Wishes (5 page)

“Or Gram’s,” I added.

Mr. Haversall raised his eyebrows. “In that case, you’d better follow Dingo. He’ll lead you out.”

The dog woofed and took off. Even though he disappeared into the fog, his illuminated collar and well-timed barking showed us a way out that left us near Gram’s house.

“Well,” I said as breezily as I could as we approached the front door. “That sure was fun. See you later.”

I was about to leap inside, but Peter leaned against the doorway, blocking my way. “Let me in,” he murmured, his eyes smoldering.

“Uh, I don’t know. I mean Gram—”

“I need to be with you, Katy. All the way.”

I coughed. “No,” I said. I could just picture Gram and Aunt Agnes finding us in a state of unbridled abandon. “Pull yourself together, Peter.”

“I want to make up to you all the times I ignored you.”

“It’s okay,” I insisted. “Water under the bridge.”

“I won’t ever let you out of my sight again.”

My shoulders slumped. I never thought I’d feel this way, but Peter’s newfound adoration for me was already getting old. “I’m afraid you’ll have to,” I said, as I moved him aside firmly and unlocked the door.

“Don’t leave me,” he pleaded. I could only close my eyes and count to ten. “Katy!” he called pitifully as I squeezed through the doorway and then shut the door behind me, leaning against it from inside. “I’ll stay here until you come out,” he wailed. “Or until I die.”

I sank down onto the floor, irritated beyond belief.

Something was wrong here. I mean I know I’d wanted Peter to give me more attention—I’d even asked Mrs. Bean for it—but this was ridiculous. I didn’t want Peter hanging all over me like a lamprey eel.

An hour later, he was still pleading for me to let him in.

With a sigh, I opened the door. “Can we talk?” I asked.

“Yes. Yes, anything!”

“Okay. Come in.”

Big mistake. As soon as he was inside, he leaped on me like an acrobat and covered my face and hands with kisses. “You nearly broke my heart,” he whispered.

“Peter, you know I love you,” I began.

He wailed and fell to his knees, wrapping his arms around my legs. “And I love
you
!” he declared. “More than life itself.”

“Okay, okay,” I said patiently, trying to ignore the headache that had started to throb in my temples. “The thing is, I don’t think this—this
attention
you’re giving me is exactly your idea.”

“Of course it is!” he protested, looking up at me with cow eyes.

“Let me finish. I think . . . Well, I think it might be magic.”

“Yes! Magic! I look at you, and suddenly there’s magic everywhere!”

“No, I mean—”

“Our love
is
magic! And nothing will ever lessen it.”

“Peter, listen to me. I’m trying to tell you something.”

“Speak to me, my angel!”

“Okay. Well. I think something might have happened in Mrs. Bean’s tent.”

“What happened?” Suddenly Peter was on his feet, his hands curled into fists. “Is there someone else? Another guy?”

I rolled my eyes.
“No!”
I said flatly. “There is no other guy. Just listen to me, okay? I’m telling you—”

Peter’s cell phone rang in my back pocket. Glad to have this crazy conversation interrupted, I took it out and looked at the screen. “It’s your uncle,” I said.

“Ignore it.”

“Maybe you should—”

“He means nothing to me. No one does except you, my darling, my dearest one, my—”

I sat down on the sofa and answered it. “Hi, Mr. Shaw. It’s Peter’s friend, Katy.”

“Put him on the phone, please.” Peter’s uncle was not a warm fuzzy guy.

I held the phone out to Peter, but he turned away. Then he moved behind the sofa and started kissing my neck.

“Er . . . he can’t come to the phone just now,” I said. “Can I take a message?”

“Why can’t he come to the phone?”

“He’s . . . er . . . indisposed,” I said as Peter breathed hot air into my ear.

Mr. Shaw sounded cranky. But then, he usually did. “Don’t prevaricate with me, young lady. If something’s wrong with my nephew, I want to know about it.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “That is, not
nothing
, exactly. I mean, he can’t talk now because . . .”—an idea popped into my head—“ . . . because he’s unconscious.”

I knew it was a mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

“What? What happened?”

“He, er, fell down and knocked himself out.”
Oh, God,
I thought. This was getting worse by the second. “But he’s all right. Really.” I tried to sound reassuring. “In fact, I think he’s coming to.”

“Then put him on the damn phone,” Uncle Jeremiah said.

“Um . . .” I looked pleadingly to Peter. That is, I tried to look, but Peter was massaging my shoulders and sniffing my hair deeply. “Oops, he just slipped back into a coma,” I said.

“A
coma
?”

“No. Well, a minor one. I’m sure it’s very minor.”

Mr. Shaw hung up.

“Peter, stop that.” I turned to face him, and he kissed me on my lips, lovingly. I felt myself melting as he sat down on the sofa beside me and put his arms around me.

“That’s more like it,” he whispered.

A part of me wanted to go on like that, devoured by Peter’s beautiful gray eyes filled with longing and love for me. But this wasn’t how I wanted it to happen. “I’m trying to tell you that this isn’t real,” I said. I was serious, but my voice was all breathy, so I didn’t sound very convincing. “Maybe Mrs. Bean—”

“Shh.” He put his finger over my lips and then homed in with his mouth, kissing me softly. I tried to speak again, but all that came out was a low moan.

“Katy,” he whispered as he stretched out on the sofa and pulled me on top of him.

“Yes,” I whispered back. There was no use fighting this. Magic or no magic, I could no longer resist. “Yes, yes . . .”

“No!”
Aunt Agnes’s voice rang out, loud enough to stop a locomotive.

Peter and I were both so startled that our teeth clicked together.

My aunt, the teleporter, had suddenly appeared beside us with her hands on her hips. Hattie Scott was with her. They both looked really angry.

“I see you’ve recovered from your
coma
,” Hattie said, her eyes bulging with indignation.

Peter sat up, causing me to roll off him unceremoniously onto the floor, and cleared his throat. “Uh . . . beg your pardon?” he inquired politely.

“Old man Shaw called me,” Hattie said while Aunt Agnes skewered me with her eyes. “He said some crazy girl named Katy told him you’d knocked yourself unconscious.”

“Er, well . . . ,” I began.

“Is any of that true?” Agnes asked. “Any part of it?”

I shook my head.

“Then you’d better come with me,” Hattie said, grabbing Peter’s arm.

“But I can’t leave Katy,” Peter said with utter seriousness. “I love her.”

“You hush up,” Hattie said.

Agnes pointed at me. “I’ll deal with you later,” she said before they all disappeared.

8.

The house was suddenly so quiet I could almost imagine crickets chirping. Now that I’d come back to my senses, I tried to figure out what was going on.

Mrs. Bean had asked me to make a wish, I knew that much. I remembered the sign in her tent at the Beltane fair that said
WISHES $2
. But Mrs. Bean wasn’t a real fortune-teller. Even if she were, fortune-tellers didn’t grant wishes. Only fairies did.

I gasped at the realization.

Your wish will come true.

“Oh, my God,” I said out loud. It hadn’t been Mrs. Bean at all. It was the glowing box I’d found in the woods.
That
had been the fairy’s treasure—to make my wish come true. I just hadn’t made the wish until I was in Mrs. Bean’s tent.

I ran upstairs to my room and practically wrecked the place trying to find the box before remembering that I’d never taken it out of my jacket pocket. Gently I removed the tiny alabaster lid. Inside lay the fortune-cookie strip of paper that had predicted that my wish would come true.

Well, it had, that was for sure. I’d wished that Peter would pay attention to me, and he’d turned into a sex-crazed pest. I took out the paper and examined it, just to make sure there weren’t any loopholes, like maybe an expiration date. It would be nice if my wish were only good for twenty-four hours.

To my dismay, the writing had faded. I held it up to the light and squinted. Then I read it again. And again.

It wasn’t the same message.

This one read
122 Snyder Avenue.

An
address
? But I’d been sure about the message. So sure . . .

No. I was still sure. Before, the fortune had said my wish would come true. I couldn’t have been mistaken. Besides, it had worked!

So why had it changed? And where was Snyder Avenue?

I decided to find out. Fortunately, I still had Peter’s state-of-the-art cell phone with a GPS that was better than mine, along with a lot of other features. The trip to Snyder Avenue would be tedious, but not really difficult, involving little more than a long bus ride into the cowen sector of Whitfield.

As I walked to the bus stop, I spotted Muffies—my term for the rich cowen boarding-school types who made up half the population of Ainsworth School—hanging around outside Yummy Yogurt. Actually, these particular girls were pretty much
über
-Muffies, queen bees who would have ruled at any school. There was Suzy Dusset, born with a mean streak a mile wide and enough family money to wield it like a club; A.J. Nakamura, a ninety-five-pound Japanese American princess; Tiffany Rothstein who, with her mane of dyed blond hair and her D-cup pushup bra, could pass for one of the Real Housewives of Tackytown; and my old nemesis, Summer Hayworth. I’d helped Summer out of a jam a few months ago, but since she possessed the IQ of a goldfish, I doubted that she would remember. As usual, I walked past them with my head down, hoping to be invisible to them.

I think I succeeded, because they were obviously talking about Peter Shaw (who
everyone
knew was my boyfriend) as if he were the prize in some competition.

“My mother saw him coming out of the Shaw Building in New York,” Suzy Dusset said.

“With the old man?” Tiffany asked. Suzy nodded tellingly.

“I thought he was disowned or something,” A.J. said.

“I guess he’s back in the will, then,” Summer surmised.

“Mother thinks he’s being groomed to take over the company.”

A.J. yawned. “Really?”

“Yes. And the girl who marries him is going to be the envy of New York society.”

Tiffany laughed. “Katy Ainsworth? Are you kidding?”

A.J. joined her. “What’s she going to do,
read
to him?”

Oh, right, I thought. For these girls, reading was about as useful an activity as alligator wrestling.

“It’s not what she
does
,” Suzy expounded. “It’s what she
is
. Or rather,
isn’t
.”

“I’m lost,” A.J. said, who was not known for her incisive intellect. “What is—or isn’t—she?”

“She isn’t cool,” Suzy said.

“No lie,” Tiffany agreed. “Her eyes are weird. They change color.”

“I heard she was a psychic or something,” A.J. added.

“Nobody even knows her,” Suzy said. “Peter needs someone who’ll be an asset to him, not some nerdy little nothing.”

“Well, he’s not going to stay with
her
,” Tiffany said. “When the time comes, he’ll choose someone who’s right for—”

That’s when they noticed me, with my cheeks flaming red and tears standing in my eyes. I wanted to hit them, to call down boulders from the sky to smash them into paste, to lash them with my superior intelligence and rapier wit. But I just ducked my head and kept walking.

As I fled from them, I heard them whispering. And Suzy Dusset was laughing out loud.

I tried to forget about what happened and focus on my mission to find out what awaited me on Snyder Avenue, but the Muffies’ words stung me like arrows in my heart. They didn’t think I deserved Peter because I wasn’t important enough to be with him.