Who Needs Magic? (6 page)

“Fifty!”

“At least.”

Ariella’s silver headband, her twinkling triple-star drop earrings and her angel jacket are brought to full shimmering brightness as she steps off the escalator, onto the shiny-stoned path that opens before us. Meanwhile, my outfit, “perfect” for an art gallery, is completely wrong
here, where it’s all about reflecting and glowing. I’m like one of those cutout silhouettes—a shadow, an absence of color and light.

“And you need to do them as fast as possible. Once you’ve done like ten, pause for a second. Wait and see if anything hits you. Mom says granting a lot of wishes at once shakes up the molecules in the atmosphere and deep-seated wishes rise to the surface.”

The glow and glare of the store window displays add to the luminescence from the giant globe streetlamps that seem to march down the middle of the walkway, set off in pairs that each bracket an S-shaped slate-gray metal bench. “We’ll start in Fermier’s. It’s up here a little ways.” I follow Ariella past several clothing stores and a travel shop. We turn a corner and pass another row of similar stores, at the end of which there’s yet another corner that leads to more of the same. It’s a dizzying maze, and it makes it impossible to tell how big the mall is, but it feels like it might go on forever, one corridor angling into another, on and on and on to infinity.

After another turn, there’s finally something different: a department store that spans one whole side of the passageway. Ariella leads me to the revolving door and we push through. As big as it looked from the outside, it’s even bigger inside, the ceiling angling up like the interior of a cathedral. The air is cold and clean, as if it’s being pumped in directly from heaven. Everything about it is
artificial, disconnected from reality. After spending all day in a mall, I’m feeling seriously stifled, but I remind myself why I’m here and that the suffering will be worth it.

Unfortunately, this hope is soon dashed on the linoleum that crisscrosses the store. First, Ariella expects me to see through the walls of the dressing rooms in order to tailor tacky dresses and boxy jackets for the women trying them on.

“I’m not Superwoman. I don’t have X-ray vision.”

“Study what they take in. Like that short, skinny lady over there. The hems on those skirts are all going to be way too long, and that shirt is way too wide in the shoulders. Right? So now you just time it so that you fix them
as
she’s putting them on.”

“How would I know when to do that?”

Ariella stares at me, mystified by the question. “Instinct.”

I have no response to this. She gave me a lime stick after we entered the store, but I don’t think it’s granted me the superpowers it’s apparently given her.

Ariella cocks her head to the left and studies me as if I’ve only now begun to come into focus.

“You’re further behind than I thought.… That’s okay, though. We’ll go back to elementary wish granting.”

Great. Doing small wishes was the one thing I thought I had down. Now I find out I’m still in the slow learners’ class.

We crouch behind a circular rack of 30-percent-off
blouses and spy on a woman trying on a crimson velveteen jacket over her shirt. The woman’s not old, exactly, but she’s definitely not young. Her brown hair is gray where the roots are showing, and there are tiny lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes. She frowns at her reflection in the pillared mirror, the permanent furrows between her eyes deepening.

“Go ahead,” Ariella whispers. “It needs to be let out in the back—see? Try making it a little longer too, but be subtle.”

I study the woman for a second. I don’t think it’s the jacket she’s frowning at.

Ariella pokes me.
“Delaney,”
she hisses. “Come on.”

I aim the candy stick over the top of the rack. The woman blinks, and then her expression softens. She leans back, considering herself. She smiles, takes off the jacket, hangs it back up and walks away.

Ariella steps out from behind the rack. “Why didn’t you do what I said?”

“I fixed her roots instead. Now she can skip the salon this month.”

“She didn’t buy the jacket.”

“That wasn’t her wish.”

“Yes, it was. Or she wouldn’t have tried it on.”

“Didn’t you see her? She smiled.”

Ariella’s attention is caught by a revolving jewelry display on a nearby counter. “Most people have multiple wishes, Delaney.” Ariella removes a thread-thin silver
necklace from a hook. A tiny angel charm dangles from it. “But you have to pick one. Fast. The jacket would’ve worked too. Or you could’ve done both together. But you can’t waste time
thinking
about it. You’ll never get to fifty if you’re too busy analyzing everybody’s secondary wants. Save that for your beneficiary.”

“Client.”

Ariella rolls her eyes and carries the necklace to a nearby cashier. I wait for her to tell me I’m hopeless. That I’m a stubborn, impossible student and she’s through with the lesson. But when she turns away from the cashier, ittybitty shopping bag in hand, the stern look is gone. Instead, she’s beaming, bright with a new idea.

“I know exactly where we should go next. It’s like a shooting gallery of small wishes. You’ll definitely score there.”

“This is such a great place for granting small wishes,” Ariella says as we step off the escalator that leads to an upper level of the mall. “Once you figure out what movie they want, you make it happen. I once did four at the same time!”

She guides me through the tangled web of moviegoers gathered outside the mall’s multiplex. Some are messily bunched up in front of the box office, where giant flat screens play scenes from the movies, above digital schedules in blinking red. The rest of the would-be ticket buyers
serpentine off from computer kiosks. We “excuse me” our way closer, until we’re near enough to see the grumpy men and swearing women repeatedly pressing the Back button on the kiosks or inserting their credit cards for the twelfth time.

I raise my lime stick and peer over the shoulder of a woman who’s squinting at the monitor through her reading glasses. She taps
Luckless in L.A
. but gets trapped in the backup loop when she keeps pressing the wrong time. I check the box-office display for the next show, but it’s playing on three screens.

“Delaney.”
Ariella waves her grape stick and the ticket spits out for the woman.

“I was about to do it,” I complain as an older couple, grandparent age, step up next. The man pouts at the screen while the woman tells him what to press, but they end up stuck anyway. I get them their tickets, but it takes a beat. Or two. I don’t know what the matter is. It usually doesn’t take me this long, although having Ariella watching over my shoulder doesn’t help. I try to ignore her, but my next wish feels just as slow. I shake the candy stick like a thermometer.

“That’s not the way it works, Delaney. You can’t shake the energy down to one end.”

“I know that.” Although it’s what I was trying to do. “I need to use my own wand.” I hand her the candy stick and retrieve my chopstick from its holster in my boot. I head
down to the other end of the kiosk row, getting Ariella out of my sight line. She seems to understand and hangs back, giving me some space.

I try to concentrate, but I’m finding it hard to care whether these people see the generic action movie or the generic slasher film. Doing a zillion wishes every thirty seconds may shake up the molecules or whatever, but it feels pointless—and I’m not saying that just because my magic seems slow-motion compared to that of Ariella P., super f.g.

Ariella catches up with me. “Hmm.” She taps her grape stick against her teeth. “Let’s get something to eat,” she says finally. “Maybe your blood sugar is low.”

“You missed another one.” Ariella waves her grape stick toward the front of the line, granting a wish I didn’t catch because the second we entered the food court, starvation kicked in from all the hunger-inducing smells—curried rice and spicy pizza sauce and sizzling stir-fries—reminding me that I hadn’t eaten anything since the Pop-Tart. My blood sugar probably
was
low. I couldn’t even decide what I wanted to eat, so I let Ariella lead me to some Japanese noodle place.
“Delaney.”
Ariella elbows me and points her chin toward two women exiting the line with their trays. Before I can even try to figure out which one has the wish and what it is, Ariella waves her candy stick over my head.

“But that
is
brown rice,” one of the women says.

“Oh, you’re right. I guess I didn’t forget to ask for it.”

Ariella snaps off a piece of the grape stick with her teeth and regards me with concern. “Did you have any problems with your last big wish?” There’s a careful, suspicious tone in her voice, like she already knows the answer.

“Sort of.”

“What about before that?”

I keep my eyes on the people in line. “I can’t focus if you’re going to distract me with questions.”

“You need to be able to grant small wishes no matter what’s going on, without even thinking about it. I just did three more while I was talking to you.”

“You wish.”

Ariella folds her arms, miffed. “You wanted my help, Delaney.”

I did, but her nonstop condescension is seriously bugging me. I look around, determined to grant at least one wish before we order, to get Ariella off my case.

At the pickup area, a customer lifts his tray, causing his miso soup to spill. I point my chopstick and really concentrate and the spill vanishes. Thank God.

But, unfortunately, Ariella remains on the case.

“You didn’t answer me. Did you ever have any, you know,
glitches
before the last wish you granted?”

“No.”

We reach the counter. Photos of the entrées are projected on a monitor and they dissolve from one to the next, like the movie previews at the multiplex. I study the sequence of the noodles and the toppings as they flash by on
the screen. The captions are in Japanese, which makes it challenging to choose. I could ask for a translation, but I’m too hungry to listen, so I narrow it down by color scheme to the noodles with the flecks of purple and green, and the noodles with the strips of orange and red. “The last time was the first time you had a problem? Everything was fine before that, right?”

“Not exactly. There weren’t any glitches before, because there wasn’t a before.”

“What do you mean there wasn’t a before?”

I ignore her and step up to the counter to give my order. “I’ll have that,” I say, pointing to the orange-red dish on the monitor. The counter guy raises his eyebrows a little in … surprise? Amusement? Wariness? It must be some kind of spicy peppers. Luckily, I like spicy. “And a root beer,” I add. This gets me a frown. I’m guessing root beer is not an authentic Japanese beverage. Either that or it goes better with the purple and green flecks.

Ariella orders, using the Japanese names for both her meal and her drink. She receives a smile for each, and the guy hands her a bottle of bright orange soda from some secret stash under the counter.

We pay and move off to the pickup counter. “You need to be honest with me, Delaney, if we’re going to get to the root of your problem. If it’s been hard for you from the beginning, just say so. For instance, how long did it take you to grant your first wish?”

“I already told you. My first was my last. My last
was
my first.”

“The one you did three months ago? That was your first? How could it have taken you that long? Didn’t your mother give you any coaching at all? Wasn’t she worried?” Ariella holds her Japanese soda bottle at shoulder height and is tilting it in a way that makes it obvious (to me anyway) that she’s using it to do small wishes.
A soda bottle
. I’m not impressed anymore. I’m annoyed.

“I’ve tried to tell you, but you don’t listen.” I grab the top of her bottle, preventing any more wish-granting, forcing Ariella to look at me and pay attention. “I inherited the f.g. thing from my dad, not my mom. She didn’t know. Neither did I until I moved here.”

Ariella pulls the bottle out of my grasp. “That’s not how it works. It goes from mother to daughter.”