by Mindy Klasky
That, and the bracelet tattoo of flames that sparked bright in the dull light of this nowhere place.
“Nice,” I said wryly. I shook my own hand, still trying to drive away the remnant tingle of my magical transportation.
She twisted a few long strands of hair around her right index finger, taking time to chomp on her gum and blow a bubble before saying, “Totally awesome, huh?” She blew me a kiss.
“You’re not quite my type,” I said.
She shrugged. “Are you ready to make your third wish?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s only been what? Twenty-four hours? Not even that!”
I expected her to be exasperated with me. Instead, she took a couple of steps away, raising her hands to curl her fingers in front of her. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that she was grasping the invisible-to-me iron gate. She closed her eyes and leaned back, breathing so deeply I thought she’d pop off one of her uniform buttons. “Can you smell that?”
“No.” I only realized after I’d answered that she’d meant the question to be rhetorical.
“Really?”
“No. I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The hyacinths are, like, totally in bloom.”
In college, I’d stage-managed a production of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. Part of the play took place in the otherworldly Hyacinth Room. I had spent three days tracking down a bottle of perfume scented like the flower so that the cast would understand the imagery of the words they were reciting. The aroma had been intense, floral, the very essence of spring.
I definitely wasn’t able to smell hyacinth here. Curiosity got the better of me, and I asked, “How many more wishers do you have to serve before you’ll be allowed in?”
Teel sighed, like every disgruntled schoolgirl who had ever faced a parent’s absolute injustice. “Two. After you.”
Wow. So close. I wondered how long her visit to the Garden would last—she’d made it clear that she wasn’t senior enough to stay there forever. But the wistful expression on her young, perfect face almost made me come up with a random third wish, just so that she could enter—for any amount of time.
Almost. But not quite.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll think about it. I really will. But I’m just not ready yet. And your dragging me here won’t make me decide any faster.”
She looked up at me through heavily mascaraed lashes. “Yeah. I was just bored.” She stretched the last word into three full syllables.
“Really?” This was the first time I’d really thought about Teel’s life outside of my presence. I suddenly remembered Susan, the woman who had apparently locked Teel in his lamp decades before. Had my genie looked for her in the here and now? Had…he tried to track her down? Or had he realized that the intervening years had severed their relationship completely? It felt too prying to ask about Susan, especially asking a girl who looked like the only person she’d want to date was on the cover of Teen People. Instead, I asked tentatively, “What do you do when you’re not with me? You don’t just stand here by the gate, looking into the Garden, do you?”
“No. That would just, like, make me feel sorry for myself.” With a perfect pout like that, she could get herself on the cover of any magazine.
“So, what? Are you walking around Minneapolis?” That might explain the boots. Not the bare skin flashing between her skirt and the leather, but the boots at least.
“Yeah.” She was slipping into typical teen communication, obviously peeved that I was asking too many questions.
“But how do you fill your time? What do you do?”
“A little of this. A little of that.” She let herself look wistfully back at the invisible gate. “Shopping malls are safest. Or, you know, libraries. Movie theaters. Since you can call me, like, anytime, to make your third wish, I need to keep from talking to other humans. It would be totally bad form to disappear in the middle of a conversation, you know?”
Bad form. That was one way to put it. She could single-handedly have dozens of people committed to insane asylums if they ranted about talking to a disappearing minor. Or whatever form she chose to take.
Teel chomped on her gum, then wheedled, “I’d totally like to wrap things up here sooner rather than later, you know? Are you sure you’re not ready for your third wish?”
I looked down at my chest. “Seriously, Teel. Do I have some sort of time limit? An expiration date?”
A sly thought flickered through her wide eyes, just a flash, followed by her biting her bottom lip. This incarnation would make a lousy poker player. Teel shook her head before rolling her eyes and sighing in teen exasperation. “Nope. I’m yours till you decide on your last wish.”
“So how long do most people take?”
“The good ones?” She smiled winningly. “A day. Two at most.”
Her attempted manipulation was so transparent that I snorted. “Too bad for you I’m not one of the good ones.”
She sighed and tugged at her uniform skirt before whining, “Can I hang out with you, then? If I’m with you, I don’t have to worry about being called away. I can talk to people and stuff.”
Stuff. My genie’s vocabulary was truly well-suited to her appearance.
Nevertheless, I felt a twinge of guilt. After all, if I could just settle on my last wish, then Teel would be on to her next wisher, that much closer to the Garden. I almost matched my genie sigh for sigh. If she wanted to hang out with me for a few days, could that really be such a big deal? “What do you mean, hang out with me? You’d stay here at the house?”
“Sure. While you’re at home. And I’ll go to work with you, when it’s time for that.”
I gritted my teeth. “It would be really hard to have you here. You won’t let me tell Maddy and Jules what’s going on, and I can’t just have a houseguest appear out of nowhere.”
Teel frowned, then reached up and tugged her earlobe decisively, twice. A ripple of nothingness stirred through the indeterminate air, as if a stream of not-quite-light was weaving into all the other not-quite-light around me. When I blinked, there was a man standing by my side.
He looked like the proverbial pencil-necked geek, with a generous overbite and ears too large for his head. He wore a white short-sleeved dress shirt, with an actual pocket protector. His brown Dockers were about two inches too short, and his white athletic socks almost blinded me where they flashed above his black lace-up shoes. Even the flame tattoo looked geeky on this guy, as if he’d gotten it years ago, the one time he’d gotten drunk on a debate team trip, pounding back froufrou drinks with umbrellas in them.
“I could be your boyfriend,” he said, his voice cracking on the last word. “Someone you just met, that you’ve fallen head over heels for.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, wondering what Teel saw in me that led him to become Nerd Guy, instead of some muscle-bound superhero. I shook my head. “That’s not going to work, either. I haven’t been on a date in more than a year. They’d never believe that I’d fallen so hard for you—er, for anyone. Not without talking to them about it along the way. Not without sharing some details.”
He scowled and pushed his taped Buddy Holly glasses back up the bridge of his nose. His annoyance combined with his overbite to make him look like a math-genius beaver who had just calculated the water-to-tree-trunk ratio of his latest dam and found the measurement wanting. “Fine. Be that way.” Before I could reconsider, he said, “Can we compromise? I’ll stay out of your hair while you’re at home. But you’ll let me go to work with you, at the theater?”
I heard the longing in his voice, almost as strong as when he spoke about the Garden. I heard the desire to be part of something, to do something, to be rescued from the infinite boredom of avoiding human beings. I thought of Teel tagging along at rehearsal, though, lurking behind me every waking minute. Posing as my boyfriend, the King of Geeks. That was the last thing I wanted Stephanie Michaelson to see, to pass on to TEWSBU. T
he last thing I wanted Drew Myers to see, as well.
“You can come,” I said grudgingly. “But not like this. Not as my boyfriend.”
“As what, then?”
I racked my brain, trying to figure out something noncontroversial, something that wouldn’t embarrass me, no matter how Teel played with the form. “A college student,” I decided. “A theater major. I’ll convince Bill that you need to shadow me for a couple of weeks for a class. An internship, I’ll say. For TH 1322. That’s a theater arts class called Creating the Performance.”
I wasn’t certain that I could sell the notion to Bill. Not if it meant having a stranger sit in on rehearsals, watching the delicate bonds that were building between the actors. If that stranger, though, could contribute to the production…If that stranger could help further Bill’s crazy gender-bent conceit…“Show up as a woman!” I said. “Someone who can tell Drew Myers how a lovelorn thirteen-year-old girl thinks.” Someone whose breasts were a little more conversational than my own, I thought, but did not say.
“You want me to be a teenager?”
I thought of the little vamp who had just been standing there in nothing space with me. Then I imagined the questions Bill was likely to ask, the directions he would push our star little witness. The last thing we needed was for someone to report the show to the police, citing corruption of a minor. “No,” I said, making my voice firm. “You’ve definitely got to be legal. Just make it so that you remind them of Juliet. Can you do that? Do you know the play?”
The smile on Geek-boy’s face was a little predatory. A lot creepy. “Yeah,” he said. “I can do Juliet.”
“Good.” I tried to believe that this was an excellent idea. At least my breasts would never have to speak up at rehearsal, ever again.
As things turned out, Teel could have hung out around the house as my geek boyfriend, my lesbian lover, or my vacationing Aunt Minerva—Maddy and Jules would never have known. It was nearly two weeks before I saw either of them in person.
During that time, Maddy left a number of messages on the white board, all in pidgin German. From that, I concluded that her romance with Herr Wunderbar continued to flourish. If past experience proved an accurate predictor, the relationship had no more than a few days left before Maddy showed her dreamboat to the door. I hoped he was having as good a time as Maddy seemed to be.
Jules’s trip to Santa Barbara was followed by a week of heavy work reprising her role as Stubborn Defendant for a new training video. This one was called So You Lost at Trial, Here’s Your Appeal! I gathered that Jules was spending a lot of time stomping around in high heels, telling her “lawyers” all the mistakes they’d made when they didn’t follow the instructions from earlier videos.
Rehearsals sucked up almost every waking hour for me. I left the house before nine every morning, and I was lucky if I got home before nine at night. Bill had a million problems for me to solve, a thousand new details were introduced every day. I was learning more than I ever thought I could, but I tumbled into bed, exhausted, every night.
As if the theater weren’t enough to keep me busy, Teel pulled me into the nowhere space of the Garden every three days, like clockwork. My genie stared wistfully at the invisible iron gate, sighing about amazing floral scents that I could never detect. Teel adopted a different persona for each of those jaunts—one visit he looked like the classic genie-in-a-lamp with flowing Arabian pants and a turban; the next visit she became a spinster schoolmarm from the 1800s. Our trips to nowheresville got shorter and shorter—I still had absolutely no idea what I wanted to wish for, and I was disinclined to stand in nothingness while Teel wheedled.
After one particularly frustrating visit—Teel had adopted a beekeeper’s suit, complete with a heavily veiled hat, so that I couldn’t see his face as he berated me for my indecision—my housemates and I found a Thursday night to stay home together and order in from Hunan Delight. Outside, it was snowing lightly, and we’d made a big pot of oolong tea while we waited for our food. Jules had a set of porcelain teacups, white and handle-less, just like the ones in restaurants. The tea had nowhere near the caffeine content of the coffee that I regularly pumped into my veins, but it was hot, which was a substantial virtue.
I ran downstairs to pay off the driver. We’d placed the order early enough that the Swensons didn’t get involved; even if their doorbell had been rung by mistake, they didn’t get nasty until after nine o’clock.
Upstairs, I left my muffler looped around my neck, still too cold to take it off. Jules was flipping Scrabble tiles over in the top of the box while Maddy unpacked the order.
“Hot and sour soup,” she said. “Eight Treasures Chicken. Here’s your winter melon soup, Jules. And what is Dragon and Phoenix?”
“Shrimp and chicken, with vegetables, in a spicy sauce.” Jules made it sound as common as pork fried rice.
“Did they leave my Hunan sauce on the side?” I asked.
“Yep,” Maddy confirmed. “I can’t believe you didn’t order soup. And steamed vegetables? I don’t think you’ve ever had steamed vegetables in all the time we’ve been ordering from Hunan Delight.”
I laughed. “So you think that I should just get the same thing, every single visit?”
“Hey, I happen to enjoy Eight Treasures Chicken!”
“And I happen to enjoy steamed vegetables,” I said.
Jules and Maddy exchanged A Look. Apparently, Jules was elected spokesperson. “Kira, Maddy and I have both noticed how you’ve lost weight. We hadn’t even realized how hard you were trying. These past two weeks must have really made a difference—we can really see it in your face.”
I felt a twinge of guilt. Dieters all across America would kill for a single wish from Teel. I brushed my flame-tattooed fingertips firmly enough that I felt the tingle up to my shoulder.
Sure, my new body had embarrassed me on its first public outing. But maybe it was time to grab the proverbial bull by the horns. Time to buy new clothes—at least a new bra, so that I could wear my old clothes without spilling out of them. No matter how crazy my schedule was, I had to be able to find a few hours for shopping. Right?
For now, though, I needed to create a distraction. “You know how it is. Sometimes a diet just clicks, and it’s easy to follow. For a while, anyway. Until there’s a pepperoni pizza on the table.” We all laughed together, and then I edged the conversation away from me. “So,” I said to Maddy. “How’s the show? Did you finally make it bright enough and happy enough?”
“Oh, yeah. Just bright enough that the entire audience could see the curtain jam opening night. And they got a great view of the lid on the wishing well getting stuck. But it was all worthwhile when Bo-Peep totally lost it during curtain call. Her robotic sheep went right off the magnetic track and plunged into the audience. The kids got quite an education—they learned all sorts of new vocabulary words.”
Jules made a face. We’d all seen our share of disastrous opening nights. She asked me, “Speaking of an education, how are Transgendered R & J getting along?”
“As well as can be expected,” I said. “We’ve already gone through three boxes of Hefty bags, though.”
“Hefty bags?” Maddy looked at me like I was nuts.
I nodded. “Bill’s trying to turn everything upside down in the show. Our fair Verona all takes place in the sewers. Bill wants the actors to think about slippery stuff, about slime beneath the city streets.”
“Sounds really appetizing,” Jules said, making a face. She pushed her spoon around in her soup.
I hurried on. “He wants everyone wearing a Hefty bag at each rehearsal. He says it’ll help them keep in mind the ‘oppressive nature of the streets.’ I say it makes them all a bit, um, ripe by the end of a hard day’s work.”
“Eww,” Jules said, bravely spooning up another dose of winter melon. I thought that the white broth looked disgusting, but I didn’t say anything. I’d already done enough damage to everyone’s appetite.
“Let’s ju
st say that some of them can carry it off better than others.” I smiled wickedly, thinking of Stephanie Michaelson trying to preserve Mercutio’s wit, her hair plastered to her head after an afternoon of swaggering around in a trash bag. If only TEWSBU could drop by rehearsal then…. Not that I actually wanted TEWSBU anywhere near our play. I forced my thoughts away from my ex. “Drew makes the whole thing seem almost normal.”
“Dreeeeeew,” Maddy said, drawing out his name. “Do tell!”
I blushed. I hadn’t made my comment offhand enough. “There isn’t anything to tell. He’s just a really good actor.”
Jules shared a sly glance with Maddy as she pounced on my words with all the bare-clawed determination of a starving panther. “I know that tone of voice! Really good actor. Right! Like you can tell that, with him reading all of Juliet’s lines.”
“He can read Juliet’s lines,” I protested. “That’s the thing. When he says them, they actually make sense!” I heard the vehemence in my voice and I hurried to explain myself. “I know it sounds like I’m a little brainwashed, but I really think that Bill was onto something when he did the casting. When a guy says, ‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name,’ it doesn’t sound like a whiny little girl, daring her boyfriend to prove his love. A guy makes it sound brave. Defiant. Like a statement of belief.”
Maddy sniffed. “That’s just because we’re preconditioned to think of girls as whiny and moonstruck, and to believe that boys are brave and serious.”
“Exactly!” I said. “That’s my point. That’s Bill’s point.”
“And Drew?” Jules teased. “Is that his point, too?”
I decided that it was time to move on from soup to main dishes. Instead of replying to Jules’s taunt, I scooped my dinner from the red take-out container onto my plate. Jules and Maddy both looked at my vegetables suspiciously, but I was truly pleased by the bright green of the pea pods, the soft yellow of the baby corn. I dipped the tines of my fork into my Hunan sauce and speared a bite of perfectly steamed carrot. “Mmm,” I said while I chewed.