You Wish (15 page)

“Oh, gross.” I grab the fork and toss it into the sink. “I’m not trying to get Raggedy Ann–ositis from you.”

She just gives me a blank look. She never gets my lame jokes.

I crack the eggs since I’m not stupid enough to think Ann could handle
that
, and then we put in the vegetable oil and start stirring.

Ann holds the bowl in one arm and the spoon in the other, and then she spins around in circles and sings along to Katy Perry. A few glops of batter sort of spray out of the bowl, and then Ann loses her balance and knocks into the countertop. The motion makes her arm jerk and she sort of launches a big glop of batter at me.

It spatters across my apron. I freeze, my big wooden spoon still in the bowl, and stare at her.

“Seriously, Ann, take it down a notch.”

That much bubbly energy should not be legal.

I set my bowl down and lean over to grab the two greased pans I’ve put out, and then Ann smacks a hand over her mouth and starts giggling.

“What?” I say, frozen, my hand still outstretched.

She points. I look down.

Oh God, my boobs are totally in the cake batter.

I slowly retreat, and the batter kind of plops back into the bowl, the rest streaking down my apron.

I sigh and rub my eyes. I slide my bowl to the side and then grab the cake pans and then we load them up with batter and put them in the oven.

“Now what?” Ann asks as she stoops over and stares into the oven. After a moment passes, she opens the door and peers in to survey the results.

“It’s not instant.”

“Oh.”

Ann stands upright again.

I’m half tempted to tell her we should see about taming her frizzed-out red hair, but then I remember that she’s going to be gone in like an hour, tops. As soon as I make that wish, she’ll be donezo, and I can go back to life as usual.

This better work.

BY THE TIME
the kitchen timer dings, Ann has performed most of the dances on MTV, even the ones done by Shakira. Since the song lyrics happen to be
There’s a she-wolf in the closet
, I suppose I should find it funny, or at least ironic, considering she
did
come from the closet. Instead there’s something annoying about it. I can’t help but be jealous because she’s figured out that weird belly-dancing shimmy thing.

I wonder if Ann could be a world-class painter or a singer or something if she just had the right teacher.

I wonder what it would be like to have that kind of shimmering possibility, that kind of endless expanse of dreams. To just choose something and be good at it.

Whatever. Now I sound like I belong on the underside of a Snapple lid.

Ann stands back as I slide the cakes onto a cooling rack. We stir up the frosting as the cakes cool, and then I get out a big waxy sheet of paper and put the cakes onto it. I use toothpicks to try and secure them to each other, holding my breath like I’m playing a game of Jenga. They seem to stay.

Ann hovers over my shoulder and watches, so close I can feel her breath.

I trust her with the frosting, which believe me, is hard to let her do. I
do not
want this screwed up. She uses a butter knife and the results aren’t pretty, but it does the job. Maybe I should have turned on some Martha Stewart instead of MTV.

She stands back as I do my best to replicate the fluffy pink-frosted flowers from my sweet sixteen. It might help if I had looked at the real deal for more than one incredulous second, but I didn’t, so hopefully this is close enough.

I jam candles into the cake—four on each layer—and then stand back and admire my work.

It’ll have to do.

“Okay, now sing the birthday song,” I say to Ann.

She just gives me a blank look.

“You know, ‘Happy birthday to you . . . ’ ”

She just continues to stare.

It takes me ten minutes to teach her the song. You’d think as repetitive as it is that it would go more quickly, but she’s really worried about getting it just right. I guess I should be too.

She’s finally ready, and she sings me the song as I grip the edge of the countertop, my knuckles turning white.

As she sings the last “Happy birthday to you . . . ” her voice going higher and carrying on longer than necessary, I close my eyes.

I wish every wish I’d ever made had never come true.

With a long intake of breath, I open my eyes and blow out every candle with one try.

Then I close them again for a quiet moment.

Wishing.

Hoping.

Maybe some kind of magical sense of peace is supposed to wash over me. Tranquility. Serenity. Something.

Finally, I open my eyes.

Ann is cutting into the cake with the butter knife she used for frosting. “This is going to be sooo good!”

I just groan and sink to the floor.

Maybe she’ll disappear at midnight, like Cinderella.

Or maybe that’s my life as I knew it.

20

I SPEND MOST
of that night staring at the ceiling in my room, listening to Ann snore and trying to come up with more wishes to fill in on the list. If I can’t stop them, it would be nice if I at least knew what was coming.

You’d think if I had used up a precious birthday wish—you only get one per year, after all—I’d at least remember what I wanted.

But I can’t. I have some ideas, of course. I remember certain toys I was obsessed with. I remember when I wanted to be one of the voices in the Shrek movies. And when I wanted to fly an airplane.

But who knows if I actually wished those things?

So, as another day dawns, I sneak out of my room and throw on a sweatshirt. It’s barely past nine o’clock, and Ann is still sleeping heavily.

I sit down on the last step at the bottom of the stairs and pull on my rattiest, most comfortable pair of Converse sneakers. I’m still lacing them up when I hear the stairs creak, and I turn around, expecting to see Ann’s messy mop of red hair.

But it’s my mom. Surprising, for nine a.m. Normally she’d be gone by now.

Sundays are usually huge event days—most often a wedding or a company retreat slash picnic—so she tends to leave in the wee hours to soothe the frazzled nerves of a bride-to-be or a hoity-toity CEO or any number of rich, spoiled people.

I mean if you can’t plan your own party and would rather pay someone to do it, you probably have more money than necessary. And I’ve seen some of my mom’s invoices. Her clients definitely have more money than necessary.

“Where are you off to?”

“The library.”

“You’re gone an awful lot these days,” she says.

“
I
am gone a lot?”

Surely, I heard her wrong.

She nods. I narrow my eyes and give her a skeptical look.

“What’s that for?”

I shrug and walk to the door to pick up my backpack. I should have kept my mouth shut. “I’m home way more than you, that’s all.”

My mom sighs. “Don’t give me lip, Kayla.”

My jaw drops. “I’m not! How is it lip if it’s the truth?”

My mom crosses her arms. She’s wearing a perfect, starched lavender blouse with pristine khaki pants. Her brown hair—a darker, much prettier shade than my own—is blow-dried into a perfect boardroom-worthy coif. “Why must you be so ungrateful? I give you everything you want, and yet you insist on wearing the same old ratty clothes and complaining all the time.”

I snap my jaw shut and clench my teeth. “Right, Mom. You give me everything I want. Got it.”

“Kayla Louise! I threw you a beautiful party not a week ago.”

“Did you, Mom? Did you throw
me
a party, or did you throw your company a party? Because it was kind of hard to tell the difference.”

My mom glances at her watch, and I try hard not to roll my eyes. She’ll never have time for me. “I have to go do bio homework,” I say, ripping at the handle of the door.

“Do you want a ride? I’m running late, but—”

“No thanks, I can walk.”

And then I rush out the door. I don’t need to hang around to know that she’ll leave a twenty on the counter with a note about takeout, and I won’t see her until sometime tomorrow.

Although, damn. Maybe before I mouthed off, I should have asked her about that bakery. I can’t ask her now, after I stormed off. This is never going to get fixed if I don’t focus on solving the problem.

The public library is a short walk from my house. It’s open early on Sundays, which never made much sense, but I’m not complaining now, because it gives me somewhere to escape to.

Ann’ll probably sleep for another hour or two and then wonder where I went. If I’m lucky, she’ll try to find me and get hit by a Mack truck.

Okay, that’s mean. I reach out and run my fingers along a chain-link fence as I walk, my mind wandering as I turn at the corner and head toward town. The Cascade Mountain range rises up in the distance. Even though most of the trees are evergreens, a few deciduous are mixed in, and the result is splashes of burnt orange and bright red, lighting up the hilltops. Further in the distance, the snowcapped peak of Mount Rainier juts into the skyline. Enumclaw is a big plateau about eight hundred feet above sea level, built on an old mudflow from when Rainier last erupted, a zillion years ago. Really reassuring, when you think about it.

But I’m not. Thinking about it, that is. I’m thinking about something far more urgent.

I wonder what today’s wish is. I wonder if I’ll figure out how to stop all this craziness before Ben tries to lay one on me. I’m still annoyed with myself for fighting with my mom when I should have faked a nice conversation and asked about the bakery. But
no
, I had to get all annoyed.

I wonder if it’s really possible Ben would try to kiss me. Like, sure, something magical is at work here, but he’s not a gumball. He has a mind of his own. Maybe he won’t really try to kiss me at all. Maybe he’ll just have the thought enter his brain and then he’ll ignore it and kiss Nicole instead, and I’ve been silly to worry about it at all.

I sigh and kick a rock across the sidewalk. It skitters across the concrete and then bounces into the street.

Someone honks at me, as if I just tossed a boulder in front of their car and not a tiny pebble, and I just wave them away and hoist my backpack further up my shoulders. It’s too early on a Sunday for people to be honking like that. They’ll wake half the neighborhood.

The car honks again, and I turn to glare, but then just stumble to a stop instead.

Um, this has got to be the
weirdest
thing I’ve seen in Enumclaw in about, well, forever.

It’s a guy in a bright-yellow convertible, never mind the fact that it’s probably fifty-two degrees out and the dew in the grass hasn’t even evaporated yet. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you only get to utilize drop-tops for, like, a dozen days out of the year. Yet this guy hasn’t put the top up.

But just as bizarre as the car is the driver: He’s probably in his late teens, pushing twenty or so—which means his parents must be loaded if he’s got his own sports car—and he has a tan so dark he must go to the tanning beds every day of the week. It’s definitely not natural, not for this area anyway.

He’s got on a tank top that shows off bulging muscles and a smile so big and sparkly he looks like he’s posing for his actor’s head shots, or maybe just a tooth-whitening commercial. I think I can actually
count
his teeth from right here on the sidewalk. He has that cheesy sort of look, like he’s selling the Bowflex on a two a.m. infomercial.

His blue eyes are wide and bright and staring straight at me, framed by curly long lashes, and his gelled-within-an-inch-of-its-life blond hair looks more like a helmet. Even his eyebrows are sculpted.

And he looks like he oiled himself up, like one of those body-builder competitions where the people look like they’re made of plastic because they’re so freaking’ shiny.

“Baby, where ya been?”

I think I throw up in my mouth a little. I glance over my shoulder and realize that yes, he’s talking to me.

Ew.

I pick up a brisk walk. Maybe I should have told someone where I was going. He is kind of creepy, the way he’s staring at me with that huge artificial smile.

I’m glad I don’t have much further to go. The library is maybe a mile from my house, through nice residential neighborhoods, just across Cole Street, the quaint little main drag in town, with its little diners and antique shops. With this guy leering at me it makes me wish I’d driven, but I figured if I walked, it would give me more time away from home and Ann and everything else that’s happening.

I ignore him as he shifts his car into gear and rolls along, paralleling the sidewalk.

“Sweetie, baby cakes, where’s your car?”

“Uh, I don’t have one,” I yell, hoping that will get him off my back. “I think you have me confused with someone else.”