Effortless

Birthdays were a big deal to most people. Many would count down the months, weeks, and days leading up to their big day because it was so looked forward to.

Ricky's family took him on vacation for most of his birthdays, especially the big ones like his tenth and his sixteenth. Bella's mom overloaded her with gifts. She got so many gifts that sometimes she would forget a present that was given to her. Kailey's family would throw parties, but they wouldn't invite classmates. They would invite a few of her friends and the rest of the guests would be extended family. So, I guess you could call it more of a get together than a party, but it was always fun.

I always enjoyed the free food and dessert that was given at parties. It was disappointing when the birthday kid picked a kind of cake that was nasty, like carrot cake for example. Though, I still enjoyed being at the party. I never went to too many birthday parties growing up but the couple that I did attend were fun.

My siblings never did anything big for their birthday. They would do something simple like go to the movie theater and spend the day with each other. They surprisingly never had the desire to throw a house party which was fine with me, it would just be a mess to clean up the next morning. I doubt they would have been allowed to do so anyway.

Benji wanted me to help him find the perfect gift for them. We all knew that he was a bad gift giver, but I felt like I was the last person he should have been asking for help. I knew that he knew that I wasn't the best person to help yet he still insisted that I did. Benji acted weirder and weirder by the day. He had always been friendly with me in the past but he had still kept his distance. Now he was insisting that I go out and do things with him and actively talking to me. He knew how my siblings felt about it, so why was he going against them now after all this time?

"Do you think Emmy would like this?" Benji asked me.

He was holding a sparkly pink tank top with rhinestones all over it. The glitter made my eyes burn and it looked itchy. It was hideous to say the least. I could have crafted a better tank top.

"No." I said with disgust for the piece of fabric before me.

Benji pointed to another tank top that looked the exact same, but it was teal instead of hot pink. "What about that one?"

"No." I repeated in the same tone as before.

"That one?"

"Are you actually going to look for a decent present for your girlfriend?" Justin asked. "Or are you just going to point at random clothes and ask if it looks good?"

Benji rolled his eyes. "Don't you have something better to be doing? I thought you came here to look for things for yourself."

"I did."

"Then go do that." Benji said as he browsed the shirts on the rack next to us. He must not had realized that those were childrens shirts . "And take Javier with you."

"I'm not going with him." Both Justin and Javier said at the same time.

This was such an unlikely group of people forced together. No one in this group had ever had more than a surface level interaction with each other prior to this, at least not to my knowledge. The common denominator here was me.

The drive to the mall was awkward. We had all piled in Benji's car and no one was speaking. Benji put on music but it didn't get rid of the tension and awkwardness. It was uncomfortable and I was regretting ever agreeing. I wanted to leave before we had even arrived.

"Maybe we should walk around and look instead of picking the first thing we see." I suggested.

Benji agreed with me. We went from store to store and looked through every piece of clothing which took forever. I didn't really like shopping all that much. Being in the mall for a little while was fine but once it passed the two hour mark I was tired of walking and ready to be done. We had only been looking for forty minutes but it had felt like it had been two hours.