Chapter 9: The Birthday Party

Sept. 1st, 2015

Cadi was super excited.

Her best friend was turning nine today!!

Time for a birthday party!!

Jubilantly, she jumped out of bed and started to look through her clothes to decide what to wear. In the middle of this, someone pounded on her door.

She ran over and opened to find her older brother’s grumpy face.

“Do you realize that you’ve had time paused for like an hour? I’ve had a stopwatch going.”

“What?”

Wordlessly, he pointed to his watch, which was reading fifty eight minutes. She looked back at her clock to see that it said 8:35, and it was then she noticed how quiet everything else was. Juno’s party didn’t even start until 10.

“Oops. Hold on.”

After a moment of closing her eyes and feeling the tinglies, time was going again.

“Did you pause time while you were sleeping?”

“I guess I did.”

“Hmmm. Well, I guess it’s only been a few days so…”

Rick rubbed his arm subconsciously.

“Just-be careful ok? Whenever you pause time it kind of affects me too.”

Cadi nodded, wondering why he was acting a little weird.

“What are you doing today?” she asked suspiciously. Rick stared at her for a second.

“I’m going on a date with Jessica today so-don’t do anything!” he blurted. Cadi gasped in delight.

“You finally asked her on a date?!” she yelled, jumping up and down. “Are you going to kiss her? Are you going to marry her? Are you going to-.”

Rick simply face palmed and walked away, leaving his younger sister to smirk in her doorway.

She decided to go with her tie-dye kitty cat shirt with googly eyes.

She was going to go down in her standard messy unbrushed hair and dirty blue and pink tennis shoes, but her mother insisted on helping her.

So here she was, wanting to take off some uncomfortable sandals and playing with her little black pigtails.

“Did you remember to get his present?”

“Yep!”

Cadi held on tightly to the bag that held the soccer ball she had planned on giving him. She also put some stickers in the bag so he could have a super awesome soccer ball. Specifically Spongebob stickers, because she knew he liked Spongebob.

When her mother dropped her off, Cadi ran into the group of kids, looking for people she knew. It didn’t take long for her to spot the curly brown mop of hair that belonged to her friend.

“Juno!! Happy birthday!” she yelled, handing him the bag. The boy smiled.

“Thanks Cadi! How are you doing?”

At this, Cadi looked around and then pulled him to the side.

“You remember that old broken bracelet your Abuela gave you before she died?”

Sadly, her friend nodded.

“Do you still have it?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is it?”

Silently, he led her into the bathroom and opened up one of the cabinets, where he kept a broken blue and green friendship bracelet that his Abuela had made for him. Unfortunately, he had worn it so much that one day it had simply fallen apart.

Cadi smiled and held it in her hands.

“This is your other birthday present.” she told him, reaching down into her stomach for the bubbles and focussing on the bracelet.

Juno’s dark brown eyes grew wide as he watched the bracelet put itself back together.

“How are you doing that?!” he whispered excitedly as she handed it back to him.

“I figured out I can do time stuff on specific things.” she told him happily. “Happy birthday.” She was a bit taken aback when tears filled his eyes. She hadn’t meant to make him cry… She just wanted to do something special for his birthday.

“Thanks Cadi.” he sniffed, giving her a hug and clutching the bracelet tightly.

Cadi stood there a bit awkwardly for a moment, unsure of what to do.

“Um… No problem. Do you want to go play now? I’m sure you’ve got stuff planned for your party.”

“Y-yeah.” he said, wiping the tears away.

Cadi nodded, and then shuffled out of the room to join the party. Quietly, Juno tied the bracelet around his wrist, grateful that a part of his Abuela was coming to his party.

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“Woah woah woah!” Emille exclaimed as she and her boyfriend Harry were on their way home from the store.

Harry swerved the car a little as the scanner in Emille’s lap started to spin and whirr.

“Why is it going off?”

“It’s picking up time signatures.”

“Where?”

“Take this right turn up ahead! Into this neighborhood!”

Harry turned the car right as the signal died. Emille picked up the scanner and held it up in the air, looking disappointed.  

“It was just…”

Harry pulled over and sighed.

“I’m sorry peach. I know you-.”

Whizzzing!

Emille jumped out of the car as the scanner went off again.

“I told you it was a good idea to bring it out!” she exclaimed excitedly, swishing around despite the looks she was getting from people in the neighborhood who were out mowing their lawns and such. “You never know when you’ll come in contact with a bit of the time stream!”

Harry locked the car and looked over her shoulder at the scanner, running a hand through his hair to mess it up a bit.

“I tried adding a time stream compass to it. Is it working?”

“The arrow is pointing east…”

The two of them followed the wiggling arrow until they heard the laughter of children. Inconspicuously, they looked over the high wooden brown fence and into a sea of balloons, cake, and little snot nosed children.

“Harry! The photos!” Emille whispered, eyeing the kids running around. “Do you think the child from the photos is here?!”

Harry shrugged.

Emille tied her white blonde hair back and scanned the group, standing in the shade of a tree, hidden from the people of the party.

“Do you see anyone that could be the child in the picture? It’s probably going to be a girl.”

“But Emille-there’s got to be at least twenty kids here!”

“Look at the shoes! Do any of them have dirty blue and pink sneakers?”

The two were silent for a moment as they searched without any luck.

“We might need to instigate something…”

“What do you mean?”

“Kid’s parties usually last a little while don’t they?”

“I guess.”

Emille looked from the party to her boyfriend.

“What’s West doing today?” she asked coolly.

“I don’t know.”

“Hmmm. You stay here with the scanner and record anything that might happen. I’ll be right back…”

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Cadi was having a blast. They ended up having a water balloon toss, and a soccer game, and cake and ice cream. Then a juggler came and juggled for them, which was one thing that Cadi mentally learned on her list to learn to do. She let other kids be Juno’s partner for some of the games cause she wanted to be fair, but she knew deep down that Juno really only had one best friend.

And that was her.

They went through the whole thing with opening his presents already, and now they were all in the front yard playing with nerf guns before everyone’s parents showed up.

Cadi hid behind a bush with Juno, guns at the ready.

“You ready to ambush Becca and Jack?” she whispered.

Juno nodded, a determined look on his face.

“Go!!”

The two of them jumped out of the bushes, yelling like warriors, taking out the other kids with their nerf bullets.

“Die alien scuuuum!!” Cadi screamed, jumping up on a boulder and cocking her gun.

Above the yelling of children, was the sudden honking of a car horn. The children stopped for a moment, a bit curious as to what the honking could be about. The adults also started to look a bit confused, and a few of them started to stand out on the sidewalk to possibly see anything else.

Cadi stretched to see what was coming.

Her eyes grew wide as a car soon came swerving down the road at a breakneck speed.

“Kids! Get back!” one of the adults screamed suddenly.

Cadi seemed frozen up on her rock as the car swerved over the sidewalk right towards the party. She turned to see Juno, knocked over into the grass from some kids that had turned to run. He seemed to be having difficulty processing what was happening.

The car was coming right at them.

“JUNO!!” she screamed as the car barreled towards him.

Her stomach lurched as the fear jumped up into her throat.

She almost forgot to pause time.

Desperately, she closed her eyes and reached for the stomach tingles.

Then the screams went silent.

Cadi opened her tear filled eyes to see a frozen scene of the carnage that was about to happen before her.

The car was only about a foot away from her friend, who was still on the ground, a terrified look on his face. Without even needing to, she ran to her friend and dragged him out of the way. Then she surveyed the rest of the situation and realized that this was going to be difficult to do by herself.

But she didn’t know where Rick was at the moment, and she couldn’t unpause time for even a second because everything would happen too fast.

She glanced over at Juno…

She had been able to pause individual things…

Could she unpause individual things?

Like people?

She bit her lip, and then focused on her friend, trying to focus the bubbles in her stomach. Trying to focus…

“Cadi?”

She opened her eyes to find that it had actually worked.

“Juno! You’re ok!” she suddenly bawled, throwing her arms around him.

“That car was about to hit me!!”

“I know! But I paused time!”

The eight year old and new nine year old looked around.

“Can you help me with this?” she asked. “I don’t think I can do it by myself.”

“Yeah. We should probably do something about the car first.”

The two of them ran over to the car and tried to open the door, only to find that it was locked.

“Who’s inside?” Juno asked as Cadi climbed onto the hood.

She froze.

“Um… Juno?”

Juno climbed up with her and gasped.

“There’s no one in there?!” he exclaimed. “Then how is it going?!”

“I don’t know… Do you know how to stop a car though?”

“I think you put it in park.”

“How do you do that?”

“We have to be inside to do that.”

Eventually, they decided they would have to break one of the windows, which turned out to be a lot harder than they anticipated. They tried with a rock, a hammer, and even a Juno’s baseball bat, but either the glass was too strong, or they weren’t strong enough.

“What do we do now?” Cadi exasperated, pulling on the door in frustration. She whacked against the glass with the baseball bat again, only to feel it jiggle her whole body. Juno thought about it.

“Well… you said you can do time stuff to individual things?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you do it to the window?”

Cadi stared at the car window and then took a deep breath.

“I’ll try.”

She concentrated hard, her eyes narrowed at the glass. At first, nothing happened.

And then… with her head pounding, it suddenly collapsed into sand, causing them both to jump backwards in surprise.

“Why did it turn into sand?” Cadi asked, sounding distressed.

“Cause glass is made out of sand. Haven’t you ever played Minecraft?”

“No.”

Cadi felt something trickle out of her nose to see that she was having another nosebleed.

“Are you ok?” Juno asked, sounding concerned.

“Uh… yeah…” she told him, sitting down cause she felt dizzy.

“I’m going to try to put the car in park, and then we can move some of the people out of the way.”

“Ok… Well… I’m going to sit here for a minute…” the little girl winced, trying to ease her throbbing head.

Guess some things were just harder to do than others…