I wanted my birthday to occur at the warehouse. I know, it's weird, but it's my kind of weird.

We have actual toilets, long shelf corridors to run down and hide in, the camper, the hot tub (though it's the adults who used it for my birthday), and we can do forklift rides.

My parents went all in. Plotter printing banners for my birthday, the two Dance Dance Revolution gamepads, our board games, and almost all of my friends and their parents.

Ellie and Richard attended, as well as Clara and Peter. Even Charlie came, but he is the only one who stayed dressed. Well, Edith was only topless, but we were used to that.

I was shocked to see that Marge's grumpy older brother attended, but she told me not to worry.

Fine, I'll tell you right away. He was indeed diagnosed to be on the spectrum, but a lot less seriously than Marge. He is Asperger's, not fully autistic. Today, we don't like using that term because Mr Asperger was a horrible person, but still, that's what Charlie is.

What Ellie thus began doing, is to give Charlie more of a structure. It's not the same as Marge, as it's not rigid rules that he cannot break. It's more of a sort of extreme stick and carrot situation.

Charlie is a lot more flexible than Marge is and can adapt to exceptions and changes of rules more casually. What he has a problem with is getting motivated to follow the rules.

Charlie likes video games a lot. So, Ellie is restricting him to only 60 minutes per day of video game play. That's nothing compared to his usual schedule. It barely registers to him as being pleasant.

Instead, each time he does a chore or is nice instead of being sarcastic or plain cruel, he gets more minutes. Each time he snaps at someone, he loses minutes. Each time he socialized instead of hiding in his room, he wins minutes.

But the minutes are not instant. There is this weird method to ensure long term pleasantness. Ellie explained it to me later: if he is in a bad mood, punishing him on the spot will only sustain that bad mood, so instead, all punishments and credits are applied later. In fact, when he is punished, he is often told to just go play a video game, which sounds completely counter-intuitive, but it works. Provided he has minutes left, of course...

And so, he came to my party hoping to score plenty of credits, with the promise that the next day, he could play almost all day.

I will shock you, but he was almost pleasant. We played 1v1 on the Dance Dance Revolution pads, alternating between players. I was one of the worst, which only made me realize that yeah, perhaps I have dyspraxia, but Charlie was the best player and made sure not to rub his victories in our noses.

Edith was rather good, to be honest, and Charlie even gave her tricks. In fact, they practiced together for almost 30 minutes while Mindy, Marge, and I played tag in the warehouse.

Mindy was done with her period and happy to be relieved of it.

To be fair, Charlie and Edith joined us later, but suggested hide-and-seek instead.

It was mostly a bust, as the hiding spots were limited, but it got warped into a new type of game.

It was a sort of hide-and-seek and tag hybrid.

There are long rows of shelves with boxes on them. The alleys are wide enough for the forklift to work with and thus, wide enough to run in.

We could, in theory, cut in some of the shelves, but we soon began treating them as solid, so that the tag could need to run to the next gap between the rows.

Charlie, when he was the tag, could smoke us, simply because he is a boy filled with testosterone and thus, energy.

Lucy and Clark could have been better than him, but even if I invited them, they couldn't show as they were out of town, like I said in the previous installment.

Edith decided to put her bra back on to run and managed to be the second best. Marge didn't mind about not being good as she found everything funny.

Mindy felt better now that her first period was over, and her heartbreak was over too, leaving her radiant and funny.

When we were all exhausted from running, my mother proposed to give us a ride.

She grabbed a pallet with the forklift, put a large picnic blanket on it, and we all sat on the edges of it. She then drove around the warehouse, sometimes raising the pallet more.

I don't even know why we enjoyed it. Maybe it was out of the ordinary? Possibly it just let us rest?

I was sitting in the front, with Mindy on my left. Marge was on Mindy's left, and Edith was on my right, but both of them were facing the sides. Only Mindy and I were facing forward. Charlie was all the way to the right.

When we were done, he begged my mother to try the forklift.

It degenerated into a 3-way conversation, with Ellie joining in.

Mindy wanted more Dance Dance Revolution, so I missed the conversation, but Edith, who listened to it, basically told me later that it was all Ellie being anxious.

In the end, my mom taught Ellie how to run the forklift, with Charlie carefully listening. Once Ellie tried it a little, she let Charlie have a go.

Well, as it turns out, being good at playing video games and being good at driving a forklift might have overlapping skillsets.

Charlie didn't want to run down the alleys like I did. What he wanted was to do precise work. Slide the forks in a pallet, lift the pallet, and place it on a shelf. He would then pick it up, put it on the floor, pick another one, and place it exactly on top of the first one. Then, he would pick the bottom one, put the two on the shelf, and put both back down. Grab a third one, stack it on top of the first two, and repeat the operation.

He was concentrated and serious, and Ellie, Kylie, and even Edith were almost hypnotized by it.

I'll spoil you with something. Remember when I said that my parents have a pickup center where clients could come pick up their deliveries?

Well, they hired someone to cover the weekends, and that someone was Charlie. That night's Charlie, not the one I used to see (or would see a few more times at Marge's house). The serious one.

Apparently, he later became a serious Rocket League player, and that requires incredible hand-eye coordination. Not that the game existed then... it came out in... 2015. The same year at my 13th birthday party, but in July, and I was born in the fall. Oh, so it did exist, but Charlie hadn't discovered it yet, and even if he had, I certainly didn't know about it.

We used the propane burners in the camper to boil water for hotdogs, but we grilled the bread on an electric range plugged into the wall. It's powerful enough to grill bread, but not to boil water quickly.

It wasn't a great meal, but only Charlie complained, and his mother promised more minutes of game play the next day if he behaved.

To my surprise, Edith gave him her 3rd hotdog, since there was a queue, with me in first place and Charlie near the end.

Both of them ate 4 hot dogs, Marge only had 2, Mindy and I took 3, but I didn't finish my 3rd one.

The cake, however, was made by Clara and was simply the best birthday cake I ever got.

I'll clue you in on a sad secret of life... Kids love sugar a lot more than adults do. Our taste buds change as we mature, so sugar is not a priority as we get older.

I don't know when that changed, but at that moment, when I was 13, in that warehouse, that cake hit harder than any I had tasted before, and sadly, my next one wouldn't be as great. I would have my more adult palate, which is a misnomer as I would still be a teen, but more advanced in my development.

I took two slices, Marge too, and Mindy had three, as it's her mother's recipe after all but Edith couldn't finish her 3rd slice. She gave the rest to Charlie, who was refused a 4th one in case other kids wanted more.

After finishing Edith's, he no longer cared about getting more cake. I think it finally filled him up.

The plan was to play some party and board games, but the kids were too high on a sugar rush or something, and we returned to tag even more frantically than before.

It's only later that we took a good look at the games brought, and Qwirkle was proposed.

Mindy, Marge, and I laid down a picnic blanket on the floor, but Edith and Charlie wanted to do more Dance Dance Revolution.

It was good seeing Edith more active.

Marge completely destroyed us at Qwirkle, never missing any opportunities, while I sucked as always, missing all the good ones. Mindy was somewhere in between.

I was starting to feel overwhelmed but wasn't realizing it. It's Marge who commented first.

"Julie, my mom told me to play with the other kids, but I am feeling burned out. Would you mind if I just went in the camper to rest a little?"

I look at hear.

"I think I am in introverted overload myself. Sorry Mindy"

"Hey, no worries, girls. I was somehow feeling sad right now. I miss Billy, but not as a boyfriend, more like as a friend. Is that weird?"

It's Marge who actually spoke up.

"People are different things to us. Maybe you no longer miss the love, but you miss the play partner"

I looked at Mindy. She was thinking hard.

It took a minute, but she ended up saying. "Yeah," and that was enough...

She took our Blokus from the pile. It's not a game I like very much. I don't see the moves much, but this time, I had a theory why: dyspraxia. Marge decided to try it if we could mostly remain silent. She was still torn between being overwhelmed and her mother's directions.

Marge didn't dominate as much for three reasons: she was starting to be tired, Mindy wasn't bad, and well, it's not as easy to dominate since you can only place one tile on each round.

Sure, you can only place one at Qwirkle, but you make from 1 to perhaps 8 points for a normal placement, but if you complete a Qwirkle (a line of 6 different shapes or colors), in addition to the 6 points for placing the tile, you get 6 bonus points for completing it. Right, for those who don't know, Qwirkle has tiles, each with one of six symbols in one of six colors, so 36 different types. It plays a lot like Scrabble.

In Blokus, the goal is just to place all your tiles. Sure, when you get rid of your bigger ones faster, it helps, but at the start, the board is mostly empty, so it's easy.

I think we had fun, but we were each preoccupied with something. Mindy with her ex, me with being in a sort of overload, and Marge, well, who knows what was in her head. She did admit her meter reset during the silence. So, we played another one, but didn't finish it. I think we were done.

Mindy decided to go with Edith and Charlie to the Dance Dance Revolution TV, but I explained I would take a small nap.

To my surprise, Marge offered to join me.

"Like a nap sleepover"

I told my mom, who was with Ellie and Clara in the hot tub, while the three dads were... somewhere else. I didn't care where.

My mom wanted to make sure I was okay, and I said I was just a little tired, but I didn't want to stop everything.

As it turned out, once in the camper, Marge wanted to talk. Or rather wanted to say something.

"Julie, thank you for being so patient with me"

"Huh? You were perfect today, Marge"

"I was?"

"I had a lot of fun with you"

"I had a lot of fun too"

We hugged, and I got into the bed my parents usually use. Marge got next to me, but we both stayed on top of the sheets.

I actually not only managed to sleep, but I even dreamed. I woke up in sweats, with Marge still awake.

"Are you okay?", she says.

"I think I had a weird dream"

"Oh. Do you remember what it was?"

"No. You didn't sleep?", I said, lying.

"No, it was, like, a few minutes. I was just trying to recenter myself."

"Ok"

We soon returned to our friends, but I stopped at the restroom first to breathe a little.

Why? Because while I don't remember the dream in detail, I know what kind it was. I just had, on my 13th birthday, my first erotic dream.

Another landmark of becoming a teenager.

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