She gave me a thumbs-up and brought out some crispy ginger cookies that she’d made. They even looked sort of edible.
When Dad and I got home, I instantly knew that something was wrong. The house reeked of Lysol, and Mom was on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. When I thought about it, I realized Mom hadn’t gone on one of her de-germing crusades since the day after Austin’s surgery.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Where’s Austin?”
“He’s upstairs napping,” Mom said. “I figured I’d tidy up a little in here.” Her voice was light, but it was obvious that something had happened.
“How was the doctor’s appointment yesterday?” I asked, glancing over at Dad.
He cleared his throat. “Physically, Austin is making great progress. But emotionally, well …”
“The doctor is afraid all this stress has been too much for Austin to handle,” Mom said. “That’s why he’s gotten so consumed with his little games.”
“What did the doctor say we should do?” I asked. Would he try to put Austin on medication or get him into therapy? Did they even have therapists who dealt with kids who acted like animals?
“He thinks with all of Austin’s recent, um, behavioral issues, we might need to take him out of preschool for now,” Dad said.
“What?” I cried. “But he loves it there. And if he’s not in school, who’s going to watch him when Mom’s at her new job?”
Mom adjusted her yellow rubber gloves. “I’m going to ask the company to put my application on hold, and I’ll reapply for the job in the future.”
But that wasn’t right. None of this was! What if Austin thought he was a hamster forever? Yes, he was technically healthy, but he wasn’t the regular kid he’d always wanted to be. At least with his medical stuff, the doctors could do something to help him. How could they cure a wish?
“Wh-what if Austin doesn’t go back to normal?” I asked softly. “Will he be able to go to kindergarten next year?”
Mom gave me a sad smile. “We can’t think like that, Lexi. We have to trust that things will work out all right.” Then she went back to scrubbing the floor.
The rest of the weekend went by in a blur of worry. By the time Monday morning rolled around, I was glad to go to school just to have something to distract me from the swirl of stress in my brain.
It didn’t even occur to me until I got to lunch that I’d never heard from Cassa about our usual Saturday-night plans. And, even weirder, I’d completely forgotten to stop at the footbridge to wait for her that morning! I wasn’t sure what that said about me, or about the current state of our friendship.
Cassa wasn’t at our lunch table. When I glanced over to Kallie’s table, she wasn’t there either. Kallie saw me looking at her and came over.
“Hiya,” she said. “You’re Lexi, right?” Her accent was so perfectly British that I wasn’t surprised Cassa had instantly befriended her.
“Yup, that’s me.”
“Could you give this to Cassa when she arrives?” she asked, holding out a book. It was a guide to English ruins. “I figure when she moves there, she’ll have plenty of time to visit them all.”
I was sure I’d misheard her. It had to be the accent. “She’s not moving there. She’s just thinking of going to visit her dad.”
Kallie frowned. “Oh … I thought she said she was moving after the new year. She was going to go this summer, but it fell through. I was pretty sure she …” She cleared her throat. “Never mind. Maybe I was mistaken.” Then she hurried away.
I was frozen for what felt like an hour, trying to process what Kallie had told me. Because suddenly I remembered what Cassa had said about wanting things to be different this year to prove that she’d made the right decision. Was that what she’d meant? Had she been planning to move to England and she hadn’t told me?
My eyes must have been about to bug out of my head, because when Cassa finally sat down at the table, it only took her a second to notice that something was wrong.
“Sorry, I had to run to my locker for something. What’s going on? Why are you looking at me like that?” She glanced at the book that I still had clutched in my hand. “Where’d you get that?”
“From Kallie,” I said through my teeth. “She said you’d need it for when you move to England.”
Cassa’s face instantly paled. “Oh, Lexi. I … I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how.”
I couldn’t believe it. How could that be true? “She said you were going to go this past summer but you changed your mind?”
Cassa nodded slowly. “I thought about it. My dad invited me a few months ago. He wanted me to come for the whole school year, but I couldn’t just leave you.”
“But you can leave me now?”
“No! I mean, I don’t want to leave anybody. At least now I know you’ll be okay if I go. Now that Austin is better and you don’t need me to be there for you all the time.”
“What are you talking about? What does this have to do with Austin?”
Cassa slumped in her chair. “The truth is, I’ve been talking to my dad for a while now. We’ve gotten a lot closer, and when he told me he was moving to England and he wanted me to come with him, it sounded perfect. I’d finally get to live with him for a while and visit all the cool places I keep reading about and do something different for a change. But then I was scared that if I left, you’d fall apart. You’re so used to doing everything the same way all the time. Everything that’s different is automatically bad luck. I was afraid that if something happened after I left, you’d think it was my fault!”
“What? Of course it wouldn’t be your fault.”
“Come on, Lex. What if I moved tomorrow, and the day after that, Austin was in the hospital again? Wouldn’t you think you had to get me to move back or he wouldn’t get better?”
I wanted to deny it, because when she said it like that, it sounded crazy. But the truth was, that was exactly the kind of thing I would do. I wouldn’t think of it as Cassa’s fault, but the result would have been the same.
“That’s why I decided to stay,” she said.
“And that’s why you’ve been acting so weird the past few months,” I said. Not just weird. Miserable.
She nodded. “When I met Marina, I thought things would be okay. She’d traveled to all these cool places and done all these awesome things. I thought maybe she and I could go on some adventures together, stuff you’d be too scared to do with me, you know? But then Marina ditched me for no reason, and—”
“That had nothing to do with you,” I jumped in.
“It doesn’t matter,” Cassa said. “I was upset about it at first, but then I realized it wasn’t really about Marina ditching me. It was that I’d had a chance to change my life and I hadn’t taken it.”
“Because of me,” I said.
“Not just because of you. I was scared too.”
But it was my fault. She might not have admitted it, but that’s why things had been so strained between us. Cassa had finally found a way to make her life exciting, to do all the things she’d been dreaming about for years, and to get to know her dad again in the process. But she’d given it up for me. And what had I done? I’d made things even worse for her with my stupid wish. I claimed to be her best friend, but what kind of a friend did that? Besides, if I was really her best friend, she would have been able to talk to me about all this stuff instead of hiding it.
“But you’ve decided to go,” I said. “You’re leaving in January, and you’re not coming back?”
“Actually, I’d leave in December so Dad and I could spend some of Hanukkah together,” Cassa said. “We haven’t done that in years.”
I nodded slowly, trying to make it sink in. In less than three months, Casa would be off on a big adventure without me.
“I wouldn’t move there forever,” she added. “Probably just for the rest of the school year. And I’d be back this summer. You’d be okay without me, wouldn’t you? Now that Aus
tin’s feeling better and you’re finally making new friends and stuff.”
I swallowed. She meant Elijah, but I didn’t want to think about him.
As much as I wanted to beg Cassa to change her mind and not go, I knew I couldn’t do that. Because as terrified as I was of things changing, I was even more scared of them staying the same. If letting Cassa go meant that I might get my old best friend back, then I had to do it.
“Maybe I could come visit?” I said, trying not to panic at the idea of hurtling through thin air in a metal box with dozens of strangers crammed in next to me. Not to mention finding my way around in a totally different country where people were convinced they weren’t driving on the wrong side of the road. But if the alternative was spending months and months without seeing my best friend, then it didn’t sound that awful.
Cassa let out a surprised laugh. “What? But you hate traveling! It’s too unpredictable.”
She was right. But that didn’t mean she had to be. “Maybe I could change,” I told her. “Maybe it’s time.”
After school, I hurried past the auditorium, where kids were getting ready for the final round of dance club auditions, telling myself that it was stupid to feel bummed. Even if I could have auditioned without singing at the top of my lungs, I probably wouldn’t have gotten in anyway.
I was so busy fleeing the building that I almost crashed into Mrs. Connor in the hallway.
“Slow down, Lexi!” she cried.
I froze, realizing I’d been running—actually running—in school! What was wrong with me?
“Please don’t send me to detention again,” I begged, my voice cracking. I couldn’t spend any more lunch periods away from Cassa, not when she’d be gone in a few months. “I won’t break the rules again. I promise. I’ll do everything perfectly from now on.”
“Whoa,” Mrs. Connor said. “Relax, Lexi.” She glanced around the empty hallway. “I think we can let it slide just this once.”
I nodded gratefully, but there were still tears stinging at the back of my throat.
“Is everything all right?” Mrs. Connor asked.
“I just … I don’t want you to think I’m the kind of person who gets in trouble all the time or gets bad grades. I’ve never messed up anything before this year, and now I can’t seem to stop messing everything up!”
To my surprise, Mrs. Connor smiled. “You know that I almost quit teaching after my first year? Everything I tried kept going wrong. I started to worry that I should have done something else, something safer.”
“But you’re everyone’s favorite teacher!” I cried. Even after those bad grades at the very beginning of the year, I still loved being in Mrs. Connor’s class. Math was starting to make sense to me in a way it never had before.
Her smile widened. “Well, I appreciate that. But I wouldn’t have gotten very far if I hadn’t let myself fail miserably.”
“You failed?” I asked in disbelief.
“Oh, yes. That first year, I failed over and over again. I was so determined to do everything right that I got it all wrong. Finally, I stopped trying to be perfect and I started looking for ways to be better.”
My watch beeped, telling me I should already be at Aunt Glinda’s house.
“Sorry, I really have to go,” I said.
“No problem,” Mrs. Connor said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I started off again, but this time at a walk instead of a run. Aunt Glinda certainly wouldn’t care if I was a few minutes late. Maybe I shouldn’t either.
When Aunt Glinda opened the door for me, she looked actually glad to see me, not the fake kind of glad that she seemed to put on for everyone else.
“Ready to get your hands dirty again?” she asked.
“Yup,” I said. But I wasn’t sure she was. When we got to Grandma Jean’s bedroom door, Aunt Glinda didn’t reach out to open it. Finally, I stepped forward and turned the knob.
I’d expected the room to be a mess, but it wasn’t, not exactly. It reminded me of the Antique Barn with its crowded walls and jam-packed shelves, cluttered yet organized. I knew that Grandma Jean had collected elephant figurines, but I had no idea how many of them she’d had.
“Whoa,” I said. “There must be hundreds of these.” I lightly ran my finger over one of the elephants, and it came away with a coating of dust.
“Three hundred and sixty-five,” Aunt Glinda said from the doorway. “One for every day of the year.”
“Why so many?”
“Because she thought they brought good luck, and she wanted to make sure she had a little bit of it every day.”
Even though it was warm in the room, I shivered. “I wish I had more memories of her,” I said softly.
Aunt Glinda laughed. “I have plenty I can share. If you want.”
“Sure.” I looked around the room. “So what are you planning to do with this place?”
“I used to like sewing,” Aunt Glinda said. “I haven’t done it in years, but maybe it’s time to get back into it. I was thinking I could turn this room into a sewing studio.” She sighed. “But what do we do with all these elephants? We can’t keep them all.”
“I can talk to Cassa’s mom,” I said. “I bet she’ll know.”
“It seems awful to get rid of them when your grandmother loved them so much.”
“But there’s a magic to old things,” I said, remembering what Cassa was always saying. “They find their way to people who need them.”
Aunt Glinda gave me a tiny smile. “That’s a nice way to think about it. And you’re right, it’s better to give them away than to keep them locked up in here.”
Still, she didn’t move from the doorway. So I grabbed a duster and some plastic storage bins and started carefully taking the elephants off the shelves, wiping them off, and wrapping them in tissue paper. As I worked, my muscles relaxed. This was like being at the Barn and putting things in order, of making sense out of chaos.
“Do you know how Grandma started her collection?” I asked after a few minutes.
Aunt Glinda smiled. “That’s actually a funny story.” She took a tiny step into the room, and then another, and then she picked up a small blue elephant from the very top shelf. “This is Leonard,” she said. “And Grandma found him on her doorstep.” Then she launched into a story about how Grandma kept trying to find the owner but never did. Eventually she accepted that he was hers and that she’d need to find him some friends. “After that, she swore that her luck improved. So she kept collecting and collecting them until she had one for every single day of the year. She said that way Leonard had friends all year round.”
“What about on leap years?” I asked.
Aunt Glinda laughed. “You really are so much like her.” She picked up a small box on the desk and opened the lid. Inside was a small purple elephant, covered in sparkling glass. “Meet elephant number three hundred and sixty-six. She brought him out once every four years. The rest of the time, she said he was napping in there.”
I carefully picked up the elephant, loving the way he sparkled in the sunlight. He felt right in my hand, somehow, as though I was meant to hold him. Reluctantly, I went to put him back in his case. And that’s when I saw it. Inside the small box was a shining gray stone, the size of a chocolate coin.
“Aunt Glinda!” I said with a gasp, holding out the box to her.
She looked inside, her eyebrows arched in surprise. “How did it get here?”
I put the elephant aside and carefully pulled out the stone. It was exactly like the others, except for the writing on the side. This one simply said Luck.
I ran all the way to the school, hoping it wasn’t too late to make it to the end of the audition. When I fell into the auditorium, everyone turned to look at me, and I could tell none of the other kids were happy to see me. No one wanted a belting lunatic hanging around.
Luckily, Miss Flores waved me over and told me I’d be going in the final group again. Then she turned back to the kids on the stage. There we
re only two groups to go before it was my turn.
I took a deep breath and started warming up just like last time—jogging in place, arm circles, knee bends, and torso twists—since it had seemed to help. But as I went through the movements, the Luck stone grew heavier and heavier in my pocket. I’d found it right before my audition. That had to be a sign. I was supposed to use it to undo my Success wish and nail my audition. Wasn’t I?
I stopped mid–knee bend and took the stone out of my pocket. I should make the wish now, before it was too late. I closed my eyes and squeezed the stone tightly in my fingers.
But what about Austin acting like a hamster and Cassa moving away and Elijah being a fake friend? It all needed fixing!
I slipped the stone back into my pocket and bent over to touch my toes. My brain was so heavy that it felt as though it might spill out of my ears. How could I use the last wish on the dance audition when I should use it on Austin? And that still left Cassa and Elijah. Of course, Austin was the most important, but I had no idea how to fix those other things in my life without wishes.
“Lexi?” I heard someone call. I straightened up to find that all the other kids in my group were already up onstage and Miss Flores was waving at me. “Are you joining us?”
Oh no. I hadn’t made the wish! As I stumbled toward the stage, barely remembering how to put one foot in front of the other, my thoughts were doing their own frantic dance. How could I audition if my stupid singing curse was still going strong? But I couldn’t use the wish on myself. Austin, Cassa, my parents, Elijah, this audition … argh! If only I could use one wish to fix everything!
And that’s when I realized what I needed to do.
I stopped at the bottom of the steps, pulled the stone out of my pocket, and squeezed it as tightly as I could. Then I whispered, “I wish to undo all my other wishes.”
Even though it meant that Austin might get sick again one day and that there was nothing I could do about it. Even if it meant Cassa might stay in England forever and Elijah might never want to actually be friends with me. Even though it meant I had to stop trying to nudge the universe where I wanted it to go and finally trust that things would work out on their own. It was the only way.
Secondhand Wishes Page 11