Just One Wish

by Janette Rallison

  I glanced at Madison for help, but she was gazing wide-eyed at the guy and not looking at me at all.

  Since the guy was waiting for me to finish my sentence, I stammered out, “He has . . . brown eyes.”

  The guy stared at me silently, waiting for me to say more. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. Madison let out a sound that was half gasp, like I’d said the wrong thing, which annoyed me since he did have brown eyes. Unless he wore contacts in the Robin Hood series. I decided not to consider that possibility, and I went on, ignoring the whole hair question. “And he’s tall, and has this chiseled jaw—”

  Madison gasped again. I wasn’t sure why. I knew I had that part right.

  “And he’s in good shape. He has, um, really nice arm muscles, and—”

  “Blond or brown hair?” the guy asked me.

  I glanced at Madison again. She was still staring at the guy, her mouth half open like she was going to say something, but she didn’t. I decided to guess. It looked so good blond; it must be his natural color. “Blond,” I said.

  He shrugged and gave me a conciliatory smile. “Sorry, you failed the huge-fan test. It’s actually brown.” He pushed past us before I could protest or think of anything else to say.

  I watched him go, with a “But . . .” hovering on my lips. Before he’d gotten more than a few steps away, the security guard approached us. He grunted at Madison and me, then turned his gaze to the guy.

  “I hope these girls aren’t bothering you, Mr. Raleigh.”

  The guy sent us another smile—the same arrogant smirk, I now realized, I’d seen time and time again on Teen Robin Hood. “No, we were just talking. They’re huge fans of mine.”

  And with a very Robin-Hood-like nod in our direction, he disappeared into the elevator.

  Chapter 5

  Madison lay on one of the beds in our motel room, and I lay on the other. I had suggested sleeping in the van because we’d already spent most of our cash, but Madison had brought her parents’ credit card with her. They gave it to her to use in emergencies, and she figured having to sleep in a van in a parking lot in California constituted an emergency. By the time her parents noticed the charge, we’d be home to explain it.

  Still, we’d gone to the cheapest motel in LA we could find. The walls were dirty, the carpet was matted, and the sheets were so worn and thin you could have used them for tracing paper.

  It was late, but I couldn’t bring myself to get in my pajamas or brush my teeth. I lay there fully dressed staring at the ceiling. I wished I could have a good, long crying jag, but for some reason I can’t cry.

  My mom cries. She cries a lot now. You can say something perfectly normal like “Have you seen my math homework?” and she will burst into tears and rush into her room. It is no use trying to comfort her. She has to get it out of her system before she can emerge and be upbeat again.

  Leah is an expert at crying. I have seen her weep when Mom and Dad yelled at her, and then stop as soon as they left the room. And I’m not talking about whining, which anyone can do, I’m talking actual tears dripping down her cheeks.

  As kids, whenever we got into fights and my parents heard her sobbing side of the story and then my clear-eyed one, I always got into trouble. So I definitely see the benefit of crying. It’s just when something goes wrong in my life and I’m overwhelmed by frustration, there is a moment where I teeter between anger and tears. I can feel it, but somehow my emotions always slide toward anger.

  I didn’t really want to cry as I lay there thinking about my meeting with Steve Raleigh. I wanted to scream, loudly and repeatedly. But I couldn’t. That’s a thing about our society; we totally understand when a person breaks down and cries, but if the same person were to scream at the top of her lungs in a motel room, it is fairly certain the other guests would flee from the building and the hotel manager would call the police.

  “If you thought it was him,” I said to Madison for the third time, “why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you stop me?”

  For the third time, she answered me patiently. She sat on the edge of her bed coating her legs with lotion and hardly looked at me. “Because I wasn’t sure, and wouldn’t we have looked even stupider if halfway through his quiz I’d said, ‘Hey, aren’t you Steve Raleigh?’ and it turned out it wasn’t him? Besides,” she added more quietly, “when I realized it might be him, I lost all ability to actually speak.”

  I spread my fingers against the stale bedspread. Instead of being soft, it felt vaguely like wax paper. “Well, I’d rather look stupid in front of a guy who turned out not to be Steve Raleigh than one who turned out to be him.”

  She finished up her legs and began spreading lotion on her arms. “I still can’t believe it was him. Steve Raleigh. Standing right in front of us. He spoke to us.”

  “Yeah. And we made fools of ourselves.” I winced as I said this. It hurt to remember it.

  “Yeah, but we made fools of ourselves in front of Steve Raleigh,” she said dreamily. “I didn’t think he’d be so good-looking in real life, did you?”

  “I obviously didn’t give a lot of thought to what he looked like in real life, or I would have recognized him—but you, Madison, you saw all those pictures of him on the internet, why didn’t you say something?”

  She set the lotion bottle down with a thud, and her voice took on a sharp edge. “Yeah, because that way he would have given you his pass so you could go up to the box—where he clearly wasn’t. We were doomed as soon as you talked to him without knowing who he was.”

  She was right. I should have recognized him. Hair color, hat, and glasses aside, I’d seen him enough times as Robin Hood that I should have known who he was. But one doesn’t expect to see celebrities, unannounced and wearing normal clothes—suddenly there—in the ordinary world. Besides, I’d been concentrating so hard on getting a pass, I’d been so busy figuring out the next step of my plan, my mind just hadn’t processed what it should have.

  I pulled myself over to the side of the bed and put my hand to my temple. “I’m sorry, Madison. I know it was my fault, not yours. I should have known it was him, and I should have made it clear it was my little brother who was the huge fan.”

  Silence filled the room, and I wasn’t sure if Madison accepted my olive branch or not. After a moment, she turned so she could see me better and her voice softened. “Even if you had, it might not have turned out differently. He didn’t seem all that interested in doing anybody any favors.” She pulled back the covers and slid under them. “At least we can say we tried. Think of it this way, you’ll have a really funny story to tell your brother about how we met Steve Raleigh.”

  Only Jeremy wouldn’t think it was funny. I couldn’t go home and tell him I’d lied about everything and there wasn’t really a genie to help him make it through surgery. I just couldn’t.

  I turned over on my back and stared at the ceiling again. “I’ve got to try one more time to see him. We’ll go to the set tomorrow and try to talk to him there.”

  Doubt flashed across Madison’s face. “Annika, it was a miracle we saw him tonight. How are we going to get into the set?”

  How, yes. It was time to decide on that. I thought back to the website about all the lingo TV people used, letting it stream through my mind. It seemed they had a different name for everything. They didn’t even call caterers caterers. They were food craft. But they probably all wore some sort of uniform. Who had access to the place that wouldn’t be in uniform? And then I thought of it.

  “We’ll have to find a pet store before we drive to the set,” I told Madison. “We’ll be animal wranglers. That will get us past the security guards. Once we’re on the set, we’ll—”

  “If Steve Raleigh didn’t want to help us tonight,” Madison said, breaking into my thoughts, “what makes you think he’d want to help us tomorrow?”

  “We never got a chance to explain anything to him. If I could talk to him, I could convince him to visit Jeremy. Besides,” I proppe
d myself up on my elbows, “we were wearing food service uniforms and our hair was shoved into hairnets. I’d be willing to bet he won’t be any better at recognizing us than we were at recognizing him.” I held up a strand of my long blond hair. “How do you think I’d look as a brunette?”

  Madison held up her hands in protest. “Oh, no—I’m not dyeing my hair. Don’t even ask.”

  “You can change it back afterward,” I said. “Let’s go to the store right now. Do you want to be a brunette, platinum blond—or you could try jet black.”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere tonight but across the room to turn off the light.”

  I conceded that part to her. The nice thing about Madison is that as long as I let her win some of the battles, she lets me win the war. I changed into my pajamas, climbed into bed, and tried to go over all of the details in my mind so I’d be prepared for anything tomorrow.

  After a few hours of listening to the room’s heater turn on and off, I eventually fell asleep. My mind returned to my neighborhood: to rows of pale stucco houses, to cactus and palm trees, to little oasis circles of grass growing among sun-bleached rock yards, to all things average, familiar, and comforting. I was in my living room now, its usual clutter surrounding me, lulling me with a feeling of security.

  And then I looked out the window and saw the Grim Reaper.

  He walked down our road, turning his long, hooded head from one house to the other, searching. He seemed to glide effortlessly, and yet each footstep hit the pavement with the sound of cracking ice. Fear exploded in my chest, and I yelled for Jeremy to hide. I ran outside, locking the door behind me. I couldn’t find a weapon and didn’t have time to go back inside for my bow and arrows, so I picked up a shovel. I walked toward the robed figure, holding the shovel out in front of me with shaking hands.

  “Pass by our house,” I told him. “I won’t let you come in.”

  He stopped and leaned on his scythe, long insectlike fingers clutching it for support. I couldn’t see his face, just a black opening under his hood, but I could tell he was considering me. Then, his dark face turned from mine and gazed past me to our house. He straightened up as though about to walk in that direction.

  “Take me instead,” I said. My voice was no more than a gasped whisper, but I knew he’d heard me.

  He shook his head slowly, and when he spoke, his voice, hollow and grating, left the air around me cold. “Do you think I deal in years or decades? You’ll be with me soon enough. I don’t need to make bargains with your kind.”

  He moved as if to go on, but before he could pass me, I swung my shovel and knocked the scythe out of his hand. It tumbled to the street with the rattle of endless chains.

  I went to grab it, but it jumped away from me and flew back into the hands of its master.

  “You haven’t the power to defeat me,” he said.

  “Then I’ll delay you.”

  But I couldn’t. He walked right through me and then was beyond me, gliding toward my house.

  My heart pounded so hard it seemed to catapult from one side of my chest to the other. “No!” I yelled.

  The Grim Reaper disappeared, and I found myself sitting up in the motel bed.

  Madison clumsily reached for the light between us. “What’s wrong?”

  I put my hand over my eyes to shield my face from the light. “Nothing. What time is it?”

  “It’s three-thirty. Did you have a nightmare?”

  I blinked, trying to locate my cell phone among the scattered contents on the nightstand. The frustration made my hands feel clumsy. Even though the light was on, even though I knew it had only been a dream, the feeling of panic hadn’t left me. “I think I should call home to see if Jeremy is okay.”

  “At three-thirty in the morning?”

  “I just . . . I think I should check to make sure all the doors are locked.”

  She rubbed one hand over her eyes. “Annika, you want to wake up everyone in your family to ask about the doors? Who are you afraid is going to break in?”

  I couldn’t find my cell phone on the nightstand, and I picked up my purse to check there. My voice came out too fast. “Anyone. The Grim Reaper, maybe. You should just always make sure your doors are locked.”

  She looked at me silently, her eyes trying to adjust to both the light and my logic. She could have said the obvious, which was “Are you insane?” or something a little less obvious but still to the point, like “I don’t think the Grim Reaper uses the front door. He goes down the chimney like Santa Claus.”

  Instead she said “Oh, Annika,” climbed out of bed, and walked to the dresser. She sifted through its contents until she retrieved my cell phone, then came back and handed it to me. “Call if it will make you feel better.”

  I looked at the phone in my hand, but put it on the nightstand. “I can’t call. They’d tell me to come home, and I’m four hours away. I’ll call him in the morning.”

  She nodded and climbed back into her bed. “He’s going to be all right.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She turned off the light, and I reached over and took my cell phone from the nightstand. I laid it against my cheek on my pillow and shut my eyes, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep.

  In the morning, we ate most of our stock of food, then drove to a drugstore for hair dye. Madison didn’t say anything about our conversation from the middle of the night. She didn’t even comment when I called Jeremy before school and told him a story about a sister who loved her little brother so much she went to the underworld to retrieve him. Usually I tell Jeremy stories about a heroic little boy, but today I needed the sister to be the hero.

  “It’s supposed to be about a mother and a daughter,” Jeremy told me. “You know, Persephone.”

  Jeremy always says her name Purse-n-phone, probably because that’s the way my dad first pronounced it when he read the story to him. No amount of my insisting that it’s pronounced Per-se-fon-ee has made a dent in either Dad’s or Jeremy’s pronunciation. I became eternally grateful when Jeremy stopped idolizing Hercules and we no longer had to listen to Dad’s butchered versions of Greek and Roman names.

  “This is a different story,” I told Jeremy. “In this one, a sister and brother were out playing catch by their house. They lived by a cliff and their parents had told them not to play near the edge, but on this day they didn’t listen.”

  “What’s the sister’s name?” he asked.

  “What do you want her to be named?”

  “Annie,” he said. “And the brother’s name is Jeremy.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to use his name for this story, as if even connecting his name with the underworld would endanger him.

  He didn’t wait for me to come up with a logical reason to protest this decision, though. “So Jeremy and Annie were out playing,” he prompted. “And then what happened?”

  “Well, the little brother ran to catch the ball, and he fell off the edge of the cliff all the way down to the underworld. In fact, when Hades first found him, Jeremy was trying to retrieve the ball from Cerberus, the three-headed dog. You know how dogs are. They love to play catch. One head had the ball, and the other two heads wouldn’t stop licking Jeremy’s face.”

  Jeremy laughed but didn’t comment, so I went on. “Jeremy’s family missed him in the worst way, so Annie decided she had to go after him and bring him back.”

  “How did she get to the underworld?” Jeremy asked.

  “She cried so hard her tears formed a river, and tears of grief always run into the river Styx. She simply followed their trail there. Well, of course, Hades didn’t want to let Jeremy go. Hades has a no-leaving policy when it comes to the underworld. But Annie walked right up to Hades and explained that she had to take Jeremy with her.”

  “What did Hades say?”

  In my mind I tried to picture the cartoon character of Hades from Disney’s Hercules movie. I meant to answer in his voice, complete w
ith New York accent. But I couldn’t picture him. I saw only the Grim Reaper from my dream, with his empty, dark face. I saw him so clearly it made me catch my breath, and a wave of anxiety swept over me. He stood on the highest precipice in an endless cavern of gray, one never pierced by sunlight.

  Since I didn’t answer, Jeremy went on. “Did Hades fall in love with Annie because she was so beautiful?”

  “No, the Grim Reaper has no heart, so he doesn’t care how beautiful a girl is.”

  “The Grim Reaper?” Jeremy repeated. “I thought it was Hades.”

  “The Grim Reaper is just another one of his names,” I said.

  “So how did Annie rescue her brother?”

  I had meant to tell him she cut off all her hair, wove it into a rope, and used her bow and arrow to shoot the rope of hair to the edge of the underworld. Then they both climbed up together. But the vision of the gray cavern was too strong in my mind. I could still see it, and there was no edge.

  “She cut off all of her hair,” I said.

  The Grim Reaper turned an icy stare in my direction. “It won’t work.”

  “And she braided it into a rope, like in the story of Rapunzel.”

  The Reaper’s hollow voice echoed toward me. “It’s impossible.”

  “Then she used her bow and arrow to shoot the rope to the very edge of the underworld.”

  I must not have sounded convincing because Jeremy let out a “nu-uh” of disbelief. “Your hair isn’t that long,” he said.

  “It grew during the walk to the underworld.”

  “Isn’t the underworld a long way down?”

  Apparently that ending wasn’t going to satisfy him. In the background, I heard my father calling Jeremy’s name.

  “I’m not finished with the story,” I said. “When the arrow flew away, she saw the rope wouldn’t be long enough. But she took Jeremy’s hand and told him they’d figure out a way to escape from the underworld together.”

  My father’s voice became louder, and I knew he stood near Jeremy. “Come on, buddy,” I heard him say. “It’s time to go.”