SIX HOURS LATER, I was ensconced on the living room couch, doing my best to drown—er, feast—my sorrows. I had changed out of my stage manager sweats into my home layabout clothes, a disreputable flannel robe that any normal person would have burned half a lifetime ago and a pair of enormous fluffy slippers that had once been red. I had my hair pulled back in a ponytail that was messier than anything Jennifer Galland had ever considered wearing, and it certainly wasn’t flopping around in a cute counterpoint to whatever I was thinking.
I was studiously scraping the bottom of a pint of ice cream. Foolish me—I had thought that I would never eat another bite when I’d fled Mephisto’s in shame. Like clockwork, though, my belly had started to rumble at seven o’clock, refusing to take a microwaved cup of frozen broccoli as an answer.
I had been forced to reach for the hard stuff: Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. This was an emergency, after all.
I knew from personal experience that some people (Read: My perfect housemate, Jules) could make a pint of ice cream last for an entire month. Every night, after she finished her well-balanced dinner (consisting mostly of leafy greens, with small portions of lean protein and the occasional ounce or two of whole grains), she would permit herself a single spoonful. If one of the delectable “super fudge chunks” lodged on the edge of her spoon, she counted that in her night’s allotment, skimping on smooth chocolate ice cream to make up for the candy treat.
Sometimes, I hated Jules.
For me, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s was a single serving.
Feeling a little sick to my stomach, and a lot sick at heart, I huddled deeper into my robe. I was fumbling wanly for the TV remote between the sofa cushions when Jules waltzed out of her bedroom, wearing a tiny black dress that barely covered half of her erogenous zones. She’d pulled her hair into a smooth updo. I knew that she was wearing makeup, but I couldn’t see where her naturally flawless features ended and M.A.C. began. I vaguely recalled that she and Justin were going to some gallery opening, the last event on their social calendar before they headed out to California.
She paused in front of me. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, burrowing deeper into my flannel cave.
“You don’t look fine.”
I bit off a sharp reply. I wanted sympathy, not badgering. “I will be fine,” I amended.
Jules perched on the arm of the couch. “You do know that getting out of that relationship was the best thing you ever could have done, don’t you?”
“Obviously,” I said, sighing and staring down at my pitiful self. I had let a dollop of ice cream slip off my spoon sometime during my administration of frozen pain medication. The chocolate stain added character to my robe.
“Seriously,” Jules said, shaking her head with a vehemence that would have led to a French twist disaster for an ordinary human woman. “We’ve been through this about a million times. You are way too good for that smarmy, superior jerk. You would have been miserable if you’d gone through with the wedding. You would have hated yourself every single morning that he skated off to his production, taking the lead over every single one of yours.”
“I would have learned to deal with the misery,” I grumbled, knowing that I was acting like a two-year-old.
“Yeah,” Jules said. “You deal with misery really well.” She bent down and scooped up my empty ice cream carton. “If you were still with him, you’d never have been able to take the job at the Landmark.”
“I would have!” I argued. Teel would have found a way for me to take the Landmark job. But I couldn’t tell Jules about Teel.
Jules grimaced. “That man’s career was too ‘important’ for the bastard to make time for your wedding. Do you honestly think he would change travel plans or casting calls or anything else, just because you landed your dream job? Come on, Kira. It’s time to pick yourself up. Get back on the horse.”
Unexpectedly, I pictured John McRae, with his cowboy slouch and his drawl designed to calm a frantic bronco. “I hate horses,” I said sulkily, pulling my hands up into the sleeves of my dilapidated robe. “The only time my father took me to a petting zoo, the pony ate my sweater.”
Jules sighed in exasperation, then stalked into the kitchen, perfectly stable on heels that made my arches ache just to look at them. By the time she came back from disposing of my comfort food remains, I had pulled the lapels of my robe up to my chin. She shook her head as she stared at me. “Seriously, Kira. Do you want me to stay home with you?”
What good would that do? We’d both sit on the couch and watch the latest episodes of some grating reality show. I would ignore the stupid television as I drowned in guilt, knowing that I’d kept my best friend and housemate from yet-another-perfect-soiree with Justin-the-perfect-man at wherever-the-perfect-locale, where Jules would have eaten three bites of whatever-the-perfect-food that whoever-the-perfect-hostess was serving.
Me? Bitter much?
I forced myself to sit up straighter on the couch. “No, Jules. I’ll be fine. Really.” She looked at me with the shrewd disbelief of a longtime friend. “I mean it,” I said, seasoning my words with a resigned sigh. “I’m going to get all of my sulking done tonight. I’ll be as good as new tomorrow. I promise.”
Jules clicked her tongue. She knew me too well.
“Okay,” I amended. “I might sulk for tomorrow, too. But I’ll be fine once I get it out of my system. Once and for all. Really.”
Jules glanced at the clock. “You’ll call me if you need anything?”
Yeah. Like I’d ever be able to reach Jules on her cell phone. Half the time she forgot to charge it, and the other half, it was buried deep in her purse, set to vibrate so that it wouldn’t interrupt rehearsal or filming or whatever.
“I’ll call Maddy.”
Jules laughed. We both knew that Maddy’s phone was surgically attached to her ear. “Where is she, anyway? Are they still rehearsing?”
I shrugged. “I think she was planning to blow off some steam with Bachelor Number One. Some guy she started seeing last week. Mauricio, I think she said his name was.”
“Italian?”
“Probably.” I shrugged. “You know Maddy. A few weeks from now she’ll tell us it had been true love, but he had to sail for Rome.” I threw a mock hand of desperation against my forehead, as if I were watching Maddy’s one true love disappear into the sunset. While Jules and I were well accustomed to Maddy’s frequent breakups, it remained a mystery to me how she managed to get over her guys so quickly, how she was ready to look for new blood a single day after sating herself with farewell sex.
I was never going to sleep with a guy again.
“When will she be home?” Jules asked, and I wasn’t certain if she was still concerned about me, or if our resident house mother had moved on to worrying about our sex-crazed housemate.
“Tomorrow? Day after? Her note didn’t say, but you know how she gets during tech rehearsal weeks.” I nodded toward the white board calendar in the kitchen, where we supposedly kept one another up-to-date on our comings and goings. Maddy’s hastily scrawled note said, “Ciao, bellas! Piu tarde!”
Jules snorted. “Let’s call her tomorrow, to make sure she isn’t lying injured in a ditch.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “She wouldn’t appreciate our interrupting her tonight.” When I saw Jules’s frown start to crease her carefully glossed lips, I scowled. I knew that she was questioning whether I’d have the nerve to interrupt Maddy if I needed anything. “Go, Jules! I’ll be fine! I promise!”
And, finally, she did.
I turned on the television and started flipping through channels, but the offerings were even worse than I’d expected. Each show that I paused on featured a team of brilliant young professionals, all pitted against one another for money, fame, and fortune. Everyone was friends now—it was only a few minutes after nine. They had another forty minutes and three commercial breaks before they’d be at one another’s throats.
I wished that I had another pint of Ben & Jerry’s in the house.
In the days immediately following my broken-off wedding, I’d bought ice cream by the carload. I always had some in the freezer, no matter how much I’d already consumed that day, that week, that month. I’d hoarded Ben & Jerry’s the way my father kept Zantac in every room of his house. You can never have too much protection, he’d explained to me once, when I’d laughed about spotting the little round tablets on his three-season porch in the middle of winter.
I just needed a little more protection. About a pint more.
During an interminable commercial break (Who would get voted off? Geneen, who had stabbed her teammates in the back? Or Denysia, who was the most likely to enjoy long-term success and thus threaten all the other contestants?), I replayed my little drama of the afternoon.
I’d been a fool to let myself think that Drew Myers might be the guy for me. Sure, he’d given me the time of day. He’d been willing to flirt over a burger and fries. But in the long run, he had to know that I was damaged goods. Everyone in the theater knew that I was broken, and nothing was going to change that. Nothing was going to heal me.
I’d made the wrong wish with Teel.
I shouldn’t have wished for the Landmark. Sure, that had gotten me out of the dinner theater racket. It had moved me away from the unfortunate neighboring porno movie house; it had let me escape from temperamental tenors and high-strung sopranos.
But it was nowhere near enough of a change. My wish hadn’t whisked away the broken world around me, the aching disappointment that I knew far too well, that I’d lived with for far too long. Disappointment with TEWSBU, yes, but even more importantly, disappointment with myself. Disappointment that I had let myself become That Woman, the bitter ex-fiancée, the one who falls apart completely and manages to spend the rest of her life living the romance that never was.
I should have wished for a perfect score on the LSAT and entrance to Harvard Law. At least that would have made my father happy. Dad deserved a little wish fulfillment after all the money he’d wasted on my non-wedding. So what if the thought of spending the rest of my days as a lawyer made my blood run cold? I’d learn to like it. My mother had wanted it badly enough. And I certainly wasn’t getting anywhere in the theater. Not with TEWSBU dogging every step, even months after he’d left me in the dirt.
I sighed, and my robe slipped loose around my waist. When I gathered it up to launch Stage Two (or was it Three? Or Four? Or was I up to a billion?) of my patented pity party, I couldn’t help but stare at the ice cream stain on the flannel.
What had I been thinking, drowning my sorrows in Ben & Jerry’s? Again.
Consuming a pint of meaningless fat? Again.
Riding the roller coaster from sweet to savory to sweet? Again.
I shook my head in self-disgust.
In the past year, I’d truly developed terrible habits. I’d trained myself to fall into oblivion with the help of food. My temperament, my body, and my self-respect were all taking major beatings. Repeatedly.
I needed to lose the extra weight that I’d gained. I needed to kick my fat-slob self to the curb. If getting rid of TEWSBU was supposed to be such a blessing, such a growth opportunity, such a grand chance to become a better person, then why not make other dramatic overnight changes?
I hauled myself off the sofa and shuffled across the living room. My bedroom door was half open, and I blinked as I stared at the mess inside. What was going on with me? How could I—a stage manager by profession, a professional organizer and tucker-in of loose ends—stand to live in such utter confusion and disarray?
When had my nice, neat life slipped so far out of balance? And why had I let it stay slipped for so long?
I waded through the mess and pulled open my closet door. Aside from my sweats, I had fewer than a half-dozen outfits now. A half-dozen things that I could wear out of the house without fear of being arrested for indecent exposure.
It hadn’t always been that way.
I shoved hangers to the side, pushing my way back three months, six months, a year into my past. There. I hadn’t lived in black before TEWSBU left me. I had that green silk blouse, the one that never went out of style, that always managed to bring out the golden glints in my hair. I had that Fair Isle sweater, a classic burgundy and gray that made me feel chic in a timeless, Audrey Hepburn way, every single winter that I’d slipped it on since my senior year in college. I had the charcoal slacks that zipped up the side, the ones that made me look positively lanky.
I had a great wardrobe, clothes that made me feel good, clothes that made me like myself, even on the gloomy days, even on the days that seemed too dark and depressing to haul myself out of bed.
At least I had, a few zillion calories ago.
I could try Weight Watchers. Or Jenny Craig. Or Atkins, or South Beach, or Zone or whatever we were calling low-carb eating this week. I could watch what I ate for a year or two, monitoring every single bite as I regained control over my life, as I took back the balance and the happiness that had been mine before the non-wedding.
Or, I could call on Teel.
Was it really superficial, for me to use a genie to lose weight? He’d already said I couldn’t use my wishes to solve the big problems. If I was never going to succeed with major humanitarian efforts, was it really that bad to ask for a little nip and tuck? For a little—all right, a lot of—liposuction?
It wasn’t like I was just asking for help in losing weight, I argued with myself. That would be superficial. No, I was asking for a return of my personal confidence. Personal strength. A jump start, so that I could best take advantage of my new job, my new life as a rising star in the theater scene. (Read: My new show with Drew Myers, a certain treacherous voice whispered at the back of my brain, but I hushed it to immediate silence.)
After all, I’d read a lot of articles about how fat people suffer discrimination. If I kept looking like this, I’d never be considered for the best jobs. Directors would always see my size first, my competence later. I would never line up another theater position. I might as well give in to my father’s demands right now and complete my LSAT application that very night.
On the other hand, if I managed to lose all the weight at once, I’d be inspired to keep it off. I’d eat like Jules for the rest of my life. I’d swear off Tater Tots hot dish forever. I’d be a new person overnight, forget about waiting till the first of the month, or the winter solstice, or the New Year, or whatever arbitrary “new beginning” I set myself to initiate the transformation that just never seemed to happen.
I’d do it now, and then I’d keep it done, once and for all. For ever and ever. Amen.
Before I could lose faith in my justification, I reached into the back of my closet, digging to the bottom of my clothes hamper to find the magic lamp. Grubby laundry might not be the recommended swaddling for an artifact of such value, but I’d been hard-pressed to find another safe place to store my treasure. I’d lived with my housemates for too long—they wouldn’t hesitate to rummage through my desk for a postage stamp or a pencil with a sharpened tip. Even my dresser wasn’t totally sacrosanct; Jules routinely borrowed my T-shirts to work out in, when she hadn’t had a chance to do her own laundry. I’d considered stashing the brass treasure beneath my mattress, but the lamp was large enough and lumpy enough that I’d suspected I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep.
So, dirty laundry had been my choice.
Anyway, it wasn’t like Teel was ever going to know.
I collapsed onto my bed and closed my eyes. I only had three wishes; I couldn’t afford to squander one. But the more I thought about asking for this change, the more I imagined myself back where I’d been a year before, wearing my old clothes, moving with my old confidence, climbing three flights of stairs without a nagging catch of breathlessness. This was right. I could feel it in my bones. My aching, nutrition-deprived bones.
I scooted up to my headboard and sat cross-legged where my pillows would have been, if I’d bothered to make my bed that morning. Or the morning before. Or the morning before that.
I’d have plenty of time to straighten my room after making this wish, I told myself. Plenty of time to live my new life. To get things back under control.
I stared at my hand, barely able to make out the flame tattoos on my fingertips. I rubbed my thumb across my fingers, and it might have been my imagination, but the pattern started to glint a little more, to shine, as if I’d trailed my hand through glitter.
I picked up the brass lamp and checked the flame markings again. They were definitely clearer where they touched the brass. The metal was warm under my fingertips, much warmer than the lantern should have been when it had just been plucked from a pile of dirty laundry. The temperature felt good, made my fingers want to rub some more. The metal seemed to hum with its own energy, like static electricity made audible.
I pressed my fingers together, hard, and said out loud, “Teel!”
Immediately, fog poured out of the lamp—glinting, gleaming mist that shimmered with ruby and emerald and cobalt. The shape within coalesced more quickly than it had in the costume shop; I blinked, and a body stood at the foot of my bed.
“Ready for your second wish?”
I almost dropped the lamp. The guy who stood in front of me was a chef.
He was dressed all in white, in the traditional double-breasted jacket and huge toque. His sleeves had been hastily folded above his elbows; I could envision him in the middle of preparing some hectic feast for a hundred honored guests. He clearly had enjoyed a fair amount of the food he generated in this persona; his belly sloped beneath the starched coat as if he were pregnant with triplets. “Teel?” I asked, although I knew that it had to be my genie.
“At your service,” Teel replied. I wondered if he’d actually found his way into one of the Twin Cities’ finer restaurant kitchens, or if he’d merely taken no prisoners at Williams-Sonoma after spending a day watching the Food Channel. Either way, I found it more than a bit ironic that he was dressed like a chef when I was about to ask to lose a year’s ill-acquired weight.
Teel took a long look around us, his bushy eyebrows coming together in a frown as he acknowledged my stained and faded bathrobe, my matted fluffy slippers. He stared at the chaos of my bedroom, shaking his head in amazement. “I think I could send over a sous-chef or two, to help you straighten things up around here.”
“I don’t need a sous-chef,” I snapped. “I just need some time. Time to get things done, when I’m not working on a play.”
“At least let me get you a vacuum cleaner,” Teel said. After a sharp double-tug on the lobe of his fleshy ear, a machine appeared, already plugged into my wall socket. The tattooed flames around Teel’s wrist gleamed against the high-end Dyson Absolute. As a stage manager, I recognized the model immediately. I had to appreciate my genie’s willingness—and ability—to conjure up the very best.
Nevertheless, I said, “Later.” I was a bit annoyed that he thought my homemaking skills were more important than any other reason I might have summoned him. He looked disapproving, as if my slovenliness put one of his Michelin stars at stake, but I staved off any further judgment by saying, “I’ve chosen my second wish.”
“Magnificent!” he boomed, as if he had just unveiled a particularly succulent standing rib roast.
Yum. Roast beef. Maybe I could put off my wish-making for a meal or two…. At least until I was feeling a little better. A little less raw about TEWSBU.
No. That was the sort of thinking that had gotten me into this mess. “I’ve decided that I want to lose weight,” I said quickly, before I could change my mind, and I immediately grimaced. I sounded just as stupid and superficial as I’d been afraid I would. I hurried on. “I want to get back to the weight I was before my wedding. The wedding that didn’t happen. You know what I mean. I want to be the person I was then, physically at least. I mean, I wouldn’t mind being that person mentally, or emotionally, or, well, whatever.”
What was it about defining my wishes that made me so confused? The same thing had happened when I’d tried to confirm my wish for a better job; I’d found myself spewing modifications to my own words, new thoughts, details, explanations.
When Teel stayed silent, I said, “So, how about it? Can you make me lose the weight I gained during the past year?”
He blinked. “Oh! Are you through explaining everything?” I narrowed my eyes, and he held up his meaty hands, as if to assure me he was only joking. “So it took you two full days to get around to that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Changing your physical form. Seven out of ten women ask for modifications to their physical appearance as their second wish.”
Something about his matter-of-fact tone set me on edge. His matter-of-fact tone, or the way that I was just another statistic to him, just another random woman who had found his lantern and made my demanding wishes? Stung, I said, “And the guys? Don’t they ask for physical changes?”
He shook his head. “Not exactly. They might ask for specific physical traits, the ability to do specific things, but they don’t go for the full body overhaul.”
“Seven out of ten?” I couldn’t decide if the ratio made me feel cheap, or if it gave me comfort.
“But most women ask for something really striking. You know—full body, full face, complete upgrade.” He stared at me, once again taking a survey from the crown of my head to the arch of my feet. I couldn’t help but feel like I came up a few points short in his overall estimation. “You sure you don’t want to consider something a little more radical than just losing a year of bad choices? I really can do a lot, if I do say so myself.” He gazed appraisingly at me, as if I were an entire salmon waiting for his chefly expertise.
I should have been offended. I mean, here was my genie, practically telling me that my body was below average, my face was a disappointment. Or would be, once he’d magic-blasted away those pounds.
But I sighed. “I’m really not trying to get a perfect body out of the deal,” I said. I tugged at my straggling ponytail, removing my elasticized band so that I could run my fingers through my curls. The motion helped me to think. “I just want what I had. I want what was mine. What I lost when TEWSBU left me.”
TEWSBU. I pronounced it the way it always sounded in my head, so that it rhymed with “who’s blue.”
“You lost me.” He settled his hammy fists on his hips. “Who is this two’s boo?”
“The Ex Who Shall Be Unnamed. The guy I was going to marry.”
“So, you want to lose the weight to get back at him?” Teel frowned, his entire face pulled into the expression beneath his towering toque. “I can do that for you, but I have to tell you, it’s a really lousy idea.”
“It’s my wish, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s your wish. And you know I’m eager for you to make it. But spending a wish just to get revenge at someone… Nine out of ten women regret spending a wish to get back at a lover.”
“Nine out of ten!” I wanted to ask him how many women had lovers to get back at, at least as much as I did, but I thought the answer would probably make me so depressed that I’d give up on the whole genie thing altogether, and just seek out another round of Ben & Jerry’s expert treatment.
“Nineteen out of twenty,” Teel offered, “if you count the lesbians who want revenge against their partners.”
Where did he get this stuff? Was there some Genie Statistical Abstract that he kept at his flame-touched fingertips? It didn’t really matter, though. I swallowed hard and tried to clarify my wish. “I’m not trying to get back at anyone. I’d be totally happy to never see TEWSBU again. It’s me that I want to change. Me that I want to get into line.”
Teel nodded, his bluff features turning the motion into an avuncular commentary. “And twenty pounds will do that?”
I curled my lips into a snarl of self-disgust. “Thirty.”
“In one year!” I thought his eyebrows might never descend from beneath his pleated hat.
“It’s been a bad one,” I said.
Teel looked around at my room, at the black sweatpants piled haphazardly on my desk, at the crumpled socks beside my bed. My trash can glittered with candy bar wrappers, and towels from my morning shower were clumped at the foot of my bed. “I can see that.”
And I could see it, too. I could see how I’d let my weight get out of hand, the same way I’d let everything else fray and scatter. The same way I’d let my confidence spin away, go whirling off into the darkest recesses of my mind. It was time to take charge. Time to get back on track. I looked Teel in the eye and said, “I wish that I weighed what I did before my wedding was called off.”
Holding my gaze, Teel raised his fingers to his earlobe. He paused long enough for me to take a breath. Another. Another.
Speak now, or forever hold your peace.
I nodded affirmatively, a tiny, determined gesture. “As you wish,” Teel said, and then he tugged his ear twice.
The electric jolt was stronger than I expected, more violent than I’d remembered from our exchange back in the costume shop. The jangling energy made me catch my breath; it froze every cell of my body. My mind decided to cry out; my throat tensed up and my lungs began to expand, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t give voice to the sparking pain.
But then, the agony was over. The electricity was gone.
I stared down at my body. The belt of my flannel robe was suddenly slack, letting the fabric gap open. I gasped in surprise, and the movement of my lungs felt different, easier, cleaner. I ran my fingers down my sides, closing them around my waist—the waist that I had not felt for months.
Everything had changed. I took a step, and I realized that I was feeling my thighs moving through the air, no flesh chafing against flesh. I raised my fingertips to my throat, felt the sleeker line of my chin, the sharper hint of my cheekbones.
I laughed, then breathed deeply to fill my lungs again. Looking down, I realized that something was different, something was…wrong. Something was not me, neither my pre- nor post-TEWSBU self.
“Um, Teel, you improvised a little.” I stared down at a pair of firm, shapely D-cups that I’d never had in my life.
“Those?” he said with an elaborate shrug. “I thought you’d appreciate a little Chef’s Surprise. Think of it as dessert.”
I knew that I was supposed to be annoyed with him, frustrated that he’d gone beyond the strict four corners of my wish. But just that once, I decided to forgive him.