You Wish (11 page)

“Good morning,” she says, one eyebrow raised. I think she already knows something is up. When does a sixteen-year-old race into the kitchen to talk to her mom? “What happened to your chin?”

“Huh? Oh, nothing.” Suddenly it burns, like one big scarlet letter. Must act casual. I put a hand on my hip and lean against the countertop. “Um, so, I’m thinking of trying out for . . . ” My voice trails off. Softball? No way she’d buy it. The school play? Probably not. “Captain of the debate team.”

Great, that makes no sense either.

I let my gaze slip over my mom’s shoulder. Raggedy Ann is racing toward the pony, who quickly spins on her haunches and starts trotting across the lawn, a giant chunk of our shrubs dangling out her mouth. The pony lets out a long, shrill whinny as it disappears out of sight, and I burst into a cough to cover it up.

My mom narrows her eyes and gives me an odd look. “Don’t you have to be
on
the debate team to be the captain?”

“Oh. Um, yes. I mean, well, I
meant
that I was going to try out for the debate team
with
the captain. The captain . . . runs the tryouts.”

Also, I’m going to set my hair on fire.

“Oh. I had no idea you were interested in debate,” she says. I don’t think she’s buying my story. But she hasn’t figured out what’s wrong either, which is practically just as good.

“Yes. I’m . . . ”

I narrow my eyes. The pony canters by with Ann’s apron in her mouth. Ann appears, her arms flailing over her head, and the two disappear to the right.

“Do we have any carrots?” I blurt out.

“Carrots?”

“Yes. I would really love a good breakfast carrot.” For some reason I flex my bicep as I say it, as if a carrot is going to give me huge muscles. Great. Maybe my mom wants tickets to the gun show while I’m at it.

My mom tips her head to the side. “Are you feeling okay?” She reaches out and touches my forehead.

“Yes! Fabulous. The carrot?”

My mom nods, still giving me a strange look, and heads toward the fridge. While she is leaning in, the door blocking me from view, I rush to the window and give Ann a “beheading” signal, as in,
knock it off and catch that stupid pony
.

She practically leaps into the air at my look and scurries after the pony. She has her apron back, and she’s holding it up like it might double as a lasso.

Whoo boy, maybe I should have been the one to chase the pony while Ann pretended she was a classmate. But she seems like she totally does not understand the art of acting cool, and I doubt she could pull off even thirty seconds of talking to my mom. This is evidenced by the fact that she’s flapping her arms around like a chicken at this very moment.

I’m almost back to my mother when she triumphantly produces a carrot. She holds it up, but then her face scrunches a little as the carrot sort of leans to the side.

“That looks kind of rubbery,” I say, reaching out and taking it from her. I can almost bend it in half. Ugh. I bet the last time my mom went grocery shopping and bought something other than frozen dinners was August.

Of 2006.

“Gross, let me toss that,” she says, reaching out to take it back.

The garbage can is right by the window, with a full, unobscured view of the backyard and the circus act currently being performed by Ann and the MLP.

“No! It’s fine, see?” I take a rubbery bite and then chew with a big smile and a rumbling, revolting stomach. This thing is disgusting, like carrot-flavored bubble gum.

My mom gives me another odd look. I glance to the left and am relieved to see Ann has the apron around the pony’s neck and is leading it into the garden shed. Finally!

My mom just shrugs and then heads over to her coffeepot just as the garden-shed door swings shut. She pauses for a second and looks out the window. I wonder if she caught that last movement of the door.

She can’t have. But I hold my breath anyway.

“Are you ready for your driving test this morning?” she asks, her back to me as she puts the coffeepot back on the hot plate.

I nod, my mouth still full of rubbery carrot. “Yep,” I say, pieces of orange falling out of my mouth.

It’s only a small stretch of the truth. If my mom had taken me driving even once in the last month, I’d be a little more confident. I’ve hardly been behind the wheel for a second since driver’s ed ended last summer.

“Good. I have a quick errand to run and I’m going to drop Chase off at work, and then I’ll come back and grab you. We should head out by seven thirty. That sound okay?”

I nod. It seems like my mom has been talking forever while I gag on the rubbery carrot. “Sure.”

Then I dash out of the room, spitting the carrot into my hand as soon as I’m out of view. That was too close for comfort.

I need a plan.

I take the stairs to my bedroom two by two and am stepping through my door just as Ann falls through my bedroom window.

I stare at her for a second, realizing my life is about to get tossed in the toilet if I don’t figure this out. “Okay. So, I have you . . . a pony . . . gumballs . . . ”

I sigh and sink onto the floor. There’s a fourth wish waiting for me.
Today.
Somewhere. I don’t even want to
guess
what kind of havoc I’m going to encounter. They’re getting worse every day.

“You’re just going to have to stay here all day,” I say, looking up at Ann. “With the pony.”

Ann sits down across from me, carefully placing her legs until she mimics my way of sitting. On her it looks like a yoga pose. Any moment she’s going to close her eyes and start saying, “Ooohhhhhhhmmmmm.”

“I don’t want to. Your school is more fun.”

“Ann!” I say, my voice a little too loud. I lower it. “You don’t get it. School only allows
students
on campus. Visitors have to register at the office and be escorted around. You can’t just show up.”

She pouts and crosses her arms.

“And that pony,” I say, pointing out the window, “needs to be watched.”

“But why do
I
have to watch it?”

“I can’t! I have to be at school or I’ll get in trouble.”

“FINE!” She stands up and stomps her feet. “I’ll watch the pony. But you owe me!”

Pft. I don’t owe a doll and a My Little Pony anything. It’s
them
ruining
my
life. But I don’t say that aloud.

We wait until my mom leaves in her Lexus, my brother in the passenger seat, before we go downstairs and outside.

The shed is big, probably a dozen feet wide and fifteen or so feet deep. But I can tell from thirty feet away the pony doesn’t like it. It’s stomping its feet and kicking the walls.

Thank
God
my mom didn’t hear this from the kitchen.

“Do you
see
why it can’t be left alone?” I ask, shooting a pointed look in Ann’s direction.

Ann just rolls her eyes. I narrow mine, because I know she had to have learned that from me, and I try to remember when I rolled my eyes in front of her.

I open the shed door and the pony tries to muscle past me. I yank Ann inside and shut the door. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust.

I just found the gumballs. They are in trash bags, stacked up all over the place. I can’t even see the lawn mower or the shovels in the back of the shed. One of the bags has been ripped—or maybe kicked—open, and gumballs have spewed out all over. No wonder the pony doesn’t like it in here. The gumballs take up two thirds of the space.

“So just hang out in here. If you’re careful, you can go inside and grab some snacks or something. But don’t let anyone see you. I’ll be back at two thirty, okay?”

Ann heaves a great big annoyed sigh and nods. “Okay, great. See ya later.”

Then I dash out before she can stop me and hope she doesn’t pop back up before my mom comes to pick me up.

THANKS
to this morning’s ridiculous antics, I nearly blew my driving test. I started thinking about Ann’s horrid clothing as I was parallel parking, and I got docked six points for bumping into one of the cones. Then I could have sworn I saw the pony wandering the sidewalk, but it was just a really overweight lady in a bright-pink T-shirt.

In the end, though, I received my hot-off-the-presses license. My photo is terrible and it’s just a paper temporary until the real thing arrives in the mailbox, but
I have a driver’s license
.

With all the other crap going on right now, it seems a little anti-climactic. But either way, I have a license, and I can’t wait to show Nicole. It’ll have to wait until photography because I missed bio. My mom drops me back off at school in time for the last twenty minutes of math class.

As I step through the door, the teacher is droning on up front. I pause and hand her my little pink slip of paper. She scans over it and nods, and then I head toward my seat.

Just mere feet away, I have a horrifying realization: If I don’t know what today’s wish is, it could be Ben. He could kiss me. Because near as I can tell, the wishes haven’t occurred in order.

So who’s to say my wish from my fifteenth birthday couldn’t happen today?

My breath hitches in my throat, and my mind seems to slow down and nearly stop functioning completely. It’s like every coherent thought I have just got stuck in the mud. I’m halfway to my desk, and my feet slow down, scrape along the carpet.

Ben wouldn’t try to kiss me in class, would he?

I finally plop down in my seat, promptly sliding to the edge, trying not to be obvious, and lean against my left elbow, away from him. I’m barely balanced on the chair, but I try to look cool and casual as I jot down the day’s math homework. I shift around, hoping to find a way to maintain this position, and something falls out of my jacket pocket.

A bright yellow gumball. It rolls down the aisle between the desks in my row, ultimately stopping when it hits a guy’s faded black Adidas sneaker. I am so sick of those stupid things popping up all over the place. I swear it was
not
in my pocket ten minutes ago.

Ben gives me a look for a long moment, his eyes narrowed just a bit, taking in my odd posture. Great. I’ve been here two minutes and he can already tell something’s up. I pretend not to notice, as if it takes every ounce of concentration to write down two sentences. Ben finally just turns his attention back to the teacher. If he asks why I’m treating him as if he has bubonic plague, I’m not sure what I’ll tell him.
Oh, I’m sorry, but according to my fairy godmother, you’re totally going to kiss me today!

My left leg is already burning from holding my weight up. There’s no way I can make it through a whole class period while this far out of my chair.

I think of Nicole and what an awesome friend she is and force myself to keep sitting there, trying to breathe normally and not as if my legs are about to burn through my worn-out blue jeans.

I remember all the cool things Nicole has done for me over the years. One time while we were on a lame field trip, I split my jeans open because I thought it would be cool to try and climb up a welded metal sculpture. (It wasn’t.) To make me feel better, she ripped a big hole in her jeans so that her polka-dot underwear was showing. If you knew how shy Nicole was—how totally mortified she gets over the simplest things—you’d realize that this was a really, really big deal.

Also, there was the time she told her parents she’d never go to Disneyland unless I could go with. And that time she helped me paint my brand-new room lime green and then repaint it plum purple when we decided that the lime green gave us headaches. We rode our bikes back and forth to the hardware store like a dozen times, collecting paint chips and checking them out in the natural light of my bedroom.

In other words, I cannot let her boyfriend kiss me because of some cursed wish, even though it sounds like total heaven. You do not betray a friend as awesome as Nicole. Even if she
did
miss most of my horrendous and fateful birthday party.

My leg starts to shake, in tiny little tremors at first until it starts to become more obvious.

“Are you okay?” Ben whispers as Mrs. Vickers continues to drone on and on up front.

I nod and hold my breath until he sits back again in his chair. This isn’t working. I’m going to have to edge back into my seat a little bit, before I—

And that’s when my muscles just give out and I crash down onto the floor, taking my chair with me. The class had been nearly silent up until this moment, and the sounds of my clattering seat echo across the room. Gumballs pour out of my pockets, ricocheting and bouncing across the dirty tiled floors.

It’s like they’re magically appearing. My pockets are the magician’s hat, and the gumballs are a rabbit.

“Uh.” I don’t know what to say so I just leap to my feet and right my chair and plunk down so fast that the little feet on the chair sort of screech as I sit. “I’m okay,” I add, for good measure.