The Christmas Genie

by Dan Gutman

  “We’re not wishing for a car!” Abigail said. “We’re wishing for a million dollars. Or forty thousand, anyway. You can buy whatever you want with your share.”

  “Hey, would we have to pay taxes on that money?” asked Ella.

  “By law, I gotta report all wishes to the Internal Revenue Service,” said Genie Bob. “So the answer to your question is yeah.”

  “How much taxes would we have to pay on a million bucks, Mrs. Walters?” asked Josh.

  “Gee, I’m not sure,” Mrs. Walters said. “Teachers don’t make that kind of money! I would guess it would be around thirty-five percent.”

  I didn’t have to take out my calculator. Thirty-five percent of a million is 350,000.

  “What!?” said William. “Three hundred fifty thousand bucks in taxes? That’s not fair!”

  I took out my calculator again. If you take 350,000 away from 1,000,000, it leaves 650,000. And if you divide that by 25 kids in the class, it comes to 26,000.

  “Hey,” I told everybody, “our forty grand just turned into twenty-six grand.”

  “Forget it,” Christopher said. “It’s not worth it. Let’s wish for something else.”

  “Yeah, something you don’t have to pay taxes on,” said Anthony.

  Mrs. Walters pulled another index card out of the bowl.

  WISH #3:

  I WISH I HAD A TRUCK FULL OF CANDY.

  “Now you’re talkin’ my language!” William jumped up and shouted. Mrs. Walters told him to sit down and be quiet.

  “That one was mine,” Matthew said. “Just think about it. A truck full of Kit Kats, 3 Musketeers, Twix, Hershey bars, Crunch, Tootsie Rolls—”

  “That would be cool,” said David.

  “I don’t particularly like chocolate,” said Elizabeth.

  “What?” Logan asked. “Are you brain-damaged? Everybody likes chocolate.”

  “Logan!” said Mrs. Walters.

  “Well, I don’t,” said Elizabeth. “I try to eat healthy.”

  “If we had a truck full of candy,” said Mia the wet blanket, “some of it might reach its expiration date before we had the chance to eat it.”

  “So we would eat it really fast,” suggested Ethan. “Problem solved.”

  “If we ate it really fast we’d get sick,” Mia said.

  “And fat,” said Elizabeth. “You know, obesity is a major problem in this country. Diabetes too.”

  “Candy rots your teeth,” Alyssa added.

  “Not if you brush frequently,” Ella said.

  “Maybe wishing for a truck full of candy isn’t the smartest idea,” said Olivia.

  “What is the problem with you people?” Matthew shouted. “Candy is the best thing in the world! What else would anyone want? I wish I had a magic candy machine that never ran out of candy, and you didn’t even have to put money into it to get the candy out.”

  “Y’know, it’s not like it’s such a big deal getting candy,” said Ella. “You can just go to any supermarket or 7-Eleven and get a candy bar for less than a dollar. I think we should wish for something that we can’t get.”

  “Good point, Ella,” Mrs. Walters said.

  “You can’t get a truck full of candy at a store,” said Matthew.

  “Where would you put it, anyway?” asked Ella.

  “Put what?” asked Matthew.

  “The truck,” Ella said.

  “Who cares where you’d put it?” Matthew asked.

  “Well, you’ve got to put it someplace,” Mia said. “You can’t just leave a truck out on the street all the time. The police would give you a ticket.”

  What a party pooper that girl is.

  “My dad would take the truck after we ate all the candy,” said Matthew. “His truck is a piece of junk.”

  “What if my dad wants the truck?” asked Logan.

  “What kind of a truck are we talking about?” asked William. “One of those little pickups? Or an eighteen-wheeler? We would have to specify the type of truck in the wish.”

  “You know,” Mia said, “if a truck full of candy was parked anywhere, people would find out and steal the candy.”

  “We would lock the truck!” Matthew said, slapping his forehead. “Look, it doesn’t even have to be a truck! That’s just a container to hold the candy. I could have wished for a giant bowl full of candy.”

  “Then we would have to worry about what to do with the bowl when the candy was finished,” Mia said.

  “At least we can get some use out of a truck,” said Madison. “You can’t do anything with a giant bowl.”

  “Sure you can,” Jacob said. “You can turn it into a swimming pool. Then we could go swimming.”

  “In that case, we might as well just wish for a swimming pool filled with candy to begin with,” said Natalie.

  “I don’t like swimming,” Ashley said. “I’m a terrible swimmer.”

  “And the first time it rains, our candy would be ruined,” said Mia.

  “Not if we covered the pool,” Ella pointed out.

  “We could cover it with a truck!” Alex suggested.

  “I wish we had a swimming pool filled with root beer floats,” Josh said, “and it never runs out of root beer no matter how much we drink. And the ice cream never melts.”

  At that point, everybody started yelling at one another. Genie Bob was rubbing his forehead like he had a headache.

  “Man, Santa Claus has it easy,” he muttered. “He just sits there and kids tell him what they want. What a life! Some people have it made.”

  “Hey, what is it with you and Santa Claus?” I asked. “What did Santa ever do to you?”

  “What did he do to me?” Genie Bob said, sneering. “What did he to do me?”

  “Yeah!” we all said.

  “I’ll tell you what he did to me,” Genie Bob said. “He ruined my life! That’s what he did to me!”

  “How did Santa Claus ruin your life?” Elizabeth asked.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes!” we all shouted.

  “Claus and I go way back,” Genie Bob said. “I grew up at the North Pole. We went to school together. That guy is a jerk. When I was a kid, he used to beat me up and take my lunch money. Him and his boys.”

  “His boys?” I said. “You mean . . . the elves?”

  “That’s right,” Bob said. “Those short guys he hangs out with. His posse.”

  “You let a bunch of elves beat you up?” asked Christopher. “That’s pathetic, man!”

  “Hey, those elves are tenacious,” Bob said. “You’ve seen ’em work.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ella said. “You’re just making all this stuff up. Santa Claus doesn’t even exist. Everybody knows that.”

  “Doesn’t exist, eh?” said Genie Bob as he lifted up his little shirt. “You see that scar?

  That’s where Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer bit me! Claus told him to do it. I hate that guy! And look what happened. Claus grows up to be one of the most famous men in history, this jolly guy who brings joy and happiness to millions of people all over the world. Do you know what I’m famous for?”

  “What?” we all said.

  “You got a computer in this class?” Genie Bob asked. “Go to Google and do a search for the word ‘genie.’ See what pops up first.”

  We all gathered around the computer at the back of the class. Ava went to Google and typed in GENIE. We all crowded around the screen.

  “Garage door openers?” Ava said.

  “That’s right!” Genie Bob exclaimed. “You search the entire Internet and the thing I’m most famous for is a company that makes garage door openers.”

  “That’s just sad, man,” said William. “I feel your pain.”

  “Garage door openers are cool,” David said. “I like to put water balloons underneath ours and crush them.”

  I wasn’t sure if I was more surprised by the fact that Genie Bob and Santa Claus went to school together, or the fact that a genie who had been trapped in a met
eorite for thirteen million light years knew how to use a computer.

  “It sounds to me like you’re just jealous of Santa Claus and all his success,” Ella said.

  “Me? Jealous of that fat slob?” Bob snorted. “No way.”

  “May I say something?” asked Mrs. Walters. “This is all very interesting and we are sympathetic. But Mr. Bob here has given us a strict one-hour deadline to come up with a wish. I’m beginning to think he’s just stalling for time to avoid granting it. So I propose we get back on task and talk about Mr. Bob’s relationship with Santa Claus another day. And I hope you kids will wish for something that doesn’t involve candy, trucks, giant bowls, or swimming pools.”

  She picked out the next index card.

  WISH #4:

  I WISH I COULD LIVE TO BE 100 YEARS OLD.

  Huh! When I was trying to decide on my wish, I pretty much just made a list of stuff I wanted to have. It never occurred to me to wish for something else. Something you couldn’t hold in your hand.

  “That one was mine,” said Ava in the front row.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” William said.

  “Why?” said Ava defensively.

  “Lots of people already live to be a hundred years old,” William said.

  “My great-grandmother is a hundred and two,” said Isabella. “And she still takes exercise classes twice a week.”

  “See? That proves my point,” said William. “Why wish for something that you might get anyway? You’re wasting the wish.”

  “Okay,” Ava said, “then what if I wish to live two hundred years?”

  “Well, that’s a different story,” Mrs. Walters said. “Nobody ever lived to be two hundred years old.”

  “It would be cool to do something nobody ever did in history,” said David.

  “Living two hundred years is an even dumber wish than wanting to live to be one hundred,” William said. “If you live to be two hundred, you’re going to be old for more than a hundred years.”

  “Some old people are healthy and happy,” said Sophia.

  “Yeah, and some are lying in a bed with no bladder or bowel control,” said William. “You want to wish for a hundred years of that?”

  “Okay, how about we wish to be young and healthy forever?” Ava said. “Or to live forever.”

  “Aha!” said Genie Bob. “The fountain of youth! An eternal quest. Peter Pan syndrome. Never grow up.”

  “I don’t want to be young forever,” Mia said.

  “Why not?” Ava asked.

  “You want to go to school for the rest of your life?” Mia replied.

  Hmmm. I’d have to think that over.

  “If we stay kids forever, we won’t get our driver’s licenses,” Mia said. “We’ll never vote. We’ll never go to college, or move out of our parents’ house. We’ll never get married or have kids of our own. We’ll never be in charge of anything.”

  “Yeah, but we’ll never die of old age, either,” Abigail said. “We’ll never get gray and wrinkly and senile.”

  “My dad has hair growing out of his ears and nose,” said Alyssa. “It’s gross.”

  “My dad has to go to the bathroom, like, every fifteen minutes,” Olivia said.

  “See!” said Andrew. “Being young forever will be great! We’ll never have to get a job and work for a living. We’ll never have some mean boss tell us what to do. We’ll always be taken care of.”

  “Oh, yeah? By who?” Mia asked. “Your parents aren’t going to be around forever.”

  “Oh, just forget about it,” Ava said. “But if you ask me, it would be a whole lot better to live forever than it would be to have something silly, like a lot of money or candy.”

  “I agree,” Mrs. Walters said as she pulled the next index card out of the bowl.

  WISH #5:

  I WISH THE BEATLES WOULD GET BACK TOGETHER.

  “Mine!” shouted Anthony.

  “What?” Christopher asked. “You mean those disgusting bugs?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Anthony asked. “You really don’t know who the Beatles were? They were only the best rock and roll group in history.”

  “Never heard of ’em,” said Christopher.

  “My dad gave me a bunch of his old Beatles albums and I listened to them,” Anthony said.

  “They were great. But the Beatles broke up a long time ago.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ella said. “Aren’t some of those guys dead?”

  “Yeah,” Anthony said. “To fulfill my wish, they would have to come back to life. Can you do that, Genie Bob?”

  “Piece of cake,” Bob replied.

  “That’s creepy, bringing dead people back to life,” said Sophia. “It seems immoral, or illegal, or something. It sounds like human cloning.”

  “But if we brought the Beatles back to life,” Anthony said, “they would make more great music.”

  “How do you know?” Mia asked. “Maybe their new music would be terrible. They made all their records when they were young. If they made music now, it would be boring old dead-guy music.”

  “If we’re going to bring somebody back from the dead, why bring back the Beatles?” asked Elizabeth. “Why not bring back Abraham Lincoln? He was a great man.”

  “Or we could bring back Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, or Gandhi,” suggested Hannah.

  “Gandhi?” asked Christopher. “Who’s that?”

  “Some Indian dude,” Logan said.

  “If I was going to bring back somebody from the dead, I would bring back Mel Blanc,” said Alex.

  “Mel Blanc?” we all asked. “Who’s he?”

  “He was the guy who did the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, and a bunch of other Looney Tunes characters,” Alex told us. “He’s my hero.”

  “One guy did all those voices?” asked Isabella.

  “Yeah. Mel Blanc did Barney Rubble in The Flintstones too,” Alex said. “Most people don’t know that.”

  “And you want to bring that guy back from the dead instead of Abraham Lincoln?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Well, yeah,” Alex said. “Then we would have more Looney Tunes cartoons. When Mel Blanc died, all those characters died with him.”

  “You mean to tell me you can get any wish you want,” asked Hannah, “and the best you can come up with is that you want to see more cartoons?”

  “Well, I’d like to have a beach house too,” Alex said.

  “You kids are pathetic,” said Genie Bob. “I hope the rest of ya came up with better wishes.”

  “Me too,” said Mrs. Walters as she pulled out the next index card.

  WISH #6:

  I WISH KIDS HAD THE RIGHT TO VOTE.

  “That one was mine,” said Olivia, who sits behind me. “I think it is totally unfair that we can’t vote on Election Day.”

  “It’s about time somebody made a serious wish,” said Mrs. Walters.

  “Olivia’s right,” said Elizabeth. “There are something like fifty million kids in this country. We make up a big percentage of the population, and grown-ups are always saying we are the future. A lot of decisions have a big impact on us. And yet we have no say in how things are run. It’s not fair.”

  “Remember that famous slogan they used in the Revolutionary War?” Mrs. Walters asked us. “We studied it last week.”

  “Give me liberty or give me death!” yelled Anthony.

  “No, not that one,” said Mrs. Walters.

  “No taxation without representation,” said Ava, all proud of herself.

  “Yes, that one,” said Mrs. Walters.

  “Kids don’t pay taxes,” Ethan pointed out.

  “Sure we do,” Abigail said. “Every time I buy clothes or something at the mall, they add tax to the price.”

  “Well, you know, there’s a perfectly good reason why kids can’t vote,” said Hannah.

  “Why?” everybody asked.

  “We don’t know enough,” Hannah said. “Do any of you read the papers or w
atch the news on TV?”

  Elizabeth was the only one who raised her hand.

  “See?” Hannah said. “How would kids know who to vote for?”

  “Hey, not all grown-ups read the paper or watch the news,” said Ella. “There are millions of uninformed grown-ups, and they have the right to vote.”

  “Yeah,” a few kids grumbled.

  “What are they gonna do, say people can only vote if they follow the news?” asked William. “People can only vote if they’re smart?”

  “If kids were allowed to vote, you know who would be president of the United States?” asked Alex. “Miley Cyrus. Or Rihanna. Or the lead singer of some dumb boy band.”

  “I would vote for the quarterback of the Bears,” Jacob said. “He would make a great president.”

  “See what I mean?” said Alex. “It would just be a big popularity contest.”

  “That’s what elections are anyway,” Hannah said. “Popularity contests. They’re like American Idol, without the singing.”

  “I wouldn’t want to vote anyway,” said Christopher. “If we don’t vote, they can’t blame us for stuff that goes wrong.”

  “That’s not a good attitude, Christopher,” said Mrs. Walters. “Every citizen should vote.”

  “What’s the big deal about voting?” Christopher said. “My dad told me that all politicians are liars. If you want to wish for something we aren’t allowed to do, let’s wish we could drive.”

  “That would be cool,” David said.

  “If I could drive, man, I would go a hundred miles an hour in my Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder,” said Christopher. “Nobody would beat me.”

  “That’s exactly why they don’t let us drive,” Ella said. “Because kids like you would go racing, get into accidents, and kill people.”

  “I would not!” Christopher insisted.

  “You would too!” said Ella.

  “All right, settle down everyone,” Mrs. Walters said. “Let’s move on, shall we? We’re wasting valuable time.”

  WISH #7:

  I WISH FOR A CLASS OF STUDENTS WHO ARE PERFECT ANGELS AND NEVER ARGUE OR ACT DISRESPECTFULLY.

  “Hey, who made that dumb wish?” Logan asked.