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  “I give you everything, Kayla. I work hard for our family. Don’t forget that.”

  “Mom, I gotta go. Talk to you later,” I say, snapping my phone shut before I get myself in trouble.

  Nicole is standing under the overhang near the mall entrance, waiting for me, and I jog across the parking lot to catch up. “What was that all about?”

  “She found out I missed class today and wanted to lecture me about it.”

  “Lame.”

  “Yeah. She tries to act like she’s mother of the year. So annoying. I could wear a giant chicken costume to school every day and she wouldn’t even know unless someone told her.”

  Nicole nods. “Send a picture to her BlackBerry. Then she’d notice.”

  I grin. Nicole totally understands the dynamic in my family, and she always makes me feel better about how screwed up everything is despite the fact that life is perfect on her home front. She’ll let me vent for an hour if I need to.

  But today I don’t want to think about it. I follow her into the mall, and we meander past all the little kiosks selling overpriced impulse buys and finally get to the costume store, our destination.

  Although Halloween is still over a month away, the store is already fully stocked with choices. Scary hoods and scythes, presidential masks, skanky wench and witch options . . . the possibilities are endless.

  “What if we do zombie queens?” I ask, picking up some green face paint. With my other hand, I grab some rubber teeth, ones that would make it look like your whole mouth was rotting out. I hold them up on either side of my face and give Nicole a cheesy smile as I model the costume options.

  Nicole glances over her shoulder and then shrugs. “Hmm. I guess that could work.”

  I frown. Not the enthusiasm I’m looking for.

  We’ve been planning since last year to crash homecoming dressed as something totally ridiculous. See, we went for the first time last year, as freshmen, and found the whole display of school spirit to be totally ridiculous. It starts with the pep rally, where the cheerleaders and football players parade around like kings and queens. And then later, at homecoming, they’re actually crowned kings and queens, while the peons worship them.

  Last year, just a month into our high school existence, Nicole and I were not yet wise to the archaic rite of passage. We thought we could show up without dates, have a good time, and get some fun pictures together.

  But we apparently missed the memo that required that we show up in couture dresses on the arms of our dates in rented Calvin Klein tuxes. We were supposed to have corsages and salon-created updos. We were supposed to ride around in limos and eat hundred-dollar dinners.

  We vowed that night that no matter what happened—even if we both got boyfriends—we’d come back this year in some silly costume and make fun of the whole thing. We knew if we had boyfriends that they’d be the cool type to go along with our goofy antics.

  “I mean, if we wore tiaras and everything, we could mock both the dance and the homecoming queen. Dual purpose.”

  Nicole nods and picks up a tiara and gives it a close inspection. “I don’t know, I’m not really feeling it.” She puts it back on the hook. “We should check that costume place down the street.”

  “I doubt they have a better selection. This place is huge. I’m sure there’s something here. What if we go as giant dolls?” I ask, turning to look at Nicole. She’s staring at a his-and-hers costume of bacon and eggs.

  “Huh?”

  “Like, Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. I have the perfect dress. You can go as Andy.”

  She curls her lip up and practically snarls. “No way.”

  “Fine, fine, you can be Ann, I’ll be Andy.”

  “I meant the whole thing,” she says. Her phone is vibrating, so she flips it open. It takes her about fifteen seconds to text something, and then she snaps it shut again.

  I imagine the sort of text she’s probably sending: Oh, Benny boy, It’s been a whole hour since I’ve run my fingers through your perfect, tousled blond spikes!

  I snicker, happy to have amused myself, because this whole afternoon is a bust.

  Nicole is not into our costume idea anymore. I can tell. I’m just standing here, waiting for her to admit she’s going to ditch me and the costumes and go to the dance with Ben, wearing a sparkly dress and heels. “Are you still into this, or are you having second thoughts?”

  She snaps her phone shut. “Of course I am. We’ve talked about this for a year. There’s no way I’m going to ditch you again, I swear. I promised I’d make amends for missing your birthday, remember? It’s just that there’s nothing here. Let’s just go get smoothies. There’s a salon next to Orange Julius that sells this awesome heat-activated curl spray.”

  That whole last sentence just makes me want to roll my eyes, but I don’t, I just follow her out of the store, my heart sinking as we leave the costumes behind.

  Maybe for my self-portrait photography project I’ll just take a picture of a big empty hole, because that’s how I feel.

  15

  THOUGH I DREAM that Ann and the pony run away to Mexico, I instead wake up early Friday morning to her leaning over my bed, staring me in the eyes, her nose touching mine.

  She doesn’t move when I open my eyes, either. She just smiles in this way that creeps me out because she’s an inch from my face.

  “I thought you’d never wake up!” she says, her green eyes flaring even wider so her thick lashes brush against her eyebrows.

  “Uh, yeah, can you back up?” I’m surprised I haven’t already knocked her over with my morning breath.

  “Oh.” She straightens up and takes a step back.

  “Don’t you need sleep?” I ask, sitting up in bed and pulling my blanket up around me. It’s both creepy and weird to have a stranger watching you sleep. Even if said stranger was once a doll. Or maybe especially if said stranger was once a doll.

  Ann shrugs and plunks down on the ground. “I’ve spent the last six years sleeping; I’m ready for adventure.”

  Great. Raggedy Ann wants to go Lewis and Clark on me. Somehow I don’t think she’s going to take kindly to me stuffing her back into the closet.

  I cross my arms and scowl at her. “You and the pony are supposed to be in Mexico.”

  “That pony?” Ann asks, pointing out the window.

  I hold my breath and then turn to look out my window. Please be wrong. I haven’t seen the pony since Ben brought it back to my house, and I was crediting my strategically placed open gate. In the last twenty-four hours, I’d convinced myself that it was long gone.

  But it is so not. I watch the pony graze on my mom’s shrubbery. What am I supposed to do now? Does the Humane Society accept ponies? What about pink ones?

  That’s when I hear the washing machine start up.

  My mom is home. And so is the pony. This is not good.

  “You have to hide that thing!”

  I leap to my feet and run toward the door. “Climb out my window, use the cherry tree to get to the ground, and then go get that pony into the garden shed, okay? I’ll keep my mom distracted. Then climb back into my window and wait in here.”

  I start to step outside my room, but I trip on something and fly to the floor, skidding a couple of feet and totally skinning my chin.

  A gumball bounces off the wall.

  Stupid, stupid gumballs! I am going to . . .

  Pony. Pony is the priority right now. I scramble back to my feet and am halfway out the door when I turn and give Ann another look. She’s got one leg outside the window, on the roof, and the other on the carpeted floor of my bedroom. “I repeat, come back in here. She can’t see you either or I’m totally screwed!”

  I run down the stairs, taking them two by two. My mom is in the laundry room, which has no windows, but any second she’ll walk into the kitchen, probably grabbing a cup of coffee along the way. She’ll look out the window as she pours, and she’ll see a bright-pink pony.

  With an ice-cream co
ne on its butt.

  I can fake like I have nothing to do with the pony, but unless I get the wishes to stop, crazy things are going to keep happening, and my mom is going to notice that there is only one thing they all have in common: me.

  I slide around the corner in my socks just as my mom is walking out of the laundry room. “Mom! So good to see you,” I say, walking toward her. I position myself so that in order to talk to me, she’ll have her back to the window.

  “Good morning,” she says, one eyebrow raised. I think she already knows something is up. When does a sixteen-year-old race into the kitchen to talk to her mom? “What happened to your chin?”

  “Huh? Oh, nothing.” Suddenly it burns, like one big scarlet letter. Must act casual. I put a hand on my hip and lean against the countertop. “Um, so, I’m thinking of trying out for . . . ” My voice trails off. Softball? No way she’d buy it. The school play? Probably not. “Captain of the debate team.”

  Great, that makes no sense either.

  I let my gaze slip over my mom’s shoulder. Raggedy Ann is racing toward the pony, who quickly spins on her haunches and starts trotting across the lawn, a giant chunk of our shrubs dangling out her mouth. The pony lets out a long, shrill whinny as it disappears out of sight, and I burst into a cough to cover it up.

  My mom narrows her eyes and gives me an odd look. “Don’t you have to be on the debate team to be the captain?”

  “Oh. Um, yes. I mean, well, I meant that I was going to try out for the debate team with the captain. The captain . . . runs the tryouts.”

  Also, I’m going to set my hair on fire.

  “Oh. I had no idea you were interested in debate,” she says. I don’t think she’s buying my story. But she hasn’t figured out what’s wrong either, which is practically just as good.

  “Yes. I’m . . . ”

  I narrow my eyes. The pony canters by with Ann’s apron in her mouth. Ann appears, her arms flailing over her head, and the two disappear to the right.

  “Do we have any carrots?” I blurt out.

  “Carrots?”

  “Yes. I would really love a good breakfast carrot.” For some reason I flex my bicep as I say it, as if a carrot is going to give me huge muscles. Great. Maybe my mom wants tickets to the gun show while I’m at it.

  My mom tips her head to the side. “Are you feeling okay?” She reaches out and touches my forehead.

  “Yes! Fabulous. The carrot?”

  My mom nods, still giving me a strange look, and heads toward the fridge. While she is leaning in, the door blocking me from view, I rush to the window and give Ann a “beheading” signal, as in, knock it off and catch that stupid pony.

  She practically leaps into the air at my look and scurries after the pony. She has her apron back, and she’s holding it up like it might double as a lasso.

  Whoo boy, maybe I should have been the one to chase the pony while Ann pretended she was a classmate. But she seems like she totally does not understand the art of acting cool, and I doubt she could pull off even thirty seconds of talking to my mom. This is evidenced by the fact that she’s flapping her arms around like a chicken at this very moment.

  I’m almost back to my mother when she triumphantly produces a carrot. She holds it up, but then her face scrunches a little as the carrot sort of leans to the side.

  “That looks kind of rubbery,” I say, reaching out and taking it from her. I can almost bend it in half. Ugh. I bet the last time my mom went grocery shopping and bought something other than frozen dinners was August.

  Of 2006.

  “Gross, let me toss that,” she says, reaching out to take it back.

  The garbage can is right by the window, with a full, unobscured view of the backyard and the circus act currently being performed by Ann and the MLP.

  “No! It’s fine, see?” I take a rubbery bite and then chew with a big smile and a rumbling, revolting stomach. This thing is disgusting, like carrot-flavored bubble gum.

  My mom gives me another odd look. I glance to the left and am relieved to see Ann has the apron around the pony’s neck and is leading it into the garden shed. Finally!

  My mom just shrugs and then heads over to her coffeepot just as the garden-shed door swings shut. She pauses for a second and looks out the window. I wonder if she caught that last movement of the door.

  She can’t have. But I hold my breath anyway.

  “Are you ready for your driving test this morning?” she asks, her back to me as she puts the coffeepot back on the hot plate.

  I nod, my mouth still full of rubbery carrot. “Yep,” I say, pieces of orange falling out of my mouth.

  It’s only a small stretch of the truth. If my mom had taken me driving even once in the last month, I’d be a little more confident. I’ve hardly been behind the wheel for a second since driver’s ed ended last summer.

  “Good. I have a quick errand to run and I’m going to drop Chase off at work, and then I’ll come back and grab you. We should head out by seven thirty. That sound okay?”

  I nod. It seems like my mom has been talking forever while I gag on the rubbery carrot. “Sure.”

  Then I dash out of the room, spitting the carrot into my hand as soon as I’m out of view. That was too close for comfort.

  I need a plan.

  I take the stairs to my bedroom two by two and am stepping through my door just as Ann falls through my bedroom window.

  I stare at her for a second, realizing my life is about to get tossed in the toilet if I don’t figure this out. “Okay. So, I have you . . . a pony . . . gumballs . . . ”

  I sigh and sink onto the floor. There’s a fourth wish waiting for me. Today. Somewhere. I don’t even want to guess what kind of havoc I’m going to encounter. They’re getting worse every day.

  “You’re just going to have to stay here all day,” I say, looking up at Ann. “With the pony.”

  Ann sits down across from me, carefully placing her legs until she mimics my way of sitting. On her it looks like a yoga pose. Any moment she’s going to close her eyes and start saying, “Ooohhhhhhhmmmmm.”

  “I don’t want to. Your school is more fun.”

  “Ann!” I say, my voice a little too loud. I lower it. “You don’t get it. School only allows students on campus. Visitors have to register at the office and be escorted around. You can’t just show up.”

  She pouts and crosses her arms.

  “And that pony,” I say, pointing out the window, “needs to be watched.”

  “But why do I have to watch it?”

  “I can’t! I have to be at school or I’ll get in trouble.”

  “FINE!” She stands up and stomps her feet. “I’ll watch the pony. But you owe me!”

  Pft. I don’t owe a doll and a My Little Pony anything. It’s them ruining my life. But I don’t say that aloud.

  We wait until my mom leaves in her Lexus, my brother in the passenger seat, before we go downstairs and outside.

  The shed is big, probably a dozen feet wide and fifteen or so feet deep. But I can tell from thirty feet away the pony doesn’t like it. It’s stomping its feet and kicking the walls.

  Thank God my mom didn’t hear this from the kitchen.

  “Do you see why it can’t be left alone?” I ask, shooting a pointed look in Ann’s direction.

  Ann just rolls her eyes. I narrow mine, because I know she had to have learned that from me, and I try to remember when I rolled my eyes in front of her.

  I open the shed door and the pony tries to muscle past me. I yank Ann inside and shut the door. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust.

  I just found the gumballs. They are in trash bags, stacked up all over the place. I can’t even see the lawn mower or the shovels in the back of the shed. One of the bags has been ripped—or maybe kicked—open, and gumballs have spewed out all over. No wonder the pony doesn’t like it in here. The gumballs take up two thirds of the space.

  “So just hang out in here. If you’re careful, you can go inside
and grab some snacks or something. But don’t let anyone see you. I’ll be back at two thirty, okay?”

  Ann heaves a great big annoyed sigh and nods. “Okay, great. See ya later.”

  Then I dash out before she can stop me and hope she doesn’t pop back up before my mom comes to pick me up.

  THANKS to this morning’s ridiculous antics, I nearly blew my driving test. I started thinking about Ann’s horrid clothing as I was parallel parking, and I got docked six points for bumping into one of the cones. Then I could have sworn I saw the pony wandering the sidewalk, but it was just a really overweight lady in a bright-pink T-shirt.

  In the end, though, I received my hot-off-the-presses license. My photo is terrible and it’s just a paper temporary until the real thing arrives in the mailbox, but I have a driver’s license.

  With all the other crap going on right now, it seems a little anti-climactic. But either way, I have a license, and I can’t wait to show Nicole. It’ll have to wait until photography because I missed bio. My mom drops me back off at school in time for the last twenty minutes of math class.

  As I step through the door, the teacher is droning on up front. I pause and hand her my little pink slip of paper. She scans over it and nods, and then I head toward my seat.

  Just mere feet away, I have a horrifying realization: If I don’t know what today’s wish is, it could be Ben. He could kiss me. Because near as I can tell, the wishes haven’t occurred in order.

  So who’s to say my wish from my fifteenth birthday couldn’t happen today?

  My breath hitches in my throat, and my mind seems to slow down and nearly stop functioning completely. It’s like every coherent thought I have just got stuck in the mud. I’m halfway to my desk, and my feet slow down, scrape along the carpet.

  Ben wouldn’t try to kiss me in class, would he?

  I finally plop down in my seat, promptly sliding to the edge, trying not to be obvious, and lean against my left elbow, away from him. I’m barely balanced on the chair, but I try to look cool and casual as I jot down the day’s math homework. I shift around, hoping to find a way to maintain this position, and something falls out of my jacket pocket.