USUALLY I don’t like a big fuss on my birthday, but since it came just two days after I got out of the hospital, my mother said we should make it into a welcome-home celebration. I was arguing with her and telling her no, forget it, when I happened to notice the situation: it was 3:15 in the afternoon, but my mother was not in the living room lying on the sofa. She was in the kitchen, her hands were flipping through cake recipes, her mouth was telling me how to celebrate my birthday, and her eyes were wide open. She was not surviving.
“Okay,” I said, “if it’s a little celebration.”
So I invited Sara and Poff and Valducci. Then I told Megin she could invite friends of hers. I knew she would ask Sue Ann and Zoe. I didn’t tell Valducci.
Poff and Valducci were the first to arrive. We were in the basement shooting darts when the doorbell rang, and Valducci, at the sound of Zoe’s voice, kangarooed up the steps, dart in hand. A few seconds later there was a howl. Poff and I ran upstairs. Toddie, scowling, fierce, was pushing Valducci across the living room, away from Zoe. Valducci backed into the wall. He looked at us, shocked. “He kicked me.”
“Zoe my girlfrenn,” Toddie snarled and kicked him again.
Give Valducci credit. A couple minutes later he came up with something that even Toddie approved of. He got an apple from my mother. He held his dart out to Zoe and said, “Miss Miranda, I besmirched your honor and ruined your apple last week at school. Now, you may take your revenge.” Zoe just stood there staring, so Valducci put the dart in her hand. Then he backed up about five feet and stood at attention and placed the apple on his head. “Fire when ready,” he said.
Only Toddie made a sound (“Shoot, Zoe, shoot!”). Everybody else was just gaping. As well as I know Valducci, even I didn’t know if he was serious, and I could tell by the faces that nobody else knew either. Zoe stared at him for a long while. You could see her thinking about all the times he’d pestered her; and the more she thought, the faster the dart rolled in her fingers. Then her face changed, just a little, and her hand was rising, up to her shoulder, then pulling back; her eyes were narrow, her lips tight. Sara grabbed my arm. My father reached out—“Okay now—” but his words were cut short by Zoe’s arm snapping forward and all eyes shot to the apple—and then Zoe was laughing, and her hand was hanging limp at her side, still holding the dart.
She was still laughing when she walked over to Valducci, still stiff at attention, and took the apple from his head. She took a bite of it, not laughing now, looking right into his eyes, the way you’d never see a seventh-grader do to a ninth-grader, and I knew she had seen the same thing I had seen: that Valducci had never flinched, not even when the dart was snapping forward. His eyes never blinked, the apple never moved. Sorry, Toddie, I thought, you lost.
I’d never heard “Happy Birthday” sung so loud before. Usually it was just my mother and father and Toddie. I was embarrassed. I kept staring at the candles on the cake. I couldn’t wait for them to finish the song. Then a funny thing happened:
“Happy birthday dear Gre-eg,
Happy birthday—”
Right in the middle of the final line, the singing stopped. I looked up. Sara was grinning. They were all grinning at me. Then they all turned to the other end of the table, and my sister, her face in candle glow, swamped in her new red sweater that fit her like a bathrobe, my sister Megin, sang the rest all by herself: “tooooo you.”
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