I was just grateful that the heavy door didn’t crush anyone when it came off its hinges. You see, I had sort of forgotten about that consequence. So Ridge and I did the sensible thing as soon as the door fell down.
We ran.
Of course Tina spotted us, and by the time we got outside, she and Vale had caught up.
“You followed me?” Tina shouted. “I can’t believe you two!”
“It was Ace’s idea,” Ridge said.
I shot him a glare and tried to explain to the girls. “I had to see what you were up to. For all I know, you could be secretly working with Thackary Anderthon.” I glanced back at the hospital. “Who was that woman you were talking to?”
Tina took a couple of deep breaths. When she spoke, it didn’t answer my question at all. “We’re basically down to six days now. If we want to complete our quests, then we’d better get moving!” She set off at a brisk pace in the opposite direction from the hospital, Vale jogging to stay close.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Where are you going?”
“You tell me,” Tina called back. “You’re the one with all the information on how to find Thackary.”
I sighed, moving hastily to catch up to her. Arguing and distrusting was going to make for a long quest. As I moved, I swung my backpack around and pulled out a couple of sandwiches. If Tina was as hungry as I was, then maybe she’d take this as a peace offering.
I handed one to Ridge and extended two others to Tina and Vale. “You want a sandwich?” I asked. “I have plenty.” To prove my point, I pulled open my backpack so they could see how stuffed it was.
“What’s with the sandwiches?” Vale asked, taking one.
I shrugged, shouldering my backpack. “I like peanut butter. Is that a crime?” I didn’t feel like explaining how my first wish had been for something so ridiculous. I peeled back the plastic bag and took a bite.
“Mmm . . .” Ridge muttered behind me. “These are good!”
Tina glanced at me from the side of her eyes, and then snatched the sandwich that I still held out for her.
“Who’d have thought . . .” I said with a chuckle, trying desperately for conversation. “Peanut butter . . .” I took another bite. “Was Vale’s creamy or chunky?”
“Hey!” Vale cut in. “You calling me chunky?”
“No,” I stammered. “I mean the jar.”
“What are you talking about?” Tina finally said through a mouthful.
I fumbled in my backpack once more, producing Ridge’s jar for her inspection. “Didn’t Vale come out of one of these?”
Tina reached into her pocket and withdrew a small object. It was a little jar of lip balm, raspberry flavored. The lid was missing, but the red balm didn’t appear to smudge onto anything.
“This is Vale’s genie jar.”
I felt a tiny pang of jealousy. Not that I wanted to carry around a jar of raspberry lip balm, but look at that size! It was a fraction of the peanut butter jar I had to lug around.
“But . . .” I stammered. “Your lips are chapped.”
“Really?” Tina smirked and tucked the jar back into her pocket. “We should talk about where we’re going. What did you learn from that page of the notebook?”
“I learned that we’ve got a long ways to go,” I said. “Anybody been to Mount Rushmore?”
Tina shook her head. “Have you?” she asked me.
“Not that I remember,” I said, giving my standard reply. I knew I hadn’t been to Mount Rushmore in the last three years. But before that . . . I really had no idea what I’d done. It was frustrating to have a blank memory.
“What about you two?” I asked Ridge and Vale. She took a bite of sandwich and kept walking.
“Mount Rushmore,” Ridge said. “That’s the one with the big faces carved in the mountainside, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Four presidents of the United States.”
“Ever wonder what happened to the rest of their bodies?” Ridge asked. “I mean, it’s kind of freaky that it’s just a bunch of floating heads.”
“How are we going to get there?” Tina asked. “Mount Rushmore’s in South Dakota. That’s way too far to walk.”
“We’ll have to wish for something,” I said.
“Ugh,” Tina grunted. “I figured out within the first hour that it’s better to do as little wishing as possible. I can’t deal with these consequences.”
“You seem to be doing fine,” I said, polishing off my sandwich and stuffing the empty bag into my pocket. “What have you got so far?”
Tina shot me a disapproving glance. “Seems kind of impolite to ask another person about her consequences.”
“Sorry,” I replied. But my apology seemed to spur Tina into telling me anyway.
“Next time I eat ice cream, it’ll taste like olives. One of my fingernails can’t be trimmed for a year, and I can’t tell blue from orange for the rest of the week.”
“So the sky looks orange to you?” I asked. Not at that moment, of course—it was practically dark.
She nodded. “It’s weird.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at Tina’s misfortune. “What did you wish for?”
“Lots of things,” she answered thoughtfully. “But there were only a few that I could accept.”
“I know what you mean.”
Tina looked at me and conspicuously wiped her cheek. She kept staring, persistently scraping at a spot next to her mouth. “You’ve got some leftovers,” she finally said.
My hand shot up to my face, only to encounter the everlasting smudge of peanut butter. “That’s a flavor saver,” I said.
“Gross,” she replied, but it got her to smile.
“You think your consequences are bad,” said Vale, “you should hear about some of my previous Wishmakers.”
“I bet you’ve got a lot of stories,” Tina said.
Vale nodded. “I once had a Wishmaker who grew an upside-down mustache for a year.”
“What’s an upside-down mustache?” I asked.
“You know, the hair grows up instead of down.”
“That would be awful,” I said, unconsciously scratching my upper lip.
“Yeah.” Vale took the last bite of her sandwich. “She hated it.”
“How many Wishmakers have you had?” I asked the question to both genies, but only Vale responded.
“Too many.”
“Do most of them succeed at their quests?” I asked.
“Most,” she answered. That was reassuring, at least. Odds were in our favor.
I turned to Tina. “You never told me your quest’s consequence,” I said. “You’re supposed to save the life of an ex-Wishmaker, but what happens if you don’t?”
“Bad stuff,” she answered. “Basically, the end of the world.”
“Hey, me, too!” I said it like we had the same pair of shoes, not like we were talking about the world ending.
“If I don’t succeed,” said Tina, “the whole world will be flooded with lemonade.”
“I happen to like lemonade,” I said.
Tina gave me a deadpan look. “Not if it causes the end of the world. Floods can destroy huge cities. Not to mention that lemonade is acidic. Nothing will survive for long.”
She had a good point. I never would have thought the world could end by lemonade.
“If I don’t stop Thackary Anderthon,” I said, “then all the cats and dogs in the world will turn into zombies and eat everyone. You have any pets?”
“I had a poodle,” she replied.
“Undead poodle,” I said. “Sounds ferocious.”
Tina laughed. For that brief second, whatever worries she carried seemed to melt away.
“A world-ending consequence isn’t very common,” Vale said. “Wishmakers often have consequences that would cause earthquakes, start wars, wreck economies, destroy chocolate . . .”
Tina and I gave her a puzzled look. “I’m serious,” she said. “I once had a Wishmaker who had seven days to pick a leaf from a very old tree in Patagonia. If he failed, chocolate would go extinct.”
“Hmmm,” I said in mock thought. “No more chocolate”—I held up my hands as if weighing the consequences—“versus zombie pets destroying humanity.”
“Don’t downplay it, Ace,” Ridge cut in. “Imagine a world without chocolate!” He said it with a hint of desperation in his voice.
“Imagine a world without people!” I replied, reminding him what was expected of Tina and me. It didn’t seem fair that the Universe had put that kind of responsibility on us. I guess I should have read the fine print on the genie jar’s warning label.