last minute.

“Didn't scare you, huh?”

I shook my head. “Sorta. Not really.”

“Well, dang,” he sighed. “It's something that I've been working on.” Then he held up the squishy finger for me to see.

“I think it needs work.”

He nodded in agreement. I reached out and took the phony finger from him. “These are so cool.” I looked up at him. “How do you make them?”

“Oh, it's easy. Did you ever make a footprint in wet concrete?”

“Once,” I nodded. “When we poured a new patio at our old house.”

“Okay. So now imagine making an impression of the
top
of your foot as well. Then when you put those top and bottom halves together, you create a
mold
. And when I pour this stuff . . .” he squished the phony finger, “. . . called latex into the empty space in the mold, it dries in the shape of whatever you want. See? Simple.”

My mind was racing with the possibilities. “You mean, you could make, let's just say . . .” I held up my right hand, “. . . a copy of my hand?”

Garry smiled. “How long can you sit still?”

 

 

To help the latex dry, Garry keeps his workroom warm. So he flipped on a bunch of space heaters until it got to be about a hundred degrees in there. But, honestly? I hardly noticed the heat once Garry started working.

He had me cover my hand with oil so I wouldn't get stuck, and then he pressed my hand into a pan he had filled with a fluffy goo that looked like marshmallow cream. It felt kind of gross at first, but Garry made me promise not to move my hand while the goo was hardening, so I didn't.

And even though we later had to repeat the whole process with the
back
of my hand, I didn't get bored because Garry kept telling me awesome stories about the movies that he had built
effects
for back in North Carolina.

He talked about making a skull with a cleaver in it for
My Principal Is a Maniac!
, which I had actually seen on the Sci Fi Channel.

“You made the skull with the cleaver?” I gasped.

“That was mine,” he blushed.

He described the swamp monster he created for
Honey, I Ate The Kids!
And there were about a dozen more that I'm forgetting now.

“And then, the
last
movie I did—the
very
last,” he sighed, “was called
The Coming Of The Brain Biters.
Now, on the other films, I was one of a bunch of guys on the crew, but this one . . . this was entirely my baby. And this was a good story! It was about this evil alien bacteria that falls to earth. When people get it on their clothes, it eats into their skin and travels up to their brains and comes blasting out their eye sockets.”

“Whoa!” My head was reeling. “I would
totally
see that movie.”

“Right?” Garry was excited. “So I made all the alien bacteria and the brains and even the eyeballs.” He picked up a perfectly painted eyeball from the counter and held it up proudly. “This was one.”

I was stunned. “That's so good it's scary.”

Garry smiled. “Thanks. Yeah. I did all the effects for every scene in the entire movie.”

“You must've felt great,” I said.

“Wait,” Garry warned, holding up a hand. “Opening night. We stood in the back of a packed theater, ready to watch the audience jump out of their seats. And my first big moment came . . . the first big scare that was going to get the first big scream, and . . . and . . .”

He stopped.

“And?” I prompted.

Garry shook his head. “They laughed.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. They
laughed
. Just a few people at first. But that's all it took. Soon the whole audience was hooting and whistling and throwing popcorn at the screen. It was all over.” He turned his face away.

“So what happened?”

He shrugged. “I left the theater. I went home. Packed my stuff. And I moved here.”

“Maybe it wasn't your fault,” I said.

“No,” he sighed. “I had been working toward that moment since I was twelve. And nobody—not one person in that audience—freaked out. I just wanted to . . . to scare them. And I couldn't.”

After a silence, he looked up at me. And he held up the eyeball.

“You want it?”

“Seriously?!”

“I don't need it anymore.”

I took it, and all I could say was, “Whoa.”

“Fortunately,” Garry continued, “I have a college degree in business, so I fell back on that. I make a lot more money now, believe me. It was the best thing I could have done. Getting out of the effects business.”

He got quiet for a second, and then he shook himself and said, “Speaking of ‘getting out,' let's get you out of that mold.” He pried my hand out of the hardening cast, and he took that mold and the one we'd made earlier over to a table where he set them in front of a space heater to finish their drying.