by Kevin Anderson

I hate birthdays.

Not other people’s, just mine.

The universe, with its transcendent sense of humor, seems to gather up a year’s worth of misery and then on my birthday delivers the whole painful lot in one big annual cosmic joke that I never seem to get. On my seventh birthday my dog was not just killed but dragged under a car for almost half a mile, screaming. Our house burnt to the ground on my tenth birthday, and on my eleventh my dad split from my mom leaving her with a black-eye.

My sixteenth birthday will always be the day I received my first sexual advance. A pretty momentous day for most but for me it was the day I found out that many people thought I was gay. To make things worse the guy making the advance also happened to be my uncle.

I didn’t stop throwing-up for almost six months.

But believe it or not there is one birthday that trumps them all. One in which no amount of therapy could erode the images chiseled into my recall. On my eighteenth birthday I found myself sitting on the highway, next to a corpse.

Blood gathered in pools around the body as the afternoon sun gave it a sickly glimmer. I remember thinking how much the dark liquid really seemed to belong on the pavement. Like oil, transmission fluid or lizard-green coolant, the blood was at home on the asphalt.

It's amazing the things you notice when events force you to grown up in the span of a moment. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This story really starts two hours earlier, with Gina. "What the Hell?" she said from the passenger seat of my 1998 four-door Mazda. We both gawked, open mouthed at a ball of flames that licked the sky about a half-mile ahead of us.

The car accident making all five lanes of the Interstate a massive parking lot had apparently become more serious. Even in the daylight, the soft glow from the flames cast an orange luster on my windshield. A thick mushroom of black smoke rose up from the flames then bled into the afternoon sky.

"There's no way that can be good," I said as the whine of emergency vehicles sounded in the distance.

"Jesus, Craig, we're never going to get there." Gina said. "How long have we been stuck here?"

Parked vehicles, most of which had turned their engines off, surrounded us. Every few minutes a highway patrol car, paramedic or ambulance sped past along the shoulder, heading toward the accident.

"'Bout twenty minutes," I said.

"Ahhhrr, feels like forever. Why can't they just move the bodies to the side of the road and open up a couple of lanes?"

I was never in the dark about my first real girlfriend's insensitivity, but it was a rare occasion when it actually took voice.

"Christ, Gina. People are probably dying up there."

"Well I'm dying here." Gina hissed. "And I have to pee."

I reached over and held out my half empty 7-11 Big Gulp. "One container. No waiting."

She looked at me as if I had just tossed dog shit on her shoes. "Have you ever had a straw shoved up your nose?"

"That's why I love you, Gina," I said, "all that sweet pillow talk."

"Go suck an elf," she said, folding her arms.

A groggy voice floated up from behind us. "Are we there yet?" Pitt, my best friend, said from the backseat as he started to wake up. It had been Pitt's idea to go to the L.A. Toy convention –- an easy four-hour drive from our hometown of Delano, California. Knowing my luck with birthdays he wanted us to get out of town reasoning that if anything bad was going to happen at least we would be near the beach.

Before Gina or I answered Pitt's eyes flickered like dying light bulbs, then suddenly winked out as he fell back asleep.

Growing up together Pitt and I had developed the same fondness for toys, comic books, video games and all other things that anchored us solidly in the harbor of our youth. Our hobbies didn't exactly endear either of us to the opposite sex, but they helped forged a bond between us. A bond I thought couldn't be broken. Then Gina came along.

"Shit, he can sleep through anything," Gina said.

"How would you know what he can sleep through?"

Gina flicked her muddy-brown hair and dealt me a steely green-eyed glare. "What the Hell is that supposed to mean?"

My response to this opening had been crafted about two weeks ago. I started working on it about they time I caught Pitt and Gina together at school. Nothing was incriminating about their manner. It was simply the fact that they were together at all. Until then, I was under the impression that they didn't much like each other's company and only endured it on occasion for my benefit. Whenever he could Pitt told me what a bitch she was and Gina never missed an opportunity to call Pitt a looser.

Seeing them together just didn’t fit. Unless I was missing something.

But now the opening for my accusation had arrived and I narrowed my eyes as a kind of launching pad for my well-rehearsed words. But as I opened my mouth, drawing in a breath, a car horn started to beep in rhythmic intervals. I believed the intensity of my eyes would transfix Gina, but the odd thumping of the horn stole her attention.

She looked back over Pitt and out the back window. "I think someone's car alarm is going off."

"Why would someone turn on a car alarm in a traffic jam?"

"I don't know –- there, two cars back. Do you see him?" Gina pointed.

I reluctantly turned around seeing nothing at first. But then the strangeness of the scene drew my gaze like lightening to a rod. Two cars back and one lane over, was a man ramming his forehead repeatedly into the horn on his steering wheel.

"There's something you don't see everyday," I said.