“Hello?” I said, half expecting the sound to disappear as it left my lips. I surprised myself, though. My questioning greeting was audible—flat, tentative, but clearly heard.
“Hello” came a reply out of the absence. I whirled around, catching a little scream against the back of my teeth.
A woman stood in front of me. She was tall, her looming height made even greater by the four-inch stiletto heels on her leather boots. She stared at me like she had every right to be there, like she belonged in this bizarre world of nothingness. She looked me up and down with an amused glance, her gaze lingering on the roll of fat that hung over the band of my sweatpants. I flushed with embarrassment. The exposure of those so-called love handles was momentarily worse than the surprise of believing myself stark raving mad, of finding a perfect stranger in my nightmare.
Even as my brain chittered inside my skull—there was a stranger, here, in the literal middle of nowhere!—I realized that the other woman had never known the embarrassment of an extra roll of flesh. She was bone thin, heroin-chic thin, cover-model thin. Her hair was dyed jet black, and it was piled on top of her head in a complicated swirl that reminded me of Amy Winehouse. She wore a laced-up bustier that revealed far more than it covered, and black low-rider leather pants that were tucked into those unbelievable boots. Her face was a palette for more makeup than I wore in a year—her eyes were outlined in heavy kohl, and her lips were painted a heavy burgundy. She’d added a beauty mark just to the right of her natural lip line.
She reached one ornately tattooed arm behind her and tugged a sweatshirt out of the nothingness. When she handed it to me, I saw the flames tattooed around her wrist.
“Are you a genie?” I asked before I could stop myself. I was embarrassed as soon as the question left my lips, but I was also strangely relieved. I could ask the question. I could say the word genie, the word that I’d been unable to get out back at the table, back in the real world.
“Teel,” the woman said, in a deep, throaty voice. “I do believe we’ve met.” She smirked and extended her hand to shake mine.
I backed away.
“Don’t be like that,” she said. “I should have said something before, when we were in the theater, but I forgot, with the time change and all.”
Back at the theater. This woman knew I’d been at the theater. My fingers tingled, as if they were responding to the tattoo on her wrist, as if they were electrically charged by their proximity to that ink. I tugged the new sweatshirt over my head, moving as quickly as possible so that the apparition in front of me couldn’t disappear.
“F-forgot?” I finally stammered, when I realized that I had to say something. What else had Teel forgotten? I’d think a little thing like the ability to change gender would be at the top of her—his—her list.
Teel shrugged. “What do you think of my new outfit? Things are a lot more…diverse out there these days. It’s a lot more interesting than when I went into the lamp.”
I nodded weakly, wondering where she’d spent the past twenty-four hours. It sure seemed like she’d given up on tracking down the mysterious Susan. Probably just as well, with all the time that had passed. “So,” I said, still trying to make sense out of things. “A couple of tugs, and you just become whatever you want? Gender doesn’t matter?”
“Gender, race, nationality…” Teel yawned, spreading crimson-painted talons in front of her mouth. “If I can work wishes like yours, it’s easy enough to change my appearance, don’t you think? Speaking of which, have you decided on your second wish?”
“Have I…? No!”
She puffed out her cheeks and sighed. The action was strangely comforting—perfectly human disappointment in the midst of so much strangeness that my head was buzzing. “Not even an idea of what you’re thinking about?” I shook my head, and she gestured at the space around us before she wheedled, “I just thought that if you could see this, if I could show you the Garden, then you’d understand why it’s so important to me.”
“Th-the Garden?” I couldn’t see anything at all.
Teel took a deep breath, as if she were savoring the most delicate fragrance imaginable. “Well, the front gate, at least.”
I peered into the absence of space. “Um, I don’t see any gate.”
“Right there?” She frowned at me. “Wrought iron. Covered by morning glories?”
I stared where she was gesturing, but I couldn’t make out anything at all. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really don’t see it.”
“Next thing, you’ll tell me you can’t smell the lilacs.”
I shook my head, feeling strangely like a failure. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Then I shouldn’t have bothered,” she said, sulking. “I thought you might have been different. You might have been one of the ones who can see.” She sighed. “I could have come to your bedroom, just as easily as bringing you here. We could have talked there.”
“Um, what did you want to talk about?”
Teel frowned at me, taking a minute to adjust the cascade of her black bouffant and to tuck herself into her bustier a little more securely. “There’s something else I should have mentioned when you summoned me.” She caught my gaze. “I’m a secret. No one can know about me. About genies. About the wishes.”
“Why not? I mean, I’ve got to explain the changes in my life somehow!”
“That’s part of the magic. No one will ask. No one will care.”
“But Maddy and Jules will! They just watched me try to talk about you, about what happened! They just saw me make a complete idiot out of myself because of you!”
“They won’t remember it when I send you back. I’ve taken care of that. Just don’t mention me to anyone else in the future, and we won’t have to go through these diversions.”
“But you don’t have to be afraid of Maddy and Jules! They’re not going to hurt you.”
Teel gave me a dark look. “When wishes are on the line, people do crazy things.” I started to protest, but she shook her head and held up a hand in the universal sign for “stop.” “It’s the one rule. You can’t negotiate it. You can’t tell anyone about me. Promise.”
“But—”
“If you want your other wishes, promise.”
Well, when she put it that way… “I promise,” I said, sounding as reluctant as a kid agreeing to clean her room on a gorgeous weekend day.
“Fine.” Teel nodded, as if we’d just signed some formal written contract. She looked to her left, toward the supposed Garden gate. “You really can’t see it? Or smell it?” She sounded wistful. I shook my head. “Then I’m guessing that you can’t hear the brook, either, or the birds?”
She sounded so sad that I wanted to lie. I wanted to tell her that I could sense her entire Garden, that I could understand how wonderful the place was, why she wanted to get inside so desperately.
I thought about making two quick wishes, just so I could help her.
But then I thought about how wonderfully my first wish had turned out. Sure, I wanted to help Teel. I owed her. But I couldn’t just throw away the possibility promised by those two remaining chances. I hardened my heart, even as she said, “No wonder the other genies said not to bother.”
“The other genies?”
“We were talking yesterday, after our weekly productivity meeting.”
“Productivity meeting?” Somehow, my genie had absorbed the worst of twenty-first century business-speak. I almost preferred Teel’s outdated disco slang.
She rolled her eyes. “All the genies who are out of their lamps get together to discuss marketplace trends in wishing. We update our statistical databases and talk about ways to increase wish-flow.” She made it sound so bureaucratic and boring, I half expected her to yawn. “I told them I was going to try bringing you to the Garden, to see if that changed your wish-making process.”
“I see,” I said, even though I couldn’t see anything at all. My mind boggled at the idea of a bunch of genies sitting around
a table in a conference room. The corporate image actually made it easier for me to hold on to my decision to wait on my other wishes. It was one thing to help Teel, the genie who had already made my life so much better. It was another to be a pawn in some sort of bizarre corporate genie game that I didn’t begin to understand.
Teel sighed, glancing wistfully at the invisible gate. “I might as well take you back. But you’ll think about your other wishes? Make them soon?”
“As soon as possible,” I said.
Teel raised her crimson talons to her earlobe and tugged twice. Electricity jangled through me, head to foot, and then I was standing, alone, in my bedroom. As if on cue, there was a knock on my door. Jules’s voice was carefree as she called out, “Kira, are you done? We’ve got the food dished up, and we’re ready for you to make the first move on the board.”
She didn’t sound like a woman who had been cheated out of half her asparagus soup. She didn’t sound like someone who had just scrambled after game pieces scattered across the dining room floor. Teel had been as good as her word. My housemate recalled nothing of the scene I had made. “Yeah,” I called. “I’ll be there in just a sec.”
When I got back to the living room, Maddy looked up from the table. A bowl sat in front of her, filled with rice, chicken, and eight delectable vegetables in a brown sauce. By her right hand, there were several cellophane wrappers, and the golden shards of fortune cookies. She was smoothing three slips of paper beneath her blunt fingers.
“Maddy!” I exclaimed.
“I couldn’t wait,” she said. “You know I like to eat my fortune cookie first.”
“Great,” Jules grumbled, manipulating her chopsticks expertly to raise a huge bite of cellophane noodles to her lips. “You could have let us open our own.”
“Yeah,” I said, grateful for the distraction, for any conversation that led away from why I’d been hanging out in my bedroom while our Chinese food grew cold.
Maddy shrugged. “The Buddha helps those who help themselves.”
I rolled my eyes and asked, “Which one was mine? What does it say?”
Maddy shoved a curling slip of paper across the table. “Romance enters through a hidden door.”
They both laughed, a little too forcefully. I knew that they were thinking about TEWSBU, about the disaster at the Hyatt Regency. I forced myself to smile with them, and we were soon eating copious amounts of the best Chinese food in the Twin Cities. But every time I looked at that curling slip of paper, the barely visible flames on my fingertips tingled, reminding me of my remaining wishes.
CHAPTER 6
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up ravenous, despite having polished off all of my crispy sesame chicken the night before (and having enjoyed a celebratory handful of Oreos after winning our Scrabble game, due to placing “quiz” on a triple-word score with double points for the Q). I mowed my way through the kitchen, supplementing a bowl of Cap’n Crunch with a couple of Little Debbie Nutty Bars that were sitting, abandoned, in the back of the pantry. My housemates had cleared the premises well before I awakened; I was usually the last one up.
I didn’t bother making coffee; I’d have time to grab a caffeine-fortified cup at Club Joe’s before the Romeo and Juliet read-through. Before stepping out the front door, I dragged my knit muffler across the lower half of my face. The temperature had settled into its heart-of-winter basement; I doubted that the thermometer would climb to zero during the day. I felt all the more cheated because the sky was a shocking blue, not a cloud in sight. A true Minneapolis winter—when it got too cold to snow.
I couldn’t continue complaining, though. The barista at Club Joe added my four shots of espresso without treating me like a crazy woman, sending me on my way so efficiently that I got to the theater with a full half hour before the cast was supposed to arrive.
Someone had already opened the front door, though. Lights were on in the rehearsal room, and chairs were distributed in a neat circle. I called out a tentative hello, but no one answered.
Slinging my backpack onto the floor, I dug out my notebook and a handful of pens. (I always kept extras ready; cast members inevitably forgot their own, and I wasn’t about to stop a perfect scene to rummage around if mine ran out of ink.)
As ready for rehearsal as I could be, I closed my hand around my coffee cup, gripping the paper sleeve as I administered a healthy dose of caffeine. When I lowered the cup, the eerie tattoos on my fingertips caught the light. I shifted the coffee to my left hand and gazed at my marked hand as if it were some fascinating museum display.
I wondered if anyone else could see the mark of the flames. I mean, Teel had kept me from telling Maddy and Jules about my wishes the night before, about the impact the genie was making on my life. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to offer that sort of protection and then let anyone who cared see the magic writ large, literally, on my hands.
“Morning, Franklin” came a deep voice from behind me, and I started as if I’d been doing something dishonest.
I curled my fingers into a fist and turned around, fighting to quell a guilty crouch. John McRae stood in the doorway. His nose was red from the cold, and he stamped his feet as if he despaired of ever restoring circulation to his toes.
“Good morning,” I said. Meeting his easy grin, I felt guilty about ducking out of the cast get-together the night before. “I—I’m sorry that I didn’t get over to Mephisto’s last night. My housemates and I ended up having dinner at home—one of them is about to start tech rehearsals and the other is going on a cross-country trip. I won’t be seeing them for weeks.”
Stop, I told myself. This guy doesn’t need your entire life story. Just. Stop.
“No problem,” he said, shrugging. “Most of us left around eight, anyway. Had to be ready for today’s rehearsal.”
And that was that. No federal case. No need for endless apologies. No need for further, contorted explanations, about TEWSBU or Teel or anything else.
“Did you set things up?” I nodded toward the circle of chairs.
“Yeah,” he drawled. “I got here early and figured I might as well be useful. Mandatory morning calisthenics.”
I grinned, more at the image of this laid-back cowboy doing some official military workout, than out of any actual amusement about the rehearsal room. “Thanks. I feel like I’m not carrying my weight around here.” I almost winced at my own words. Leave it to me, to call attention to my weight. Desperate to change the topic of conversation quickly, I nodded toward a heavy cardboard tube in his hands. “What’s that?”
“Drawings for the set. Left ’em in the truck by mistake and had to go back out there.” He peeled off his coat and shook his head ruefully. Even though I was a big fan of Minnesota, I understood his reaction to the bitter winter cold. It must be particularly difficult for him, Texas transplant that he was. He brandished the tube. “They’re sketches, really. Bill wanted to photograph them this morning, to use as a background for some pages in the program.”
I tried to hide my surprise. At Fox Hill, the program was always a last-minute scramble, proofread by me—or anyone else awake enough to see straight—a week before the show opened, then sent off to Kinko’s for quick printing, folding, and stapling.
I tried to sound a little bored, like I was used to the Landmark’s professional way of producing programs. “May I see?”
He smiled self-deprecatingly. “I thought you’d never ask.”
We crossed to the worktable against the wall. I was impressed by the way his strong fingers pried the cap from the end of the sturdy tube—I always needed to resort to screwdrivers to lever those stupid things out. John’s hands were large, tanned, even in the middle of winter.
I remembered my own tattooed fingers. Suddenly, I was overcome with the urge to test him, to test the visibility of Teel’s magic. As John unrolled the sheaf of papers, I made a point of anchoring two corners, spreading my right hand across the white surface of the paper. I tilted my wrist to make the iridescent fire
shimmer as much as possible.
From my perspective, the flames glowed; I could make out specific licks of crimson and vermilion and topaz, as if the design was stamped there in Technicolor. I waited for John to leap back in astonishment, to swear in surprise, to stare at my hands in slack-jawed amazement. Or, at the very least, to dip his head and say, “Cool tats.”
Instead, he tugged at his belt, deftly detaching a tape measure to weigh down my side of the drawing. “Thanks,” he said, anchoring the curling far side himself. He gestured at the top drawing. “For the opening scene, I picture the guys on this platform, looking down on the rest of the town square. Bill and I talked about moving each scene lower, deeper into the streets, into the sewers.” John’s twang softened his words, made them less of a lecture and more of a conversation.
I wasn’t ready to give up on the tattoo thing quite yet, though. I pointed vigorously toward another area of the drawing, as if I were showing off the world’s most expensive manicure. “What’s that?”
“A trap door,” he said, oblivious to the magic sparking before his very eyes. “We’ll use it to take out Friar Lawrence, at the end of his first scene.”
Nothing. He obviously couldn’t see the marks on my fingertips. Teel would remain a secret, even if I saw evidence of magic every time I waved my hand.
I blinked and actually paid attention to the drawing for the first time. Now that I was no longer trying to measure my Visible Genie Quotient, I could see that John had done a great job of capturing his design ideas. His drawings were obviously only sketches, ideas that would be modified as they were turned into models, then actually constructed by the Landmark’s renowned carpentry shop. But the lines were firm, the overall design confident, quietly competent in a straightforward way that many theater designers lacked.
“How will you handle the balcony scene?” I asked. Even as I voiced the question, I remembered Jennifer and Drew reading the day before. I resisted the urge to wrinkle my nose—as much as I respected Bill Pomeroy’s daring ideas, I didn’t like the notion that the gimmick of reverse-gender casting might ruin the audience’s appreciation for the stagecraft evident in John’s drawings.
Act One, Wish One Page 8