As You Wish Page 13

  “Come on, Merrill. I’m not in the mood.”

  “You’re not in the mood? Well, OK, Eldon, I guess we’ll let the corruption continue because you’re not in the mood to deal with it.”

  I sigh. “Fine. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  So are half the kids at our table, mostly football players and cheerleaders. Merrill either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. I’d put money on the latter.

  “It’s the rules, Eldon. Who decided the rules? Have you ever stopped to think maybe this eighteenth birthday bit is bullshit? For all we know, everyone has infinite wishes. Who’s to say we don’t? Who’s to say the mayor isn’t going up there once a week to wish for whatever he wants? They keep those bars on the entrance and say no one can get in, but has anyone tried? Have you heard the story of Silas Creed?”

  I have, but only because Merrill brings him up once a month.

  “Let me tell you, he knew the whole setup was a lie. It’s not about wishing. It’s about control. This whole town is trying to keep us placid. Silas Creed took matters in his own hands, and he went up there and cut through those bars. And you know what happened to him?”

  I do, because Merrill has already told me.

  “He was found in the river two days later with a bullet in his head. Shot execution style. And do you know what happened to the cave?”

  His voice is getting higher and higher, and soon, he’ll run out of air. Then he’ll pound his fists on the table and draw in a big gasping breath. Then he’ll start again.

  “They put up new bars. Bars that are thicker than before. The game is rigged, Eldon. Something is very wrong in this town, and the powers that be are making sure we never find out what exactly it is.”

  Everyone around us has turned to stare.

  Merrill shoots them a dark look. “We’re screwed,” he says simply. “We can’t get the upper hand.”

  “Were you smoking with Royce this morning?” I ask.

  “Was I… What the hell? No, I wasn’t smoking with Royce. This isn’t some drug-induced paranoia or—”

  “People can hear you on the other side of the cafeteria, you know,” says a voice behind me.

  Merrill and I both look.

  “Oh great, Norie Havermayer’s here to tell us it’s all part of God’s plan,” Merrill says.

  Norie rolls her eyes and gestures for me to scoot over. Which is weird, because wherever Norie usually sits at lunch, it sure isn’t with us. I make space for her on the bench, and she puts her lunch tray down next to me. “You really believe all that stuff?”

  “Nah,” I say before Merrill can answer. “He just gets off on the idea of being the one to blow open a big conspiracy.”

  “Well, you’re probably right on some level,” Norie says to him.

  Merrill and I both look at her, surprised.

  “I don’t think it’s as dramatic as you make it sound though. It’s not some grand plot or anything. But we’re definitely not told the whole truth about wishing.”

  “Thank you, Norie,” Merrill says smugly. “Have I mentioned how much I value your opinion?”

  “I must have missed it. Was that before or after you insulted my beliefs?”

  I laugh. Maybe Norie sitting with us isn’t so bad. Especially when I catch the glance Juniper gives us from a few tables over.

  “No one knows if Silas Creed was a real person,” Norie says.

  “I’ll ask at the wish museum,” I offer. “I’m going there after school.”

  Merrill takes off his glasses and cleans them on his shirt. “I can’t imagine a more boring way to spend an afternoon.”

  “They’ll probably have more answers than anyone else in town. Plus, my dad’s keeping me out of practice until next week.”

  “I’ll go with you. I haven’t been there for a while,” says Norie.

  “Why have you been there at all?” Merrill asks.

  Norie takes a sip of water before responding. “It’s amazing. With all your conspiracy theories, you’re not actually willing to learn real information to back them up. Or maybe you’re worried that they’ll be disproven?”

  Merrill grins, accepting the challenge. “The lady’s right, Eldo. Let’s get educated.”

  Even though I’m out of football practice for the day, I still feel like I’m part of a team.

  • • •

  Madison isn’t filled with rocket scientists, but we’re not dense either. The wish museum doesn’t have a sign, doesn’t even have a real name. It’s in a house on the edge of town, set back from the street, where no tourist will stumble into it.

  The house was built when Madison was a new town, so it’s not stucco like most of our buildings. It has wood siding and a wide front porch. It looks like a house out of a western movie, a place the town sheriff might live. In real life, it’s occupied by the Samson sisters.

  One sister is named Marla, and the other is Eulalie, though I never remember which is which. They’re both old and gray haired. One is tall and one is short; one is thin and the other is pudgy. But when you’re with them at the same time, all their features blend together, and they become a blur of a person, one being speaking with two voices.

  “Come in, come in,” says one of them when we knock on the front door.

  “Young people! We rarely get young people!”

  “Don’t just stand there, come in!”

  “Come in!”

  They’re like witches from an old fairy tale. Except, as far as I know, they don’t cannibalize children. I hope.

  We go inside. It’s dim and run-down but clean. The entire downstairs has been turned into a museum, and the sisters live above it.

  “It’ll be two dollars each,” one of them says.

  “Yes, just a bit to keep us going. It’s not much.”

  “Not much at all.”

  “I got it,” Merrill says, pulling out his wallet. I try to protest, but he waves me away.

  The three of us split up and look around. There are a few items on display, an old journal, some mining equipment, but it’s a museum of photos. They go back nearly to the beginning of Madison. I see pictures of the wish cave from before they barred the door. The Last Chance Saloon when it was still brand-new. The first Mayor Fontaine when he was a kid, dated 1942.

  “It’s such a lush history,” Marla or Eulalie says.

  “Oh, yes,” says the other. “In some ways, Madison is a typical Nevada mining town, but in others, it’s so very unique.”

  “What’s the story on Silas Creed?” Merrill asks.

  “Oh, Silas, what a fun old rumor.”

  “They say he was shot, but we have no record of it.”

  “You know how these old stories are. So much is conjecture.”

  While Merrill tries to pull out more info about Madison’s rogue wisher, I wander to a pedestal with a huge book on it. It’s one of the few items in the museum that looks new.

  The cover is blank. I open it to find pages and pages of precise cursive. Dates and names and, after those, wishes. The entire wish history of Madison.

  I flip to the last page with writing, and there it is. My birthday, my name, and a blank space after it. They’re ready to add my wish.

  I go backward, January of 1992.

  Harmon Wilkes: Increased football prowess.

  Forward a few months.

  Luella Maylocke: Love (Harmon Wilkes).

  Back even further, 1969.

  Barnabas Fairley: To be left alone (accidental).

  It’s all there, every wish that’s been made in Madison. After people started tracking wishes, at least. The first few pages in the book are spotty, with random dates and a lot of question marks.

  I run my finger down the list of wishes. Wishes that helped people and ruined people. Wishes for material goods and wishes for stuff you�
�d never be able to see or touch. It feels like you could learn everything there is to know about a person by finding out how they spent their only wish.

  That gives me an idea. I turn back to the current year. February.

  Eleanor Havermayer: Unknown.

  So Norie is a mystery to them too. Before I can turn the page, my eyes land on a name a few spaces below Norie’s.

  Fletcher Hale: Materials facilitating acceptance to Harvard University.

  The anger comes again, thick and cloying. Fletcher couldn’t wish himself directly into Harvard, but he made his transcripts good enough to guarantee acceptance into any top-tier college. He has a future beyond this place, this life. And it makes me want to kill him.

  Before I completely give in to my rage, I flip through the book again. I go back into the end of the sixties, but I don’t see what I’m looking for. Go forward a little bit, to 1970. There it is.

  Gil Badgley: “Truck.”

  It’s the only wish in quotes. The sisters know. How the hell do they know?

  “Do people tell you their wishes?” I ask, interrupting the sisters’ conversation with Merrill, which is starting to get heated.

  “Oh yes, some do.”

  “Some, but not all. We hear many rumors though.”

  “You can hear so much if you listen hard enough.”

  “Check this out,” I say to Merrill.

  He crosses the room and joins me at the pedestal, peers over my shoulder as I flip through the pages.

  “It’s a record of every wish. Wanna see yours?”

  “I don’t need to see my own wish,” Merrill says. He nudges me out of the way and goes back a few years. “What’s my brother’s say?”

  Royce Delacruz: Unlimited supply of an illegal substance.

  Merrill and I laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Norie asks, wandering over from the other side of the museum.

  “My brother.”

  Norie follows our gaze. “That’s actually more sad than funny.”

  “You antidrug or something?” Merrill asks.

  “Well, yeah. But besides that, it’s a waste.”

  “You shouldn’t think of it that way,” says Marla-Eulalie.

  “No,” agrees Eulalie-Marla. “A wish is never a waste if it feels right to the wisher.”

  “Anyway,” I say before we get too off track, “we’re trying to find out more about wishing. Like how it started.”

  “No one knows how it started, of course.”

  “Just that it did, and for that, we can be thankful.”

  “So very thankful.”

  It figures.

  “I guess I was hoping you guys had some idea,” I say.

  “Well, of course, we have ideas.”

  “The cave walls are so very smooth, you see.”

  “And there are holes. Not many, but some. We call it a cave, but it’s probably a mine.”

  “Almost certainly a mine.”

  “And if a miner happened to be there at the right time—”

  “And said the right thing—”

  “Then perhaps a wish occurred, all on its own.”

  Merrill snorts. “Not only would that be a massive coincidence, but how would this original miner dude even know his wish coming true had anything to do with the cave?”

  “God works in mysterious ways,” says Norie.

  “Not God, dear. Wishes,” says Marla-Eulalie.

  “But all this is speculation, of course. We don’t really know,” says Eulalie-Marla.

  “I can see our trip here has been immensely helpful,” Merrill deadpans.

  I turn back to the wish history, flip through it for a few more seconds. Wish after wish after wish. It’s all here.

  Or is it?

  The wishes are listed, yeah? But what about the stories behind them? What does it matter if you know someone’s wish if you don’t know why they wished it? If you don’t know what happens next? A wish can’t be reduced to a few words.

  It makes me think of the people I’ve been talking to, the wishes I’ve heard directly from the sources. Those are real. Those are the true wish history of Madison, Nevada.

  I turn away from the book, wander the museum for a while longer, the sisters trailing behind me and offering useless bits of information. I hate to admit it, but Merrill is right. We wasted an afternoon.

  “What about Othello Dewitt?” I ask the sisters.

  They look at each other before answering.

  “A very odd case.”

  “The most odd.”

  “The only time in the history of Madison someone chose to give up their wish.”

  “So it’s true?” I ask, and they nod in unison. “Why?”

  “Well, I’m sure we don’t know.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “But you can ask him.”

  “Oh yes, if he’ll talk to you.”

  “He’s a hermit, you know.”

  “Thinks he’s Henry David Thoreau.”

  “My Life in the Woods.”

  “My Life in the Desert.”

  They both giggle. They sound like girls I go to school with, only coming from them, it’s kinda disturbing. Merrill and I glance at each other. He shudders.

  “Well, OK,” I say. “Maybe we’ll talk to him.”

  I’m ready to get out of here before I’m infected with whatever wish mania has taken over the Samsons. I thank them, and we make our way to the door.

  Norie turns back. “What did you two wish for?”

  “Why, the museum, of course,” says Marla-Eulalie.

  “We always fancied ourselves historians,” agrees Eulalie-Marla.

  “Yes, always.”

  “You both wished for the museum?” asks Norie.

  They nod.

  “But once one of you had it, didn’t you both?”

  “It wouldn’t have been fair, you see,” says one of them.

  “It wouldn’t have belonged to both of us.”

  We say our goodbyes pretty fast after that.

  “Well, that was creepy,” Merrill says as we walk back to the car.

  “They’re not creepy,” Norie replies. “They want something to believe in.”

  “And they have wishing,” I say.

  Norie looks at me. “Wishing isn’t enough.”

  We get into the car, and Merrill starts it. He glances at me before shifting into drive. “So I assume we’ll be paying a visit to Othello Dewitt?”

  “You assume right,” I say.

  Chapter 16

  Countdown: 12 Days

  It’s Penelope Rowe’s birthday, and she’s determined everyone knows it. And cares about it. I’m hardly through the school doors when she assaults me.

  “Eldon, hi! Can you believe it?”

  “Um. No?”

  “You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you? That’s OK. I know you have your own big day coming up, and you’re probably totally distracted. I know I’ve been completely out of it for, like, days.”

  Ah, right. Wish day.

  “Happy birthday, Penelope.”

  “Thank you!” She beams. “I can’t believe it’s finally here. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this. Well, not my whole life, because when I was a baby, I obviously didn’t know what wishes were, so it’s not like I was excited back then.”

  That’s when I notice Juniper a few steps behind Penelope. It’s pretty shocking that I hadn’t noticed her immediately, since she looks freaking amazing.

  “He knows what you mean, Penny,” Juniper says and gives me an amused smile. The same kind of smile I used to get from her all the time, the one that said we knew exactly what the other was thinking.

  While I’m gazing at Juniper and reminiscing, I he
ar Penelope say, “Dessie, hi!”

  Shit. I’ve been avoiding Dessie Greerson since that night at the hot springs. Judging from the way her eyes narrow in my direction, she’s not exactly thrilled to see me either. I have a sudden, horrifying vision of Dessie bringing up what happened between us in the cave while Juniper listens in.

  “Look, I need to get to class,” I say. “But good luck with your wish, Penelope.”

  “I won’t need it, but thank you,” Penelope replies with her megawatt smile.

  I quickly make my exit.

  Penelope’s day will unfold like it does for most kids on their wish days. She’ll wait all day, excited, nervous. Depending on what time her wish is scheduled for, she might go home and have a nice meal with her parents. Eat cake. No candles of course. No kid in Madison has ever wished on birthday candles. There won’t be gifts either. Kids don’t get gifts on their wish birthdays. I guess people figure they’re already getting the biggest gift there is.

  It’s kind of sad. After you make your wish, your birthday stops mattering. Nothing is ever going to top the year you turned eighteen. So everyone stops celebrating, and it becomes just another day. I was probably five before I even realized my parents had birthdays too.

  I go to art class and take my seat. Fletcher isn’t here yet. The bell rings, and Ms. Dove talks for a while, and Fletcher still doesn’t show. Fletcher’s never late, not anymore. He must be out sick.

  That should make me happy, yeah? Because I don’t have to see his face first thing in the morning. But he’s been doing our assignment on his own all week, which means I have no idea what to work on. Ms. Dove will definitely notice if I don’t pretend to do something in class.

  So I take the only obvious course of action. I tell Ms. Dove I have an appointment with Mr. Wakefield.

  • • •

  “I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you sought me out,” Mr. Wakefield says when I’m settled in his office.

  I shrug.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

  “Oh, you know…”

  Mr. Wakefield has a serious look on his face and nods like he understands. Which is impossible, because I don’t even know what I meant.

  We sit in silence. I wonder if it’s the first time anyone has willingly entered his office. He’s probably at a loss for what to do.