The Seventh Wish (7 page)

We talk about the feis as we head down the hall. Dasha nods and smiles and looks excited, but I can tell she's still upset about that test.

Dasha laughed about Bobby O'Sullivan but didn't really have any advice, so when I get home, I text Abby. She's always had boys asking her out, so she must know how to handle these things.

I watch the screen for a minute, but she doesn't answer, so I change into warm clothes, put on my winter stuff, and run to Drew's house. He and his nana are outside loading the sled.

“Hello there, Miss Charlie!” Mrs. McNeill calls. “Fishing for crystals again?”

“Yep. I have two more weeks before my feis.” Mrs. McNeill thinks it's crazy how much the solo dresses cost, but she's been helping me out. Every once in a while, she sneaks one of her fish into my bucket when Drew's not looking.

“Nooo . . . not another feece!” Drew clutches his face with his hands, drops to the ground, and rolls in the snow,
pretending to be in agony. “The feces . . . they are boring me to death!”

“Is Rachael going?” I ask, and then realize it's a dumb question. She's at the Prizewinner level—that's above Novice—and she goes to pretty much every feis on the East Coast.

Drew ignores my question anyway and keeps rolling around moaning.

“You'll have to forgive him,” Mrs. McNeill whispers. “Rough afternoon at basketball practice. Final tryouts and cuts are coming up, and his father's putting on the heat.”

“Dad's so excited about the tryouts he got me new basketball shoes that cost like a hundred fifty dollars.” Drew sighs. I feel bad for him. Those shoes aren't going to solve anything. “And if I get cut, I'm still not off the hook.” He looks over at the fishing poles. “Ha! Off the hook, get it?” He kicks at the snow. “Dad says if I don't make this team, I gotta try out for baseball or something.”

“Does it have to be a sport?” I ask. “Science fair is sort of extracurricular, and we get extra credit if we do it.”

“Nah. If I did science fair, Dad would find a way to make that about sports too. I'd end up studying how many granola bars a guy can eat before he pukes during a workout or something.” He starts pulling the sled toward the frozen lake. “Let's fish.”

It's been on the warm side this week, and today is the first day it's dropped back into single digits, so the ice is talking again. We're walking by the point when I see the hole from our first week of fishing, all frozen over. I stop. “Mrs. McNeill? Can you help me open up this hole again?”

“You chickening out?” Drew makes
bawk-bawk
ing noises for a few seconds until his nana gives him the stop-it look.

“No.” I'm fine with going out farther now, but I've been thinking all afternoon about Dasha and the test that made her so sad. “I want to fish here for a while. Then I'll come out.”

Mrs. McNeill fires up the auger, drills through the frozen circle of ice, and leaves me a bucket and a rod with a lure on it because the bait shop was out of minnows. The lure looks more like a silver feather than a fish, so I'm not expecting much when I lower it into the hole.

But apparently, any magic fish dumb enough to get caught in the same spot three times is also dumb enough to think a piece of shiny metal might be good to eat. The tug comes right away, and I reel in the fish.

Same sparkling eye.

Same raspy voice.

“Release me . . . and I will grant you a wish.”

Chapter 6

The Third and Fourth Wishes

“Please let . . .”

I'm about to wish for Dasha's English to get better, for her to pass that awful test so she can be in classes with me. But then I realize this is the third time I've caught the wish fish. This fish didn't say anything about a limit, but in stories about genies, the third wish is pretty much the end of the road. (My first two-part wish, about Roberto and my fear of the ice, only counts as one, I think. Especially since the real Roberto Sullivan still doesn't know I exist.)

What I really want is to make this one a triple wish.
Please let Dasha learn English faster so she can pass her test, and please let Drew be awesome at his basketball tryouts so he'll make the team and then his dad will leave him alone, and please let Dasha and me both place in the top three in our feis so we can move up to Novice.
But maybe it was the double wishing that first time that made
the fish mess up with Roberto. So I decide to stick with a single wish.

“Please let Dasha pass her language test,” I whisper, and I let the fish go. I'm tempted to stick the lure right back into the water to see if I can catch it again and make Drew's basketball wish, but that seems like it might push a magic fish over the edge.

I pack up and walk out to where Drew and Mrs. McNeill are sitting. “How's it going?”

Drew grunts.

“Slow,” Mrs. McNeill says, bobbing her pole up and down. “But feel free to join us.” She nods toward the auger, and I use it to drill myself a hole. The auger blade spins, and it sinks in, leaving a shiny donut of shaved ice around the hole. It takes a while to hit water; the ice must be at least twelve inches thick by now.

I sit down on my bucket, drop a line, and pull out my phone to try Abby again.

Charlie:
Is your class over? I need advice.

Abby doesn't text back right away, so I put my phone back in my pocket. Pretty soon, we all start getting bites.

“You must be our good-luck charm, Miss Charlie!” Mrs. McNeill says, using a pair of pliers to twist her lure out of a fish's mouth.

“What about your four-leaf clover charm?” I ask, laughing.

She shakes her head, dropping her line back in. “I'm wearing it, but it wasn't doing a thing for me until you showed up.”

The fish only bite for about half an hour. By the time it slows down, it's getting dark anyway, so we head in to shore and deliver our fish to Billy.

Mrs. McNeill says it again. “Charlie's our lucky charm!”

“Thanks.” I smile and accept my twelve dollars for today's perch, feeling just as lucky as she says I am. In fact, I feel downright sparkly.

My sparkly luck hangs in there for most of January. The weather's been great for fishing, with cold nights so the ice gets thicker and sunny days so the fish can see the lures. By the week of the feis, I have more than four hundred fifty dollars for my solo dress.

“Do you think I should go with blue or orange?” I ask Dasha as we're lacing up our soft shoes at dance on Sunday. “Mom says blue matches my eyes, but I like how bright the orange dresses are.”

“I think both look nice,” Dasha says.

“Let's go, ladies and gentlemen!” Miss Brigid shouts. “Line up and we'll start with a reel.”

I find a spot in front of the mirror between Dasha and Chloe. We reel and slip jig through the first half hour of class and then switch shoes for the treble jig and hornpipe.

“Point your toe on the hop!” Miss Brigid calls over the music. “Straighten that knee!”

When class ends, Dasha and I change into our sneakers while the Novice kids get ready. We're staying to watch their class so we can see what it'll be like when we move up.

“Are you guys in Novice now?” Catherine pulls her wheeled dance bag up beside us, sits down on it, and starts putting on her hard shoes.

“Not yet,” I say. “But hopefully after the Montreal feis.”

“You'll make it,” Catherine says. She finishes lacing her shoe, straps the buckle over her ankle, and hurries across the room to stand by Isabelle for the start of class. Then she races back to her dance bag.

“Catherine, we're ready to begin. Is there a problem?” Miss Brigid asks.

“No!” Catherine rummages through her bag, pulls her flour baby out from a jumble of shoes and extra clothes, and props it up on a chair. “Sorry! I had to get Meredith. She likes to watch.” Catherine races back to her spot as Miss Brigid shakes her head and starts the music.

I don't know these steps yet, but when the music begins, I can't keep my sneakers still. The Novice class is about the same size as ours, but the dancers are more powerful, more sure of themselves, and that makes them a lot louder.

Tick-a-tuck! Tick-a-tuck! Tick-a-tuck!
They fly over the floor in unison, arms tight to their sides.

“Good, but I'm not hearing the clicks,” Miss Brigid says when the song ends. “Line up and let's do a click exercise.”

I tap my sneaker-heels together while the Novice girls kick their way forward.

“Click-two-three, click-two-three . . . Step! Click-down!” Miss Brigid calls. “Much better!”

All the heel clicking reminds me of Dorothy's magic ruby slippers from
The Wizard of Oz
, and that reminds me of my latest wish. “Hey . . . ,” I whisper to Dasha. “When do you have another one of those language tests?”

She'd been smiling, watching the dancers, but now her face falls. “Tomorrow.” She sighs. “I study all week but . . .” She shrugs as if it's hopeless. I want to tell her it's not, that things will be better this time, but she'll think I'm just being nice. She'll find out soon enough.

“Very nice, ladies!” Miss Brigid calls when the class is over. “Who's going to Montreal?” They all raise their hands. “Great! I'll see you there.”

Catherine comes back over to change her shoes. “Are you going this weekend?” I ask.

“Yep. My sister has a gymnastics meet in Vermont Friday night, so we're going up from there and staying in a hotel.” She shrugs. “Montreal's a huge feis, though, so I don't really have a chance of top three. I'd need a first place to move up to Prizewinner.”