Click to Subscribe - By L. M. Augustine Page 0,53

It’s large, at least the size of my face, and it’s smothered all over with dark chocolate icing. Above the icing is a layer of sour gummy worms, and on top of those, I make a mini Oreo pyramid.

But the cake is not done yet. The best birthday gifts are also sentimental, so I head back up the stairs to my room. Pictures, I tell myself. I need pictures. Old pictures of Cat and I, of us smiling and having a good time, of Cat doing weird things and me taking photos of it. I’ll put them around the cake, on the plate, for her. When I reach my room I hear Dad muttering to himself in his own room across the way. For an instant, I strain to hear what he’s saying, but I can’t make out his words. I shake my head and shut my bedroom door. It doesn’t matter. I go back to looking for pictures of Cat.

It takes me a minute of throwing around clothes and old trinkets before I find a photo album of us. I smile a little as I pull it out and open it up.

I flip through page after page of photos, starting with when Cat and I were kids and we went to the bus stop for the first time, to when we were six and lost our first teeth and showed off our gap-toothed smiles to the camera, to when we went skiing together in sixth grade and quickly learned we were not born skiiers. I pull out a few more pictures here and there, of Cat and me sticking out our tongues to the camera, posing in front of The Icecreamery as kids, and so on. Eventually, I make my way to the more recent pictures, smiling like an idiot all the way through. I feel something else, too, though; the beating of my heart. The buoyancy inside me. I look at the pictures of us, how close we were, how much we loved being around each other, and I start to feel… well…

I turn the page before I can finish the thought. These pictures are of Cat and me showing off our dorky Harry Potter Halloween outfits, Cat and me looking like Sumo Wrestlers as we joke-fight each other on the boardwalk by the lake, Cat holding my hand and telling me I’m the biggest badass of a friend anyone could ever ask for.

I flip the page. Next are pictures of us playing our epic games of whiffleball, which Cat always won, where we were laughing and smiling and not caring how stupid we looked. Another picture shows us on that trip to France we took with Mom last year, where we’re wearing fake mustaches and French painter hats, posing for the camera and grinning so hard. The next shows me and Cat doing our best fish impressions at the beach, our faces inches apart, our lips puckered like a fish’s. Then, I see one of Cat and me dressed up for our first Prom, our arms around each other, our faces so close and smiles so wide. By how happy we looked with each other, it seemed like we were going to Prom together, even though we went with different people.

I turn the page. My heart tingles, rising slowly upward in my chest. All of a sudden, I can’t think straight. I’ve completely forgotten why I was even looking at these pictures in the first place, because now it’s just Cat and me and our memories. And as I look at those pictures of us laughing and smiling and being dorks and not caring because we have each other, my eyes start to mist—and I just know.

I know like you know if you failed a Math test, or you did well in a job interview; I know because of that little instinct in the back of my mind screaming at me that “YES!! THIS IS THE RIGHT ANSWER!”

I know right then, as I stare at those pictures, that my quest for happiness, for love, was right in front of me the whole time.

I know that I, West Ryder, am in love with my best friend.

***

Before I realize what I’m doing, I bolt out of my bedroom, abandoning the cake and the photos and my dad and everything else, fly down the stairs, out the front door, and sprint faster than I ever have before to Cat’s house. It isn’t a long run, but I wouldn’t have noticed