As You Wish

by Chelsea Sedoti

I wonder too.

  Chapter 17

  Countdown: 11 Days

  You can only wait around for so long. Eventually, everyone realizes we aren’t going to get any more of an update anytime soon. So we go home and climb into our beds and wait until the next morning to find out if Fletcher survived the night.

  A weird hush has fallen over Madison.

  “Does that mean he’s alive?” I ask my mom in the morning.

  “He was when I left last night.”

  She’s dressed in work clothes and has her purse in hand, clearly on her way back to the doctor’s office. It’s one more reminder of how serious the situation is. Ma never goes into work on Saturday unless she absolutely has to.

  “Would someone have told you if he died overnight?” I press.

  She closes her eyes and rubs at her forehead. “I don’t know, Eldon.”

  I refrain from asking the question I most want an answer to.

  Do you want him to live?

  I’m certainly not the only member of the Wilkes family who has complicated feelings about Fletcher.

  I take a glass from the cabinet and turn on the tap to fill it, but nothing happens.

  “Your father turned off the water,” Ma says.

  “I guess he’s making progress on the sink, huh?”

  “Apparently.”

  I put the glass down, check to make sure my keys and phone are in my pocket, then head toward the door.

  “Are you working today?” Ma asks.

  I nod.

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  I sort of would’ve preferred walking to the gas station. I want time to think. But the way my mom was standing in the middle of the kitchen looking lost and unsure makes me think alone time is the last thing she wants. So I say, “OK, thanks.”

  We make our way through the house, but Ma pauses as she’s about to open the front door.

  “Eldon?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you seen my cast-iron skillet?”

  Really? Now is the time she chooses to bring this up?

  I hope my expression doesn’t give me away as I tell her I most definitely have not seen it. What would I want with a cast-iron skillet?

  • • •

  Around ten in the morning, Penelope Rowe pulls her yellow VW Beetle up to the gas pump.

  I wave hello, but she isn’t looking at me. Her eyes are fixed straight ahead; her hands clench the steering wheel. I get the gas pump started, then walk over to the driver’s window and knock.

  She only rolls down the window a couple of inches. I’m not feeling too good about the situation. At this point, even the most oblivious person in the world would have a sense of foreboding, yeah?

  “I can’t talk right now, Eldon. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  “It seems like you need to,” I say.

  “Well, I can’t.”

  But she doesn’t roll up the window.

  “Where you coming from?” I ask.

  Her response is almost a whisper. “The doctor’s office.”

  “Were you visiting Fletcher?”

  Nothing.

  “Penelope. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  She sniffs and wipes her nose. “I wanted to do the right thing.”

  “What did you do?” It comes out slow and patient, like I’m talking to a child.

  She doesn’t respond, keeps staring blankly ahead.

  “Penelope. Hey, look at me.”

  She meets my eyes. She’s been crying.

  “Penny, seriously. What’s going on?”

  Her face crumples. It’s like she held herself together for as long as possible, but now she’s finally breaking. Her eyes are locked on mine, and in them, I see a world of regret.

  “Hey, it’s OK,” I say when her tears start falling. “It’s going to be OK.”

  She shakes her head. “Eldon,” Penelope says, her voice trembling. “I think I made a very serious mistake.”

  • • •

  I almost stay home that night. I keep thinking about Fletcher and Penelope, which doesn’t exactly put me in the mood to party. But I don’t know what else to do. So once it starts to get dark, I walk through my ghost neighborhood until I get to the skeleton house.

  Merrill is already there, which isn’t abnormal. The surprising part is that Norie is with him. It’s weird, them hanging out without me. I wonder what they’ve been talking about.

  Probably about Fletcher. That’s all anyone’s talking about tonight.

  “Hey,” I say, climbing up to the top of the house. “You going to the hot springs with us, Norie?”

  “I guess. I’ve made an effort to stay away from there, but what the heck. We’re graduating soon. I might as well experience it once.”

  I sit down next to them. If they were talking about Fletcher, they don’t resume their conversation. Instead, we swing our legs over the open space, talk about stuff without really talking about anything at all. I start to tell them about my run-in with Penelope a few times but keep changing my mind. It’s not really my news to tell. And besides, I don’t want to ruin the moment.

  There’s something easy about this. About being with the two of them. Uncomplicated, amid a million things that are anything but. I feel like the three of us have been friends forever, that we’ll always be friends. Eternity is sitting in a half-built house, saying more in the silences than when we talk.

  But eventually Merrill says, “Wanna head to the party?”

  I don’t. At all.

  But what are you supposed to say? Nah, let’s sit here and contemplate our friendship for a while.

  I tell him I’m ready. We go to the hot springs.

  • • •

  I guess it’s morbid, yeah? Going through the canyon right after Fletcher tried to kill himself there. But everyone needs a release, and we don’t have anywhere else to go.

  “There’s seriously not an easier way in?” Norie asks when we get to the rope.

  “This is the easy way,” I say. “Unless you’re good at scaling walls.”

  When we get to the springs and the party, Norie surveys the area. “Well, this is exactly what I was expecting.”

  I laugh. “If you stop being judgmental for a few minutes, you might actually have fun.”

  “She’s religious,” Merrill says. “Judgment comes naturally to her.”

  “Wow, you guys have a whole comedy routine.”

  We laugh and wander to the cooler. Merrill offers Norie a beer, but she shakes her head.

  “Seriously?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Because of a health thing?” Merrill asks.

  “Because of a Word of Wisdom thing.”

  “I’m gonna need a few of these before I get into that with you,” Merrill replies, cracking open his first beer of the night.

  We circle the party to see who showed up. I keep looking for Penelope, though I’m pretty sure she won’t be here.

  To Norie, this might seem like a typical night at the hot springs, but it’s not. Even with the music and talking and drinking, it’s somber. Fletcher is on everyone’s minds. Or maybe I’m projecting like Mr. Wakefield talks about.

  When Merrill wanders away to get more beer, I ask Norie if she wants to go sit by one of the pools.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for him?”

  I shake my head. “He’ll get distracted and spend the rest of the night trying to convince a freshman the mayor is the reincarnation of Hitler or something.”

  So we go to one of the springs away from everyone and stick our feet in the water. It’s a nice night. The temperature hasn’t dropped below ninety, but there’s a breeze. The moon is bright, and the air feels rich. You can almost pretend someone didn’t try to kill themselves fa
rther up the canyon.

  “I never pictured you as the guy who goes off on his own at parties,” Norie says.

  “I’m not feeling it tonight,” I say.

  “Because of Fletcher?”

  “Because of everything.”

  Norie doesn’t ask more, for which I’m grateful.

  “What’s your deal?” I ask her. “Why haven’t you ever come here before?”

  “This isn’t exactly my crowd. Obviously.”

  “Do you have a crowd?” I ask.

  Norie laughs. “What, you think because I don’t hang out with the popular kids I don’t have friends?”

  I hadn’t considered it one way or another, because I hadn’t paid attention to her until she started hanging out with us. Norie was just another person at school, someone who wasn’t in the same social circle as me.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I mumble.

  “No?” Norie raises her eyebrows. “Here’s the thing about the people you hang out with: you think what you’re doing is so important and special that you can’t imagine there’s a whole other world happening behind you. Or below you, as you’d probably think of it.”

  I try to read her expression. Is she angry, insulted? She just looks matter-of-fact.

  “So who do you hang out with?”

  “A bunch of different people. We don’t all fit into neat little cliques the way you think.”

  “Stop telling me what I think,” I say, my voice rising a little.

  She looks surprised. “You’re right. Sorry.”

  For a while, we watch the party without talking. Juniper shows up, hanging all over Calvin Boyd. I sigh.

  “What’s your deal with her?” Norie asks.

  “You gonna tell me how much better I can do?”

  “No. I think Juniper’s really nice.”

  I didn’t realize she even knew Juniper, but I know better than to say so.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I say to Norie, keeping my eyes on Juniper and Calvin. “She’s special. Even before her wish.”

  “Her wish?”

  “Yeah. To be beautiful.”

  Norie laughs. “Are you kidding me? Juniper didn’t wish for beauty.”

  This gets my attention. “She didn’t?”

  “She wished to keep her dad’s bar running. It was about to close, you know.”

  I can’t wrap my mind around this.

  “But…after we broke up, it was right around her wish. I swear she changed.”

  “Maybe you saw her differently because she was the first girl to break your heart. You’d never been dumped before, had you?”

  I hadn’t.

  “If that’s true, why didn’t she wish for money? They could’ve been rich enough that her dad didn’t need the Last Chance.”

  “That’s your problem, Eldon,” Norie says. “You reduce everything. Try to make life too simple. Like thinking every girl at school only wants to be beautiful. People want more than that, you know. Juniper’s dad doesn’t care about money. He cares about the bar. That’s why he wished for it in the first place. It’s his passion.”

  I think about that for a minute. I wonder what it must feel like to care about something so strongly that you want it simply for the sake of having it in your life. Then I think of my sister, and I realize I already know.

  It’s like Norie reads my mind. “Haven’t you ever been passionate about anything?”

  “I guess so,” I say. “What about you? What are you passionate about? God?”

  “Oh jeez. Why does it always have to be about God?”

  “Because you’re the only person in this entire town who’s religious,” I say. “It’s sort of a huge deal.”

  “First of all, I may be the only person in Madison who believes in God, but I’m not the only one who’s religious.”

  “Name one other person,” I challenge.

  “Don’t you get it? Wishing is a religion here. For me, that’s not enough.”

  “Why?”

  Norie thinks for a long moment. She twirls the ring on her finger. “My whole life, I felt like something was missing. I was convinced there was a bigger picture, more to the world than what I was seeing. More than just wishing. It seemed as if everything happened for a reason, but I didn’t know what the reason was.”

  She looks at me, and I gesture for her to go on.

  “A few years ago, I was in Las Vegas for a Varsity Quiz event. I snuck away for a while and spent time wandering around and…I don’t know, imagining what it would’ve been like to grow up somewhere else. That’s when I ran into Elder Jansen. We got to talking about Mormonism, and it clicked for me. All I’d been confused about came into focus.”

  “That must have felt good,” I say.

  Norie narrows her eyes as if I’m teasing. I’m not. “Yeah. It did.”

  “But the whole God’s plan thing, don’t you ever feel like it’s a cop-out? An excuse to never take responsibility for your actions?”

  Norie snorts. “And how is that different from the way people treat wishing?”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “There’s one big difference though,” Norie says. “Religions encourage you to help others and be the best person you can be. With wishing, you get your heart’s desire handed to you without effort. It doesn’t matter if you’re mean or selfish or lazy. In fact, wishing encourages that behavior.”

  She isn’t wrong. I’ve heard my fair share of spiteful wishes. That’s one of the reasons we have to get wishes approved by Mayor Fontaine.

  “You see my ring?” Norie asks, holding out her hand.

  I lean over. It’s a simple band with a shield on it. Stamped on the shield are the letters CTR.

  “It stands for choose the right.” Norie pulls back her hand and examines the ring herself. “It’s a reminder. Life is full of tough times and hard decisions. But as long as you choose to do the right thing, you’ll be OK.”

  Sounds fine in theory. “But how do you know what’s right?” I ask.

  Norie smiles at me. “You just know, Eldon. Even when you think you don’t.”

  I don’t buy it. Maybe Norie knows. Maybe all she needs to guide her through life is a ring. But I’m looking for a little more direction than that. I need a clear path.

  “I refuse to believe this is all there is to life.” Norie gestures to the party around us. “And I refuse to let my future be dictated by wishes.”

  I watch my classmates. Norie’s right. They’re held hostage by wishes. Drinking away their nights to escape boredom, counting down the hours to their wish days, thinking that’s when their life starts. And after that, after their wishes are made, counting down the hours until they die, because their moment has passed. No one’s living—they’re waiting. What they’re waiting for is the only part that changes.

  “Really, Norie,” I say. “What did you wish for?”

  Knowing the answer is becoming more important by the day.

  “I’ll never tell,” Norie says with a serene smile.

  I sigh. “You know, the longer you hold out, the more invested I get.”

  “Are we still talking about wishing?”

  The joke catches me off guard, and I laugh.

  Norie laughs too and nudges me with her elbow. “My wish won’t help you, Eldon. You need to come up with your own.”

  “Yeah.” I frown. “I know.”

  On the other side of the party, Merrill is holding court, regaling a group of people with God knows what story. He gestures wildly and spills his beer but doesn’t notice.

  “I can’t let him get too drunk,” I tell Norie. “He’s supposed to drive me to Vegas tomorrow.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m visiting my sister.”

  “Ah,” Norie says. “You do that
often?”

  “Not as often as I want.” I turn to her. “Wanna come with us?”

  “Yeah. I’d like that.”

  A melancholy silence falls over us. Or maybe it’s only melancholy for me. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to talk about Ebba without feeling like someone’s stomping on my heart with football cleats.

  Thinking of Ebba leads me right back to Fletcher Hale. For the rest of eternity, the two of them will be linked in my mind. The accident created a union between them as strong as marriage vows.

  I guess Penelope’s wrapped up in that too now.

  Word hasn’t gotten out about Penelope’s wish. If it had, the entire party would’ve been buzzing about it. It’s only a matter of time though. You can’t keep secrets in a small town. And even the most oblivious of Madison’s residents will find it pretty hard to miss a dead guy walking among us.

  Chapter 18

  The Wish History: Penelope Rowe

  Open up the wish history and flip to the latest entry.

  Penelope Rowe. Look at her, bursting with sunshine and rainbows, doing her best to change the world.

  See how people mistake her optimism for naivety?

  Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Penelope Rowe knows the world is far from perfect. There are so many terrible people. There are so many terrible things that happen to good people. The world can be a dark place, and nothing will ever change that.

  But Penelope also knows moping around and feeling sad isn’t going to help anyone. And more than anything, Penelope wants to be helpful. She may never change the world. But that doesn’t mean she won’t try.

  Turn to the page where eight-year-old Penelope first realizes she can Make a Difference.

  She’s watching the news—a broadcast about a flood on the other side of the country. Look closely at the horror on her face as she hears about people who are dead or missing or now homeless. Watch the tears pour down Penelope’s cheeks as a flood victim on TV cries about not being able to find her dog.

  Little Penelope Rowe scoops up her cat and snuggles her as tight as she can. When Penelope has a really bad day, like when she gets a B on a test or doesn’t get the lead in the school play, hugging her cat is what makes her feel better.