The Wish Read online

  Chapter Eleven

  I gave Nina and BeeBee Stephanie’s message and said I had to go home. At the subway station I took the first train that came, even though it wasn’t my train. I walked from car to car, looking for the old lady. I had to find her and fix my awful mistake.

  I had been so stupid. She had offered to make me one of the in crowd, which exists at any school. Instead, I got my dream come true—for three weeks!

  As soon as we graduated, the kids who liked me now wouldn’t anymore. BeeBee and Nina would care that I had been mean to Stephanie, their real friend, and Ardis would remember how I had terrified her with Reggie. I’d go back to being ignored. And the dog jokes would start up again.

  The old lady wasn’t on the train, and she didn’t get on at any of the stops. She didn’t seem to, anyway. But she might not always look like an old lady. She might be able to take whatever form she chose. She could be the toddler in the stroller across from me. Or she could be the conductor who was coming into our car right now.

  I got off at the last stop and waited for a train going the other way. On the ride back, I calmed down a little. Maybe I’d misinterpreted everything. Maybe there was another reason Stephanie didn’t like me. Maybe she was immune to spells. Maybe I wasn’t under a spell at all. Maybe the old lady was only a coincidence, and I had just naturally become popular that day. I had waited long enough.

  Yeah, right. Outside Claverford that morning I was unpopular. One step inside and I was popular. Very natural.

  It was a spell. And it was going to end.

  Being left back would solve the problem. If my theory was right, the sixth and seventh graders would go on loving me. I could be popular all my life; I’d just have to stay in middle school. I’d be twenty-five and still going on sleepovers. I’d be married and still in eighth grade. I’d be in the same class with my own children. And then my grandchildren.

  Sunday. Fifteen more days of popularity.

  When I got to the Central Park Zoo, Jared was waiting for me at the ticket kiosk. I had never seen him in anything but the Claverford uniform for boys—blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt, and maroon-and-blue-striped tie. Today he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Except for his one eyebrow, he looked okay. I was wearing jeans too, and my red zipper-neck T-shirt that I love, except Mom made me put a cardigan over it because it was cool out, and the only one I had that wasn’t too heavy was an ugly bright green.

  “Hi,” Jared said, smiling at me. “You look good.”

  I smiled back, thinking he should never smile. The eyebrow above and the smile below made an almost complete circle.

  “I look like a lollipop,” I said.

  His smile widened. “They’re feeding the sea lions in two minutes,” he said.

  I love the sea lions. They have so much fun, you don’t feel sad that they’re in captivity. But I didn’t like the announcer for their performance. After he made the sea lions hold their fish in their teeth till he gave the command to eat them, he told us this was proof they were smarter than dogs. He said you could never get a dog to hold its food like that.

  “I could,” I said. “I could train Reggie to hold on to a treat for as long as I told him to.”

  “Can he do tricks?”

  The show ended while I told Jared about Reggie. We sat on a bench facing the sea lions’ pool. I explained all the things Reggie could do, and Jared listened, really seeming interested. Unless the spell made his eyes stay on mine, made him laugh in the right places, made him keep saying, “Go on. What else?”

  When I finished telling Reggie stories, he said, “Reggie loves you. He must think you’re great.”

  “I love him too, and he’s great.”

  “Right. It’s like the seals. Their trainers are kind, so they think humans are terrific. But a baby elephant whose mother was killed by a hunter would think we were terrible.”

  I had never thought about it that way.

  He added, “Maybe they’d both be right.” He stood and put out his hand to pull me up. I took it, thinking he would let go when I was standing, but he didn’t.

  There was nothing wrong with his hand. It wasn’t clammy or anything, but I imagined what Suzanne would say if she saw us—“Sweater Girl and Eyebrow Boy Hold Hands.” That’s what she’d say. I felt more on display than the animals.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I hate this sweater,” I said. “I’m taking it off.” Jared would have to let go of my hand. I could put up with being a little chilly.

  “What’s wrong with the sweater?” he asked.

  “It’s too green.”

  “Give it to me.”

  I handed it over, and he tied it around his shoulders. It looked like he was wearing a cape. It looked dumb.

  “It looks as bad on you as it did on me.” I wished he’d take it off. It was embarrassing. “Give it back.”

  “No. It matches my toenail polish.”

  Automatically I looked at his feet. Which were in sneakers.

  “Gotcha.” He was grinning again.

  I grinned too. I couldn’t help it. He was funny, even if he was crazy.

  “Let’s watch the penguins eat,” he said, “unless you want to study Hamlet.”

  “Penguins. I had time to study last night.”

  The penguins were behind glass. When they ate, they lifted their heads and opened their mouths wide like baby birds.

  I said, “I guess if they don’t catch their own food, they never have a chance to grow up.”

  “Ancient hunters might feel the same way about us,” Jared said. “We don’t hunt for our food, so to them we’d be like children.”

  He said the most amazing things.

  “What do you want to be someday?” I asked as we left the building. I wondered because of the ideas he came up with.

  He blushed. “A writer. What do you want to be?”

  Why was he blushing? It wasn’t like he wanted to be a terrorist.

  “A vet,” I said.

  “Are you going to Elliot next year?”

  “Yeah. Are you?”

  “Yup. We’ll be together again.”

  Well, that’s okay, I thought, surprising myself. He was nicer than I expected.

  Now we were by the polar bears. My favorite place. Everybody’s favorite place.

  Their pool is built into a hill with a glass wall on one side. At ground level, you see the bears plunging through the water, and when you walk up a flight of stairs, you see them coming up for air or lumbering around on the rocks.

  “They’re so adorable,” I said.

  “They have big heads,” Jared said. “I once read that the animals we think are the cutest have the biggest heads. They remind us of human babies.”

  How did he know this stuff? “Like pandas?”

  “They’re the ultimate,” Jared said. He took my hand again.

  This time, I let him keep it. It wasn’t a lifetime commitment.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “I don’t usually like popular girls. But I guess it makes sense in your case, because I liked you before you became so popular.”

  “You did?”

  “You know I did. Right after Christmas, your friend Suzanne Russo—”

  “She’s not my friend.”

  “I see you together some—”

  “We live in the same building.”

  “Oh. Anyway, she wanted to copy from me on a French test. I said yes, if she’d tell you I liked you.”

  “She never said anything.”

  “She’s a creep. In college she’s going to major in Creepology.”

  I laughed. “She’ll get straight As.”

  We watched two bears play with a red rubber ball. Had Jared really liked me before the wish? He might lie, the way Suzanne had, thinking I’d like him better for it.

  I looked at him, wearing my stupid sweater. Here was someone who wouldn’t lie. Here was someone who liked me, the real me, the before-the-spell me. And when the spell ended, maybe he’d go
right on liking me.

  He continued, “So after nothing happened from Suzanne, I was scared to do anything else. But then, last week, when everybody was writing you notes and trying to sit next to you, I thought, if they can do it, so can I. So I wrote the note about the zoo.” He paused. “And a couple more notes.”

  “That you didn’t sign. Which ones?”

  “I’m not telling. This was the important one. So far.”

  Did he write one of the anonymous invitations to Grad Night? I hoped not. Even more, I hoped he wouldn’t ask me in person. I didn’t want to go with him. He was growing on me, and maybe we could be friends. But this was my only chance to go with somebody cute, somebody popular. And I didn’t want to make him feel bad by saying “no” to his face.

  The bears had stopped playing and were snoozing on the rocks.

  “Jared?” He was the one to ask about popularity. He could probably quote some article that would explain everything. “Why do you think some girls are popular and some aren’t?”

  He was quiet for a minute. “I don’t know, but the popular girls are usually locked together in bunches and you can’t separate them. Want to go to the bird and monkey house?”

  “Sure.”

  As we walked over, he added, “I once read that the most most popular kid—somebody like Ardis—hardly ever grows up to be anything special. Like she wouldn’t invent time travel or paint an important picture.” He blushed again. “I don’t mean you. You just became popular. You haven’t been that way all along.”

  Yeah. It wouldn’t apply to someone who was only popular for a month, either.

  Jared pushed open the door to the Tropics building. Birds don’t interest me much, but the monkey room was fun. We watched two monkeys groom a third.

  “That one”—Jared pointed at the one who was being groomed—“looks like he’s at the dentist.”

  He was right. The monkey looked patient, unhappy, numb. “Yeah, and that one”—I pointed at the one doing the heavy grooming—“is the dentist, and the other one is his helper. They should be wearing white gowns and rubber gloves.”

  We watched the whole operation. I had never had such a good time at the zoo before. I fought back a giggle. If I told Jared, he’d say he once read that boys with one eyebrow were the best companions at zoos.

  When we were sure the patient was resting comfortably, we left the zoo and walked into the park. The path through Central Park leaving the zoo is lined with benches, and the benches were filled with portrait artists and caricaturists. We watched them work for a while. I wandered around, but Jared stayed near a caricaturist—Antoinette, according to the flamboyant signature on her samples.

  “I’ve always wanted to see what one of them would do to me,” he said.

  Antoinette was drawing a man with a long face. Only in the caricature his face was so long and narrow that his eyes and mouth could barely fit inside it.

  Jared laughed. “That’s so funny. Maybe I should do it.”

  How could he? “Why pay somebody to make you look bad?”

  “Not bad—funny. Would you mind waiting?”

  I didn’t want him to do it, but I also wanted to see what Antoinette would come up with. I’d never seen a caricaturist draw someone I knew.

  “All right. Go for it.”

  Antoinette handed the drawing to her customer, saying, “You’re done. I outdid myself.”

  “Can you do me now?” Jared asked.

  “Pay me first, and remember, you asked for it.” She waited for Jared to hand over his money.

  He paid her and sat on the bench, grinning.

  She stared at him for a minute, then extended her arm with her charcoal pencil held vertically. She looked at Jared down the length of her arm and turned the pencil horizontally. Then she drew an egg shape, with the wide end on top.

  After that, she marked off where his eyes, nose, and mouth would go. The caricature part began when she put in his forehead. She made it look like an overhanging story on a house—it jutted way out in front of the rest of his face. His eyes were lost underneath, just dark holes. Then she worked on his mouth, which she made narrower than it actually was. After his mouth, she added detail to his nose. She got the shape right, but she drew it too small too. Next, his eyebrow.

  Jared has thick, curly brown hair, and his eyebrow hair is curly too. She made it bristly, like barbed wire, as if he had coarse, kinky bristles crawling up his forehead.

  I was furious with her. If it weren’t for his eyebrow, Jared would be cute. His eyes aren’t huge, but they’re totally alert. His nose is straight, not too small, not too big. His lips are thin, and I like that. All he needed was tweezers.

  She drew in his ears. They were okay. But then she made the hair on his head like his eyebrow, only longer. Now he looked like he was being electrocuted.

  The crowning touch came when she started shading. She left his forehead pure white and put the rest of his face in shadow. This made his forehead, bordered by writhing antennae, seem to stick so far out that it cast a shadow over the rest of him, possibly down to his shoes, which were off the page.

  “You’re done.” Antoinette sprayed the drawing with a can labeled “Fixative.” “I outdid myself.”

  Jared came around to see. “It’s terrific! Look, Wilma. My eyebrows are a riot.”

  Antoinette took the caricature away from him and slid it into a big envelope. “How about your girlfriend?” she said. “You want to give her a gift she’ll never forget?”

  A caricature of me? No way.

  His girlfriend? Jared One Eyebrow’s girlfriend? Double no way.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You want to?” Jared asked. “I have enough money.”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh. Okay.” But I could tell he was disappointed.

  Antoinette scanned the area for customers. “Tell you what. I’ll do her for half price.”

  “You will?” Jared looked delighted. “You’re sure you don’t want to, Wilma? If you do, we’ll both have souvenirs.”

  I did not want a caricature of me as a souvenir.

  But I didn’t want Jared to know how much all this embarrassed me. Especially, I didn’t want him to know that he embarrassed me. He was still wearing my sweater as a cape and holding his revolting caricature tenderly.

  He was nuts, but he looked so hopeful, as hopeful as Reggie before mealtime. I couldn’t spoil his day. Anyway, how bad could it be? It took just a few minutes, and nobody from school was around to see.

  “Okay,” I said. “But if you ever tell anybody about this, I’ll . . .”

  “I won’t. I’ll go to my grave—”

  “Pay me first. And remember, you asked for it.”

  I sat on the bench where Jared had been, and instantly it was worse than I expected. I faced out, so everybody who passed by could see me. I hadn’t thought about that when Jared was sitting here. I felt like a spotlight in the sky was focused on me. My face heated up. If I fainted, Antoinette would just draw me sideways, with my tongue hanging out.

  She held out the pencil again.

  “Why do you do that?” I asked, to delay things. Maybe she’d talk and forget about drawing.

  “Explanations aren’t included in the price.”

  Jared laughed.

  “I do it to compare the length and width of your face.”

  She started drawing. I started panicking. What was she doing? Was she already turning me into a joke?

  “Are you all right, Wilma?” Jared said.

  I pasted on a smile. “I’m fine. How does it look?”

  Antoinette didn’t seem to mind if her victim talked. She went on drawing.

  “She hasn’t done much yet.” Then he added, “Wait. That’s good.” He grinned. “She just put in your shoulders.”

  What was wrong with my shoulders? I forced myself not to dash to the easel and tear off the page with poor mutilated me on it.

  A few centuries passed. I sat. People walked by, l
ooked, did not gasp, and walked on. A woman and her son, about nine, stopped and watched. The boy stuck his teeth out at me.

  Oh no. My big beaver teeth. I clamped my lips together, but I was sure it was too late.

  Antoinette stood back from the caricature and studied it. “You’re done. I outdid myself.”

  I jumped up and zoomed to the other side of the easel.

  The first thing I saw was my teeth, popping out of my mouth, big and squared off as piano keys. My whole face receded behind those teeth, except for my lips, which smiled insanely around my bicuspids and incisors and molars and fangs and tusks.

  Then I saw my shoulders. In themselves they were fine. But they cradled my head. No neck. None. My head was like a golf ball resting on a tee. Like an egg in the palm of your hand. Like a horror movie.

  Jared’s voice got through. “—super. It’s even better than mine. Don’t you love it?”

  I nodded. Yes, I don’t love it. I hated it.

  “Never before in history,” Jared said. “There’s never . . .”

  If Ripley saw this, he’d put me in a museum.

  “. . . been a popular girl before who would do this, who wouldn’t be too scared of how she’d look. The most popular kid at Claverford. No wonder.”

  He was serious. He actually liked me better than before, and he thought other kids would too. I was totally confused.

  We left the park. Jared took my hand again, and we walked along Central Park South. He was going to walk me to my apartment and then get the subway home. We went a block or so without talking. I was thinking about how I didn’t act popular. Like I should have turned Jared down when he asked me to the zoo, and I shouldn’t be holding hands with him, and I definitely should have said no about the caricature.

  “Wilma . . .”

  “What?”

  “Could we trade caricatures? You can have mine if I can have yours.”

  I took my drawing out of its envelope. Suppose it weren’t me? If it weren’t me, then I’d think the smile was insane but infectious, and the eyes, although they were too small, were friendly. And the face itself was heart shaped, which would have been pretty if you could ignore the teeth and the lack of neck, which of course you couldn’t. But on the real me, you might be able to, if you tried.