TWENTY SIX AND FORGOTTEN

ADELINE

By six in the evening, I had received three birthday wishes.

Two were from businesses trying to sell me things, and the third was from a woman who thought I was someone named Amelia.

I put my phone away and looked through the glass window of the bakery. A little girl stood beside the counter, pressing both hands against the display case while her mother tried to convince her that one cupcake was enough. The girl looked personally offended by the suggestion. Her mother looked like she was reconsidering every decision that had led her to motherhood.

I understood the child. There were days when one cupcake simply wasn't enough.

Today was one of them.

I went inside and bought myself a small chocolate cake The cashier placed it in a white box and asked whether I wanted a candle.

"Do you have one that says twenty-six?"

"We have regular candles."

"So, no candle that acknowledges the tragedy of my situation?"

She blinked but the. I smiled.

 "A regular one is fine. I don't want to make the cake uncomfortable." She gave me a thin, uncertain smile and slipped a pink candle into the bag.

I paid, thanked her, and walked outside. It started raining before I reached the bus stop.

Of course it did.

I stood beneath the narrow awning of a closed shop, holding my cake against my chest while the rain came down hard enough to make the road shine. Cars crawled past, spraying water onto the pavement. People hurried by with bags over their heads, umbrellas tilted against the wind, and expressions suggesting that the weather had personally insulted them.

My phone vibrated again.

For one ridiculous second, I thought it might be someone who actually knew me but It was a notification reminding me that my electricity bill was due.

"Wonderful," I muttered. "The people who want my money remember my birthday more than my friends do."

A woman sheltering beside me laughed.

I glanced at her. She looked to be in her thirties and was carrying two grocery bags, one of which had a hole at the bottom. An onion rolled out, bounced off her shoe, and landed near my feet.

I picked it up for her.

"Thank you," she said, taking it from me. "This weather is ridiculous. I left home ten minutes ago. Ten minutes. Now I'm standing here wondering if I should call my husband to come get me or accept that I'm going to die beside a shop that sells phone chargers."

"Call your husband. If you die here, someone will have to explain why you were carrying an onion."

She laughed again, then looked at the cake in my hands.

"Birthday?"

I glanced down at the box. "Is it that obvious?"

"Well, people don't usually carry cakes around in the rain unless they're going somewhere."

"I was going somewhere. The weather disagreed."

"How old?"

"Twenty-six."

She made a sympathetic sound. "Oh, you're still young."

"I love it when people say that. It makes me feel like I have plenty of time to waste."

"Trust me, you do. I'm thirty-four, and I still don't know what I'm doing."

For a few minutes, we talked about the rain, expensive groceries, When the rain finally eased, she waved goodbye and hurried toward a waiting car.

I remained under the awning until the road became manageable.

Then I carried my little cake home.

Nobody sang for me. Nobody surprised me. Nobody called to apologize for forgetting. I didn't even have the satisfaction of pretending I was too busy to care.

At home, I put the cake on my kitchen counter, changed into comfortable clothes, and stuck the pink candle into the middle. I couldn't find a lighter, so I used the gas stove.

The candle caught.

I stared at the tiny flame.

"Happy birthday to me," I said.

My voice sounded ridiculous in the empty kitchen.I blew it out before I could feel any worse.

Then I cut the cake, carried a generous slice to the sofa, and opened my laptop. If I was going to spend my birthday alone, I might as well do it with chocolate and a movie. Chocolate had never forgotten an important date in its life.

The movie I chose was one I had watched a week earlier: When the Green Tide Rises, an apocalyptic romance that had somehow convinced an entire audience that the end of civilization was the perfect time to fall in love with a man who couldn't remember to attend his own engagement dinner.

I had watched it once but I had complained about it for two hours afterward.

And now I was watching it again…I had problems. I was aware of them.

The male lead, Dorian, appeared on the screen in a perfectly tailored suit, looking like a man who had never carried his own groceries or waited for a bus in the rain.

He was rich, handsome, and emotionally unavailable. The film treated these qualities as if they were rare gifts bestowed upon humanity.

His fiancée, Adeline my fucking namesake, was waiting for him at a restaurant. She had dressed up, ordered dinner, and apparently spent the entire afternoon preparing for a date he had promised not to miss.

Dorian sent her a message.

Something came up. I'll make it up to you.

I paused the movie.

"Something came up," I repeated. "What came up? A natural disaster? Your building caught fire? Your secretary swallowed a paper clip? Give the woman a reason, Jasper."

I resumed the movie.

His secretary, Sloane, was waiting in his office. She had a delicate face, enormous eyes, and the permanent expression of someone who had never had a bad thought in her entire life. When Dorian told her he had missed dinner with his fiancée, Sloane  looked concerned.

"You shouldn't keep making her wait," she said softly. "She might misunderstand."

I stopped chewing.

She might misunderstand?

I leaned toward the screen.

"Darling, she understood perfectly. Her fiancé stood her up to spend time with you. There is nothing mysterious about the situation. Even a houseplant could put this together."

Sloane  lowered her eyes while Dorian reassured her that she was the only person who understood him.

I looked at my cake.

Then back at the screen.

"Of course she is. You're emotionally attached to a woman who apologizes when you step on her foot. She probably thinks your bad mood is a weather condition."

The film continued, and I continued eating.

The worst part was that the movie wanted me to hate Adeline.

She was jealous, demanding, and increasingly cruel. She screamed at Sloane , threatened to ruin her career, and kept using her family's money to force Dorian to stay with her. Every time he ignored her, she became more desperate. Every time she became more desperate, the film gave the audience another reason to laugh at her.

I wasn't defending everything she did. Some of her behavior was genuinely awful.

But I couldn't ignore the fact that Dorian had spent half the movie treating her like an inconvenient appointment, while the story acted as if she were insane for noticing.

"Listen," I told the screen, "if you don't want to marry her, cancel the wedding. If you love your secretary, tell your fiancée the truth. You don't get to keep someone on a hook because you enjoy being wanted. That's not romance. That's a personality defect with expensive watches."

Dorian kissed Sloane 's forehead.

I set my fork down.

"Oh, get a room. Preferably one with a therapist."

By the final act, the apocalypse had begun. Strange plants spread through the city, rain carried dangerous contaminants, and people fought to escape collapsing streets. While ordinary families struggled to survive, Adeline was still chasing Jasper, convinced that if she could just make him choose her, everything would be all right.

It wasn't.

She died trying to reach the survivor settlement where Dorian and Sloane  had taken shelter. The film gave her a tragic death, a brief flashback, and a few seconds of sad music.

Then it moved on.

I sat there with my empty plate balanced on my knee.

"That's it?" I asked. "That's all she gets? A sad violin and six seconds of screen time?"

The credits rolled.

I picked up my phone and opened the movie's review page. I hadn't planned to write anything, but the box was sitting there, inviting me to make another bad decision.

So I did.

The apocalypse was more believable than the romance. Dorian cross has the emotional range of a locked refrigerator, Sloane    needs a personality outside being understanding, and Adeline deserved a better story than spending her final days begging a man to notice her. She was wrong for a lot of things, but the film seems determined to punish her for having feelings while rewarding everyone else for pretending not to.

I reread it, nodded, and added one final sentence.

If the world ever ends, I hope I'm not stupid enough to spend my final days begging a man to love me.

I posted the review.

Then I closed the laptop, took my cake box to the kitchen, and decided that twenty-six wasn't going to be the year I turned my life around. That sounded exhausting, and I had already done enough emotional work for one evening.

I would start tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I would make a proper plan. I would get my life together, find better people to spend time with, and stop watching fictional women ruin themselves over fictional men.

It was a very good plan.

I was proud of it.

I went to bed, pulled the blanket over myself, the lights in my room blinking on an off as I mentally reminded myself to pay the goddamn light bill