I stare at the ceiling until the sun paints it this glorious too-early-for-eyes orange, reminds me of Camila before the house collapsed like I know it did. I don’t sleep, but something behind my eyes rolls over, climbs into itself, and emerges like a newborn baby.
Trevor is standing on the counter in my apartment, reaching up to the top cupboard and opening it, closing it again. He does this a couple times, as if something might appear in place of its emptiness.
“You really ain’t got no oil?” he asks.
I’m standing over the only large bowl I own, stirring with every muscle in my arm, making a whirlwind out of the chocolate.
My right hand starts tensing up, so I switch to my left. “Thought it’d come with some. Shit, why I gotta do everything? Buy it from a box for a reason.”
It’s my birthday.
Normally, Marcus and I take a bus down to San Leandro and go to this bakery Daddy’s childhood friend owns and buy this huge-ass fancy cake with the edible flowers on top. This year, though, Marcus and I ain’t speaking and I don’t have enough money in my pillowcase for no flowered cake. After a night perspiring under the heat of 612’s arm, I watched him finally wake up and turn to me, spitting at me that I had to get out of his house. I asked again for my money and he said he already paid me, let me sleep in his bed.
I’ve been out on the streets for the past two weeks and still haven’t seen Camila. There’s something in the air, in the way all the johns been staring me down that tells me when it’s time to go home. I’m surviving off sky man and shirtless and whatever savings I have hidden behind the mirror in the bathroom.
Trevor asked me if he could sleep in my apartment last week and he hasn’t gone back to Dee’s place since. We moved all his clothes into my place and now I’m not as worried about paying his rent, except if Vernon evicts Dee, then Trevor can’t be seen around no more. I like having him with me, sleeping on my mattress, especially since Marcus is gone.
Trevor said he’d help me bake a cake after I told him I wasn’t gonna have a birthday cake or presents or nothing. Said everybody gotta have cake on their birthday. I don’t remember Dee ever making him no cake on his, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she showed up at midnight on his birthday with a three-tier chocolate cake and didn’t even remember who made it. She’s ethereal like that, appears out of nowhere and might just open her mouth and turn the whole city to laughter, make everything sweet.
I tell Trevor to look in the other cupboard and he climbs down, opening it and muttering some joke about how I don’t know how to clean, then pulling out a bottle of syrup from the back of the cabinet.
“Guess we making a pancake cake.” He brings it over to me at the counter and I swear he’s grown another inch in the span of the last month because he’s nearing my height and can stare into the bowl without shifting his weight to the balls of his feet.
“How much you gonna put in?” I ask him.
He screws open the top of the bottle. “All of it. Gotta be real sweet, Ki.”
The bottle is about halfway full and I know this cake’s gonna taste like Aunt Jemima exploded all over our kitchen. I let him pour it all in anyway.
Trevor finishes stirring and I pick up the bowl, pour the batter into a pan we got from Dee’s cupboard. The pan is shaped like a heart and I bet Dee got it one year for Valentine’s Day and forgot about it because it is rusted and unused. Trevor opens the oven door for me and I slide the cake in.
“How long it gonna take?”
“Box said twenty minutes. Go on and grab your ball and we can practice your dribble or something.”
Trevor runs toward the mattress and starts throwing blankets and clothes aside, looking for his ball. He comes back and tosses it right at me. We go outside, scrimmage along the row of doors until the ball falls down to the pool area. I chase Trevor down the stairs and my legs might be longer, but the boy knows how to turn his body into a bolt.
I slow down when it looks like he’s gonna beat me.
“Now I get the first piece of cake, right?” he calls out to me.
I try to keep my mouth a thin line, but it spreads into a smile. “Better get your ass back up there before the cake burns.”
Today is my eighteenth birthday, the one I’ve been waiting for. I’m letting today be just about me and Trevor, our cake, and Sesame Street reruns on TV. Trevor and his ball sprint up the stairs and I hear the door of the apartment slam closed before I’m even on the landing. Maybe adulthood makes you slower. Feels like it.