Wishes

by Molly Cochran

  “Peter, you know I love you,” I began.

  He wailed and fell to his knees, wrapping his arms around my legs. “And I love you!” he declared. “More than life itself.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said patiently, trying to ignore the headache that had started to throb in my temples. “The thing is, I don’t think this—this attention you’re giving me is exactly your idea.”

  “Of course it is!” he protested, looking up at me with cow eyes.

  “Let me finish. I think . . . Well, I think it might be magic.”

  “Yes! Magic! I look at you, and suddenly there’s magic everywhere!”

  “No, I mean—”

  “Our love is magic! And nothing will ever lessen it.”

  “Peter, listen to me. I’m trying to tell you something.”

  “Speak to me, my angel!”

  “Okay. Well. I think something might have happened in Mrs. Bean’s tent.”

  “What happened?” Suddenly Peter was on his feet, his hands curled into fists. “Is there someone else? Another guy?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No!” I said flatly. “There is no other guy. Just listen to me, okay? I’m telling you—”

  Peter’s cell phone rang in my back pocket. Glad to have this crazy conversation interrupted, I took it out and looked at the screen. “It’s your uncle,” I said.

  “Ignore it.”

  “Maybe you should—”

  “He means nothing to me. No one does except you, my darling, my dearest one, my—”

  I sat down on the sofa and answered it. “Hi, Mr. Shaw. It’s Peter’s friend, Katy.”

  “Put him on the phone, please.” Peter’s uncle was not a warm fuzzy guy.

  I held the phone out to Peter, but he turned away. Then he moved behind the sofa and started kissing my neck.

  “Er . . . he can’t come to the phone just now,” I said. “Can I take a message?”

  “Why can’t he come to the phone?”

  “He’s . . . er . . . indisposed,” I said as Peter breathed hot air into my ear.

  Mr. Shaw sounded cranky. But then, he usually did. “Don’t prevaricate with me, young lady. If something’s wrong with my nephew, I want to know about it.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “That is, not nothing, exactly. I mean, he can’t talk now because . . .”—an idea popped into my head—“ . . . because he’s unconscious.”

  I knew it was a mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

  “What? What happened?”

  “He, er, fell down and knocked himself out.” Oh, God, I thought. This was getting worse by the second. “But he’s all right. Really.” I tried to sound reassuring. “In fact, I think he’s coming to.”

  “Then put him on the damn phone,” Uncle Jeremiah said.

  “Um . . .” I looked pleadingly to Peter. That is, I tried to look, but Peter was massaging my shoulders and sniffing my hair deeply. “Oops, he just slipped back into a coma,” I said.

  “A coma?”

  “No. Well, a minor one. I’m sure it’s very minor.”

  Mr. Shaw hung up.

  “Peter, stop that.” I turned to face him, and he kissed me on my lips, lovingly. I felt myself melting as he sat down on the sofa beside me and put his arms around me.

  “That’s more like it,” he whispered.

  A part of me wanted to go on like that, devoured by Peter’s beautiful gray eyes filled with longing and love for me. But this wasn’t how I wanted it to happen. “I’m trying to tell you that this isn’t real,” I said. I was serious, but my voice was all breathy, so I didn’t sound very convincing. “Maybe Mrs. Bean—”

  “Shh.” He put his finger over my lips and then homed in with his mouth, kissing me softly. I tried to speak again, but all that came out was a low moan.

  “Katy,” he whispered as he stretched out on the sofa and pulled me on top of him.

  “Yes,” I whispered back. There was no use fighting this. Magic or no magic, I could no longer resist. “Yes, yes . . .”

  “No!” Aunt Agnes’s voice rang out, loud enough to stop a locomotive.

  Peter and I were both so startled that our teeth clicked together.

  My aunt, the teleporter, had suddenly appeared beside us with her hands on her hips. Hattie Scott was with her. They both looked really angry.

  “I see you’ve recovered from your coma,” Hattie said, her eyes bulging with indignation.

  Peter sat up, causing me to roll off him unceremoniously onto the floor, and cleared his throat. “Uh . . . beg your pardon?” he inquired politely.

  “Old man Shaw called me,” Hattie said while Aunt Agnes skewered me with her eyes. “He said some crazy girl named Katy told him you’d knocked yourself unconscious.”

  “Er, well . . . ,” I began.

  “Is any of that true?” Agnes asked. “Any part of it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then you’d better come with me,” Hattie said, grabbing Peter’s arm.

  “But I can’t leave Katy,” Peter said with utter seriousness. “I love her.”

  “You hush up,” Hattie said.

  Agnes pointed at me. “I’ll deal with you later,” she said before they all disappeared.

  8.

  The house was suddenly so quiet I could almost imagine crickets chirping. Now that I’d come back to my senses, I tried to figure out what was going on.

  Mrs. Bean had asked me to make a wish, I knew that much. I remembered the sign in her tent at the Beltane fair that said WISHES $2. But Mrs. Bean wasn’t a real fortune-teller. Even if she were, fortune-tellers didn’t grant wishes. Only fairies did.

  I gasped at the realization.

  Your wish will come true.

  “Oh, my God,” I said out loud. It hadn’t been Mrs. Bean at all. It was the glowing box I’d found in the woods. That had been the fairy’s treasure—to make my wish come true. I just hadn’t made the wish until I was in Mrs. Bean’s tent.

  I ran upstairs to my room and practically wrecked the place trying to find the box before remembering that I’d never taken it out of my jacket pocket. Gently I removed the tiny alabaster lid. Inside lay the fortune-cookie strip of paper that had predicted that my wish would come true.

  Well, it had, that was for sure. I’d wished that Peter would pay attention to me, and he’d turned into a sex-crazed pest. I took out the paper and examined it, just to make sure there weren’t any loopholes, like maybe an expiration date. It would be nice if my wish were only good for twenty-four hours.

  To my dismay, the writing had faded. I held it up to the light and squinted. Then I read it again. And again.

  It wasn’t the same message.

  This one read 122 Snyder Avenue.

  An address? But I’d been sure about the message. So sure . . .

  No. I was still sure. Before, the fortune had said my wish would come true. I couldn’t have been mistaken. Besides, it had worked!

  So why had it changed? And where was Snyder Avenue?

  I decided to find out. Fortunately, I still had Peter’s state-of-the-art cell phone with a GPS that was better than mine, along with a lot of other features. The trip to Snyder Avenue would be tedious, but not really difficult, involving little more than a long bus ride into the cowen sector of Whitfield.

  As I walked to the bus stop, I spotted Muffies—my term for the rich cowen boarding-school types who made up half the population of Ainsworth School—hanging around outside Yummy Yogurt. Actually, these particular girls were pretty much über-Muffies, queen bees who would have ruled at any school. There was Suzy Dusset, born with a mean streak a mile wide and enough family money to wield it like a club; A.J. Nakamura, a ninety-five-pound Japanese American princess; Tiffany Rothstein who, with her mane of dyed blond hair and her D-cup pushup bra, could pass for on
e of the Real Housewives of Tackytown; and my old nemesis, Summer Hayworth. I’d helped Summer out of a jam a few months ago, but since she possessed the IQ of a goldfish, I doubted that she would remember. As usual, I walked past them with my head down, hoping to be invisible to them.

  I think I succeeded, because they were obviously talking about Peter Shaw (who everyone knew was my boyfriend) as if he were the prize in some competition.

  “My mother saw him coming out of the Shaw Building in New York,” Suzy Dusset said.

  “With the old man?” Tiffany asked. Suzy nodded tellingly.

  “I thought he was disowned or something,” A.J. said.

  “I guess he’s back in the will, then,” Summer surmised.

  “Mother thinks he’s being groomed to take over the company.”

  A.J. yawned. “Really?”

  “Yes. And the girl who marries him is going to be the envy of New York society.”

  Tiffany laughed. “Katy Ainsworth? Are you kidding?”

  A.J. joined her. “What’s she going to do, read to him?”

  Oh, right, I thought. For these girls, reading was about as useful an activity as alligator wrestling.

  “It’s not what she does,” Suzy expounded. “It’s what she is. Or rather, isn’t.”

  “I’m lost,” A.J. said, who was not known for her incisive intellect. “What is—or isn’t—she?”

  “She isn’t cool,” Suzy said.

  “No lie,” Tiffany agreed. “Her eyes are weird. They change color.”

  “I heard she was a psychic or something,” A.J. added.

  “Nobody even knows her,” Suzy said. “Peter needs someone who’ll be an asset to him, not some nerdy little nothing.”

  “Well, he’s not going to stay with her,” Tiffany said. “When the time comes, he’ll choose someone who’s right for—”

  That’s when they noticed me, with my cheeks flaming red and tears standing in my eyes. I wanted to hit them, to call down boulders from the sky to smash them into paste, to lash them with my superior intelligence and rapier wit. But I just ducked my head and kept walking.

  As I fled from them, I heard them whispering. And Suzy Dusset was laughing out loud.

  I tried to forget about what happened and focus on my mission to find out what awaited me on Snyder Avenue, but the Muffies’ words stung me like arrows in my heart. They didn’t think I deserved Peter because I wasn’t important enough to be with him.

  And I guess I wasn’t. All my life I’d wondered what it would be like to be . . . well, somebody. Someone people looked up to. Someone people wanted to be with, and wanted to be.

  No one had ever wanted to be me, to have my life instead of their own, while I could think of a whole raft of people I’d rather be. Taylor Swift. Selena Gomez. Lady Gaga. Kristen Stewart. Mia Hamm. Venus Williams. The list went on and on. Girls who were wanted. Girls who belonged.

  When the time comes, he’ll chose someone who’s right . . .

  The bus stopped on Snyder. I could barely see to get off.

  A block later, Peter’s GPS led me to what looked like an abandoned building. Its windows were boarded up with plywood, and the exterior brick was covered with spray-painted graffiti.

  “This can’t be it,” I said out loud, but there it was, right above the doorway: the number 122.

  After blowing my nose and squaring my shoulders, I climbed the six crumbling steps of the stoop and tried the door. It opened with a creak.

  I cast a glance toward the street, wondering if I was breaking the law by entering the building. Then I thought, Get real, Katy. If I could get in so easily, so could a lot of undesirable people. It was probably a crack house. My hand hesitated over the doorknob.

  Don’t be paranoid, I told myself. It was still daylight. Even if it were a crack house, the inhabitants probably weren’t going to murder me in cold blood in the middle of the afternoon. At most, I figured, they’d steal Peter’s cell phone, which he didn’t want anyway.

  Taking a deep breath, I walked in.

  The place was beyond creepy. The boarded windows kept out all sunlight except for what streamed through knotholes and cracks in the plywood covering the broken glass, so I could barely see anything, But the very walls seemed to sigh with resignation, as if the building were a living thing, old and sick and waiting to die. The only sign of warmth was a faint glow emanating from one of the upstairs rooms. I leaned against the guardrail beside the moldering staircase and craned my neck, but I couldn’t see anything except for the light, which was so faint I could almost believe it was my imagination.

  “Hello?” I called out tentatively as I mounted the stairs.

  There was no answer. With each step, the stairs creaked and the railing wobbled under my hand. I held my breath, hoping the structure wouldn’t give way beneath my weight. “Anybody here?” I squeaked once I reached the landing.

  There was definitely a light coming from one of the rooms. It flickered like the light from a TV, only there was no sound. When I looked in, I spotted someone sitting cross-legged on the floor next to a candle.

  My first impulse was to plaster myself against the wall in the hallway. Crack addict! I thought in a panic.

  “You can come in,” called a girl’s voice.

  I remained frozen against the wall, breathing hard.

  “I’ve already seen you, you know,” she said.

  I cleared my throat and stepped into the doorway. “Er . . .” I blinked. She was reading a book, Huckleberry Finn. So maybe she wasn’t using the candle to cook heroin, or whatever. Maybe she was just reading. Plus, I’d seen her before . . . recently. She’d been the Goth girl coming out of Mrs. Bean’s tent while I was going in. That had been in the Meadow, where cowen couldn’t go.

  “Are you a witch?” I whispered.

  “No,” she answered, not bothering to look up from her reading.

  “Oh.” Clearly I needed to use a different tack. “Schoolwork, huh?” I asked, trying to find some common ground between us, although I didn’t think that would be easy. She had spiky black hair, KISS-type eye makeup, black nails, emo pants, and a T-shirt that read ROADKILL.

  She closed the book with a sigh. “I don’t only read because some teacher orders me to,” she said caustically.

  “Oh. Right,” I said, shifting from one foot to the other. “That is, I read all the time, myself. Well, maybe not all the time—”

  “What do you want?”

  “Er . . .” I looked around the room. “I think I have the wrong address,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I don’t? I mean, how do you know?”

  “Because I’m the one who gave it to you.”

  “You? But I thought . . . that is, you said . . . I asked you if you were a witch, and—”

  “I’m not a witch, you dipstick.”

  “But . . .” I pulled the little box out of my pocket.

  “I’m a . . .” She grimaced. “Do I have to say the actual word?”

  “Um, you mean fairy?” I ventured.

  She shrank back as if I’d squirted her with poison gas.

  “What’s wrong with being a fairy?”

  “Nothing,” she said sarcastically. “It’s just peachy. Now, why are you here?”

  “Well, I, er . . .” I felt my eyebrows knitting together. “Hey, you called me here. Sort of, anyway. You gave me this address. You said so yourself.”

  “Okay. I wanted to tell you something.”

  I blew air out my nose. She could have called or texted me or something, instead of making me come all this way on a bus to this revolting place. “What?” I asked flatly.

  “Just that you can change your wish.”

  My mouth dropped open. “I can?”

  “In case you’ve had enough of Loverboy’s attentions.”


  “Right,” I said glumly. “That didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. By the way, what did Mrs. Bean have to do with all this?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Then why—”

  “Look, would you have come to me asking for your dearest wish to come true?”

  I guess she knew how her personality affected people. “Maybe not,” I said.

  “I could hear you through the tent.” She snickered. “God, you’re one klutzy chick.”

  I blushed and laughed along with her, despite my serious intentions.

  “And your boyfriend groping you . . .” She covered her face and shook her head.

  “So I want to change my wish, okay?” I mean, enough was enough.

  “To what?”

  “I . . . I don’t know, exactly,” I said. “I don’t even know if that’s the treasure. The wish, I mean. Or wishes. Whatever.”

  She peered at me through the flickering light of the candle in front of her. “Would you prefer it if I selected your treasure? What if I presented you with a wildebeest?”

  “A what?”

  “Or an antique model train? Or a river cruise to Latvia?”

  “Okay, I get it. My treasure, my wish.”

  “So what’ll it be?” She snapped her fingers. “Hurry up, babycakes. I haven’t got all day.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked crankily. “Look, I don’t have to take your insults. If you ask me, you’re not much of a fairy. You don’t even look like one.”

  “Oh. Sorry you’re disappointed,” she said as she transformed before my eyes into a literal fairy princess, in a long gown of gossamer, with long blond hair topped by a diamond tiara. A slender wand made of sparkling crystal appeared in her hand. “Is this more in keeping with your idea of a real fairy?” She waved the wand. “Bibbity bobbity boo!”

  I gave her a fake smile. “At least you look better,” I said.

  She turned back into Goth Girl. “To you, maybe.”

  I shrugged. “Actually, I don’t care what you look like. Or why you’re so angry—”

  “You think I’m angry?”

  I almost laughed out loud. “Everything about you is angry,” I said. “I can almost see a black cloud around you.”