The Mystery of the Birthday Basher

even though I cleaned up afterward, I was still finding confetti for months and months!”
She paused to pick up the trash, then shoved it in her pockets. The other B-Buds helped too.
“Better already,” Amirah said, smiling.
“So how did you all get here?” Lacey asked. “For us, it was our birthday cakes.”
“You have birthday cake even when it’s not your birthday?” Olivia asked in surprise. “What a great idea!”
Lacey laughed as she shook her head. “No, I meant last January,” she explained. “It was magical! One bite of my special coconut birthday cake and poof! I found myself in the most wonderful city I’d ever seen in my life!”
“That’s how it happened for me too,” Ziggy spoke up. “Except my cake was a caterpillar cake. Best birthday cake I’ve ever had!”
As soon as Ziggy said the words caterpillar cake, a memory popped into Amirah’s head. The very first time she dreamed of the Magical Land of Birthdays, before she met her B-Buds, Amirah had seen a caterpillar cake rush past her. She was almost positive that she’d heard the cake mumble something about how it was looking for someone named Ziggy.
“Was your caterpillar cake fudge on the inside, with tiny chocolate shoes and a white chocolate face?” Amirah asked.
“How did you know that?” Ziggy gasped. “Is your special birthday cake a caterpillar cake too?”
Amirah explained how she had encountered Ziggy’s cake on her last visit.
“It sounds like this place might be even more magical than we realized!” Olivia commented.
“So how did everyone get here today?” Amirah asked.
“I had just taken a bite of a sugar cookie,” Olivia said. “With blue frosting and plenty of hundreds and thousands, of course.”
Amirah grinned at Olivia. It didn’t matter that Amirah called them sprinkles or that Olivia called them hundreds and thousands: They were definitely magical!
“I had a donut,” Elvis said. “You know that bad boy was loaded up with sprinkles. It had so many sprinkles on it I couldn’t even see if the frosting was chocolate or vanilla!”
“I had ice cream!” Mei said excitedly. “And the cone had been dipped in chocolate and rolled in rainbow sprinkles. How about you, Amirah?”
“Sprinkles, of course,” she replied. “I made sure to choose one in each color—pink, yellow, orange, green, blue, and purple.”
“The rainbow!” Olivia suddenly exclaimed.
Everyone turned to look at her.
“Put us together, and our favorite colors make the rainbow,” she explained. “See?”
And now that she’d mentioned it, it was unmistakable. Even in their regular clothes, the B-Bud’s favorite colors shone through. There was a completeness to their group that had been missing last January—even though Amirah hadn’t known what was missing until they were finally all together.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “One special color, one special sprinkle, for each of us . . . even though I didn’t know you yet, Ziggy and Lacey. I’m not surprised it was sprinkles that brought us all together. That’s just the power of sprinkles at work, I guess!”
“The power of sprinkles?” Lacey asked, her eyes wide. “I’ve never heard of that before. I thought it was just birthday magic.”
“You’re not wrong,” Amirah said, trying to find the right words. “They’re definitely connected. I’m just not sure how.”
“I don’t need to know how,” Lacey said with a warm smile. “Sometimes you just have to believe.”
You just have to believe.
Amirah shivered. Weren’t those the exact words that Mrs. Maria had said to her?
The connection that Amirah had always felt with her B-Buds had only grown stronger.
“ Here’s what I can’t figure out, though,”Ziggy said. “How come we celebrated our birthdays in the city while you celebrated yours in the countryside?”
As Ziggy spoke, Amirah’s mind continued to churn:
The power of sprinkles.
Birthday magic.
They’re definitely connected.
Amirah held up one hand. “Wait a second,” she said, her voice low and urgent.
Everyone turned to look at her.
“Has anyone noticed . . . something wrong with birthday magic?” she began. “Back home there are some things that just—they just aren’t right.”
Everyone listened quietly as Amirah told them what she’d noticed since her phone call with Paulina.
“Now that you mention it . . .” Mei said. “Every year, my oba-chan—who loves birthdays as much as I do—plans a special dinner for the whole family to celebrate her birthday. But last month, when it was her birthday, she just didn’t feel like a big celebration—or any celebration,” Mei finally finished with a sad shrug. “She said, ‘maybe next year.’”
Amirah shook her head in sorrow. Imagine taking a year off from celebrating your birthday—the most special day of your life, the day when you were born! It was unthinkable.
“It must be an epidemic,” Elvis said, his voice sounding quieter than usual.
Everyone turned to look at him.
“In my town, we had a restaurant that’s all about birthdays. It’s called the Birthday Cakery,” he explained. “Every single room had a different party theme. You could have a dinosaur party or an art party or a princess party or a pirate party or a music party or—”
“Was there a sprinkles room?” Amirah asked brightly, holding up her vial of sprinkles and giving it a little shake.
“You know what? There was a rainbow room with sprinkles painted on the walls,” Elvis replied with a grin. Then his smile faded and he sighed. “But the Birthday Cakery went out of business three months ago,” he finished. “I still can’t believe it.”
“Out of business?” Amirah echoed in shock. “How is that possible? That sounds like the most amazing party place on earth!”
“It was,” Elvis said, nodding sadly. “But now it’s gone, and all we have left are memories, I guess.
“Something weird happened in my family too,” Ziggy spoke up. “On my little sister’s birthday, we accidentally—we accidentally burned her cake.”
Amirah’s hands flew up to her face. “Oh no,” she gasped.
Ziggy nodded glumly. “It was so weird—the timer never went off! And since we were outside, by the time we noticed the awful smoky smell, it was way too late. The cake was burned black all over. We couldn’t save any of it.”
“Was your sister’s birthday ruined?” Olivia asked.
Amirah almost didn’t want to