And To My Parents, A Very Happy Anniversary

“You just can’t keep doing this, Ethan,” she huffed on a strained laugh that sounded about halfway between incredulity and desperation. “You can’t keep throwing yourself these stupid parties every year, especially to celebrate a day which, even you have to admit, most people would never want to acknowledge, least of all celebrate. And,” Moe finished her little tirade by waving her finger in the air in a way that definitely screamed “person-in-charge,” “you especially can’t keep throwing these parties if this is to be the aftermath after every single one of them.”

At this, Ethan could do nothing but turn in place and admit that his aunt’s place was, despite his best efforts (which consisted almost entirely of taping a Please do not destroy sign on every wall in the place), well and truly trashed. Despite all this, however, and the fact that he loved his Aunt Moe very much and never actually meant to make her house look like Hades’ realm (except Hades probably had a nicer place, since he was, after all, a god), he could not bring himself to feel sorry for what he had done, nor, to be completely honest, did he want to. The previous night, as his aunt had been on the last leg of her two-week-long book tour to Australia (she was a wildlife author, documenting this or that endangered species' comings and goings), Ethan Wellsbury had thrown his third annual “Orphan Day” party.

The first year he had called it “My Parents Died in a Car Crash Day,” but when only two of the hundred or so lucky people he had invited had RSVP’d, he’d decided that perhaps a little ambiguity was needed. And so, on Year 2 of being an orphan, Ethan had spent the anniversary of his parents’ tragic death doing the Cha Cha Slide alongside one hundred and fifty other sweaty teens from the high school he was unlucky enough to attend. Ethan’s aunt, Moe Rogers, had turned a blind eye, as always, but not before not-so-subtly dropping a hint that that lamp by the entrance was new, and wouldn’t it just be such an shame for it to be broken in, say, a hypothetical stampede or episode of teenage recklessness? Ethan had gotten the message loud and clear and placed the lamp in a room which he had filled with pictures of the aforementioned dead parents, wall to ceiling. Try making out in that room, teenage fiends.

Next, he had gone to the grocery store and bought enough plain tortilla chips to fill three bathtubs, and placed them throughout the house along with the only drink he deemed worthy for the occasion, Coke Zero. If people had been curious enough to bother asking why, he would’ve answered “Black and empty, like the depths of my soul,” but people were rarely interested in anything but themselves, especially rager-ready teens. The playlist for the party was curated by yours truly, and included everything from party classics (“Three stomps now y’all”) to timeless anthems (“And ayeeeee will always love you”) to the best of his emo self Ethan could drag out (“When I was, a young boy…”). All in all, Orphan Day was a success with a crowd who wanted nothing more but a space where they could rub against each other and pretend their parents didn’t have control over them (which they very much did) and a host who was interested only in filling up a house just to prove that he could.

That was the closest thing to an explanation Moe had managed to edge out of Ethan over the last couple of years regarding his morbid obsession with partying on the night of his parents’ “death birthday,” as he called it, but she sensed there might be something more behind it. In the three years since he’d come to live with her, she had tried everything to try to get him to open up, from therapists to psychiatrists (which she could now say with confidence, were two very different things) to the most extreme forms of “medicine” the hippy city they lived in had to offer, but the result was always the same; Ethan was fine. Ethan, according to Ethan, had always been fine and would always be fine, and in fact if people could have status updates like they did on the Internet, his would be set to one constant setting: fine. Moe, being a non-stupid and non-oblivious adult, however, suspected that behind that brave and slightly disturbing facade, her nephew was in pain.

As they began cleaning up the aftermath of Orphan Day III (yes, she was helping, because her nephew had lost both his parents in a car crash and acts of service were her love language, ok?), Moe could not help sneaking glances at Ethan to see if anything had changed since she’d seen him last, two weeks ago. Apart from a pair of bloodshot eyes (which he’d attributed to his “wild partying”) and a tiredness which seemed to go well beyond his seventeen years of life, the kid looked the same. Picking up her one hundredth smashed can of coke, Moe gave herself a minute and sank on her haunches in the middle of the living room. Ethan had briefly gone upstairs to take inventory and make sure nothing had been stolen from the house (which, you would have to be a real dick to do in general, but especially so on a day like Orphan Day), so she knew she only had a few moments before she would need to put her “Super Aunt” mask back on and pick up where they’d left off.

The thought which she spent the majority of her day suppressing, and which she had berated herself for having on multiple occasions, crept into her mind, poisoning her thoughts and making her world a little darker at the corners. I didn’t sign up for this, her mind spat out with something resembling disgust; at herself, at the world, at the people who treated her nephew like a basket case and crazy person for learning to cope with trauma however he could. I didn’t sign up for this, and neither did he; so why were they both here, the sole survivors in an adventure which was much better left to the fiction characters who could handle it? Moe didn’t know, and she was pretty sure she would never fully comprehend it, and as much as she resented these places where her mind took her involuntarily so often these days, it was also in moments like these that she thought she was the closest to understanding Ethan than she’d ever been.

It wasn’t so crazy, when she thought about it, to throw a party to celebrate (commemorate?) your parents’ death anniversary when everything else had started to appear just as crazy and unreasonable; in a way, Ethan was just rising to the occasion. On that day every year, he had had a choice; to wallow in sadness and despair, as she had planned on doing the first year, or do something even more ridiculous and unbelievable than his parents (Moe’s sister and her sister’s husband) going out for a cereal grocery run at 11pm at night and finding themselves flipped over the road after being hit by a truck carrying women’s menstrual products. There had been probably been other things in that truck, but when she had arrived at the scene, Moe had only been able to focus her attention on one detail at a time, and at the time, that had been the massive tampon advertisement which could still be made out on the mangled remains of the truck.

It was with this thought, this horrifying, morbid, and incredibly hilarious thought that Moe broke out in manic laughter on the floor of her dirty living room, clutching a trash bag filled with smashed chip remains, empty cans and a forgotten shirt whose owner must have been very comfortable in his own skin, to her chest as it shook uncontrollably. And it was to this sight that Ethan Wellsbury, three-year-strong orphan and completely fine teen, came downstairs to on the morning after his Orphan Day celebration. It was, he decided, perhaps not the best moment to tell his aunt of the abandoned cemetery where next year’s celebration would be held.