I remember my 9th birthday party very well. I didn’t have tons of friends, but the ones I had were very close. There was Matt, Darren, and Luke. There were a few other kids at the party too, but I didn’t know them as well. Most of them were other kids in my class at school. They mostly went off and did their own thing with their good friends, but I stuck with our little foursome of activities.
I didn’t want to invite the other kids, but my mom made me. Yes, I know, it’s a lame excuse, but I never can win an argument with her. Three days before the party, she came up to watch over my shoulder as I was making a list of the people who I wanted to invite. She was silent for a few moments, then she spoke up.
“I think you should invite your whole class, Tristan. You don’t want to exclude people, do you?” She obviously didn’t know how birthday parties work.
Yes, I thought, I actually do want to exclude people who would end up excluding me anyway at a party.
“No,” I said. “But we would have to make a lot more invitations, right?” I tried to keep my breathing steady, so it wouldn’t look like I was afraid of making extra cards.
“I’m sure we can handle it,” she said with a slight smile.
I can’t remember what I said to this. All I know is that we did end up making extra cards. The upside to that, which I only realized on the day of the party, was that I would get extra presents.
The next day, I handed out the cards at school. The day after that, I stayed home from school because of the snow. There was so much of it piled up in front of our door, it wouldn’t budge. It was a great chance to start decorating for my party, and me and my mom jumped to it. My dad wasn’t helping, he was attending to some “important business” upstairs in his office. He was probably taking the chance to start another chapter in his novel, a slow, romantic book that I never wanted to read.
My party was supposed to be dog themed, and it lived up to it’s expectations. There were dog posters on the walls, dog themed games placed all over the house, even a custom ordered dog shaped cake with nine brown (dog colored) candles placed in it. As I was attempting to drape brown streamers over the refrigerator, my mom told me to call my dad down from his important business. I reluctantly let the streamers drop to the floor, promising myself that I would try again later.
“Dad?” I called, when I had reached the foot of the stairs. I herd him reply, but not from the direction I had expected.
“Tristan?” My dad said. I spun around to fact the stairs leading down to the basement.
“How’d you get down there?” I asked.
“I’m, um, well, oh never mind that, what’s the problem?” he shouted up to me.
“Mom wants you,” I said.
“It better be something important” I heard him mutter as he started ascending the stairs.
As soon as he got to the top, my mom put him to work. At the end of the day, we were almost halfway done decorating.
It will eventually be a fantasy story. I mean, this part is just part of a memory the main character is describing.
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