A Birthday Party

I found a seat just as all heads turned to look at the birthday girl, Paola Mendez, throw her first ball down the lane. She lightly rolled the ten-pound magenta ball down the oil-slicked pine and maple lane and it thumped into the pins, knocking down at least four—the computer confirmed five. The party cheered with joy, no one really caring about the actual score except for the one guy who actually bowled regularly. He stopped her as she walked down the lane—back to the seating area—telling her that, given the strength with which she was throwing, she needed a heavier ball. In a strange twist of fate, I knew what she was thinking as she smiled sheepishly and nodded at the boy’s advice: she didn’t want a heavier ball, she wanted the magenta one.

Earlier, while picking my own ball—they were stacked in wooden shelves that ran down the entire length of the bowling alley—I had stopped at the same rack as Paola and stared awkwardly as she stood directly in front of the thirteen-pound ball I wanted—I had never really bowled before, but as a dedicated seventeen-year-old nihilist, I insisted on choosing the most socially unlucky number.

“I’ve bowled before with a twelve-pounder and done okay, but I really like the color of this ten-pounder,” Paolo said, hands on her hips. She turned to me with a mischievous grin that strangely put me at ease. “What do you think?”

I was surprised. I’d talked to Paolo all of twice in my entire life, both times at random and both times for less than five minutes and now I was a guest at her birthday party and she was speaking to me as if we were friends—I guess friendly acquaintances would suffice in this description. Normally, I’d be nervous and attempting a mysterious vibe that normally ended up being very uncool because I’m not in an anime or televised media of any kind but something about her seemed to put me at ease and my mind found words to form a proper response. “I mean, what’s winning if you can’t do it in style, right?”

She smiled, grabbed the magenta ten-pounder, and walked back to our lanes.

There were roughly twenty-two people attending the birthday party, so Paola—or whoever had organized the party—had reserved four lanes. I knew maybe four people at the party, people I could barely call acquaintances, so I awkwardly stood a safe distance away—in the back against one of the ball shelves. It was a spot where people could generally ignore me while also being close enough to be considered “part of the group”. Here I didn’t have to engage in any strained awkward small talk, something my friends discussed at length but ultimately decided I should try to avoid.

“You’re awkward, and can come off kinda creepy,” Greg, one of my closer friends, said very candidly while we were hanging out several days ago. Everyone nodded in agreement.

Why are you even here? My mind shouted at me as I felt my blood pump fast into my ears. You aren’t friends with anyone here. There’s no reason for you to be here. Why did you even get an invitation? It must have been a mistake, right? Like she just accidentally clicked you when sending out the event invites. And now, after you stupidly showed up, she can’t be like: “Oh awkward, I didn’t mean to invite you”. You should have just not come and spared everyone this… My mind cut out as I saw my name come up on the score screen. It was my turn.

My cousins had taught me how to bowl one summer vacation, so I knew how to spin the ball but, in order to avoid bringing attention to myself, I bowled normally, throwing the ball straight down the lane.

When I had finished my turn and returned to my spot against the shelves, my mind resumed its series of rebukes. Why are you here? You’re not friends with these people. They don’t like you. Stop. Stop. A mental image of Amy holding her hand up to my face knocked away my self-immolation.

“When you have all those weird thought that you have,” she texted me yesterday, “just shake your head a bit and get them out of there…Make sure no one sees you when you do it.”

I shook my head per her instructions. You don’t know that they don’t want to be friends. You know some people here. You’ve had science class with Jessica both years of middle school and you had a group project with Jack. We didn’t really hit it off and it was kinda hard to talk to them after a while. I shook my head again. You’ve talked to Paola and her friends a few times and all of them have been pretty amicable. What even is a “friend”, right? Some amorphous relationship that gets harder and harder to define as you grow with someone and learn how to be around each other. Just as the meaning of one’s life is amorphous and intangible, so are human relationships with their…Stop. No existential thoughts. You’re at a birthday party.

“Is that a Zelda T-shirt?” a girl whom I didn’t know approached me from one of the other groups. She had long black hair and she was so good-looking that I instinctively looked away—my body had decided I was not worthy of such a sight.

“Uh…yeah,” I stammered, looking down at the shirt—part of a birthday present from my brother two years ago: three shirts, each with a different iconic video game symbol—“Um, it’s Navi from Ocarina of Time.”

“Yeah, that flying fairy thing,” the girl said. “My ex and I used to play that game when we hung out. This one and the one where he turns into a wolf.”

“Oh, uh, Twilight Princess,” I said. I tried to look her in the face, make eye contact like a normal person would, but my eyes refused and I ended up looking at the spaces just around her head. “That one was pretty fun too, though the wolf mechanic was under-utilized.”

“Yeah,” she put out her hand. “I’m Alexis.”

“Philip,” I responded, taking her hand as gently as I could—suddenly conscious of how clammy my hands were.

“My ex was an asshole,” Alexis said, “but I did like it when he played Zelda.”

“Oh,” I nodded and tried to look the opposite of nervous.

“You sorta look like him,” she said.

“I’m…” I grimaced, trying to think of something to say while holding back the deluge of anxiety that felt like it was about to burst forth and drown my brain.

“He cheated on me,” Alexis looked off into the distance and frowned, then looked back at me expectantly.

“Um,” I stammered. “Did you know that those two games are linked…um, chronologically?” Alexis looked slightly surprised, which I nervously misinterpreted as a green light to move forward, but in retrospect realized she just wasn’t expecting the conversation to go in this direction. “I mean…that is to say, Ocarina of Time, you know how the hero time travels in that game and creates different timelines?”

“I didn’t know that,” Alexis said, her voice trailed.

“Oh, well there are technically three ending paths in the game, even though the story only gives you one,” a mixture of my anxiety, my hatred for awkward silences, and my fondness for Zelda lore—the first game I ever played—coalesced into an unstoppable momentum and Alexis’s obvious disinterest went unnoticed. “There is one ending where the hero is defeated, essentially if you, the player, never finish the game—we don’t have to talk about that ending. Then there are two more, one where the hero travels into the future and defeats Ganondorf after he’s already taken over the world. That leads to the Wind Waker game followed by the Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. Then, if you remember the ending of Ocarina, you see the hero go back in time to when he’s a child and meet Zelda while she’s spying on Ganondorf’s meeting with her father, the king. Well, we find out that Link tells Zelda everything that is going to happen in the future and they work together to prevent Ganondorf from ever getting the Triforce of Power.” I should have stopped a while ago. “With Ganondorf thwarted while Link and Zelda are still children instead of adults, a new timeline is created where Ganondorf is executed instead of sealed away. This leads to Majora’s Mask and then to Twilight Princess where they find out that the sages were unsuccessful in executing Ganondorf and ultimately banished him to the twilight realm, which is where Midna is from.”

“Oh,” Alexis said, “that’s…cool.”

“Uh…yeah.” A wave of regret came over me as I realized what I had done, drawn someone into a protracted lore conversation about a topic she was simply trying to use to break the ice. The embarrassment flushed into my face, “I think I’m gonna go get a soda,” I said before rushing away.

I bought a Coke and then went into the bathroom where I splashed water on my face before returning to the party. When I got back to my spot at the shelves, Alexis had already returned to her friends in the other lane, laughing and joking about something probably unrelated to Zelda. I sighed with relief, the awkwardness had ended—at least for now.

I flew under the radar for the rest of our time bowling. Most people got in the range of sixty to ninety points while Martin—the guy who actually bowled regularly—finished with two hundred eighty-nine points. Paola, who used the magenta ten-pounder all the way to the end, finished with one hundred and twelve points. I finished proudly with eighty-two points, an inoffensive and forgettable score.

After the game, the plan was for the party to return to Paola’s house where we would hang out by the pool until dinner. I had driven myself to the bowling alley, but others had been dropped off by their parents and thus, I was given three passengers to taxi to Paola’s house—a request from the birthday girl that I couldn’t refuse. We all went to the same high school, but two were complete strangers and I only knew the other one from Mrs. Gonzales’s literature class in sophomore year. We had never talked to each other. They each introduced themselves as they got into my car: Diana, Athena, and Clark—the guy I knew from Gonzales’s class who didn’t seem to remember me.

After ten minutes of complete silence, Clark turned to me. “So Phil, how do you know Paola?”

“Oh, uh,” I shifted in my seat, “We met after school in detention. Well, to be fair, I was in detention, she was there helping Mrs. Moreno grade papers.”

“Why were you in detention?” Athena asked.

“Oh, Moreno caught me sleeping in the middle of class,” I said, “…for the third day in a row.”

“Damn man, is Moreno that boring?” Clark asked. Everyone laughed at the joke.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I just…there are some days or weeks or something where I just can’t sleep at night,” I chuckled a bit, but the three passengers got quiet. “I mean, I get tired and everything, but when I go to bed, I just can’t sleep, you know?”

“Oh…” Athena said, “do you have insomnia?”

“That’s, like, a serious problem, right?” Clark asked.

His demeanor had shifted to something more serious and panic flooded my mind as I saw the mood of the car devolve.

“Do you need to go see a doctor for that kind of thing?” Athena asked.

I could barely hear her speak as my mind tried to think of ways to change the subject, but what subject could I switch to? My mind stalled into self-immolating rebukes before I heard her. “Oh umm, well, my parents don’t really trust American doctors, so we went to an Asian herb doctor a few weeks after it started and he has me doing some neck exercises and I drink this really bitter tea before I sleep.”

“That’s…” Athena said.

“It’s weird,” I chuckled. Get out of this conversation! Get out! Get out! “So—”

“Does it work?” Clark asked.

“It…” I thought for a second, shoving all my panic to the back of my head where a dull pain began to thrum. “No, not really…but the sleep I do get is really deep, and I have a bunch of crazy dreams.” Maybe this will be a better topic!

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Clark said. “I thought dreams meant your brain was still awake, so you’re not actually sleeping deeply.”

“Oh…” I said, realizing for the first time that I didn’t really know the truth behind dreaming and sleep.

“No,” Diana said, a small, sharp-eyed girl who looked like she frowned with her entire body. “You can dream in all stages of sleep, but your most vivid dreams and the one where you’re most lucid mostly happen during REM sleep, which is the deepest stage of sleep.”

“REM sleep?” Athena said.

“Rapid eye movement sleep,” Diana explained, “your eyes flutter around rapidly like you’re seeing things in your sleep.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said, thankful to Diana for shifting the focus. “I can’t really tell if my eyes are fluttering, but my dreams always feel pretty real. Sometimes really stress…” I trail off, realizing I might be walking back into awkward territory. “I dreamt that I had superpowers once,” I lied—even though I probably had dreamt that at some point, I didn’t remember it—with the goal of getting everyone to talk about their dreams.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. “My dad’s a doctor,” Clark said. “He’s a podiatrist, but he knows other doctors, do you want me to ask if he can get you to see someone? A sleep doctor or something?”

  I felt a natural revulsion as I saw his face and quickly turned back to the road. It was a feeling I couldn’t quite verbalize at the age of seventeen. A visceral anger that turned off all self-deprecation and fear of being disliked, if there was anything I hated more than an awkward situation, it was being pitied.

  I shrugged Clark’s hand off my shoulder and stared straight at the road ahead. “I’m good.” We spent the rest of the car ride sitting in silence.

  When we got to Paola’s house, people had already divided up into two groups. One, the larger group, were people out by the pool lounging and swimming aimlessly as some of them talked of starting a game—the choices being truth or dare or never had I ever. The other group had crowded around a grape purple Nintendo 64, playing Super Smash Bros. on a gigantic OLED TV in the living room.

I gravitated towards the N64, even though I didn’t know anyone in the room. However, after years of dedicated training—besting my siblings in single combat and then fighting teams of level ten CPUs by myself—I felt that this could be my moment to shine and impress a group of peers.

I waited patiently for my turn, but as the fighters in the queue began conversing while they waited and my heart began to drum into my ears again, faster and faster until all I could focus on was a thin monotonous ringing that echoed from the depths of my mind. Without a word to anyone, I got up from my seat and walked outside. At a quickened pace that matched my heartbeat, I reached my car and leaned against the driver’s side door—eyes closed—until the ringing disappeared.

The sun was setting and the once-blue sky had transformed into a intangible staircase of oranges, pinks, and violets. I stared up into that wide expanse until the shadows from the trees grew long and overbearing. I took a deep breath and then walked back towards the house just as Paola emerged from the front door and we nearly crashed into each other.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked. Her eyes took on that mischievous look that always dropped my guard.

“Oh, just catching a breath,” I said, unable to make eye-contact. “Did something happen?” I wondered why she was out here alone.

“I’m just taking a break too,” she said. “I’m happy everyone’s here, but I’m not used to so many people all at once like this.”

I nodded with understanding and smiled, feeling my apprehension subside. “I can leave you out here if you—”

“Oh no,” Paola shook her head. “You’re fine.”

There was an awkward pause before either of us spoke again.

“Umm…” I looked around, fully conscious that we were both standing awkwardly in the middle of her front yard. “The sky is really pretty today, there’s a great view from out on the street.” 

“Well then,” she grabbed my arm, “why don’t we go for a walk?” I followed Paola down to the end of her street—the sidewalks covered in tall, lush trees—to a set of concrete stairs that led out to a small park. The sun was still peaking just above the rolling hills in the distance as only the brightest of stars made their appearance. We sat there for a while, staring up into the sky. Nervousness started to creep into my periphery as I began to wonder when her parents would serve dinner, if her friends were looking for her, or what they would say if they found us sitting here like this. Then a thought returned to me: why did she even invite me? It was a question I desperately wanted to have answered but, as I turned to look at her—staring contently up into the sky—I realized it wasn’t the right time for such insecurities.

It was a strange feeling, after an entire day of anxiety and regret, I stared up at the darkening sky and felt calm. All my questions and concerns seemed to fall away as my energy seemed to renew in that dimming twilight.

After a while, Paola stood up with a relaxed sigh. “I guess it’s time to head back in. I think dinner’s happening soon.”

“Yeah, I guess we should be getting back to your birthday party,” I took perhaps too many steps to get to my feet and chuckled awkwardly.

On our walk back to the house, Paola wrapped her arm around mine without a word. When we got to the front door, she sighed again. “Thanks for coming to my birthday party,” she disengaged her arm from mine and turned to face me.

“Oh, of course.” I nodded.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

“…I’m glad I came,” I smiled.

She turned and rushed through the door. I took a deep breath, then followed after.