Fighting For Normal

The thing about Jake’s backyard was that it had a specific gravity. Once you were in it, you didn’t leave. You just migrated toward the grill or the cooler or the string lights and settled there and let the evening happen around you, and at some point you looked up and two hours had passed and you weren’t surprised.

Dad and Pops had arrived with food. Jake already had everything going. That was the division of labor that had existed since before I was born and nobody had ever questioned it, because it worked.

Sixteen years of this. Sixteen September fourteenths in Jake’s backyard, give or take the one we did at our house because Jake’s porch was being redone and the one we did at a park when we were all seven and everyone agreed it was a mistake and we never did it again.

Stetson was holding court near the cooler, which was his natural habitat at any gathering. He was tall in the way that had happened fast, still slightly surprised by it, doing something with his hands while he talked that made Emory lose it completely. Emory’s laugh was the kind that worked backwards, getting louder the longer it went, and it had been going for about fifteen seconds. Maekynzie was watching them with the expression she wore when she thought something was funny but wasn’t going to give Emory the satisfaction of showing it.

Noelle had arrived first, the way she always did, golden-blonde hair in a high pony that bounced when she moved, a balloon and an iced coffee she was already halfway through and a story she’d started before she was even through the gate. She was currently telling it to Jake, who was leaning against the railing with his full attention on her the way he did with everyone in his orbit, like what they were saying was worth his actual focus. Noelle bloomed under it. Most people did.

Tinsley had come last and quiet, set gift bags in front of me and Chandler and Stetson without ceremony or explanation, and gone to find a spot against the fence where she could watch everything without being required to participate. That was Tinsley. Showing up and not making it a thing.

Chandler was next to me.

He was next to me the way he always was, no one deciding it, just the natural pull of sixteen years. Faux hawk, navy quarter-zip, a coffee he’d clearly already started. He was talking to Stetson about something I wasn’t tracking, tilted slightly in that direction, and I was half in the conversation and half watching the string lights come on one by one as the dark settled over Jake’s yard.

Pops appeared with the cake.

He set it on the table without announcing it, which was the Pops method of doing most things. Chocolate, three layers, chocolate fudge with chocolate buttercream, from the bakery on Mesa, the one that tasted exactly like itself and nothing else. He’d gotten it without being asked. Dad looked at it and then said he’d been just about to mention the cake, which was a lie so comfortable it had become tradition.

“Photo,” Jake said, which was the signal it always was.

We did the thing we’d done sixteen times. The same cluster, the same general chaos of people trying to get into frame. Stetson got Emory in a headlock that Emory immediately tried to reverse. Noelle positioned herself and Maekynzie like she’d been thinking about the composition. Tinsley stood where she was told.

Chandler’s arm went around my shoulders.

It always did, in the birthday photo. I’d stopped noticing it somewhere around age twelve and then started noticing it again somewhere around age fifteen, which was a problem I wasn’t examining.

The arm stayed a beat after Jake said got it.

I did not say anything about that. Neither did he.

Later we ended up on the back porch steps with paper plates, burgers going cold in the best possible way. The yard had gone quiet, the main noise moved inside. The Colorado dark came in fast the way it did in September, blue to black before you’d finished adjusting to blue, and the string lights were doing more work now.

“Stetson’s going to be insufferable tomorrow,” Chandler said. “He already thinks sixteen is different.”

“To be fair, last year he thought fifteen was different.”

“And the year before.”

“He’s consistent.”

Chandler ate something off his plate. I shifted on the step, the concrete edge catching the back of my thigh, and reached down absently to rub above my left knee. The joint had been a little stiff all week. Conditioning, probably. Coach had pushed the Tuesday practice and my body was still catching up.

I didn’t think about it.

We talked about nothing for a while in the easy way that was only possible with someone who had been in your life so long that silence didn’t have to mean anything. His shoulder was warm where it was close to mine. The lights in the kitchen were yellow. Inside, Stetson’s laugh went up over everything else the way it always did.

“Good birthday?” Chandler said.

“Good birthday.”

He looked at me for a second in the way he sometimes did, like he was checking something that didn’t have a name. Then he looked at his plate.

I looked at the yard.

I always looked away first.

They brought the cake out.

Stetson led the birthday song at a volume that was exclusively Stetson, the kind of volume that made Jake’s neighbors’ porch lights flicker on out of reflex. Emory added harmonies that weren’t harmonies. Noelle clapped on the wrong beat on purpose because she thought it was funnier. Maekynzie recorded it. Tinsley sang one line at the exact right pitch before stopping, which was more participation than she usually gave anything.

Chandler caught my eye mid-song.

The corner of his mouth went up.

I looked at the candles.

Sixteen of them, which nobody had counted before lighting because we’d been doing this long enough to just know. The frosting was exactly the way it always was. Pops had his hand on my shoulder without making it into something. Dad was filming, which he did every year and then never watched the video, but kept them all in a folder on his phone labeled September 14.

Make a wish, someone said.

I made one.

I blew out the candles.

The smoke rose and dispersed in the September air and everyone clapped and Stetson took a bow on my behalf, which was a thing he did every year because he was Stetson.

“For the record,” he said, straightening up, “I was born three minutes before her, which technically makes this my birthday first.”

“It makes it your birthday for three minutes,” Chandler said.

“Three very significant minutes.”

“Sit down, Stetson,” Emory said.

He sat down. He was grinning the way he always was, bright and easy, those blue eyes lit up the way they got when he’d landed something exactly right and knew it.

Later, sitting in the Suburban in Jake’s driveway while Dad and Pops said the long goodbye that happened at the end of every gathering, I tried to remember what I’d wished for.

I couldn’t.

I’d made it and meant it and blown out every candle and now it was gone, already, and I couldn’t get it back.

I didn’t know that part yet.

But the edge was there.