by Rose David
I shrugged. “I’m all right.” And by all right, I meant, totally screwed. I added in what I hoped was a more optimistic tone, “Just tired, I guess.”
“Really?” She raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure there isn’t something else?”
Gulp. I opened my mouth to say something (though I wasn’t sure what), but halted when Mom continued:
“Your father and I are really upset about what happened earlier today, too.” She put a hand on my knee. “You know we’re just worried about your condition, right? It’s not that we don’t trust you.”
It took me a second to realize what she meant. Our argument had only happened a few hours ago, but it was already hard to remember.
“It’s just...” Mom bit her lip. “Honey, you’ve never been away for us for long, and it’s hard for your father and me to think of you out there on your own.”
In spite of everything, I still felt a twinge of annoyance. “I’m not moving, Mom. I’ll be in a dorm with Natalie the whole time.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” she said. “Listen, your father and I discussed it, and we’re willing to seriously consider letting you go to arts camp.”
A shard of excitement broke through my grey mood. “Really?”
“Yes, really, but only on the condition that we keep your ring somewhere safe.”
And, just like that, my excitement fizzled.
“It would be somewhere in the city,” Mom said. “You wouldn’t have to be away from it for long, but we’d feel better if your ring was in a safe deposit box while you’re in Chicago.”
“Mom--”
“Layla, we know you don’t want to do this, all right? You’ve made that extremely clear,” she paused, frowning before she finished, “on several occasions.”
“So, if you know I don’t want to, then why are you suggesting it?”
Mom exhaled a sharp sigh. “If you’ve got another idea about how to make sure you’re safe during camp, I’d love to hear it.”
“Umm, you could try trusting me.”
Weird how I could manage that with a straight face even while my ring was wrapped around on Sean Fabry’s finger. It’s the principle of the thing, I told myself. My parents didn’t even know I had lost my ring, and yet Mom was still talking to me like I couldn’t be trusted. Talk about unfair.
Mom crossed her arms. “How many times have you shared a room with someone?”
“I sleep over at Natalie’s all the time.”
“Sleeping over for one night is different from sharing a space for five weeks. You’d be doing laundry together, for God’s sake. What if someone asks about the ribbons in your pockets?”
“Yeah, Mom, because that’s what teenagers talk about: laundry.”
Her eyes locked on to mine, unblinking and serious. “It’s not easy to trust you when you act like this. If someone got a hold of your ring, it could ruin your life.”
“No kidding,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “I’ll think about the safe deposit thing, okay? I just need some time to get used to it.”
Mom nodded and stood. “We’ll talk again later, all right?” She lingered in the doorway for a moment before stepping out into the hallway and shutting my door behind her.
Sighing, I pulled the notebook out from under my pillow and squinted at the scrawl of words. As soon as I finished this wish, I could move on with my life. With any luck, I would never have to think about Sean Fabry again.
I worked on the wish for about an hour, crossing things out, adding little notes, changing phrases. I must have read it over a thousand times, staring at the page until I thought my eyes would cross.
When I finally had something good, I cleared my throat and read, “In reference to the incident earlier today, I wish that Sean Fabry would have, instead of picking up my ring when he got down on the ground to retrieve it, merely pointed it out to me, rather than reaching over and grabbing it himself, thus allowing me to be alerted to the location of the ring in order to pick it up.”
I held my breath, waiting for the wish to course through me. Maybe the magic would suck me through time and plop me back in the parking lot. That would make sense. Once I got back there, should I return to the game, or walk home like I had already done?
Or, rather, like I had done before, in the first version of the past. Or something. I closed my eyes, still waiting.
A minute later, I blinked at the blue walls and general chaos of my room and tried not to curse or cry (or both).
Don’t panic, I told myself. This doesn’t mean the wish didn’t work.
I mean, I hadn’t specifically asked to travel back in time. I just wanted to change one little part of the past. Maybe the timeline had only moved around to accommodate my wish, but nothing else had changed. That meant I should have the ring with me right now.
I checked my pocket, and sighed as my fingers came up empty.
I should have known it wouldn’t work. Otherwise, nobody would ever get their wishes, and we genies could just mind our own business and live in peace. And who the hell wanted that?
So I still owed Sean three wishes. If I was lucky, he might run through all three of them without realizing what was actually going on, wasting wishes on small things like an five extra bucks or a refill on his soda. From there, I could probably just wish my ring back into my pocket and call it a day.
The possibility of three smooth wishes was a cold comfort, not viable enough to make me feel totally better, but at least I wasn’t so desperate anymore. Glancing at my alarm clock, I winced at the time. I had been away from the charity booth for a while, despite the fact that I had told Nat and Rajesh that I would be right back.
I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and found two text messages from Natalie, both asking if I was okay. I texted her back, telling her I had felt sick and had to go home.
Get well soon! popped on to my screen almost instantly, calling a miserable smile onto my face. Right now, I had a better chance of giving birth to a unicorn than feeling better.
Since my time-travel experiment had been a total bust, all I could do was wait for Sean’s first wish. It was like crushing on a guy and waiting for him to call, but about twenty times worse.
I slipped into a ratty, old Hello Kitty robe and wandered into the private bathroom adjoining my bedroom. (Being an only child does have its perks.) As I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I didn’t even care that I looked like a puff of cotton candy--even if Grandma Grubman had no idea that I wasn’t nine years old anymore, at least she knew how to pick good bath time gear.
I filled the tub with bubbly, scented water, poured at the perfect, just-below-scalding, guaranteed-to-make-you-look-like-a-lobster temperature that I liked. Breathing in the sweet scent of Grandma’s Hello Kitty bubble bath (if you could actually smell pink, this would be it), the tension in my neck eased just a little. Even if my life was crashing down around me, at least I could always take a nice, relaxing soak in the tub.
I had just started to undo the belt on my robe when I felt myself float right off the tiles, hovering. As the magic sucked me away like dirt into a vacuum, I cringed.
CHAPTER SIX
I landed hard, but instead of cracking open my head, I felt myself bounce off something firm, but weirdly soft.
“Whoa!” said someone nearby.
As I settled down, I could only gape at my surroundings. I was in a big, bright messy bedroom. I had landed in the middle of the bed, which was a good thing considering the hard wood covering the floor (although maybe the scatter of dirty clothes would have broken my fall). Off in one corner, I saw a little flat-screen TV and an Xbox and, right beside it, there was a little bookshelf that was filled mostly with athletic trophies.
I groaned, partially from nausea, but mostly because I suddenly had a good idea about where I was. My head felt a little spinny, as if I had just stepped off a roller coaster. If I puked, I planned to do it all over S
ean’s pretty blue bedspread.
Sean’s eyes were like saucers as he stood half-in, half-out of a wheelie office chair in front of a desk. “Oh, man,” he breathed. “It’s true.”
“Did you think I was telling you just for my health?” I shook my head, trying to clear the fuzz from my brain as I sat up.
“Layla, umm,” Sean said, “do you want to borrow...?” Jeez, again with the stuttering. You’d think he had never seen a genie before.
“You know,” I said, “you really need to work on--” But the words jammed in my throat as I caught a glimpse of cotton candy pink.
I was still wearing a robe.
Just a robe.
On Sean Fabry’s bed.
Abruptly, the lint in my brain disappeared. I gasped and squashed myself into a ball, tucking my robe around me as tightly as I could. “Turn around, perv!”
Sean spun his chair around to face the opposite wall. “Sorry! Sorry!”
But even with Sean’s back to me, I felt way too exposed. Knowing that I was almost naked (as in, totally without clothes) made my cheeks flame up. With frantic hands, I pulled Sean’s blanket across my shoulders. “Okay. I’m decent, or whatever.”
When Sean turned back to me, he looked as red-faced and frightened as I was. His eyes traveled all around me, but never quite looked at my face. Too casually, he said, “Hey, Layla. What’s up?”
It was such a completely normal thing to say that I couldn’t even think of a sarcastic comeback. Neither of us spoke while I waited for my heart to stop hammering and Sean allowed his eyes to readjust. I glanced around again, and this time, my eyes settled on a dog-eared MAXIM magazine on the floor. At least it was better than finding another Hooters calendar, though I couldn’t help wondering where he kept all the, umm, other magazines in his collection. If Sean was as dim as I thought he was, he kept his private stuff in the most obvious place: under the mattress.
That meant I was probably sitting above a big stack of porn right now. Oh, joy.
An eternity later, Sean cleared his throat. “So, are you okay?”
I shrugged. Come to think of it, my shoulder felt a little tight after hitting the bed at such a weird angle, but it was better than landing on the floor. “I’m fine. I had a good landing pad.”
Sean slid his chair a little closer. “So, you were telling the truth today. You really are a genie.”
I couldn’t help but squirm as Sean’s attention lingered on me. “More or less.”
“Yeah...” He looked at his shoes for a thoughtful moment, after which I hoped he might stutter out his first wish. Instead, he only smiled and shook his head.
Wait one damn second. Was he actually amused by this? What the hell was so great about me on his bed, half-naked and sweating bullets? Actually, ew... I didn’t want to know the answer to that.
He must have caught the murder in my eyes, because he held up a hand and said, “Sorry. It’s just... Well, girls don’t magically appear on my bed every day, you know.”
Not yet, they don’t, I thought.
“What did you mean by ‘more or less?’” Sean asked.
I took a deep breath. It felt weird telling anyone about this (let alone Sean Fabry), so the words rushed out. “I’m not exactly normal. Like, for a genie. I grant wishes and stuff, when I have to. But, basically, I’m a regular person.” The last part came out like a desperate squeak, despite my best efforts to sound confident.
“I get it, sort of,” he said. “You’re just... not exactly what I expected.”
My first thought was to ask Sean just how the hell he had expected anything, considering he hadn’t believed in genies until about two seconds ago, but then another thought made me go rigid. “What did you expect, Fabry?” I asked, my voice hard.
“Umm, n-nothing.” Sean scooted his chair back about a foot.
“You were thinking I’d be some blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl in a belly-shirt, weren’t you?”
“No! You’re great. Really.”
I glared. Like I even cared what he thought of me. “You’ve seen too many slutty Halloween costumes, pal.”
Sean opened his mouth, but instead of spitting out incoherent syllables, he decided to snap his jaw shut and stay quiet.
“You know,” I said in the silence that followed, “a blonde genie is basically impossible. Genies are middle-eastern. Hello?”
“I’m sorry, okay?” He hesitated, his forehead creased with worry. “Uh... You’re not going to turn me into a turtle or something, are you?”
“You think I’d do that? No, of course...” I trailed off, thoughtful.
Oh man, how could I not have realized this before?
Sean’s eyes turned into shaky, blue dinner plates. “You were going to say ‘not,’ right? Layla?”
I didn’t bother to answer. My brain was going a hundred miles-per-hour. I knew now that I couldn’t wish for Sean not to have my ring, but what if I could force him to waste his wishes on small, useless things? That way, no one would get suspicious and start sniffing around, and I wouldn’t end up granting other people’s wishes for the rest of my life (or locked in my bedroom, if my parents found out first).
The idea made my head spin, but it was worth a try. “I wish...” I began.
Biting my lip, I looked for a notepad or something. I would have to be pretty careful about this. Tempting as it was, I didn’t think it would be very nice to rush through the wish and accidentally scramble Sean’s brains (though I wasn’t sure if anyone would be able to tell the difference).
“I wish that you, Sean Fabry, would... Umm...” I tapered off again.
Sean shoved his chair backward, rolling across the room in one strong push. Then he dived to the closet and plunged his arms in, grasping for something. I was too surprised to be scared, though I guess he could have been reaching for another coat hanger.
A moment later, Sean held up a hockey stick and a tennis racket, sticking them together at an angle. “Stop right there!” he said.
“What are you doing?” I squinted. “Is that supposed to be a cross? Dude, I’m a genie, not a vampire.”
Doubt fluttered across his face, and Sean responded by holding the “cross” even tighter. He was quaking with fear, as if I had just threatened to tell him all about my last period or something. “The power of Christ compels you!”
Okay, now he was just being rude. “Could you stop doing that? I really wish you would.” I couldn’t help saying the magic words--he was being such a jerk. Still, images of Sean puking again, or worse, lying comatose on the floor, made me hastily add, “...and I only want you to put the stuff down, not anything else. Just put it down.”
“No freaking way,” he exclaimed.
Wait a second... I blinked, as if my eyes needed to reboot. Sean still crouched on the floor, holding the tennis racket and hockey stick, totally unaffected by my wish.
“I wish you would put those things down,” I repeated more firmly.
Nothing happened.
“Of course,” I sighed.
“What?” said Sean. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t burst a blood vessel, Fabry. I can’t hurt someone who has my ring.”
“Y-you can’t?” he asked.
I shook my head. Why should a genie be able to control her so-called master? Just the way Sean couldn’t wish for more wishes, I couldn’t cheat, either. Man, it sucked to be me. “Fabry,” I said, partly as an experiment and partly because I meant it, “I really wish you were a nematode. A pink one.”
Sean threw his arms over his head, flinching against a wave of magic that never came. A minute later, he checked himself for any nematode-iness and, finding everything intact, stood.
“Listen,” I said, “I think we--” I broke off to watch Sean run across the room to his desk.
He grabbed my ring, and thrust it out at me. “Take it back, Layla.”
Instinctually, I ducked underneath the covers. The heavy comforter muffled my voice as I told him, “I can’t take
it back. You have to make your wishes first.”
Sean growled with so much frustration that, for a moment, I thought he might just reach underneath the blanket and force the ring into my hands. If he did, I really would turn him into a nematode--I’d figure something out, damn it.
But then I heard footsteps falling in a worried rhythm, and I poked my head out from my blanket cocoon to find Sean pacing in front of me. “Wishes. Right. Okay,” he said to himself. He walked the room over and over, muttering scraps of sentences.
If he took much longer, my bath water would get cold. Wishing hadn’t been this difficult for my parents, but then again, they weren’t exactly asking for important things. They had only wished for an ice cream sundae or another slice of pizza, that kind of stuff, just to see if we could work around my powers.
As he continued to pace, Sean might have mumbled something about iPods and “unlimited downloads,” but I couldn’t be sure. I was surprised he hadn’t moved on to the dirty stuff yet, but then again, I didn’t know exactly what he intended to download.
My stomach sank as I remembered that I would still have two more wishes to grant even if he decided on something tonight. If Sean saw how easily I could zap up some internet porn, what else would he make me bring?
I tucked myself tighter underneath the blanket. So far, the biggest wish I had ever granted was to make Mom’s baby weight disappear. What if I couldn’t zap up a dozen Swedish supermodels, or whatever ridiculous thing Sean might ask for? What might happen to me then? I shuddered, hoping Sean would wish for something small and easy.
“I got it,” he said, jumping like he had been struck by lightning. “World peace!”
I screamed. Loudly. Couldn’t help it.
Most people would have asked for money or fame or power. Sean wanted world peace? Give me a break. If I even tried it, my head would probably explode. The upshot was that I wouldn’t have to grant his next two wishes. However, the downside was... Yuck.
My scream was so horror-movie-worthy that Sean grabbed his hockey stick and crouched down to fight some invisible monster. When he realized that no one else had appeared in his bedroom, he straightened up. “What the hell?” he demanded.