IN THE END, I chickened out on going to Mephisto’s. I felt bad—John’s invitation had seemed genuine enough, and I could practically taste one of Mike’s burgers. But I’d spent too many months avoiding the place, too much time worrying about whether TEWSBU was there, what he was doing with his post-me life.
Besides, I hadn’t seen Jules and Maddy since getting the Landmark job. My entire life had been turned upside down in the best of all possible ways, and I hadn’t had a chance to gush about it with my housemates.
Alas, I’d apparently spent my entire allocation of luck finding the brass lamp and summoning Teel. Traffic was terrible on Hennepin as I left Dad’s office, and it was well after seven by the time I got home. I needed to park three blocks away and walk back to the house. When I finally got to our walkway, I saw that the lights were on downstairs. I consciously resisted the temptation to slam the entry door. It wasn’t the Swensons’ fault that parking spaces were scarce around the lake.
By the time I got upstairs, I was in a foul mood—and ravenous besides. Maddy took one look at me and said, “Hunan Delight?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Jules chimed in from the sofa, where she had her ballet-perfect legs thrown over the couch’s arm. “We’ve just been waiting for you to get home, so we could order. Who knows when we’ll all be home at the same time again?”
Home. The apartment that Dad might raise the rent on, if I didn’t square away another theater gig. If I didn’t take the LSAT.
No reason to bring down my housemates with that little wrinkle. Yet. Instead, I mustered enthusiasm to say, “That’s right! Maddy, you start tech rehearsals next week, don’t you?”
As a lighting designer, my housemate’s life would be crazy for the next seven days, while the cast learned to perform their play with all her lighting cues in place. Maddy would be in a foul mood, too. She hated making changes to her design when actors couldn’t remember to stand in specific spots to deliver specific lines.
Her current show was called Jack and Jill; it was a kiddie production that retold Mother Goose rhymes. Maddy had been grumbling over her lighting design for months, complaining that the director had the imagination of a rock, regularly insisting that Maddy’s design be “brighter!” and “happier!”
“Yeah,” she said, putting on a brilliant fake grimace. “And Jules is heading out of town with Justin.”
“Not till Sunday!” Jules said. Justin was her long-time boyfriend, a lawyer who would have made my father proud. Justin’s firm was based in Los Angeles, and they had a retreat every winter, bringing in all their lawyers from across the country to enjoy fine wine, gourmet food, and endless seminars on how to sue corporate America. Jules had decided to accompany Justin for the three-day retreat, and then they were going to indulge in a well-deserved vacation.
I pouted just a little. Maybe my father’s life plans for me weren’t really so far off. Law firm life—wining, dining, and enjoyable recreation with a perfect boyfriend? Oh. That’s right. I didn’t drink. I certainly didn’t need to eat any more. And I didn’t have any boyfriend, perfect or otherwise.
Maddy must have sensed my change of mood from parking-frustrated to love-life-morose. She waved the Chinese menu in front of me enticingly. “What’ll it be?” She already had the phone in hand.
“Hot and sour soup, with an extra packet of crunchy noodles,” I said. “And crispy sesame chicken.”
What could I say? Even if Chinese food could be healthy, I didn’t need to obsess about making it so. And despite the conversation with my father, I was feeling celebratory.
I had a genie on my side.
Maddy nodded and started punching in numbers as I shuffled back to my bedroom. Slipping out of my Converse All Stars, I tossed my backpack onto my desk. There was a soft clunk, and I remembered that I’d shoved Teel’s lantern deep into the recesses of the bag that morning. I’d been strangely reluctant to leave it behind in the apartment; it was almost as if I feared my position at the Landmark would evaporate if I didn’t keep the thing with me.
Glancing over my shoulder toward my open bedroom door, I considered taking out the lantern, bringing it into the living room to show Maddy and Jules. They’d never believe my story about Teel if I didn’t bring absolute proof. I pulled out the lamp, staring at it in the light from the overhead fixture.
It gleamed as if it were lit from within. There was something…satisfied about its appearance, something peaceful. Serene. Just looking at it made me feel peaceful and calm.
I brushed my fingers against the metal. Tiny vibrations shuddered up my hand, as if the nearly invisible tattoo across my fingertips was shimmering in harmony with the lamp. Two more wishes, I thought. Two more chances to change my life in any way I wanted.
“Kira!” Maddy called. “Come on! Are you going to play Scrabble?”
My housemate’s voice jerked me back to the present. I wondered how long I’d been standing there, how long I’d been caressing the brass lamp, dreaming of the treasures Teel could give me. I blinked hard, as if I were waking up after a long, restless night. “Um, yeah,” I called back. “But just a sec. I want to show you something.”
I started to carry the lantern out the door, but it didn’t want to go.
Okay. I knew it was an inanimate object. I knew it didn’t really have wants, couldn’t possibly have desires. But it grew heavy as I carried it, suddenly so massive that my arm sagged, my muscles trembled.
I turned back to my desk, and everything was normal.
Scowling, I shifted my grip on the lamp. My fingers must have slipped on its graceful, swooping handle. It must have been weighted, originally for ease of pouring oil, I guessed. There. I had it firmly in hand this time. Two steps toward the door, though, my fingertips started buzzing, itching with a ferocity that was on the edge of stinging.
I wasn’t an idiot. The lamp obviously didn’t want to leave my room.
Shrugging, I set it on my desk. As I moved away, though, it fell over on its side, with a clunk that was mostly muffled by my backpack. I was getting exasperated now—I wasn’t a clumsy person by nature, and there was nothing I had done that should have made the lamp fall.
I righted it and turned to go, only to find that it had fallen again.
So. The lamp didn’t want to come with me, and it didn’t want to stay on my desk. At least it didn’t want to stay upright on my desk.
This was utterly bizarre. The lantern hadn’t had any problems in my father’s office; I hadn’t sensed it jumping around inside my backpack then. It hadn’t moved around while I was driving home; there had been no strange lamp behavior in the car. It hadn’t clunked against my spine through the canvas of my backpack as I walked the three blocks from my car.
And then the answer dawned on me. The lamp didn’t want to be seen by anyone other than me. It hadn’t rebelled at Dad’s, in the car, during my walk, because it had been hidden.
After everything else that had happened in the past two days, thinking of a brass tchotchke as a sentient object didn’t actually sound that strange. I took the lamp from my desk and opened my closet door. By now, I wasn’t surprised that it was happy with that choice; I could feel its satisfaction tingle through the tiny flames on my fingertips.
It was even happier when I shoved it into my hamper. It almost sang when I covered it with my coffee-stained sweatshirt from the day before.
I was still looking at my fingers when I went back into the living room. I forced my voice to be normal, nonchalant even, as I asked, “So what did you guys order?” Before they could answer, I said to Maddy, “Don’t even bother. I know you got the hot and sour soup. And Eight Treasures Chicken.”
Maddy stuck out her tongue. “Am I that predictable?”
I grinned. “If it makes you feel better, you can claim ‘reliable.’ ‘Dependable.’” The truth was that Maddy had chosen hot and sour soup and Eight Treasures Chicken every single time that we’d ordered Chinese in all the years I’d known her. If she had selected anything else, the world would have slipped off its axis. The moon would have crashed into the sea; the earth would have spun into the sun.
That, or I would have been so astonished that I couldn’t have eaten my own meal.
Jules looked up from her perch at the table in the corner of our living room. She had the Scrabble board set up, all of the tiles turned upside down in the top of the game’s box, ready to be selected and played. She flashed me her killer smile. All of us were Scrabble fiends, but Jules had a dictionary embedded in her brain.
I still didn’t understand why Julia Kathleen McElroy had given up on her stage career. She said it was because she was only ever cast as a romantic lead, and she knew that she couldn’t continue that once she lost her looks. That sounded so grounded, so centered, that I knew it had to be a lie. I think that she’d had a bad experience, losing out on one coveted role a few years back. When she succeeded at her next audition, for an industrial training film, she never looked back at the crueler, more objectifying life of live theater.
Jules still looked the part of the girl who got the guy. Her shoulder-length black hair was thick and straight, possessing a magical texture that let it take a curl and hold it, no matter how hard rain or snow fell outside. Her eyes were so green that she was regularly asked if she was wearing contact lenses, which might have annoyed her if her natural vision had not been twenty-ten. Her skin was tawny, and her cheeks were permanently flushed; she looked like she had just come from a tennis game on a sun-drenched court in the Riviera.
If her looks weren’t enough cause for hating her, her love life just might be. Jules had been dating the same guy since high school. She and Justin had been Homecoming Queen and King; they had been voted Most Likely to Marry. The only reason they hadn’t tied the knot yet was that Justin was playing the law firm game, cruising through the ranks at a firm even larger than my father’s. Justin promised Jules that they would get married the year he made partner, when he would be able to spend enough time with her, all the time in the world.
Me? I would have taken the perfect guy, whether he had to work late or not. But what could I say? The delay worked for Jules and Justin. And Maddy and I had never needed to look for a new roommate.
“What did you order, Jules?”
She smiled. “Corn and asparagus soup,” she said. “And Ants Climbing Trees.”
“What’s that?” We’d been ordering from Hunan Delight for years, but Jules still managed to find exotic dishes that I’d never noticed on the menu before.
“Spicy pork over cellophane noodles,” she said, as if ants and trees were as common as peanut butter and grape jelly on Wonder bread. “Want to try some, when it gets here?”
“No thanks,” I said, a little too quickly.
It wasn’t the fact that it was spicy—I liked my food hot. It wasn’t the pork; I was an avowed fan of The Other White Meat. It wasn’t even the cellophane noodles; in the past year, I had developed a love for all carbohydrates, without discriminating against any grains of origin.
I just didn’t like to share my food.
I’m not sure where the aversion came from. Some kids throw fits if one type of food touches another on their plate. Other kids hate to eat green vegetables. Still others refuse to consider trying anything other than chicken fingers or mac and cheese, preferably the neon-orange kind purchased in a bright blue box.
Not me. I was a good eater, even before my TEWSBU-inspired binges took control of my life.
I just didn’t like to share, didn’t like people digging around on my plate with chopsticks or forks, snagging the perfect bite that I’d saved for last. Of course, I knew that I was acting like a baby. I knew that the vast majority of mature adults enjoyed tasting one another’s food. I knew that Chinese food, especially, gave people a chance to try new flavors, to experience with textures.
So, I felt a little guilty. And that guilt kept me from trying other people’s dishes, even when they freely offered their own food.
Jules laughed. She found my aversion to sharing hysterical. She wasn’t above testing me when we went out, asking me for a French fry, or begging for a forkful of salad. I had learned to look her in the eye and call her bluff, volunteering to place an order for a whole new plate of whatever I was enjoying.
What could I say? I was a freak.
As if to confirm my self-diagnosis, the buzzer rang, indicating that the delivery guy was at the front door downstairs. Jules said, “I’ll get it.” She brandished her wallet. “And that will close out last week’s Scrabble debt in full.” We played for a dollar a point, and Jules had hit a really bad stretch, getting stuck with a U-less Q in three consecutive games.
Maddy and I made noises of agreement as Jules scurried downstairs. I heard the Swensons open their door, and I winced. The delivery guy had obviously rung their doorbell before—or after—he’d rung ours. The financial transaction at the front door was muffled, but I heard Jules say, “Sorry, Mrs. Swenson. Would you like some dumplings?” There was a mumbled reply, and then Jules said, “No, I don’t think any of us has ever gotten indigestion from eating this late. I’m sorry they got the bell wrong. Again.”
She sprinted up the stairs and closed our apartment door, leaning against it in pantomime of being chased by wolves.
“Brave, brave woman,” Maddy said sardonically.
“What were you going to do if she took you up on the dumplings?” I asked.
“Act astonished that Hunan Delight forgot them,” Jules replied, shrugging as she carried her bounty to the kitchen counter. She made short work of parceling out the bright red containers, and we were soon crowded around the Scrabble board, slurping soup before we got to our main dishes.
Knowing how to build tension in a dramatic scene, I waited until they had both selected their seven tiles, hiding them on their trays. Jules flipped over a W. Maddy flipped over an N. I flipped over an E. I got to go first. I pretended to study my tray as I fished out a piece of tofu from my hot and sour soup. I touched one tile, then another, and then I put my spoon back in my bowl. “So,” I said, drawing out the word. “I got a bit of good news yesterday.”
“Your father’s dropping our rent by a hundred dollars,” Maddy said, taking a moment to crumble more fried noodles into her soup. Jules followed suit. I glanced down at my black sweatshirt, momentarily regretting my double order of noodles as I recited my ten thousandth resolution to return to my prewedding-abandonment weight.
What the hell. I was celebrating. If I was going to eat crispy sesame chicken—fried chicken in a sweet, hot sauce—a few extra noodles in my soup couldn’t hurt. I added a thorough handful, taking time to break them into pieces as I enjoyed the anticipation growing on my housemates’ faces.
“Um, not exactly.” I refused to let my LSAT obligation get in the way of my good news. There’d be plenty of time for my housemates to tease me about my study books for the exam, the endless logic questions that I’d leave strewn about the apartment.
“You found the crown jewels from Camelot!” Jules offered.
“No.” I frowned. I’d forgotten they were missing. Oh well, that garage sale bonanza was going to be up to Anna to continue. The Fox Hill fundraiser already seemed very far away. Fearing the next crazy guess my housemates might lob my way, I took pity on their curious faces. “You, dear friends, are looking at the Landmark Stage’s latest stage manager.”
“What?” Jules said, her perfect brow creasing into a frown as she parsed my words, comparing them with her encyclopedic knowledge of local theater productions.
“Really!” Maddy said at the same time. “For what? One of their summer shows?”
“Nope.” I shook my head. “Romeo and Juliet.”
Jules said, “That’s impossible! That’s opening in three months! They must have set the stage manager ages ago.”
My conscience prickled just a little at her words, and I resisted the urge to stare at my fingertips, at their ghostly film of a flame tattoo. Maria’s mother was going to be fine, Bill had said. I didn’t need to worry.
Instead, I raised my chin and announced, “I got the call from Bill Pomeroy yesterday, just as I finished tagging the costumes. His stage manager had some family emergency.” I looked down at my lap, feigning modesty. “I was the first person he called. We had our first rehearsal today.”
My housemates cooed with a gratifying level of support. Maddy said, “Wait a second. That’s the show with Drew Myers, right?”
I surprised myself by blushing as I thought of our leading man’s, er, leading lady’s square jaw. “That’s the one,” I said.
“That’ll fill a few seats in the house.”
I shrugged and tried to sound as if I hadn’t noticed how gorgeous Drew was. “The whole cast is good.”
Maddy waggled her eyebrows. “I’m not talking about acting ability. He played Happy in that Death of a Salesman I worked on last year. And just about every woman in the audience had a smile on her face every time he walked onstage.”
We all laughed. It felt good to share the joke with my housemates. We all knew the Twin Cities theater scene. We all knew just how important this Landmark job could be. I let their kind words break over me, thinking how long it had been since I’d had great news to share.
That could have been because I’d been sacrificing my career for TEWSBU’s, when he and I were still together. It could have been because I’d turned down three great stage management prospects in the year that we were engaged, jobs that would have meant traveling out of town, away from my so-called sweetheart. It could have been because I’d let myself loll in the Fox Hill hammock for too long, lulled into complacency by a steady paycheck, even if that paycheck was lean, and I was bored to tears with second-class renditions of musicals designed to do nothing more than please the masses.
But all of that was behind me now. All of that was history. And I hadn’t even told my housemates the most amazing thing. I glanced at my fingertips again. The flames were too faint to make out in the living room’s shadows. They were never going to believe me when I told them about Teel.
“There’s something else, too,” I said, immediately silencing Maddy’s and Jules’s chattering congratulations. “I didn’t totally get the job on my own,” I said. “I had help.”
“Help?” Maddy asked, spooning up the last of her soup.
I nodded. “I was cleaning up the Kismet costumes, and I found a brass lantern. It must have been part of the set decoration. I started to polish it, when all of a sudden—”
I couldn’t speak.
Just like that, I couldn’t form words. I moved my mouth, but nothing came out; I was as silent as if someone had punched the mute button on my personal remote control device.
I coughed, and that sound was audible. I took a sip of water and started again. “I started to polish it,” I got out without any trouble, but when I tried to say, “and a genie came out,” I was knocked utterly silent again.
“Are you okay?” Maddy asked, putting down her own spoon. “Are you choking?”
I shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said, my voice totally, completely normal.
My housemates stared at me as if I were nuts. Which, all of a sudden, I was beginning to think I might be. I took my last mouthful of soup, swallowed it. There was nothing wrong with my throat. Nothing wrong with me at all. I gritted my teeth, suddenly more determined than ever to complete my story. “I was tagging the last of the Kismet costumes, when I knocked a brass lantern onto the floor. When I picked it up, it was filthy.”
There. That had been easy. I gripped my spoon and clenched my jaw. I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and then measured out each word, concentrating on the sounds like a student learning a new language. “I…polished…it…and…then…a—”
Crash.
Without warning, my hand swept across the Scrabble board. I tried to stop my fingers, tried to interrupt the sweeping motion, but it felt like my grip no longer belonged to me. I had no control. I knocked over the game board and all of our tile holders, sending little wooden letters flying across the room. As if for good measure, I turned over Jules’s soup bowl, sending her half-finished corn and asparagus flying across the table, toward my unsuspecting chest.
“Kira!” Jules exclaimed.
Maddy sprang into action, whipping her napkin off her lap and trying to mop up the disaster. Fortunately, Jules’s soup was no longer steaming hot. My tough-as-armor sweatshirt blocked most of it from my skin.
“I am so sorry!” I said. “I—” How could I explain what had happened? I didn’t even have any idea what had happened.
“That’s okay,” Jules said wryly. “I’d had enough, anyway.”
Maddy’s napkin was quickly soaked, though, and mine had been sacrificed to the initial deluge that seeped down to my lap. I shrugged in disgust and said, “I’ll be back in a sec.”
I pushed away from the table as Maddy and Jules started collecting the Scrabble tiles. They made concerned noises, but I assured them that I’d just had a really strange cramp in my hand. I saw them exchange a look, but they let me go.
I closed my bedroom door behind me and peeled off my sweatshirt. Something had happened there. Something strange. A distinct power had taken over my hands, a definite force that had emanated from the tattooed flames on my fingertips.
I opened my closet door and reached toward the hangers where another half-dozen sweatshirts waited. Before I could seize clean clothes, though, the world around me disappeared.
Yes, I know how bizarre that sounds. Believe me, it was more bizarre when it happened to me. One moment, I was peering into my closet, shaking my head at the strangeness that had overtaken my life. The next, I was standing nowhere, surrounded by nothing, peering at nobody.
Automatically, my arms folded across my chest, as if I could shield my less-than-stunning décolletage from the complete absence of anything familiar around me. I looked around frantically, wondering if I’d accepted Teel’s magical presence too easily. Maybe my first instinct had been correct. Maybe I truly was going nuts.
I glanced down at my feet—they were firmly anchored on top of an invisible surface. I tried shuffling my toes to the side. I kept my balance, which implied that the absent floor extended beneath me in an even plane, but I still couldn’t feel anything of substance. Cautiously, I crouched down, trailing my fingers beside my sock-clad toes.
Nothing.
The space around me wasn’t warm, wasn’t cold. It wasn’t hard, wasn’t soft. It wasn’t dark, wasn’t light. It was like a memory of something from before I’d ever lived, like my personal recollection of what my life had been like a year before I was born.
“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.