Birthday Girl: A Novel

There was a time when everything I could think of wanting would fit inside two or three sneaker boxes piled up high.

But that was before.

The night the Child Services people came to get me is one I have trouble getting right in my head.  I know there was a huge SUV parked up close to Becca Salinas’ house because I remember seeing myself in the side mirror—hair wet and black, pasted flat over my animal-wide eyes—as I pressed next to it.  I know the sky was letting all its breath out, heaving and thrashing, uprooting whatever couldn’t hold tight.  The other thing I know—and I know this for sure—is that was the night I woke up for the very first time.

My only real memory of Becca Salinas was that I sat across from her in math class when I went to school in Fresno.  It was hard not to stare at someone like that: a real, live Malibu Barbie who swore at the teacher and drew on eyeliner instead of taking notes.  Why I ran to her house that night, I’ll never figure out.  Maybe it was because hers was the second last stop the school bus made before dropping me at the corner.  Or maybe it was because I thought she smiled at me once or twice in the hall, making us secret friends.  Becca and I wouldn’t have been friends if we were tied together in a three-legged race for a week.  She was the kind of kid who lived in a super-fancy neighborhood, wore different outfits every day, and had her own credit card with her name on it.  She drank coffee for breakfast and brought it to class in a tall paper cup with a lid.  Everybody smelled it anyway.  No one I’d ever met—no kid I’d ever heard of back in Juneau—was anything even close.  Becca was a walking billboard for one of those girlie underwear kinds of stores where everyone was permanently made-up, ready for the red carpet.  I was more of a Bait and Tackle kind of person, an army surplus poster child.  At least that’s what everyone felt the need to keep telling me.  Most of the kids I knew back home were lucky if they came to school clean so I didn’t think about it one way or another.  Didn’t stop them from saying things to me, from chucking stuff from across the room.  I’d never smeared on lip gloss in my life, much less from the end of a fuzzy stick, and I sure didn’t want to.  That was more my mother’s thing.  To Becca, I probably blended nicely with the furniture.  No one was more surprised than me to find myself huddled on her bedroom floor while the windstorm screamed outside.


I ran to her place in a sort of blindness.  Something big and glass had shattered in another part of my father’s house and the sound of outside was coming in.  Maela left to go see what happened and I found myself walking out the front door.  I stood out under the punctured sky uncertain that I was really truly feeling the night air on my bare arms. A minute before, I was using their toilet while Maela held the door; the next, my eyes were being lashed by my hair out in the yard.  I stepped forward.  The wind lifted me, blowing in every direction, going up under my thin T-shirt and basketball shorts.  I started walking.  Trees and bushes swayed as if underwater.  A dog whined somewhere nearby.  Soon, I was running.  I took up the centre of the road, not caring that a car might come and make the flying feeling the last one I ever had.  I pushed against the gusts, taking them deep into my lungs, breathing at last.

The lights of the few houses that sat on the empty fields went dark.  The single street light on that part of Calle 29 popped and faded out.  I stood still; I wanted to listen.  With my eyes closed, the palms along the road sounded just like the thunderstorms that used to splatter our windows in Juneau.  I stretched out my arms to feel for the rain but there was only mist, a tingling kind of damp that smelled sharply of soil.  The memory of home soaked me, making me run again, flying even higher than before.  Even with my eyes open, I couldn’t see much.  I tripped on one of the huge fronds littering the road but didn’t stop; it was just me and the road and the never-ending night in every direction.

A bright glow pulled me towards the end of the street.  There, down an easy hill, the power was on.  The low sign for Valencia Glen was lit as were the three tall palms bending on either side.  The houses across from the darkness were a hive, welcoming, begging me to come.  So I did.  I got to that sign in what felt like a second though it had to have been more like ten minutes if I remembered my walk from the bus stop right.  I disappeared into the maze of streets knowing that Maela wouldn’t be able to tell which way I’d gone.  I knew then that I wasn’t going back.

My rabbit legs took the first right.  I kept to the shadows in case she was looking for me.  I turned again then one last time as if I’d planned to go to Becca’s house all along.  Outside, in the driveway of the big house, the muscles in my thighs shook as I flattened myself between the SUV and the tan stucco wall.  I waited, not really knowing what to do next.  The wind brought the sound of a car engine creeping around the corner into the cul-de-sac.  Maela called my name out the window of her battered Aerostar, her headlights shining for me in the dark.

“Come on now, girl,” she yelled over the bells and wind chimes flailing in the storm.  “I don’t have time for no games.”  As if I was a puppy that had broken her leash.  I could hear the bite of irritation coming across the wind.  I stayed still and held my breath.  Sweat and warm and the hiss of blood pushed through in my veins.  It was almost louder than anything else.

When the Aerostar’s taillights disappeared, I sank down into the sheltered doorway of Becca’s house and waited for my breathing to steady.  I don’t know how long I sat there because my mind kept replaying how I’d left Roy Burns’ house, how Adele hadn’t come for me like she said, and how she hadn’t called in a long, long time.  I wondered, if something happened to her, would I know?  Did she know what had happened to me?

A dog barked inside the house.  Its warning grew louder and angrier as the animal got close.  I could tell it was small and hungry and was the kind with super-sharp teeth.  I pulled myself up from the concrete.  The fangs were right there on the other side of the door.

“Finally,” Becca said, flinging the door open.  She barely saw me standing on their bristly doormat before she grabbed my wrist and pulled me in.  She’d grown taller since I’d seen her, as I had, and out, as I hadn’t.  She must have been sixteen then—same as me—and was still the same Barbie I remembered grinning at me as she spat gum down into Ollie Hernandez’ hoodie in math class.

“Come on, before my mom hears you,” she said.  “She’s out back in the hot tub.”  The ball of orange and white fur winding around her ankles grumbled.  “Shut up, Lester,” she said, sliding the animal out of her way as she pulled me upstairs.  “Stupid dog.”

Relieved to be with someone other than Maela or Roy Burns, I let her take me with her.  Lester followed, teeth ready to sink into me any second.

“You want anything?”  she whispered loudly.  “We got Oreos, cheesies, Coors Light.  My mom just came back from the Von’s.”

I shook my head and barely said No.  I hadn’t spoken in a while so my lips made the word shape but that’s about all that happened.  Becca wasn’t waiting for an answer anyway and kept talking as if she was stuck on fast forward, every word coming out on top of the last.  Maybe that’s why I started to feel overwhelmed and kind of dizzy.

“Darlene’s late,” she said.  “What else is new, right?  She’s got the cash so you might as well hang out.”  She let go of my wrist once we got inside her room.

Becca shut the door, sealing us in and the puffy little dog out.  She clicked off the TV.

“Some stupid new show,” she said, tossing the remote on a pile of clothes beside the bed.  “As if anyone named Buffy can kick serious vampire ass.”

She turned the radio up, then pushed magazines, underwear, and makeup tubes off her giant bed and onto the floor.  The room was in all the colors of Easter candy.  Everywhere—the walls, the curtains, the carpet, everything—was pink and purple and sweet.  It was the exactly the kind of setup I’d pictured back when I couldn’t believe kids like her were real: stuffed animals stacked two and three deep on shelves around the ceiling, paper star lamps in matching colors, and clothes falling out of drawers and closets into enormous piles.  It was a 90210 kind of room, the kind I thought couldn’t exist outside of my TV.

She settled cross-legged on the bed and flopped open a magazine.  Somehow she looked less like a movie star than she did back at school but at the same time, she seemed like the same Becca.  My dizzy feeling got worse, shifting and changing every second.  I jumped when the wind scraped some bushes against the side of the house.  She rattled on about somebody named Kevin, about how he’d kill to be her boyfriend and how that would never happen.  I leaned back and held the doorknob as the tight, buzzing sickness spun from down behind my knees, through my middle, and settled in the pockets on the other sides of my eyes.  I couldn’t control it; it was as if everything inside my skin wanted to get out, needed out.  Then I swore I could hear Maela coming up the stairs.  I must’ve spaced for a second because I thought I was locked in the bedroom at Roy Burns’ again and I didn’t want her to come in.

“Darlene should be here in a minute,” Becca repeated, cheerfully unaware of the huge Cuban woman who may or may not be just on the other side of her bedroom door.  “She’s totally, like, always late,” she said.

Becca looked up from her magazine, curls bobbed to one side.  I couldn’t tell if she was looking at me or just in my direction.  She tried to focus, first on me then on something behind me then on me again.  I shifted from one foot to the other, trying to come off regular.

“We were going to hit the Promenade,” she said, sighing, “but the weather totally sucks, you know?”  She looked me over.  “Aren’t you cold?  It’s, like, fifty degrees out there.”

She meant my T-shirt and basketball shorts.  They were what I’d been wearing since I’d outgrown the clothes I had when we came to Fresno.  Maela left some of her son’s stuff in the room for me, mostly so there wouldn’t be a girl in tight clothes around the house.  Her sons were pigs.  The shorts stayed on if I rolled the waist and anyway, I didn’t get to go out.

I said I wasn’t cold but Becca’s nose wrinkled anyway.  Her look turned all suspicion.  I tried to keep from fidgeting and being a complete weirdo because I didn’t want her to make me have to leave but I couldn’t hold it together.

“What’s your damage?”  she asked, eyeing me closely.  “Hey, you’re not some sort of crackhead or anything, are you?  Shit,” she yelled in her whisper-voice, “you’re a fucking meth freak.  Kevin sent a meth freak, didn’t he?”

I didn’t know what a meth freak was exactly but I had a feeling about what she meant.  I started to say she had me wrong, that she was confusing me with someone else but it didn’t matter.  Becca was already flipping out.

“I totally can’t believe this,” she said, looking around for one of her friends to side with her but coming up empty.  “This isn’t happening.  You’d better not rip anything off,” she pointed at me, looking dead serious.  “I’ll call the cops.  I will.”  After a second, she lowered her voice.  “Did you bring the stuff at least, or did you scarf it all?”  She waited, hands on hips, for an explanation.  “Hey, meth freak, I’m talking to you.  Do you have our E or not?”

I thought she was going to get up and search me.  She looked wired already and it felt like she wanted to fight.

“Becca--” was all I got out before my knees turned to milk and I sank to the floor.  My insides started shaking from the cold and from the rushing feeling.  I doubled up, hugging my legs hard up to my chest.  There was nothing I could do to stop it.

She crawled over towards me on her bed.  I looked up, not knowing if she was going to kick me or what.  My jaw pressed closed.  I held on.

“Do I know you?”  she said, her anger slipping.

The shaking got worse.  I wrapped my arms around my middle, closed my eyes.

“You go to my school,” she said.

I nodded, tried to tell her my name.  Nothing came out.

She tried to place me, pick me out from the furniture of that time.  When she spoke again, disgust seeped in.  “Where’s your shoes?”

I looked down.  She’d noticed my feet for the first time since I’d come in; they were grimy, bare, and bleeding from the road.  When I saw them like that, torn and painful looking, that’s when they started to hurt.  I saw myself, crumpled on the floor in a miserable heap, like there were two of me.  There was one me watching from someplace above and the other, embarrassed and stupidly pathetic and alone on the floor.  I wanted my Friend, needed her.  She didn’t come like she always did to hold me, to whisper in my ear and tell me everything was going to be okay.

“Whoa,” Becca said.  And I heard the tone in her voice that said she was coming down from wherever she was and that she saw me, Tracey Burns, bleeding there on the floor of her room.

“You’re not Kevin’s friend,” she said, “are you?”  It wasn’t a question.

I shook my head.  Spit was beginning to soak the shiny knees of the basketball shorts.  I wiped my nose with them anyway.  I could only look at her sideways, like a dog who’d been sent to its corner.  I hadn’t done anything though.  Not really.

“Just hang on a minute,” she said then sat back on her heels.  She didn’t say anything more for a while.  Then she got up.  I held myself tight, ready for her to do anything, to make me leave.  Instead, she pulled the comforter off the bed and tucked it in all around me.

Then Becca yelled for her mother.


I’d thought about leaving Roy Burns’ house a zillion times but when I pictured it, it was always Adele who had come to get me.  I’d lie there in the dark and see the whole thing; it played in my head like the opening to one of those Nickelodeon reruns: fast and kind of bouncy with lots of happy music underneath.  It’d be one of those days where the clouds are high and rippled, like sand.  Adele would drive up in our station wagon, honking the horn and waving for me to hurry up.  I’d grab my little green suitcase with all the things Maela hadn’t given away already packed inside and rush out to the car.  My mother would have a cold Cherry Coke waiting for me right there on the seat and a fresh double-pack of Juicy Fruit warming on the dashboard for herself.  I’d shove my bag under my feet with just enough time to get in before the door swung closed as we sped away and the name of the show unrolled across the picture.  Maybe it’d say The Adele & Tracey Show or Juneau Or Bust! or something dumb like that.  Either way, it would be her and me going back home like we were supposed to in the beginning.  But when I found myself outside Roy Burns’ house that night, the warmish wind whipping my hair and rasping against my face, there was no station wagon and no Adele.  There was nothing but the skitter of tormented leaves and the pulling feeling that I belonged out in the night.

When Mrs. Salinas opened the door to the lavender room of mirrors and posters and a zillion Gunds, she had to squeeze by because I was blocking the way.  She had on a thick white bathrobe and a matching towel around her head.  Her skin was pink from the bath.  My shaking calmed a little when she stood over me and I inhaled her sharp, spiced warmth.  Maybe she could fix everything.  Maybe she could find Adele and make it all go back to how it was.  But Mrs. Salinas’ eyes flicked over the dirty carpet and over me: my stringy hair, sweaty and matted, the bones of my back poking through my shirt.  I was going back to Roy Burns and Maela and she was going to send me there.

“Becca,” she said sideways, “what did I say about having boys in your room.”

When the police came, Becca sat on her mother’s knee like an overgrown baby.  She wouldn’t look up from where she’d buried her face in her mother’s clean neck.  Mrs. Salinas hugged her close as I was bundled in rough blankets and taken away by strangers whose names I wasn’t told.  She said to them that she’d found me on her steps when she came home and that Becca didn’t know who I was.

“My Becca goes to Westland Marsh,” she said to the police officer who wrote everything on a tiny black notepad.  I understood from the way she said it that the name of the school should mean something, that girls like me—girls without shoes in the middle of the night—didn’t go to her daughter’s school.  She stroked and twisted Becca’s curls around her soft fingers there on the sofa in front of their big picture window and watched them take me.

Out in the blue and red lights of the police car, the policewoman who held my head so I wouldn’t bump it when I got in bent low and said to me, “Don’t you worry now.  Everything’s going to be just fine.”  She shut the door softly and went around to get in front on the other side.

Of course it would; I could’ve told her that.  If you hold your breath long enough, eventually you have to breathe again.

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