Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) Read Online Free Page B

you very much, and enjoy the show.”
    Liesel started
laughing first, then I joined in. She had to slam her
hand over her mouth to keep from making too much noise.
    She nodded and
smiled at me, wiping a few tears from her eyes. “That’ll be good
entertainment,” she said with another chuckle. “A guy who ages backward.”
    I got more
comfortable in my seat and leaned my head toward Liesel’s. I was enjoying this
rare moment of laughter, one that probably wasn’t going to rear its head again
for a long, long time. “Been there, done that,” I said.
    “Story of our
lives,” Liesel added.
    “My life,” I
said. “And now everybody’s life.”
    “But they’re not
going backward. They’re going…”
    “Forward.”
    The woman next
to Liesel woke up and wiped the bottom of her chin. “Has the movie started
yet?” she asked.
    Liesel just
shook her head. “No. It’s starting right now, actually.”
    “Anything good?”
the woman asked.
    “The main
character dies in the end,” Liesel said. “It’s sad… tragic…”
    “Oh, my word,”
the woman said, closing her eyes. “I hate stories with unhappy endings. I’m
going back to sleep.”
    Ten seconds
later, she was snoring.
    I stayed close
to Liesel for the rest of the flight, hoping that we would touch down in San
Francisco sooner rather than later. We would then have a short one-hour flight
from San Francisco to Reno, and Liesel and I could start focusing on our big,
scary adventure.
    I turned back
and looked at my family. My mom was reading a magazine, and my dad and Kimber
were both sleeping soundly.
    I didn’t want to
do it. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
    I don’t want to say goodbye.

 
 
    COACH WELSH

 
    The temperature was
reaching ninety-nine degrees when Theodore Welsh exited his two-bedroom home on
the corner of Kietzke and Vassar to go for a brief jog before dinner. Standing
a massive six-foot-six, and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, Theodore
typically found it both easier and more enjoyable to use elliptical machines at
his local gym than to go for a strenuous run in the heat. But there was
something he loved about running outside; it was a passion ingrained inside of
him since his track school days at Caughlin Ranch High way back forty-something
years ago.
    Known more as
Coach than as Theodore around the high school campus, he always thought of
himself as a misunderstood man who many believed to be nothing more than an
egotistical jerk . He had a tough personality to deal
with; he knew that. On the court, he was the scariest man on the planet, not
only because of his booming voice and sheer height, but because of his will to
win, every time out. He now had enjoyed two straight years of winning the State
Championship, and he was ready for a third. He had been coaching basketball for
nearly sixteen years, and this had been his first time enjoying two straight wins in a row . He
didn’t want the momentum to stop.
    As he started
running down Kietzke, he thought about how much flack he would receive if any
of his students found out about his true love—writing poetry. He didn’t
get much of his writing published, and when he did, he published it under his
pen name—Thomas Winters—but it was something that gave him creative
and mental clarity every morning before his busy day began. He would often wake
up as early as 4 A.M., read poetry for an hour or so, and then sit down at his
desk in the corner of his bedroom and write. A lot of his material he threw
away in the trash. Some of it he put away in a folder to come back to later.
There were pieces he had been working on for weeks, months, even years—in
fact, he had been working for over five years on a piece about his nephew Joey,
who had died in the early 2000’s in a tragic car wreck. He loved the work, and
it gave him a chance to distance himself from the stress of his job.
    Theodore was
lost in thought as he started running across an intersection, not recognizing
that he had