“I’ll come over in the morning,” Barrett said. “Then maybe we could take a picnic up to Central Park—sit there and talk in private. Does that sound like fun?” He was looking at Sofie, not at me.
“Whatever Joplin wants,” she said.
“I’ll tell you what Joplin wants,” I said. “I want you to act like a regular person, not a genie out of a lamp who has to grant my wishes. Just be my friend, okay? Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’ve done it before.”
I blinked. “You have?”
“I was a person once before. For eleven years.”
“Long ago?”
“Sort of. Not too long. I’m not entirely sure.”
“Good. That means you know how things work.”
She nodded.
“And that makes things easier—because I’ve actually sort of come up with an idea. It’s not perfect, maybe just a temporary solution, but it’s better than nothing. Only you’d have to seem, you know, pretty normal.”
“What’s the idea?” Barrett asked.
I hesitated. “It would mean trusting another person.”
“Just tell us, Joplin.”
“Okay. We have this upstairs neighbor. Her name is Chloe. She used to be my babysitter, but she’s in college now, so she’s officially a grown-up. Her mom and dad are on sabbatical in France for the spring semester. So at the moment it’s just Chloe alone in a two-bedroom apartment.”
“Aha,” Barrett said.
“She’s kind of a different person. But she’s lots of fun, up for anything. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a girl with pink and blue streaks in her hair.”
“No,” Sofie said. “Is that usual?”
“It’s something people sometimes do for fun. They dye their hair weird colors. Anyway, asking if you can stay in her apartment is going to be tricky. I’m not sure how I’m going to explain it. Maybe I’ll come up with something.”
“Do you trust her?” Barrett asked. “That’s the important thing.”
“Yeah, I do. Sofie, what do you think? Be honest.”
She put her sandwich down and thought about it. “Well, I don’t know her, of course. But you do, and you seem convinced it would work. I can’t go on living in the garden, as you said.”
“Barrett?”
“I agree. We don’t have any other options, so we’ll have to trust your judgment about Chloe. But I’d like to ask one question first. It’s kind of jumping ahead of things, but we need to have a long-range plan before we get bogged down in the details.”
Barrett leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked directly at Sofie.
“Joplin asked you to be honest, to say what you really feel. So here’s the big, big question: What do you want?”
“How do you mean?”
“Do you want to go back and be a picture on a platter? Do you want to stay here in New York, maybe with a foster or adoptive family to look after you, so you can go to school, then to college, and grow up to be—I don’t know—a teacher, or an accountant, or an astronaut?”
She shook her head, no.
“Why not?”
“I can’t ‘grow up.’ I will always be as I am now. Years pass, but I stay the same. It’s as though I’m trapped in a moment of time that goes on forever.”
“Oh!” I said, shocked. “And you know this from when you were a person before?”
“Yes. It’s one of the complications.”
“Just for now, forget all that and ask yourself, within the bounds of your reality: If you could do anything at all, what would you choose for yourself and your future?”
She didn’t hesitate. “I would go home.”
“To Holland?”
“Yes. But as I said, that was a long time ago. My family and my home aren’t there anymore. There is no going back. It’s impossible.”
“What if I wished you were back at home?” I said. “Not in Holland as it is now, but at the time when you lived there.”
“We tried that. It didn’t work. For some reason sending me home is different from other wishes. You don’t have the power to do it.”
Barrett got up and paced in circles. I figured this was what he did when he was trying to work something out. Finally he sat down again.
“It’s like a puzzle,” he said. “A really hard puzzle with lots of pieces. But if this is real—and I think it is—then there must be some kind of internal logic to it. We just have to find the answer, and that’s going to take time. Meanwhile, you need to be somewhere comfortable and safe.”
“All right,” I said, getting to my feet. “Let’s go do this thing.”
12
The Short Version
BACK IN THE OLDEN DAYS, before our building was broken up into four separate apartments, it belonged to a single family. The owners used the top three floors, while the servants lived and worked in the basement, where I now lived with Mom and Jen.
The servants had their own humble entrance, aka our front door, cleverly hidden under the flight of seven wide stone steps that led up to Chloe’s stoop and the formal entry door. Which is where we now stood, waiting for her to let us in.
Naturally, the Martinellis’ apartment was nicer than ours. Not as big, since the stairway took space from the top three apartments, but it had fancy moldings, high ceilings, big windows, and wooden floors with a ribbon design around the edge.
You’d think they’d have bought fancy antique furniture to go with the old-fashioned rooms. But the Martinellis were super artsy and into “midcentury modern,” which I never quite understood, except that it’s stuff that was in style back in the 1950s.
I’d asked Chloe about it once or twice, and I guess I was a little too persistent and also totally clueless, because she finally said, “It’s just a thing, Joplin—okay?”
Anyway, the place was all shag rugs and bright-colored furniture in these weird, swoopy shapes. “Be prepared,” I told Sofie and Barrett. “It’s kind of different.”
“Like Chloe?”
“Yeah.”
Chloe buzzed us in. When we reached her apartment, she was waiting for us, the door already opened. She had on overalls and a sleeveless T-shirt, her hair pulled up with a fat clip. It looked like a multicolored fountain was erupting from her head.
“Hey,” she said. “Wazzup? We having a party?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “These are just my friends.” And I made the introductions.
Chloe seemed highly amused. She probably thought Barrett was my boyfriend.
“Actually, we have a weird question to ask. Kind of a favor.”
“Come on in,” she said, waving us in the direction of their lime-green, notoriously uncomfortable, apparently stylish sofa. We sat in a row like three little soldiers while Chloe slouched across from us in an orange molded chair.
“So what’s the weird favor?” she asked. “I can’t wait to hear.”
“Um,” I began, “it’s pretty simple, really. My friend Sofie needs someplace to hang for a while. She’s not a runaway or anything like that, I promise. It’s just that she has this really complicated problem and we’re trying to help her with it, but that’ll take some time. So I thought maybe she . . .”
“Could stay here?”
“Yeah, basically that’s it.”
“Just curious, but since she’s your friend, wouldn’t she rather live with you?”
“Well, that’s the problem. See, I can’t tell Mom about her situation. It’s complicated.”
“So you’ve already mentioned.”
Chloe stared up in the general direction of the ceiling, took out the clip, and started playing with her hair—pulling it back like she was making a ponytail, twisting it in a knot, then letting it go again. She did this over and over, just staring into space and not saying a word.
I looked over at Sofie. She was sitting very stiff and straight, like a little kid on her best behavior, hands in her lap. I suddenly had this really bad feeling that Chloe was windi
ng herself up to say no. And I didn’t have a second option. This was my one and only idea.
“I’m cool with Sofie staying here,” she finally said. “But I’m not getting in the middle of some weird family situation.”
“There is no weird family situation.”
“Bad custody decision? Foster family gone terribly wrong? Mom lost her apartment?”
“No, none of that.”
“Then why don’t you just tell me? If you want your friend to stay here, I get to know why.”
This wasn’t what I’d expected. She was acting like an uptight grown-up, not the crazy Upstairs Chloe I knew and loved. “You won’t believe it,” I said.
“Try me.”
I turned to Sofie and Barrett. They gave me blank looks. Apparently this was up to me.
“Okay, but you have to promise not to tell anyone. Cross your heart and hope to die.”
Chloe drew an X on her chest with her finger. “Hope to die if I breathe a word.” She was grinning like mad. She thought I was hilarious.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll give you the short version. The long version is even more confusing.”
“I’m sure it is. Go ahead. You have my full attention.”
“Sofie is from Holland,” I began. “But her parents died a long time ago and she’s temporarily stuck here. Mom’s in a really weird mood right now, as you no doubt noticed the other day, and I’m afraid if she knew about the situation, she’d call child services and they’d take Sofie away.”
“That’s your explanation?” Chloe said. “She’s ‘temporarily stuck here’?”
“It’s the truth,” I said. “Every word.”
“Kind of like ‘it’s complicated’?”
“Yeah.”
“No dice. Sorry, Joplin, but that’s not enough.”
I drooped like a wilting flower, right there on the Martinellis’ lime-green couch. Chloe wasn’t going to help. Worse, she’d probably run downstairs and tell Mom that I ought to see a therapist. That I was making up harebrained stories about some homeless kid I’d picked up on the street because I was so desperate to have a friend.
Through all of this, Sofie hadn’t moved a muscle, except to drop her head a few inches. Barrett was giving me this do something look.
“C’mon, Chloe! Can’t you just go with the flow?”
“No, Joplin, I can’t just go with the flow. Are you insane?”
I actually thought about that for a nanosecond but decided I was not.
“Look—it’s obvious that this is some kind of mess. And my dad would freak if I took in some runaway whose picture is up on the post office wall.”
“Give me a break, Chloe! Does Sofie look like a runaway?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? They come in all flavors.”
I stared down at my hands, my face burning. I’d screwed things up. Chloe wasn’t budging and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was absolutely going to tell my mother. I tried to come up with something, but I kept hitting a wall.
And then it came to me.
“Chloe,” I said, “I really wish you would help us.”
She blinked a couple of times. “Sure,” she said. “I’d be glad to.”
Barrett spun around and glared at me. Sofie didn’t move.
“Great!” I said. “Now, she’ll be spending the weekend with me, so she’ll move in with you on Sunday night. I’m going to tell Mom that she’s your cousin from Cleveland and you’re watching her while her parents are on vacation. I really wish you’d go along with that story. In case my mother asks.”
“Of course,” Chloe said. “No problem at all.”
We walked down the stairs in absolute silence and out the entry door to the stoop. There Barrett sat down. I sat beside him. Sofie sat by me.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I said.
“Good. Because that was a terrible, really dangerous thing you just did.”
“It worked, though. I wasn’t sure it would.”
“Is that how you make moral judgments? If it works? Because then it’s okay to smash a store window and steal a camera—as long as you don’t get caught. It worked. You got a free camera.”
“Excuse me?”
“You totally don’t get it, do you? Sofie has to grant your wishes. She has no choice, because something terrible happened to her. It’s like she was enslaved in some magical way. And you took advantage of that.”
“I did it to help her.”
“I know that. And I’m not saying you’re a bad person.”
“Oh, thanks!”
“But when you wished she was your friend and she suddenly appeared, you did that in complete innocence. But what you did just now, that was different. You knew you had the power and, without consulting Sofie or even really thinking it through, you used it. That’s the really dangerous part. What’s the chance you won’t use it again? Get to like it.”
He was right. I hadn’t thought it through. Suddenly I felt sick.
I reached over and took Sofie’s hand and squeezed it hard with both of mine. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry! I won’t do it again. Not ever.”
She looked at me with those soulful, deep-water eyes but didn’t say a thing. Not at first, anyway.
My natural instinct has always been to fill any silence in a conversation because they make me uncomfortable. But I had the feeling that Sofie needed to think things through before she spoke. So I forced myself to shut up and wait. Barrett did too.
Finally, when Sofie was ready, she said what was on her mind.
“Only one person has ever made me feel like a slave,” she said softly. “And that was the person who enslaved me—I’ve never thought of it that way, Barrett, but it’s a good analogy. Since then I’ve granted lots of wishes, but they were always innocent, like you wishing I was your friend, or well-intentioned, like what you did just now. But it is dangerous, Joplin. More than you know.”
“I believe you, but I don’t understand. Not really. It seems like your power to grant wishes could be used for good.”
“I suppose. No one’s ever wished for universal peace. But if they did, they’d be harnessing the forces of evil to do it.”
I put my face in my hands and started to cry. Sofie put her arms around me. She was warm and soft, like the real flesh-and-blood person she was. I felt kindness and comfort in her hug. And then Barrett was reaching his long arms around both of us, and I knew that we were all right.
We would solve this problem.
13
The Mystery Man
MOM WAS IN THE KITCHEN, hunched over a pair of boneless, skinless chicken breasts on the cutting board. With the precision of a surgeon, she was slicing them into paper-thin cutlets.
“Mom?” I said softly. She finished that cutlet. Like the others, it was flawless.
“What?” she said, her attention still on the chicken, angling her knife for another pass. She’d been doing that a lot lately—talking at me, not bothering to look up.
“Can you put that down for a minute, please? I don’t want to shock you into cutting off a finger.”
She stood up straight and set down the knife. She had managed to smile and be cheerful while Barrett was around. Now that he’d gone home, she seemed unbearably tired. “What have you done now?”
“Nothing. I just made another friend. That’s two in one day. Don’t fall all over yourself with amazement.”
“You need to stop doing that.”
“Making friends?”
“No. Running yourself down. Acting so surprised when people like you.”
“I’m just being realistic, Mom. Anyway, her name is Sofie. She’s Upstairs Chloe’s cousin from Cleveland and she’s staying at the Martinellis’ for a while. You’ll like her.”
“I’m sure I will.”
“And I hope you don’t mind—I know I should have asked you first—but I invited her to spend the weekend with us.” Then, in a whisper, “Actually, she’s already here.”
“Here? Where?”
“In the living room.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Joplin! Bring her in so I can meet her.”
Mom washed the chicken goo off her hands while I went to get Sofie.
We’d carefully prepared for this moment, starting with a makeover. I’d gone through my closet looking for the most generic items I owned, so Mom wouldn’t notice they were mine. I’d chosen a denim skirt, a pale yellow tee, and ballet flats. Finally, we took out the braids and I gave her a ponytail. That transformed her completely. She looked like she belonged in the twenty-first century.
Next, we’d created a fictional life for Sofie, down to her street address in Cleveland, the school she attended, her full name—Sofie Ann Carlson—what her parents did for a living, and how they were related to Chloe. When we had it all figured out, I’d tested her by asking questions, pretending to be my mom. She hadn’t made a single mistake.
So I was feeling really confident when I ushered Sofie into the kitchen.
Then suddenly things got weird.
Halfway in, she stopped in her tracks. Then she just stood there, gazing at Mom with what looked like amazement or surprise. Starting to panic, I turned to see how my mother was reacting and saw that Mom was staring at Sofie in exactly the same way, like she was searching her memory for something she couldn’t quite grasp. And they went on like that, gazing and blinking like a couple of canaries studying their reflections in a mirror.
That moment felt like a lifetime, though it probably lasted little more than two seconds, much longer than it took to tell. And then—snap! It was over.
“I’m sorry, Sofie,” Mom said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. You just looked so familiar, like someone I knew a long time ago. It took me by surprise.”
Sofie nodded and smiled, but I could tell it took some effort. Then she took a deep breath and pulled herself together.
After that, things got normal again. Mom seemed instantly comfortable with Sofie. And Sofie not only remembered all the details of her fictional life in Cleveland, she seemed to have an instinct for what would interest my mom. Pretty soon they were chatting away like old friends. And for a precious few minutes our little apartment was filled with warmth and cheer. I couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome.
Joplin, Wishing Page 7