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It was my birthday. My first birthday while we were dating. I told him he didn’t have to get me anything, but I knew he would. What exactly he’d get me, well… that I didn’t know.
Technically, we were waiting on one more person to arrive besides Zak, but I did my best not to let myself think about that. Things were different. They had to be different. I was with Zak, and if that meant I had to cling to Zak as an excuse, then that’s what I’d do.
The moment his car pulled into the driveway, I stood up. The sun was bright and unrelenting overhead, the air hot and humid—one of the pains of having a summer birthday was you could never have decent weather. It was either too hot and humid or thundering outside in a random downpour.
All that to say, I knew I didn’t look the best. My hair was a little frizzy, but I’d pulled it up into a messy bun. I wore a light blue tank with long shorts, and absolutely nothing else. When it was this hot, only idiots wore socks and tennis shoes.
Zak was grinning when he got out of his car. He tried to hold a box behind his back, but he failed miserably at it, nearly dropping it. I went out to greet him, and after balancing the wrapped box against his hip, he pulled me in for a hug and a sweet kiss on the lips.
“Happy birthday, Charlie,” he said, grinning against my mouth. When I pulled away, he sheepishly handed me the box. “I know you said not to get you anything, but I couldn’t show up empty-handed, could I? What would your parents think of me if I came to my girlfriend’s birthday cookout without coming with the goods?”
Zak liked to joke that my parents hated him at every opportunity, but in actuality, I think they liked him more than they liked me. He was always complimenting my mom on stuff—which she loved—and he and my dad talked about sports and fishing and all that boring stuff. The first time he’d come over to meet them, they couldn’t stop talking about him for hours afterward.
Seriously, they had to like him better than me. But, you know what? I understood. I wasn’t all that interesting… which was a reason why I still caught myself wondering why Zak was with me.
I took the box from him, saying, “You didn’t have to, really, but thank you.” I turned to lead him into the house. After setting the box in the kitchen, we walked hand in hand to the back and joined the rest of the party.
“There he is!” my dad beamed. “Zak, my man. How are you?” Leave it to a dad to try to be cool when everyone who’d ever met him in his life knew he wasn’t.
“I’m good, sir, how are you?” Zak spoke as we sat down at the picnic table, on the same side as Claire and Tyler. Zak always let me sit on the end; I never liked getting boxed in, though I’d never told him why.
There were a lot of things I never told Zak, just like there were a lot of things he never noticed. He definitely had no clue that, in addition to not being boxed in, I liked sitting on the edge because then I could be ignored. I was comfortable when no one was watching me, when I wasn’t a part of the conversation. Even though it was my birthday, I wanted to fade away into oblivion.
Zak was easy to talk to. Claire had met him before, but she acted as though this was their first official meeting, and she asked him all these questions. What classes he was taking, whether we shared any at the high school, if he had Mr. Boggart for math.
My mom went inside the house to grab the meat for the grill, and when she came back out, she was accompanied by someone else.
Uncle Dave.
I smiled when my mom brought him over, saying, “Look who I found sneaking around the front of the house.” She handed Dad the plate of hamburgers. The smile I wore was fake, of course, but no one ever noticed it.
Uncle Dave laughed at my mom’s joke, and then he brought his eyes to me. “There’s the birthday girl. Happy birthday, Charlie. I left your present inside with the others.” He always went above the limit my parents placed on birthday and holiday gifts, at least for me. Less so for Claire, but I knew why that was.
It was only a second before I muttered a soft, “Thanks.” No one seemed to realize just how uneasy that word was when I said it.
As my dad went to start grilling, Uncle Dave sat down across from me. Finally, his eyes shifted to Zak. “And who’s this?” Uncle Dave grinned, and maybe I was the only one who could see past it, but that grin made my stomach twist.
“I’m Zak,” he said, offering his hand, “Charlie’s boyfriend.”
“Ahh, the infamous boyfriend,” Uncle Dave mused, taking Zak’s hand and shaking it vigorously. “I’ve heard a lot about you. You’ve been dating for, what, three months now?” His full attention was on Zak, which I was grateful for.
“Almost six,” Zak corrected him.
“Six, damn. You guys are serious then—well, as serious as you can be in high school, I suppose.” Anything Uncle Dave said sounded like a joke to everybody else, but not to me. I was the only one who sensed an underlying venom. “Well, Zak, you might’ve won over my brother, but you haven’t won me over yet. I need to vet any boy who thinks they’re good enough for my Charlie.”
My Charlie. He got Zak and my sister to laugh, but I wasn’t laughing. I was too focused on themy Charliepart. It made my skin itch in the worst way, and I wished Uncle Dave would knock it off.
Zak did his best to answer any question Uncle Dave threw at him—and he threw a lot at him, to the point where Claire had stopped listening in and turned to have a conversation with Tyler. When my mom heard all the questions, she came over and set a hand on Uncle Dave’s back, smiling and saying, “Oh, stop. We like Zak. You know that.” To Zak, she smiled harder.
“Seems you have the stamp of approval from the Mulanies, then,” Uncle Dave said, taking a sip from the beer bottle my dad had gotten him a few minutes ago.
“Glad to hear it, sir.” Zak beamed at that, proud to have gotten the stamp of approval. The thing with Zak was, he always took everything for face-value, and sometimes there was more to it than that.
But that’s why I think I loved him. He was so simple, so easy. He made me think, even if it was just when I was alone with him, that I could have a future. That Iwanteda future. He gave me hope, and he had no idea about any of it.
We ate, we had cake. My parents brought out the presents and I opened them with everyone’s eyes on me. Zak had gotten me a pretty necklace; he’d tricked me into thinking it was this big thing, but in reality it was a bunch of smaller boxes wrapped up around each other over the tiny jewelry box.
I didn’t wear necklaces, but it was pretty. A small silver heart with tiny flecks of diamonds. He didn’t have a job, so I had no idea how he got the money for something like this. Maybe his parents had helped him. I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to ask. It was such a normal present. I really did love it.
