“Used?”
“If they were with other old stuff, maybe whoever owned them in the first place already used them.”
Used wishes? Was it even possible to use wishes more than once? Then again, was any of this possible?
“If they were already used, maybe the wish wasn’t as strong as it should have been and that’s why things have been going haywire,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Elijah said, looking doubtful. “Based on everything you told me, the wish seemed pretty strong to me.”
“Then why are things going so wrong? I never wished for Austin to start acting crazy, and I definitely wasn’t looking to turn my dance audition into my Broadway debut!” A Broadway debut … I stopped walking. “But wait—what if the first person was?”
“On Broadway?” Elijah asked.
“No, what if whoever owned the wishing stones before me used the Success wish to be good at singing? So when I used the stone again, my wish came true, but part of someone else’s wish did too.”
“Okay, but what about Austin? What did the other person use the Health stone for that would make him act all nuts?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a squirrel fell out of a tree or something and the person used the stone to save its life.” And somehow that had made Austin start acting like a squirrel—or whatever he was—too.
Elijah was nodding, as if this all made sense. Maybe it did, in some twisted sort of way. “But what about Cassa?” he asked. “You wanted her and Marina to stop talking and seeing each other. That wish seemed to go okay.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. Technically Elijah was right. I’d gotten exactly what I’d wished for with the Friendship wish. Of course, I should have wished for Cassa to be my best friend again, rather than trying to get Marina out of the picture. But that wasn’t the wishing stone’s fault. That was mine.
“Maybe the first person wished for the same thing,” Elijah said.
“They wished for Cassa and Marina not to be friends anymore?” I asked with a laugh.
“Well, no. Obviously not. But something similar enough that it didn’t warp your wish the way the other ones did.”
“Maybe,” I said, but it sounded like too much of a coincidence. Still, things were finally starting to add up. “If that’s all true, how do we fix this? I want my brother to be healthy, really healthy. When I left the house, he’d put one of the outdoor trash cans on its side and was trying to run around inside it, like a gerbil or something.”
Elijah chuckled, and yeah, maybe it was kind of funny when it wasn’t happening to your little brother. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But figuring out who the stones belonged to will help.”
When we got to the Antique Barn, Ms. Hinkley was clearly surprised to see me there with a stranger at my side. “What have you done to my daughter?” she joked.
“This is Elijah,” I said as he reached out and politely shook Ms. Hinkley’s hand. “We wanted to ask you a question.”
“Oh, sure.”
“I found a bag of stones in one of the boxes you had me sort through last week, and I kept them. Now I’m trying to figure out who they belonged to. Any chance they came in with those armoires?”
Ms. Hinkley frowned. “No, I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I was having you unpack the boxes that someone left on our steps.”
That’s what I’d been afraid of. “So the stones could have come from anyone?”
“I guess so.” I must have looked upset because Ms. Hinkley asked, “Is everything all right?”
“I just need to find the person who owned them before. It’s important.”
She thought for a second. “Well, I can give you the inventory list for the things we put on the shelves that day. Maybe something there will help.”
I thought of the things I’d sorted through, of the calendars and ratty T-shirts and concert tickets I’d put aside. Those might have helped tell us who they’d belonged to, but they’d all gone in the trash.
Still, Elijah and I got to work going through the inventory list and then tracking down the items on the shelves. When we were finished, we had a pile of dishes and cutlery, stacks of old cassette tapes, and a couple of salt and pepper shakers.
“Not sure a bunch of tapes is going to help us,” Elijah said when we’d finished looking at all the items. He flipped through a few of them. “All grunge bands. Mama Dee was into this stuff when she was our age. She tried to get me to listen to it once, but …” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It was weird to think about either of my moms being in middle school, you know? It made my brain hurt.”
I laughed, trying to imagine my parents at my age. All I could picture was them stressing out about lunch money. It was funny to think that they hadn’t even known each other back then. Mom had grown up in town, but she hadn’t met Dad until she’d gone away to college.
“Look!” Elijah said, pointing to one of the tapes. On it someone had written: For Gem.
“Gem?” I repeated. “Who names their kid Gem?”
“Isn’t your aunt’s name Glinda?” Elijah asked. “That’s not exactly common either.”
He had a point. I studied the tape more carefully. “Look, it’s dated the same year as one of the calendars I found with the wishing stones,” I said, thinking back. “That has to mean they belonged to the same person, right?”
Elijah’s face lit up. “We can try to search for people named ‘Gem’ who lived in town in the 1990s.”
We used Elijah’s phone to google it, but what little info we could find from that time wasn’t helpful.
“Maybe she didn’t even live in town,” I pointed out.
“I’ll stop at the library on my way home and look up old town records. That might tell us if Gem lived here back then.”
I looked at my watch. “I should get home. But I’ll take this mixtape and listen to it. My dad has an old tape player in our garage. I can see if it still works.”
Elijah nodded. “I guess if you don’t want your future wishes getting messed up, any research we do might help.”
“Wait, what future wishes? The wishes I’ve made have done enough. Really, I should throw those stones away!”
Elijah’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about? You can’t get rid of them! Think of all the good you could do with them.”
“But I haven’t done a lot of good, not really. Yes, Austin’s better, but only sort of. Everything else is even more complicated than it was before.” I shook my head. “No more wishes. Not until we figure out how this all works.”
Maybe not ever.
When I got home from the shop, I made a quick stop in the garage. After a little searching, I dug up my dad’s old tape player from the pile of ancient stuff that my parents hadn’t let me throw out when I’d life-hacked the garage last summer. The cassette player was dusty and the clear plastic part was a little cracked, but when I popped the tape in and pressed play, music flared to life on the headphones.
I tucked the tape player in my sweatshirt pocket and headed into the house, but I noticed something strange in the backyard. There were several small mounds of dirt on the edges of the grass. When I went to investigate, I almost fell into a hole that looked like an entrance to a tunnel. Definitely not the usual chipmunk holes we got in our yard. This was bigger, much bigger. An Austin-sized hole, I realized.
“Austin?” I called, peering inside. There was no squeak in response. That probably meant he was in his room sleeping again. He’d been doing that a lot actually—sleeping more and more during the day and then spending all night working on his weird projects.
I let out a deep sigh and turned to go into the house, but then I noticed something inside the tunnel. I knelt down, reached into the dirt, and pulled out a handful of crackers. When I leaned in to get a better look, I realized there was lots more food tucked inside the tunnel: grapes and Cheerios and a bunch of Austin’s other favorite foods.
Oh god. He was storing up food for the winter. Austin was going to try to hibernate
here!
I got to my feet and hurried toward the house. I had to figure out how to fix this. I just had to.
As I closed the door behind me, I heard shouting. My parents were arguing again. Only why were they both home? Shouldn’t Mom still be at work?
“I thought if we could get him healthy, everything would be all right,” Dad was saying. “But it never ends!”
Oh no. Had Austin hurt himself while digging all those tunnels?
But then Mom chimed in. “We’ll get through this. We always do. I’ll find another job—”
“I can’t believe they’d fire you because you had to take time off to be with your sick child. It’s immoral, and probably illegal!”
My mouth fell open. “Mom, you got fired?” I cried, charging into the kitchen.
My parents froze, and it was obvious in their horrified expressions that they hadn’t been planning to tell me the truth.
“We’re going to be fine,” Mom said. “It’s a minor setback, that’s all.”
But I barely heard her. Because Dad was right. It never ended! Even with luck on our side, things kept getting worse!
“Lexi,” Dad began, but I didn’t want to hear my parents reassuring me that everything was going to be okay. So I turned and ran up the stairs. As I passed Austin’s room, I heard him squeaking away to himself, but I covered my ears until I was in the safety of my room. Then I slammed the door shut and threw myself down on my bed.
After all that time I’d spent trying to keep the universe happy, all it did was keep chewing us up and spitting us out. No matter what I did, it was wrong, wrong, wrong!
I lay there for a little while, glaring up at the ceiling as if this whole mess were somehow its fault. Downstairs, my parents’ voices grew louder, arguing again.
I noticed something digging into my hip, and I realized it was the cassette player in my pocket. I pulled it out and slipped on the headphones. As the music sounded again, loud and angry, it perfectly matched my mood.
Maybe those grunge people knew what they were doing, because after a few minutes, my heart stopped drumming in my chest and I started to breathe again. It felt as though someone understood. That someone else was as fed up as I was.
After a few songs, a slower one came on that made me sit straight up. It was the song I’d sang during my audition—the Sally one! When I glanced at the list of songs handwritten inside the cassette tape case, I saw it was by a band called Oasis. Suddenly, I remembered a T-shirt with that same name on it in the box of things I’d been going through when I found the wishing stones. This couldn’t be a coincidence. It proved that whoever “Gem” was, the stones had once belonged to her.
I fast-forwarded through the song, since the last thing I wanted to do was relive that horrible audition. Then I lay back when a softer, quieter song came on.
Eventually, I dozed off. When I woke up, the headphones were still on my head but there was no sound coming out of them. The tape must have ended. I sat up and yawned, and my jaw let out two deafening cracks.
That’s when I realized that I’d made a decision. It must have come while I was asleep.
Even though I said I wasn’t going to, even though I knew it was probably a bad idea, I didn’t have a choice. I was going to make another wish.
I dug out the wishing stones and pulled out the Family stone. I almost laughed when I saw that little word etched into it, as if it had been waiting for this. As if it had known that I would need it one day.
I mulled over the wording of my wish for a while, not wanting to mess anything up this time. Finally, I settled on a wish that I couldn’t imagine backfiring.
Then I closed my eyes, wrapped my fingers around the stone, and whispered, “I wish my family could be happy.”
When Mom came to get me for dinner, she was all smiles. “Guess who’s downstairs.” I couldn’t tell if my wish had worked, or if she was only pretending that everything was okay.
“Who?” I asked, suddenly nervous.
“Come and see!” she chirped.
When I got to the dining room, there was a take-out feast of Thai food spread out on the table. I was surprised to see Aunt Glinda sitting in Dad’s usual chair, a plate of noodles in front of her.
“Hey, Aunt Glinda! What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Your aunt is joining us for dinner, that’s all,” Mom said. She gave me a meaningful look across the table, and I wondered if this was all thanks to the conversation we’d had in the car the other day.
“She brought chocolate chip cookies!” Dad chimed in. He was all smiles too, which had to be fake since he was definitely not a fan of my aunt’s cooking.
“They’re store-bought,” Aunt Glinda admitted.
“That’s okay!” Mom said. “We really don’t mind!”
I could see Dad trying not to laugh. There was something about the air in the room. It felt different. Less heavy than usual. I felt myself relaxing a little as I grabbed a plate.
“Where’s Austin?” Mom asked. “Austin! Dinner!”
I held my breath, hoping that my brother would be back to his old self. Then I’d know for sure that my wish was working. But a minute later, Austin barreled in from the family room inside a giant clear exercise ball. And I mean in it. He’d somehow taken Mom’s old ball, cut a hole in the side, made a bunch of air holes, climbed inside, and closed up the flap. It was like a giant hamster ball. The whole contraption was ridiculous, and it barely even worked since the ball was mostly deflated. But Austin had never looked happier.
Weirder still, everyone else laughed when they saw him.
“Oh, Austin,” Mom said. “Your imagination just doesn’t quit!”
Dad was laughing too, a big, real belly laugh. The huge fight I’d heard earlier seemed to be long forgotten. Okay, my wish had to be working. My family did seem happy.
“Mom?” I asked. “Are you still fired?”
Her smile faded slightly. “I’m afraid so, honey. But don’t worry. I have a few leads on some jobs, and I even have a phone interview set up for tomorrow.”
“What if you don’t get any of them?” I asked.
She patted me on the shoulder. “Let me do the worrying, okay? Everything is going to be fine. Trust me.”
“Okay, let’s dig in!” Dad said.
And we did. Even Austin came out of his ball for a bit to curl up in his chair and eat noodles with his hands instead of with utensils. Everyone was eating and chatting and laughing. It was like a scene out of a movie.
Even though things felt far from perfect, they actually felt okay. At least for now.
After dinner, I helped load up the dishwasher. As I worked, I started humming one of the tunes I’d heard on the mixtape.
“Oh,” Aunt Glinda said. “I haven’t heard that song in forever!”
I froze, mortified that I’d been caught singing in my terrible voice again. But then my aunt started singing the next part of the song, and I couldn’t help joining in. For a minute, we actually sounded pretty good. Then I messed up the next verse, and she laughed. “We should take our show on the road.”
My smile faded as I remembered my audition again. No way. I was never ever, ever going to get up onstage again.
After we finished the dishes, Dad started handing out cookies to everyone in exchange for knock-knock jokes.
“Oh boy,” Mom said. “I bet he’ll be telling those over and over for the next week.”
We all laughed when Dad put his hands up, a cookie in each one, and said, “Guilty.”
Then it was time for Aunt Glinda to head home. “Thanks for having me over,” she said, giving my mom a quick hug. “You’re right. It is nice to get out of the house once in a while.”
“You’re always welcome here,” Mom said, hugging her back. “You know that.”
I could tell from the mistiness in my aunt’s eyes that she hadn’t known that. Suddenly, I felt bad about how much I’d been judging her. No matter how overly emotional she was, she was still fam
ily. That’s why my wish had brought her to us tonight.
“Lex, you made it!” Cassa cried when I ran into her before first period the next day.
“Huh?” Why was she suddenly so happy to see me? She hadn’t even been at the footbridge that morning. I figured it was because she was ignoring me.
Cassa laughed. “The dance club. You made it to the next round.”
“Yeah, very funny.” I hadn’t even bothered checking the list when I’d gotten to school since I’d known I wouldn’t be on it.
“Really! Come on. Let’s go look if you don’t believe me.”
I didn’t believe her, so I hurried to Miss Flores’s office and glanced at the list of kids who’d made it to the final round of dance auditions. There it was, Alexandra Block.
“But I was a disaster!” I said.
“Obviously not,” Cassa replied.
I couldn’t believe it. Did that mean my dancing had actually been good, despite my horribly embarrassing singing?
“You’ll get into the club for sure!” Cassa said. Even though things had been so off between us lately, I could tell that she was happy for me. Maybe our friendship wasn’t as doomed as I’d thought.
It only took a second for my excitement to fade as I remembered belting out the Sally song. I couldn’t audition, not again. Not until I figured out how to undo the singing curse I’d accidentally put on myself. There was no way I was going to put myself through that humiliation again.
“Whoa,” Cassa said. “Marina’s on the list too.”
That wasn’t a surprise, of course, but it still kind of stung to think she might make the team when I wouldn’t.
“You didn’t tell me she was there,” Cassa went on.
“Was I supposed to?”
“Um, yeah! It would be nice to know that someone’s actually seen her alive!” Thankfully the school administration had pulled down the “missing” flyers, calling them a prank, but Cassa was still convinced that something fishy was going on. “How did Marina seem? Did she talk to you or anything?”
“Why are you so obsessed with Marina?” I couldn’t help asking. “You two have only been hanging out for a few months. It’s not like she’s your best friend or anything!”
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