Instead of Three Wishes

by Megan Whalen Turner

  After the third nightmare, Kevin was desperately happy to see the morning. He set off to the schoolyard, tired but cocksure, confident that the power he had wielded as a sixth grader in an elementary school would be waiting for him as a seventh grader in junior high. His confidence disappeared with his lunch money when kids from the high-school side of the building shook him down in the schoolyard.

  Kevin had never been in a school where students changed classes with each subject. He didn’t share a homeroom with his friends; he had no one to remind him that he was cool and tough and didn’t need to be intimidated by a complicated schedule and unfamiliar teachers. He had to bully a couple of kids out of their small change to make himself feel better and get enough money for lunch.

  Lunch should have been a pleasure. Kevin had never known a school cafeteria to sell ice-cream sandwiches. They were all he had money for, but they were all he wanted. He never saw the foot that snaked out and tripped him as he made his way to the junior-high side of the lunchroom. His lunch tray flew into the air as he stumbled to his knees. The whole lunchroom laughed. Somebody stepped on his sandwich.

  In the afternoon he got lost and ended up in the high-school side of the school, where he was chased by the same group that had taken his lunch money in the schoolyard.

  “Hey, Kevin,” they called down the hallway, “we heard you’re really tough.”

  “We heard you were the big man of the sixth grade.”

  “Big deal, Kevin.”

  They tipped his books out of his arms and left him with a scatter of papers to collect.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow, Kev. Don’t forget your lunch money.”

  By the end of the day, Kevin had forgotten there was a reason to dread going to bed.

  “Nothing,” he said to himself as he settled between the sheets, “could be worse than today.”

  The giant snakes came back. This time they crawled up to the front door and slid beneath it. They came under the back door and through the bathroom drains. They slid down the hall to Kevin’s door and bumped against the doorknob. Terrorized, Kevin buried his head under the covers. The snakes slid under his bed and came up along the walls. Kevin could feel them hunting through the rumpled blankets. When they found Kevin, they pushed their mirrors against his skin, cold and sharp and insistent. Kevin moaned. He kept his face hidden in the pillow until one very insistent poke forced him to turn over. He looked into one of the mirrors and saw a reflection of his day.

  Over and over he watched himself handing over his money to the older boys. He writhed with misery and embarrassment as his ice-cream sandwich flew through the air, and again and again he watched the sneaker stamp down on it. He heard the whole lunchroom laughing in muffled roars like the noise of an underground train.

  “Big man of the sixth grade, Kevin?” He was surrounded by high-school students, and he saw himself with their contempt and disgust. He relived every horrible scene of the day, and there was no relief. He saw himself bullying smaller kids and felt no surge of arrogance and power. Instead, he watched from their eyes, and he looked hateful and insecure. He didn’t look tough. When he was trying hardest to look tough, he only looked ridiculous.

  Mesmerized by the mirror, Kevin watched his whole day pass over and over until he had seen it from the viewpoint of every person he’d encountered and felt every person’s opinion.

  In the morning, he was exhausted. He dragged himself out of bed and made his way into the kitchen on shaking legs.

  “Mom, I don’t feel well. I don’t want to go to school today.”

  His mother laughed. “Only one day and already school makes you sick? Go get your clothes on. There’s nothing the matter with you that breakfast won’t cure.”

  The days passed. The nights passed, too, but more slowly. No matter what he did, Kevin spent each night reviewing his actions with loathing. Every night the snakes came and prodded him with their mirrors until he dragged his face out of the pillow. In miserable and unavoidable detail, he watched himself through other people’s eyes. Inevitably, anyone who noticed him did so with contempt or malicious amusement or loathing. The mildest emotion he ever registered was distaste from his science teacher. No one was ever impressed by him; no one ever admired him. No one thought him good-looking or fashionably dressed.

  Most unfair of all, he never once saw himself through the eyes of his friends. He would have protested this, he would have protested everything, but who was there to protest to? Instead, he tried to sound out his friends. He asked them about their dreams but lied about his own. Some of the other kids had had nightmares, but they didn’t sound anything like his. Of course, how was he to know? If he was lying, maybe they were, too. He began asking trick questions, hoping to catch them in a lie, but this earned him a few strange looks, and he and his friends drifted further apart. They shared no classes, not even lunch, and somehow it was easy to avoid meeting them after school. Kevin found that if he went straight home and sat in his room, those hours at least would not show up in the mirrors at night.

  Why, though, did everyone hate him so much? Why did no one ever think anything good about him? Couldn’t he at least dream about what his friends thought, just once?

  The apartment was locked the next day when he got home. His mother wouldn’t be back for hours, so Kevin left his books by the door and went to look for the gang. They were surprised to see him, but they made room for him at the top of the fence next to the play lot. They spent the afternoon together. They stole a basketball from one of the littler kids and shot baskets for a while. Then they wandered down to the vacant lot by the train tracks and smoked cigarettes that Jerry had taken from his father. The rest of the gang wanted to go to Walgreen’s to see if they could lift some candy, but Kevin backed out. He had an idea already that his dreams would be bad. He could guess what the people in Walgreen’s would think of him. He went home. He did his homework and ate dinner and went to bed.

  That night, watching himself in the mirror, he saw himself through his friends’ eyes. None of his friends liked him much. Since the first day of school, when they had watched him fork over his lunch money, they’d been embarrassed to have him around. Kevin wasn’t cool. He was a nobody. Every day the high school kids asked him for money, and every day Kevin handed it over just like all the other nobodies in the school.

  In the morning, Kevin put his clothes on and, desperately miserable, headed to school. The first bell hadn’t rung yet, and the yard was full of people talking about their boyfriends or girlfriends or future or ex boyfriends or girlfriends. Everybody was making plans for the weekend. Kevin couldn’t face his friends after the previous night’s revelations. He turned left and walked around the school to the front entrance, one that was almost never used. It was deep in a recess formed by the gymnasium wall on one side and three stories of classrooms on the other. The sunlight passed right by without stopping. The wind swirled a couple of pieces of paper and a pop can in a corner against the steps while Kevin sat on the cold concrete steps and thought about how a perfectly normal life can turn into a disaster and all it takes is two weeks in the seventh grade.

  The bell rang. Kevin went inside. He dumped his books in his locker and moused his way through another day. He’d never done homework in the sixth grade, but he did it now. There was nothing else to occupy his time as he sat alone in his room every afternoon. And he found that he liked it. He liked the orderliness of mathematics once he understood the rules, and he got almost the same kick out of solving problems that he used to get stealing candy from Walgreen’s. He wished his life were as easy to work as a math problem.

  By using the school’s front entrance, Kevin had avoided the high-school boys who usually relieved him of his lunch money. Having enough money for a regular lunch should have been a bright spot in his day. Unfortunately, he met one of the older boys as he was leaving the lunchroom. The older boy looked down at Kevin’s substantial lunch and shook his head back and forth. Kevin scuttled away, realizing that h
e should have settled for an ice-cream bar; the hamburger stuck in his throat.

  That night, when the snakes held up their mirrors, Kevin saw himself slinking down a school hallway, using his notebook as a shield. He was concentrating so hard on anonymity that it was only a particularly conscientious teacher who would have noticed him. Kevin felt the teacher’s ripple of curiosity and distaste for the cringing figure. Then the dream moved on.

  In the morning, Kevin thought there had been something familiar about that scurrying person in the dream. Of course it had to be familiar; he was watching himself. But there was something beyond that. When he got to school, he slipped around the building, looking for other open entrances. He had cheated the older boys of his lunch money the day before. They would be looking for him that morning. He sat on the steps on the far side of the gymnasium and thought about his problems until the bell rang.

  For the next week, Kevin entered the school by various doors. He went through the music room door. He waited once for the late bell to ring and snuck into the building through the auto shop. The older boys glared at him in the lunchroom, but Kevin was safe while in the building, and the junior high let out half an hour earlier than the high school. One of the gym doors didn’t close properly, so Kevin slipped in that way twice. After school, he headed straight home without stopping to hassle any of the smaller kids. Seeing himself through those kids’ eyes every night had taken the fun out of the bullying. Kevin’s goal was to get through the day with no one noticing him at all.

  While sitting alone in his room for hours, Kevin thought about his nightmares. The crouching mousy figure in his dreams rang a distant bell. Kevin racked his brains trying to understand. Finally, the next day, as he waited on the gymnasium steps, the bell rang right inside his head. The sloping walk that he saw in the dreams was the same as the walk of the Jell-O lady, the one he and his friends had been hassling just before school started. The rest of the day passed in a blur. Kevin didn’t care what his dreams would be like that night. For the first time he thought he knew where they came from, and he hoped to get rid of them.

  After school, he went straight to the bus stop at Fifty-fifth and Hyde Park Boulevard. He checked the passengers getting off every bus. He spent all day Saturday at the bus stop as well. He sat on the bench until the manager at Orly’s chased him away. After that, he walked up and down the street, hurrying back to the bench whenever a bus arrived. She wasn’t there. By Sunday, he was beginning to despair. What if that had been the only day she had ridden the bus? What if she had bought a car? What if, after ruining his life forever, she’d decided to move to Ohio or someplace like that? He walked up Blackstone Avenue trying to find her apartment building, but couldn’t pick it out. Maybe he would never find her and he’d be stuck forever slinking down hallways like some sort of deformed rabbit.

  He was late for dinner and should have started home, but he kept telling himself he would wait for just one more bus. Finally, he thought he saw her. Maybe. But she was wearing different clothes, a red coat and an orange dress, and she walked differently, swinging her arms and bobbing her chin, humming to herself as she walked. Kevin had seen her the day before but had not recognized her. He still wasn’t sure if this was the woman he wanted or not. He followed her down the street. She turned at a familiar corner and headed for a familiar building.

  “Wait,” Kevin shouted as she put her key in the door.

  She turned and recognized Kevin immediately. She laughed in his face.

  “No backsies,” she said. The door closed and locked behind her.

  “Wait, wait!” Kevin threw himself against the door and rattled the lock. Through the dirty glass in the door he saw the woman disappear up the steps inside without looking back. After a moment, he sat down on the steps and hugged his knees. Eventually, he had to go home for dinner, but the next morning, when the woman came out to go to work, he was waiting on the step.

  “What, are you still here?” she asked.

  “What did you mean, ‘no backsies’?” he asked.

  “Just what I said. You can’t give it back to me. You have to give it to someone else who asks for it.”

  “But what is it?”

  “What do you think? It’s a nightmare.” She walked down the street.

  Kevin met her when she got off the bus that afternoon.

  “Why did you give it to me?” he asked.

  “Because you asked for it. Hassling an old woman and telling her you want whatever she’s got. People who ask for it get what’s coming to them.”

  “Then where did you get it?”

  She stopped at the corner. She looked down at him and nodded her head as she admitted, “I asked for it.”

  “How long?”

  “How long did I have it? Six years,” she said softly.

  Kevin rocked back in horror.

  “And you never do get all the way rid of it. Spend time with that nightmare, and you can always see yourself in other people’s eyes. Even now, people look at me and think I shouldn’t wear a red coat and an orange dress, and I say to myself, ‘Hey, I don’t care what they think as long as they don’t think it in my dreams.’”

  “But it’s only ever bad things. Why not any good things?” Kevin pleaded.

  The woman shrugged. “That’s why it’s a nightmare.”

  She looked at Kevin sadly. “Better you than me,” she said. Then she walked away, and this time Kevin didn’t follow.

  His thoughts ran through his head in circles. Six years. I’ll be old. Six years, and she only got rid of it because she ran into an idiot like me. How many people that stupid can there be in the world? What if I never get rid of it? What if all the people in the world who are stupid enough to ask have already had it once and I was the very last dummy? Kevin had heard that there’s a sucker born every minute. Maybe the next sucker was just being born, and Kevin would have to wait until he or she grew up enough to say, “Hey, gimme that nightmare. It’s just what I always wanted.”

  Kevin went home. He ate his supper without a word and headed to his room to do his homework. His mother looked with concern at the dark circles under his eyes, but Kevin was too steeped in misery to care. That night he turned a resigned face to the dream mirrors. The woman in the red coat didn’t appear, but the disgust of the manager at Orly’s oozed over Kevin and stuck like tar.

  The next day was Monday. Kevin had run out of open doors at school, so he was forced to begin the cycle again with the main entrance and hope the high-school boys had forgotten him. As he rounded that corner from sunlight to shade, he was momentarily blinded. Shadow figures knocked his books out of his hands and pushed him against the wall.

  “Hey, Kev,” said a voice out of the dark, “you haven’t been in the yard lately. We missed you.”

  Hunching his shoulders, Kevin could only think of how this scene would reappear in miserable dreams. He didn’t really pay attention to what the older boy was saying.

  “We were beginning to think you didn’t like us, Kev. You do still like us, don’t you?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, sure.”

  “Doesn’t sound real sincere. Tell you what, why don’t you give us a token of your esteem?”

  “What?”

  The older boy held out his hand. “Hand it over Kevin. Empty those pockets. Whatever you got, I want.”

  “You want…?” He stopped in confusion and then was tongue-tied with rage. That was his chance. Maybe the only chance he’d ever have and he’d blown it. Now the boy leaned closer. He was going to ask again, but this time he would be specific. He wanted Kevin’s lunch money, and Kevin was going to have the nightmare for the rest of his life. Kevin wanted to bang his own head against the wall he was so frustrated, but then, to Kevin’s relief, the older boy repeated himself.

  “Whatever you got, Kevin, I want. Do you understand?” He clenched his hand into a fist, then opened it again, palm up.

  “Yeah,” said Kevin, “yeah, sure.” He cupped his hand around invisible Jel
l-O and tossed it into the older boy’s waiting hand. “It’s all yours,” he said, and ran for the school doors as the bell rang.

  The Baker King

  Once upon a time, there was a very small kingdom that consisted of a single island just off the coast of the mainland. The island and kingdom both were called Monemvassia. Monem meant “one” and vassia meant “way,” and truly there was only one way to reach the Monemvassians. All visitors had to come in at the harbor gate. Only at the harbor was there a break in the cliffs that rose straight out of the sea to form the island. One could get to the island by boat, or one could walk across a bank of sand during low tide, but the harbor gate was the only door to town.

  Once you passed through the harbor gate, there were stairs to climb that led up the sides of the island to the very top, where there were various flat spots planted with olive and eucalyptus trees and grapevines and small stone houses. The residents of Monemvassia fished, and they cultivated olives and wine, and many of them spent their days carving wooden spindles out of the local eucalyptus trees. The wooden spools they sent off to the mainland to trade for things that didn’t grow on the island. Most people in the kingdom were happy. Some people attributed this to the fact that Monemvassia was the only known kingdom that had no king.

  The old king had sent his only child off to school to be educated in kingly ways and then had unfortunately caught a chill while out fishing. Before the king’s councillors had a chance to ask, “By the way, to which institution of kingly learning was the crown prince sent?” the old king had died, and the councillors were stuck. There were some angry words exchanged about the foolishness of letting the king choose a school for his son and send him off without informing the council, but the prime minister explained that the old king had thought that the crown prince deserved a little privacy before he became king and gave it all up for the public life.

  “Well, he’s certainly got his privacy now,” said one minister. “He’s so private we don’t know where he is.”