May: Birthday Part I

[...]

Nick was under the impression that his friends were hiding something from him.

This tendency towards paranoia was not a strong trait of his, and neither was suspicion, but both of the threads in his not-quite-as-subconscious-as-he-thought subconscious had been tingling for the past few days. He couldn’t quite put his fingers on what was wrong, and there were no definite signs he could find which would justify either his paranoia or his mounting trepidation. More accurately, he had never tried to put a rigid definition on his friends and the friendships and therefore could not find anything concrete to compare his recent experiences with. For instance, he felt like his other three friends were spending more time together—which was fine, except it was more time together without him. He would’ve brought it up except there was, quantitatively speaking, no significant decrease in the amount of time he spent with his friends, and he wanted to be sure it wasn’t just his paranoia talking. That, and the fact that he did not like to bring up these sorts of things and tended to be rather bad at it.

So instead of paying attention during the lecture on resource economics like the good student that he strove to be, Nick found himself trying, instead, to recount everything that he’d done within the past few weeks in an effort to see if he’d somehow offended someone. Just because the initial search turned up a blank didn’t mean that he really did no wrong. After all, it was American culture and he was French, as Mike so frequently reminded him.

Sighing quietly to himself, Nick looked down at his notebook and made a face. Today’s lecture had featured, if he were to go by his notes, two lines on public sectors and half a page full of cartoon doodles.

Friends did strange things to a person, Mike concluded. You could be walking along, minding your own business, and then, just because you have friends, you suddenly start thinking about them and wondering what they were doing and when you could next hang out together or go to the movies or something. It meant looking forward to things, which Mike usually was quite apprehensive about. It meant wanting to make other people happy. It meant watching out for each other and feeling protective and irritated, sometimes one right after the other but more often than not at the same time.

“The ice-cream’s meltin’,” commented Gary, peering into a grocery bag.

“Well put it in the fridge!” replied Zach from amidst the other bags on the floor, sounding slightly aggrieved. “We do have everything, right?” He asked worriedly, for the third time in the five minute period that they had been in Gary’s room. Mike rolled his eyes.

“No Zach, we have forgotten something veeeery important.”

“Nick isn’t here yet,” said Gary. “He’s sort of important. Since.”

“Right.” Zach finished putting away the food and stood up, staring at the door of the refrigerator as if he could see through it. “Hm,” he muttered to himself. “Cake. Cider. Chips.”

“Alright,” sighed Gary, with the air of one who was about to bring a torturous trial upon himself. “Wanna try the decorations now?”

“Sure,” said Mike, eyeing the roll of tape. “So long that I won’t have to deal with the tape.”

Zach made a strangled sound that was between a cough and a laugh. Mike looked at him.

“I’ll do it,” Gary offered, digging out a packet of paper cups and plates that might be called festive or might be called “A Most Failed Attempt At Cubism”. Mike pointedly looked away from it. He was not about to look at anything with that combination of colors any longer than strictly necessary. “Do we really need to try streamers?”

“We should make the effort,” said Zach solemnly. “And if we’re killed in the process, I’m sure Nick would appreciate the thought.”

“Uh.” said Gary.

Mike sighed. “Well you know how May’s a really big month in France, right?”

“…Yes?” hedged Gary.

“They usually have loads of holidays and stuff, and I hear from Nick that his sister’s birthday’s around this time too and they usually—I mean his family, obviously—make this really big deal about it.”

“I remember Nick mentionin’ somethin’ like that.” Gary nodded.

“Right. So I figured…”

“It’s probably his first birthday away from his family,” added Zach.

Gary looked thoughtful, then he looked down at the packet of streamer in his hand with a determined expression. Mike vaguely wondered if he was actually trying to intimidate the strips of rolled-up crepe paper, and what the results of that sort of intimidation might be. “Right then. Streamers.”

“I’ll set out the other stuff,” said Zach. “Nick knows we’re here, right?”

“It’s Thursday. We always end up here on Thursdays.”

“You don’t have to get all peevish,” grumbled Zach. “Here, help me with the plastic wrappers—I can’t get them off.”

That was the thing about friends, thought Mike, salvaging a package of plastic forks from Zach’s lack of hand-eye coordination. You found yourself doing the strangest things for them—such as picking out cake. In a grocery store. In broad daylight. And stranger still, you found yourself not minding it. It was friendship. Certainly there was no other explanation for why he would check out a movie that he would not normally even come close to; no other explanation for why he would voluntarily struggle to get poked repeatedly in the fingers by the points of a multitude of plastic forks. There was most certainly no other reason why he should eventually, unaccountably, find himself standing on the table, taping streamers to the wall and what was more—catching himself whistling ‘Happy Birthday’ underneath his breath.

It was almost like a sickness, some bouts of mental insanity that preyed on the less wary minds and Mike, being entirely masochistic and completely unconcerned with himself as far as health was concerned, thankyouverymuch, decided eventually that he didn’t really want to get well. And certainly not get well soon.