Gage Cilleti has just begun his junior year of high school, and is becoming more and more involved in his school's activities, considering he'd been playing baseball since he was just seven-years-old.
Elijah McCay has just dropped out of school, du...
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My eyes open, slowly adjusting to the sunlight peeking through my curtains. My head lulls around to the other side of my pillow, softly smushing the cloudy texture. The smell of blueberry pancakes fills my nose, the smell causing my heart to almost skip a beat.
It never failed. Every single birthday of mine had began with my mother making me a stack of blueberry pancakes to kick off the day. I'm not so sure why I expected this time to be different. My mother's footsteps is all that is to be heard throughout the long hallway. Well, her and Toro's.
Toro is whimpering, most likely from my mother not sharing any of the pancakes with him. "Sh!" She hushes him, causing a whine to leave his snout. And I wonder how long it'll take her to bust open my bedroom door.
Not even a minute later, my door is pushed open, revealing my smiling mother and more than excited dog. Toro jumps onto my bedspread, causing me to groan. "Dude, you're dirty." His tongue hangs from his mouth, obviously not paying much mind to my very white and clean blanket.
"No, he's not," my mother scolds. "I gave him a bath yesterday."
My eyebrows raise in suspicion. "Mom, he's brown." I point to our usually white dog.
"Oh, never mind him," it's only then that I realize she's holding the stack of pancakes in his hands, shoving them toward me. "Happy birthday, darling!"
Her words are shouted, causing me to retract slightly from the intensity. She continues. "Here, you can eat these in bed—don't say I never gave you anything—and I have a lovely, lovely surprise for you downstairs when you're ready." She finishes off her sentence with a frightening smile so big I'm almost certain her cheeks are hurting.
"Thank you, momma," I lean in to land a kiss on her forehead, causing her smile to widen even more. "I'll be down there in like twenty minutes."
She and Toro flee my room, leaving me with my birthday breakfast. It doesn't take me another minute to dig in. I spend the rest of my twenty-minutes or freedom showering and getting dressed in a pair of clothes that aren't too flashy, but also not too modest because hello—it is my birthday.
And there's a possibility that I'll be seeing a certain someone later this evening. But I tried not to think about that as much.
I greeted my mother with another hug once I descended down the staircase, carrying my now empty plate into the sink.
She sits idly near the kitchen table, her reading glasses perched on her nose as she flips through her Sunday magazine. Coffee is already brewed and poured into my mug. I take a sip from it, smiling at the familiar taste.
