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Scott Brown grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and began his career in journalism writing for Entertainment Weekly, Wired, GQ, and Time, among others. He was chief drama critic for New York Magazine from 2010 to 2014, and received the 2013-2013 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Lately, he's written a lot of TV: HBO's Sharp Objects, based on the novel by Gillian Flynn; WGN's critically acclaimed Manhattan, and the Stephen-King-derived suspenser Castle Rock for Hulu, for which he received a 2018 Writers Guild Award.

Scott also co-wrote the book for Beetlejuice the Musical (with Emmy-nominated writer-producer Anthony King) for Warner Bros. Theatricals. Also with King, he co-wrote and co-composed the off-Broadway musical comedy Gutenberg! The Musical! Off the clock, Scott likes to play piano, hang out with his kids, and scream back at the car radio. He lives in Massachusetts. Learn more about Scott on Twitter at @scottabridged.

I woke up to the smell of fear.

You know what fear smells like? When you re not quite five feet tall? And turning sixteen?

Cake.

Maybe that s just me.

For normal people, birthdays--the cake, the singing, another candle every year--signify impending adulthood, which is so exciting, you actually appreciate the lame-assery that comes attached. But for us Smalls, birthdays never lose that paper-hat vibe . . . because that s all there is to them. Seeing your name in baby-blue frosting, year after year, from the same exact altitude--well, it has a way of shaming your testicles right back to where they descended from. In my crazier moments, I used to think the parties themselves were keeping me small. Which is why I d come to dread the sound of two little words:

Will! Breakfast!

My dad is such an awful actor, it s almost charming. He s just too straightforward by nature. His inability to fake anything--it makes him a great dad. Makes him a natural with zoo animals, too--zoo animals like a straight talker--so that works out well for him professionally, as a zookeeper. But it makes him just awful at surprise parties. Will! Breakfast! was something my father said precisely once a year. On my birthday. My big day. My big, smoking crater of a day. I woke up, smelled cake, and thought, Oh, God, no.

Which is kind of a shitty thing to think when a cake s been baked for you.

But consider this: a birthday s a promise. Something changes today! By birthday the sixteenth, I d discovered otherwise. Every promise had been broken, five promises running, because biology, God bless, can be a real dick sometimes.

So I stalled in bed. Faked a sleep-in for a precious half hour. Any longer, and masturbation would be suspected. This birthday, like all the rest, just needed to happen as quickly as possible, then vanish again. So I could vanish again.

That was my top-ranked fantasy on the morning of my sixteenth birthday. Invisibility. To be a shadow. He who slips past, unseen. With one (very notable) exception, that was as wild as my dreams got. Slipping Past Unseen was how I planned to get through high school, in the hopes that college would be better. And if it wasn t? I d slip past that, too.

There was just one thing I wanted to take with me. Just one person I wanted to be seen by. That Notable Exception.

She s why I wanted to slip through this day with as little trouble as possible and get to what would happen next, the thing I didn t even dare name, even though I d spent the last fortyish nights imagining it.

But first: cake. Should I just rip off the Band-Aid? Or attempt evasive action?

I considered the sycamore outside my window. I could shinny down the trunk in twenty-five seconds, if I had to. Which might ve been impressive in a dude of normal proportions. When I did it, I looked like a performing lemur. Something you d reward for the effort with a slice of mango and a pat on the head.

Have I mentioned how deeply, how furiously I hate pats on the head?

Anyway, I got dressed, like a good lemur. A grateful lemur, desirous of cake.

I took a deep breath and padded downstairs, right into the teeth of it: my birthday ambush.

Birthday ambush! my dad barked, in a voice usually reserved for lemurs that hopped the fence. He came toastering up from behind the love seat--an impressive, slightly scary, always embarrassing maneuver for a middle-aged man, especially one of above-average height.

My father, Brian Daughtry (6¢1²), the zoo s chief primate keeper, was the right size for a keeper. He had presence, like a force field t