How Not to Make a Wish Read online

  What did it matter? I spent most of my time backstage in a dark theater. Why did I need a real wardrobe, anyway? It wasn’t like the dating gods were showering gifts upon me. There might be dozens of theaters in the Twin Cities, but TEWSBU had friends in all of them. Stupidly, I was still caught off guard when theater people nodded as I introduced myself, a distant glint of recognition in their eyes. I was that one, they all seemed to say. And then they all darted not-surreptitious-enough glances at my ever-expanding waistline, silently saying, “Well, no wonder he left her.”

  A lot of theater people could be superficial. That came from judging actors on their body types, day in and day out, defining whether they could fill a role based on how they looked. But the most frustrating thing about all of my weight gain? My chest was still flat as a board. At twenty-eight years of age, I could still get by wearing an undershirt, instead of the engineering feats of lace and wires that other women proudly sported.

  I was jilted, fat, flat, and miserable.

  And the absolute worst part was, I couldn’t even drown my sorrows in alcohol. Sharing a few six-packs with girlfriends had carried me through the loss, years back, when my boyfriend broke up with me freshman spring at the U. And when I kicked out my sophomore beau, I already had a bottle of chardonnay waiting on ice. Tequila shots dulled the pain when my junior year beloved turned out to have a side thing going with my then-best-friend. And each and every time I broke up with one of those meaningless senior-year guys, a legally purchased martini had marked the occasion.

  But at some point in the past six years, since I’d been cut loose from the serious business of college partying, I had become allergic to alcohol. It was really strange—if I took a sip of wine, a swallow of beer, touched my lips to anything stronger, I could feel my cheeks turn bright red. The handful of times I’d tried to go beyond that warning sign, I’d been rewarded with blotchy hives that itched like the devil.

  My doctor had shrugged and told me that allergies sometimes develop later in life. She’d shaken her head at my dismay and reminded me that I was actually pretty lucky. After all, no one really needed alcohol to make it through the day. I could avoid it easily enough, she’d chided. It wasn’t as if I had a severe allergy to eggs or wheat, to something that would put me constantly in danger of a reaction worth a hospital visit.

  Yeah, that was me. Lucky. Lucky like a Minnesota Vikings fan, watching my team forever slip out of contention.

  I brushed my hands against my black fleece pants and turned toward the rolling racks of Kismet costumes. There were a dozen outfits for dancing girls—long, flowing harem pants in pastel colors, each matched with a scandalous golden bra. The boys’ outfits featured similar pants, but in saturated hues.

  I started to hum “Stranger in Paradise” as I attached price tags to each of the frothy creations. I couldn’t imagine anyone actually wearing one in public, but then again, there were a whole lot of men and women who thought nothing of donning slut-wear for Halloween. We just had to find a lot of people willing to buy almost a year in advance.

  Somewhere nearby, we must have stored the accessories from the show. If I remembered correctly, the dancing girls had worn elaborate veils in one scene and necklaces of gold coins in another. The men had sported ruby-studded sashes, and we had to have at least a dozen scimitars. The Kismet cast would never have made it through airport security. If, you know, they were actually going anywhere. It wasn’t like Fox Hill productions traveled to New York, or Hollywood, or anywhere else smacking of theatrical power or prestige.

  Absentmindedly, I tugged at the third rolling rack, ready to find the small pieces and finish my work for the day. A loud, metallic clatter made me jump back, and I bit off a curse. If the necklaces had fallen, they’d send coins flying all over the shop floor. It would take me forever to collect the debris.

  I quickly realized, though, that no jewelry had fallen. The clatter I’d heard had been loud, echoing, not the tinkle of scattered metal. I squatted beside the rolling rack and reached beneath to retrieve whatever had fallen.

  That motion had been a lot easier thirty pounds before. My hand came down sharply on something metal. I dragged it back and sat down hard, eager to relieve the pressure on my knees.

  A lamp.

  A brass oil lamp, with a high delicate handle and a long, gently curved spout.

  It must have been one of our props—we had dressed the set with all sorts of pseudo-Arabic bric-a-brac. I could still remember the props master coming in from Goodwill, thrilled to have found a string of glass beads that looked like they’d just surfaced in the local bazaar. We’d joked about who’d had such tacky decor in their own home before donating it for our greater good.

  The oil lamp in my hands was absolutely filthy, so caked with dust and tarnish that I wouldn’t have thought it metal if I hadn’t heard it fall.

  Huffing and puffing more than I was willing to admit, I clambered to my feet and stepped back to the center of the costume shop. I raised the lamp toward the bare lightbulb overhead, hoping to make out some stamp on the bottom, something that would let me jack up its price for our current desperation sale.

  Shaking my head, I pulled the sleeve of my sweatshirt over my wrist and rubbed at the brass, trying to polish off its coat of grime. Pressing harder, my fingertips brushed against the curved brass spout.

  An electric shock jolted through my arm. The force was strong enough to make me yelp, and I dropped the lamp with another ungodly clatter. My fingers jangled violently, and I shook my hand as if I could make the pain fall away, drip off like splatters of boiling water. My heart pounded so hard I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even swallow, and for just a second, I thought that I had somehow, impossibly, managed to electrocute myself.

  I kept on breathing, though. Kept on breathing, and kept on watching, even as my jaw dropped in disbelief.

  Fog poured out of the brass lamp’s spout.

  Okay. I was a stage manager. I knew how to generate fog onstage. I knew how to make great billowing clouds with dry ice. I knew how to generate clammy banks that hugged the floor, twining around actors’ ankles, making audiences shiver in anticipation of London accents and wolves howling on moors. I knew how to create a soft, fuzzy mist with fine droplets of heated oil, a shimmer that could diffuse spotlights and make a crowd believe that they were lost in a dream, that they were in the company of Broadway stars who belted out ballads as if their fictional lives depended on it.

  I could order up atmospheric effects in my sleep, recognize them—any of them—from twenty paces.

  This was no atmospheric effect. This was real. This fog swirled as it emerged from the lamp, shimmering with its own inner light. It expanded and twisted on itself, writhing like a living thing, glinting beneath the fluorescents. I could make out flashes of cobalt and emerald, ruby and topaz.

  I blinked, and the fog disappeared.

  In its place was a man. A man wearing a white polyester suit with wide lapels, and a black synthetic shirt with an ungodly, buttoned-up white vest. He was tall, a good head taller than me, and so skinny that I wondered if he might be ill. As I gaped, he shot his right hand up in the air, striking out his left leg in a perfect 1970s Disco Fever dance pose.

  A tattoo wrapped around his right wrist. The ink was compelling; it drew my eyes, even as I gaped at the bizarre sight in front of me. I could make out a delicate tracery in red and gold, individual tongues of flame outlined in jagged black. The design made me shiver, as if it spoke to some dark, secret memory deep inside my brain.

  As I stared, absolutely speechless, the guy smiled and tossed his blow-dried hair in a way that I was apparently supposed to find seductive. “Hey, foxy lady! Ready to boogie on down with a wish?”

  CHAPTER 2

  FOXY LADY? HAD I SUDDENLY BEEN TRANSPORTED back to 1977? Was this John Travolta wannabe really talking to me like we were on the set for Saturday Night Fever?

  I tried to answer.

  I tried to say something, anything
, form any sort of verbal response.

  But my mouth just wouldn’t work. My mouth wouldn’t work, my brain wouldn’t work, my entire body was about to collapse on the costume-room floor.

  This guy was real. He was flesh and blood. I could reach out and touch him—him and his white disco suit. And all of it—suit and man—had appeared from nowhere. Not from nowhere, my brain screamed. From the lamp. I had conjured him out of the brass lamp by rubbing the damned thing.

  “You—You’re a genie,” I croaked.

  He tossed his blow-dried hair and lowered his dance-ready right arm. “Psych! Who else would grant you a wish?” He stared at the Kismet costumes with a distinct look of disgust. “Well, bummer. Are these the threads everyone is wearing these days?”

  I started to laugh.

  I couldn’t help it. First, it was the way the guy sounded like a reject from That ’70s Show, like an extra who had been cut because he was just too…obvious. Almost immediately, though, I pictured everyone walking around on the Minneapolis streets, dressed like some Hollywood dream of a harem, come hell or high snowbanks.

  Once I started to laugh, I couldn’t stop. Nervous tension, the stage manager part of my brain diagnosed—I was still recovering from the jangling electric shock that continued to make my fingers tingle, that made me want to shake my arm and restore the proper blood flow to my fingertips. Partial electrocution, then near asphyxiation by jewel-toned fog…And now this bizarre…genie (could he really be a genie? What sort of crackpot dream was I having?) who sounded like a cross between a valley girl and Casanova.

  With a supreme effort of will, I managed to smother my totally inappropriate laughter and gasp, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Teel.”

  “Teel?”

  He sighed in obvious exasperation. “Teel,” he repeated, like it was Jason, or Michael, or any other name I should have known. He pulled himself up to his full height—and a rather impressive height it was—and he cocked his head at an angle that made him look more like a curious parrot than a killer disco dancer. My treacherous laughter bubbled up again. He was not at all amused. “And what is so funny about that?”

  “It’s just…” I had to concentrate. I had to pay attention to what was happening here. If nothing else, I could pretend that this was a play. A musical, like everything we performed at Fox Hill. There. That was calming. Why hadn’t we ever done a musical of Saturday Night Fever? Was there one, in stage form?

  Concentrate now! I said, “I thought…”

  But what did I think? What was I going to say? Why couldn’t I make two brain cells rub together to form a single coherent sentence? Oh. There was one. Why hadn’t I left with Maddy when she tried to take me out for burritos? I could have been eating a burrito and chatting with my housemates about silly Twin Cities theater gossip, and not worrying that my past year of sorrow and self-indulgence had finally driven me mad, finally made me see apparitions.

  That apparition wasn’t going away. In fact, it was only looking more annoyed with every second I delayed. I tried again. “I expected…” One last time. “Teel! I was expecting something a little more majestic. Aladdin, maybe. Ali Baba. Something more exotic.”

  “And I suppose they call you Scheherazade.” He sniffed.

  I realized that I probably wasn’t the first lamp-rubbing human to comment on his name. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. There. I finally had my nervous giggles under control. “I’m Kira Franklin.”

  I started to extend my hand to shake his, but one glance at his flame tattoo made me stop. I’d seen a lot of tattoos in my theater days, but there was something about Teel’s wristband that kept me from completing my simple civil gesture.

  There was power in those flames. They were brighter than any tattoo I’d ever seen. Stronger. Purely different. Other.

  To cover my prickling awareness, I glanced at the brass lamp, glinting now in the center of the room. “Hey!” I said. “How did that thing get so clean?” Even to my own ears, I sounded afraid.

  Teel’s eyes flashed in the predatory way of all terminally cool dudes cruising dark discos for foxy chicks. “Chill, baby,” he crooned. “It’s cool.”

  Despite everything, despite my confusion, despite the utter bizarreness of a man springing to life in the middle of the costume shop, I gritted my teeth at his patronizing tone. His eyes narrowed, and he asked, “Too much?”

  “Nobody calls me baby,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes. “Another feminist. Let me guess. Susan put you up to this.”

  “Susan? Who’s Susan?”

  His laugh was tight, a little nasty. He took a step away from the brass lantern, his shoes—black ankle boots with substantial, clunky heels—thudding on the linoleum floor. “She must be having a great time watching us. Where is she hiding? Susan?” He thrust his hands through the feathers and fluff of our Gypsy costumes. “Susan! Enough joking! Where are you?” His voice turned fawning as he called out, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  “Um, I don’t know any Susan,” I said, before he could begin attacking another rack of costumes. Well, I did know a Susan. Two, in fact. But not one who was going to be lurking in the Fox Hill costume shop on a Sunday afternoon in January. Not one who knew a genie named Teel. I was willing to bet money on that.

  “Of course not.” He glared at me, clearly not believing a word I’d said. “What is this place supposed to be? Backstage at a theater? Well, you’d better brush up on your acting skills if you expect anyone to believe that line.”

  Despite myself, I blushed. “I’m not an actor!”

  “Obviously not.” He sighed and looked around the rest of the costume shop. “Susan! Come on! Tell me you forgive me, and we can get back to planning our little getaway to the Poconos.” I shook my head, but he held up one commanding hand. “Susan? Susan! This isn’t funny anymore!”

  “Teel!” I said, sharply enough that I finally commanded his attention. “There really isn’t any Susan. I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you don’t know Susan, and I’ve been abandoned to the first idiot who rubbed my lamp.” He completed a head-to-toe survey of my admittedly grimy self and shook his head in disbelief. “I dig it. Susan is still upset about catching me with Connie. She’s going to make me pay. But where did she find you?” Before I could retort, Teel made his voice as sweet as the corn syrup we used to make stage blood. “Susan, that girl meant nothing to me!” Silence. Silence, which Teel broke by howling toward the ceiling, “What! Are you trying to get an extra wish? You know I have to follow the rules! I can’t hand out extras to anyone. I’ve already told you. That never works.”

  “Wishes?” I gasped. He’d mentioned them the second he appeared out of the lamp, but I was only now realizing that I was part of a real-life fairy tale. Me. The woman who was so unlucky, she just made donations to charity, instead of buying scratch-off lottery cards.

  Was I really going to get three honest-to-goodness chances at happiness? He couldn’t be serious. Wishes were impossible.

  But not less possible than a man materializing out of a brass lamp

  Teel suddenly blinked, as if he were seeing me for the very first time. Me, and absolutely no hope of Susan. He stared for a long minute, and then he exhaled, breathing out with a force that seemed to deflate him like a collapsing balloon.

  “Susan isn’t here, is she?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you.” He looked so crestfallen that I had to add, “Maybe we can find her, though.”

  “What year is it?”

  For a moment, the question stunned me. Here I’d thought that my genie was a fashion lunatic. In an instant, though, I understood. He must have been forced back inside his lamp in the seventies, at the height of disco, bad hair, and slang that made my teeth ache. He didn’t intend to dress like Disco Stu; he just didn’t know any better.

  “The year?” he prompted again, and his tone was sharper.

  I told him, and he
started to swear under his breath, linking phrases with a fluidity that would have impressed any playwright. Curse words hadn’t changed much in the past few decades. “Dammit!” he finally wound down. “Dammit all to brass shards!” Okay. Maybe he had a few odd oaths up his white polyester sleeve.

  Sighing explosively, he raised his fingers to his right earlobe and tugged twice, hard.

  Another electric shock jolted me from head to foot. This one wasn’t as strong, though, as the spark that had set everything in motion. Instead, I felt like I’d been shuffling across a carpet in wool socks, then touched my finger to a doorknob. Nevertheless, I blinked and jumped back.

  And when I opened my eyes again, Teel had changed. His white polyester suit had metamorphosed into midnight-black sweatpants, in-seam pockets slightly turned out. His dress shirt and vest had melted away into a stretched-out black sweatshirt. His blow-dried hair was gone; he now sported unruly curls, messy, as if he’d spent an afternoon working in the costume shop.

  In fact, staring at him, I realized that Teel had just patterned himself as a mirror of me. He must have believed that I was the height of current fashion, that I was a perfect model for him to fit into the world around us.

  Poor guy. He was really in a fix if he was relying on me for fashion guidance.

  “There,” he said, dusting off his hands in a universal gesture of completing a job well done. I could still see the flame tattoo on his wrist, poking out from beneath his sweatshirt’s sagging cuff. If anything, the individual tongues of fire were more compelling against the black than they had been against the white disco disaster. My eyes kept drifting toward the inked image, unaccountably drawn to its sharp, clear lines. Teel nodded. “That’s more like it.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I said weakly, knowing that I needed to say something else, anything; I needed to fill the silence. “Um…So I guess you don’t have any idea how your lantern ended up on our set? From Kismet?”