Down With the Shine (15 page)

“So what?” I sneer. “That’s an excuse? Are you gonna tell me next that you don’t even remember calling me?”

He shakes his head and sighs. Several long moments
pass before he finally answers me in a much lower voice than before. “No, I remember. I just thought . . . I didn’t think you’d care. Stupid, I know. But . . . after Dyl . . . I’d see you around and you looked like you were made out of stone. Like none of it could even touch you. You became friends with Larry and I saw you laughing about something at lunch one day.”

“What?” I interject, still loud and angry. “So I’m not allowed to have friends? Or I’m not allowed to laugh?”

“Both. Neither. I don’t know. It, it—it pissed me off. Okay? I’m mean, it’s not okay. I get that. But then I was really drunk and I was mad and I was gonna say something to you the next day about how I didn’t mean it and stuff, but then I saw you and I thought you’d probably already forgotten it.” He sighs, glances toward me and then back up to the ceiling once more. “I didn’t know you’d save the message. Or remember it like that. You always seem like you don’t give a shit.”

I snort. “That’s funny coming from you, the original Mister Cool.”

“Well, maybe we have that in common. But that’s about the only thing.” Smith suddenly takes his focus away from above and back down to me. He spins, turning his whole body so that we are directly facing each other and neither of us can look away. “You wanna talk about slumming it?
About who between the two of us has the power? Think for two seconds before you open your mouth, Lennie. You brought my sister back from the dead. You made Zinkowski into a really messed-up monster and gave another kid wings. You literally grant wishes.
I’m
the one who’s scared. Of you. I’m scared as hell. But I’m also . . .”

Somewhere in the house someone howls,
“Michaelaaaaaaa!”
Smith ignores this, his laserlike focus never wavering from me.

“I’m also enjoying it while it lasts. The way I see it, you’re stuck with me, not the other way around.”

I think my mouth falls open.

While I sit stupefied, Smith faces forward again and goes back to studying Michaela’s ceiling as if he didn’t just say something monumental and so heavy that it felt like my whole world tilted sideways. Suddenly, I am looking at things from a whole new angle.

I’d been thinking of the whole wish-granting thing as a colossal mistake and the world’s biggest screw-up. And yeah, it’s still that. But it’s also fierce and powerful. No.
I
am fierce and powerful.

That thought reverberates through my head like a new math concept I can’t quite grasp. Yet.

I look at Smith with new eyes too. He said he was afraid. Of me.

But unlike Todd Wilkins, he isn’t running away. Okay, yes, he doesn’t really have a choice there. Except when we were here earlier this morning, he could’ve left me behind. And since then he’s done his best to protect me.

“Smith.” I say his name and as I do my own skin begins to burn with a red-hot blush. Unable to meet his eyes, I look down at our interconnected hands. “I’m scared too. About everything.” I don’t say more than that. I can’t. It’s a freaking miracle I was able to get those words out with my mouth, which is suddenly Sahara desert levels of dry. But I hope he understands that when I say “everything,” I don’t just mean the wishing stuff plus him. I mean him, too. Or maybe especially him.

Being near him. Kissing him. And most of all, hearing that he might feel the same way. That last one scares me most of all. Because like lame old Todd, I’m realizing it’s one thing to watch someone from a distance and daydream about them and think
what if
, but it’s a whole ’nother thing to have them in front of you making your heart beat so hard it might explode out of your chest.

The former is safe, the way I always like to be. The second is bungee jumping with a cord made out of moonbeams and promises. It’s falling without knowing if you’ll bounce back up.

And I’m falling. I’m falling hard.

W
e bury a cardboard shoebox filled with Cheetos in the backyard.

I am fairly certain Michaela would not have approved.

Actually, I know it for a fact. One of Michaela’s heartbroken minions informed me in a whispered aside as I led the informal funeral procession through the house that this was not the protocol. Prior to Michaela, three other people had reached an unfortunate end at Zinkowski’s hands, and after each . . . er, death, Michaela had ordered a moment of silence over their remains. Then she’d gathered them up into a Tupperware container and hid it in the attic to be used as emergency rations.

So, no, she would not be happy to have her decision overruled just because she’s no longer around to enforce it.

No doubt she would’ve been equally critical of the
shallow hole hurriedly dug in the rose garden.

And of the battered old shoebox we’d chosen to hold her remains.

But most of all, I can imagine her scorn if she had witnessed the awkward shuffling of feet after she’d been lowered into the ground as we all wondered what to do or say next.

Perhaps she would have liked the moment when Todd appeared, tearing at his own clothes in grief, before throwing himself upon her grave and watering it with an abundance of hot salty tears.

Probably, though, she would’ve told him to knock it off before he killed all the roses.

None of us do that. Instead, everyone disperses and scatters, quickly taking refuge inside the house until only Smith, my uncles, and I are standing there watching Todd noisily sob and beg Michaela’s forgiveness.

“Poor bugger,” Uncle Dune says in a low voice. “Love wishes never end well.”

Jet and Rod nod in sage agreement.

“Okay, so how can we fix this?” I ask, feeling more than a little impatient with my uncles, who have been maddeningly silent.

When they returned to Michaela’s bedroom where Smith and I had obediently waited for them, they barely
acknowledged our presence. And when I asked what happened with Zinkowski, they only said, “He’s okay. Tucked away where he won’t hurt anyone.” And when I asked what we should do next, meaning “let’s get some new wishes going,” they told me it was time to bury Michaela. Still, I’d pushed back, demanding to know what happens next. For that I got a sharp reprimand from Uncle Rod. “A girl’s dead, Lennie.” He paused and I could hear him editing out, “because of you.”

I could have explained that doing something was my way of paying my respects to Michaela. But instead I followed their orders to, “Find something to put her in,” and so dug through Michaela’s gigantic closet looking for a box to hold her remains.

Now, though, I am done with waiting. It’s past eight o’clock, which means that we have a good amount of time to grant some wishes before the sun rises again. “Michaela told me what you said about me granting wishes to fix this.”

My uncles are already shaking their heads. “We told her a few carefully chosen wishes might make everyone a little more comfortable. But trying to wish your way out of this . . .” Uncle Jet pauses to give another shake of his head, this one almost mournful. “More wishes would only make this worse.”

“But you told me, Michaela—” I start to protest, but Uncle Jet cuts me off.

“It’s complicated,” he booms, which, duh. Luckily he elaborates. “Trying to undo a specific wish almost never works. When a wish is granted, the natural order of things is changed permanently. Say you broke a vase into a bunch of tiny pieces and then glued it back together. It wouldn’t be the same as it had been.”

“It would look like shit,” I say.

Uncle Jet frowns. “Okay, forget the vase. What’s one of the wishes you granted last night?”

I exhale in a rush. “You’ve seen most of them.”

“How ’bout his wish?” Uncle Rod chimes in. “That boy holding her hand.”

“All right,” Uncle Jet says. “That’s a good one to start with. So if you wished that he didn’t want to hold your hand, at first it would be fine.”

“At first?” Smith and I ask at the same time.

“Yeah. At first it would seem like the second wish canceled out the first one. But in reality, there would be two wishes battling it out inside of the boy, and he would eventually find himself fighting against two contrary impulses.”

I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to know.

Smith, though, isn’t interested in being kept in the
dark. “And then?” he demands.

“Best case scenario . . .” Uncle Jet sighs deeply. “Madness. A complete break from reality, resulting in an inability to function within the world. Worst case—”

Not wanting to hear, I break in, “Losing your mind is the best case scenario? Seriously?” I can’t help but think of the way Smith had fought for control over his own hand. It was easy to see how it tore him apart to give in to the wish. But to give up control over his own mind . . . “Most people would rather be dead.”

“Yeah, well,
that’s
the worst case scenario.”

Silence descends. I cannot look at Smith. Then again, I don’t really need to. I can feel the despair coming off him in waves.

Uncle Jet clears his throat. Loudly. “There’s one other option,” he says at last. Reluctantly, like he’d rather not mention it.

“What?” Smith and I demand as a tiny spark of hope flashes in an ocean of black ashes.

“Tell ’em, Dune,” Uncle Jet says. “You’re the one that knows the most about it.”

It’s rare for Uncle Jet to cede the floor to anyone, but when he does it’s usually to Uncle Rod. Uncle Dune’s more the silent listening type, but now he steps forward, clears his throat, and proceeds to blow our minds.

“It’s a time machine of sorts,” he says. “Or basically a wish that takes you back to an earlier point in time, before the wishes you wish to un-wish were wished.”

“Okay, Dr. Seuss,” I say, while trying to wrap my mind around this. “Then can we just reset the clock to Friday afternoon?”

Uncle Dune shakes his head. “Too close to the event, it’s unlikely you would be able to perceive what had already occurred in time to choose a different path.”

And I’m lost again. “What now?”

“Wishes cannot be undone. Nothing in life can ever really be undone. Even with this method. There’s a shadow, a feeling that lingers of events that already occurred. The idea is to put you back in time far enough to sense this and change course, but not so far back that you simply shake it off, or worse, settle into the groove of what’s already happened.”

Groaning, I stare up into the sky, as if it might provide some answers. Sadly, it does not, but the movement must at least get the blood in my brain flowing, because an idea occurs to me. “What if I wish to go back
and
have a note in my pocket saying, ‘Hey moron, ask your uncles about the whole wishing thing.’”

I can tell from Uncle Dune’s expression that he thinks this is the dumbest thing he has ever heard. “Would you
take this note seriously? Or would you dismiss it as a weird joke?”

Oh. “I wouldn’t believe it,” I admit with a sigh. “I’d think it was nuts. I had no idea about the wishing. I had no idea about anything.”

“Yep, that’s not good,” Uncle Dune says, which sorta seems like an understatement.

We are all silent for a moment, mulling this all over, when Smith pipes up. “How do you know all this anyway?”

To my surprise, Uncle Dune goes bright red. “Dated a girl a long time ago. She knew things. Things that had happened and could happen. Almost married her, but she turned me down. Said she was gonna die young and didn’t want to break my heart. Broke it anyway, though.”

Uncle Dune looks so sad, I can’t believe I’d never heard of this lost love of his. But at the same time I can, since he almost never talks about himself. It’s especially surprising, because I’ve always known Uncle Rod as the ladies’ man and Uncle Jet’s had the same girlfriend he’s been stringing along saying they might make things permanent for almost two decades now. But Uncle Dune has never shown any interest in the opposite sex. I’ve always seen him as somewhat monklike. Now that I think of it, him nursing a broken heart makes a hell of a lot more sense.

“All right,” Uncle Jet says, taking control once more. “Enough chitchat. I vote Lennie heads home and—”

“No!” I burst out. “You’re not getting rid of me! I don’t care if all our options suck, I’m wishing for something—anything—to try and make some of this better.”

“Then go home and do it!” Uncle Jet bellows back at me, loud enough to blow my hair back.

Normally, I’d back down. Going against Uncle Jet is like trying to stand upright during a hurricane. But normal’s gone and may never be back again. Besides which, I’m pissed, too.

“Stop trying to get rid of me! I’m sorry I’m not Michaela. I’m sorry I fuck everything up. I’ll stay out of your way. Okay? I’ll stay so far away you won’t even know I’m here.”

Uncle Jet sucks in another lungful of air and just as I’m ready for him to shout it back out at me, he deflates instead. “Lennie,” he says, suddenly uncharacteristically quiet, “I don’t wanna get rid of you. It’s only that I can’t stand the idea of something happening to you.” I look at him then and notice how tired he looks. No, not simply tired. Beaten. Exhausted. Worn out. “None of us can,” Uncle Jet adds, and Uncle Rod and Uncle Dune nod in affirmation.

“Oh,” I say, wondering when my uncles started giving a shit about me and then wondering if maybe they have
all along . . . in their own kind of rough way. It occurs to me that they might not know how I feel either, and even though it goes against everything I’ve been raised to believe, I confess, “Well, I’m worried about you guys too.”

If I was expecting my uncles to get all misty eyed, I should have thought again. Instead, they look offended. Like, majorly insulted. “We can handle ourselves, Lennie,” Uncle Rod informs me, while puffing his chest out.

Realizing there’s no way I’m gonna win this fight, I give in. “Okay, fine. I’ll go home. But if I think of a way to wish us all outta this, I’m gonna do it.”

I wouldn’t blame them for forbidding me to do so, for coming up with all kinds of threats. It’s not like I’ve done one damn thing that’s shown even the tiniest shred of good judgment.

Uncle Dune’s oversized hands raise up and I prepare myself to be forcibly locked away somewhere, probably near poor Zinkowski, where neither of us can do any more damage. But instead he grabs hold of Uncle Jet and pulls him away. “You gotta do what you gotta do, Lennie,” he says, which sounds like a condemnation, until he adds, “And we trust you to figure out what the best move is.”

Uncle Rod leans in and hands me his little plastic sports bottle with a few fingers of shine sloshing around the bottom. He’s always carried it on him, for as long as
I’ve known him. I guess so he could grant wishes anytime, anywhere. “You might as well have this now, in case you gotta wish your way outta anything.”

It’s as close to “I’m proud of you” as I’ll ever get. Hell, it’s better than I’m proud of you, ’cause that’s for something you’ve already done, but this, this is them having confidence that they’ll have reason to be proud of me at some point down the road. It’s enough to make me want to forget Uncle Dune’s idea about turning back time, because in that version of my life I might never have this moment.

I shove the bottle into the front pocket of my hoodie. “Thanks,” I say in a shaky voice. “I’m gonna . . .” I stop, realizing I have no idea what I’m gonna do.

I take a step away from them, and then another. There’s a feeling of finality to this moment, and instead of immediately running from it, I do something crazy.

“I love you guys,” I say. Before I can see whether they look dumbfounded, disgusted, or something else, I spin away so fast Smith stumbles behind me, and take off for Smith’s Cherokee.