Maybe I really had become dumber. Sigh.

 
The book told us a lot about what could and couldn’t be done with my magic, but mainly it repeated in several ways that I was stuck. I was going to be female and under my master’s orders for as long as seventy years or more.

I didn’t feel nearly as bad about this as I thought I should. The idea of serving Travis by granting his wishes, magical and otherwise, appealed to me on some level I didn’t understand.

Maybe I really had become dumber. Sigh.

We tried to make plans for how to acquire the house. Buying it seemed simplest. “Wish for some money,” I urged him.

He worked carefully on the wording. “Jonny, I wish,” he finally said, “that I had thirty thousand dollars or as close a sum as we can get in modern American currency, no counterfeits, no marked bills, and no singles.” That last had been my thought. Can you imagine what a pile of 30,000 ones would look like?

But I crossed my arms, nodded and blinked in approved Jeannie fashion and a small pile of greenbacks appeared on the table next to our Magic Mirror. I squealed in excitement, and Travis laughed. The mirror said nothing because Travis had not reactivated it yet.

“Let’s count da loot,” I suggested. So we did, and it turned out to be $27,250, a bit short of thirty thousand, but maybe the spirits flunked arithmetic? One oddity though: among the 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, and 100s there was just one $1000 bill.

At first, I thought it was just an oddly printed hundred, but no, it was a genuine thousand dollar bill. I held it up to show Travis. “Huh?” I said. It had a picture of Grover Cleveland on it, but only once.

He took the note and examined it carefully. “It looks real, but I don’t think they make these anymore. The date says 1928, so maybe they don’t.”

Something occurred to me. “I’ve seen them on TV, that show with Monty Hall. He sometimes offers people one if they sell their soul or something.”

“Huh?” Travis shook his head. “That can’t be right.”

Have I ever mentioned that Travis is the tiniest bit gullible? I giggled to clue him in that I was kidding.

He grinned at me, kidding me back, and I giggled some more. If I were a puppy dog, I would have been wagging my tail.

“Let’s find out how much they want for the house,” he said. I got ready for him to tell me to tell him, but instead, he turned to the mirror.

“Mirror, mirror, oh, so flat,” he intoned. “Let’s have a little chat.”

The rhyme was as flat as the mirror, but it did work. Neary’s face appeared, floating ghost-like in front of the reflection of the room. “You’re right, o master of the mirror,” he said in syrupy tones.

Travis frowned. “I’m right about what?”

Neary looked smug. “Every time you get information via genie magic, Jonni forgets an equal amount of things she used to know.”

I eyed the book we had conjured up. Did I mention that it was about six hundred pages? Had my memory turned to Swiss cheese? I glared at the mirror like it was his fault. Well, I couldn’t blame Travis, could I?

“What kind of things have I forgotten?” I demanded. Well, for one, I had forgotten that the mirror did not answer my questions without approval from our mutual master.

Neary raised an eyebrow at Travis who shook his head. “This is still part of the answer to the first question I asked. Demonstrate what she’s forgotten by asking her a question.”

“I’ll give you this,” agreed Neary. “Jonni, what’s the capital of Wyoming?”

“That’s uh,” we’d learned that stuff in elementary school, and it was just as useful now as then. “Uh, Denver?” I guessed. Was Denver in Wyoming? “No, huh?”

“No,” agreed Neary. “She’s forgotten most of the geography she knew, along with some other things. What’s the letter that comes after you?”

It sounded like a riddle. “I dunno,” I said. Ouch! That might be more important than knowing the state capitals. I felt a chill. “Dub-ya?” I looked at both of them. “No, huh?”

“It’s vee then dub-ya, Jonny,” said Travis. “Have you forgotten anything else?”

“How would I know?” I said. I felt my lower lip tremble. I hadn’t had any trouble reading the book, though, so I still knew which letters spelled what. I just didn’t know what order some of them went in.

“I’m sorry, Jonny,” said Travis and I nodded, trying not to cry because I didn’t want him to feel any worse about it.

“She’s forgotten some unimportant history dates, and the names of people she’s unlikely to ever see again, things like that, mostly,” said Neary. “On the plus side, she knows the stuff in the book now without using any more magic. She’ll remember it if you ask.”

Travis nodded, looking thoughtful.

“On the negative side, re-learning things she’s forgotten will be twice as hard as they were the first time,” he added. Great.

I didn’t like Neary talking about me as if I weren’t right there. Though oddly, being called ‘she’ had stopped bothering me otherwise. I glared at him, just on the principle of the thing.

“Oof,” said Travis. “So this doesn’t affect you,” Travis said to Neary; careful to make that a statement, not a question I noticed.

“No master, I’m not a genie nor created with genie magic. My knowledge comes from wizardry, and our bargain with the spirits is completely different.”

“You pay something though?” I suggested. It didn’t matter if I asked, mine didn’t count against the five Travis got each summoning. And the mirror could answer or not, if he liked.

But Neary answered with a question of his own, “You observe I no longer have a physical body?”

Travis and I both winced. Put it that way, not knowing my way around a map or the end of a dictionary wasn’t so bad.

Travis shook off the distraction Neary had hit us with. “What we summoned you for was we want to buy this house. We don’t know who owns it or how much they want for it or even, really, how to buy a house.”

“Hmm,” said Neary. He did look like Vincent Price hatching some evil plot in a Hammer Film. “Have you a question? I’ve about reached my limit on free information I can hand out this time.”

Taking a deep breath, Travis framed his question. I felt a little sorry for him, knowing that he was intellectually lazy. His brain was getting quite a workout.

“We have money, what’s the best way to go about buying this house, in detail, please?” he asked.

“Short answer,” said the mirror, “hire a lawyer.” Neary explained that we might have trouble dealing with someone directly because of being so young. “Travis is 18 which is old enough to sign contracts in this state, but likely to make someone want to talk to an adult. Plus, there’s the question of where did you get the money. Going through a lawyer can avoid those problems.”

He continued. “Use the phone book. In the yellow pages, there is a list of lawyers. Call the fourteenth name on the list and arrange to meet him and give him a retainer. He can work out the purchase for you. And, besides that, now you will have a lawyer.”

I had another question. “Why was the money we got short of the thirty thousand we asked for? And what’s up with that $1000 bill?”

“The $1000 bill is a collector’s item, the difference in face value and real value will make up the rest of the money you asked for,” said Neary, a little smugly, I thought. “Also, showing it is likely to get someone’s attention.”

Travis nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Jonny, can you magic us up a phone connection here and a phone book, too, without damage?”

He meant damage to me. I thought about it. One of the things I knew as a result of magicking up the idiot book was that I could alter the past, only if no one who didn’t know about magic would notice. “I can do that,” I said, confidently, okay, a bit smugly. I stuck out my tongue at Neary, and he raised one eyebrow.

“Jonny, I wish we had a working telephone connection here and a phone book to go with it,” said Travis.

I did the magic thing, knowing as I did it that the spirits were arranging that the phone had never been turned off and the billing had never gone out.

Travis looked around. “Where’s the phone?” he asked.

I answered before Neary could so it wouldn’t count. “Upstairs,” I said pointing. “And here’s the phone book,” I added, handing him the Yellow Pages.

He flipped quickly to the right page (while I wondered if I could still do that; L for Lawyer came just after P, right?). “Solomon Berger,” he read the name.

I giggled, a little startled. According to the Book, Solomon (or Suleyman) was the name of the magician who imprisoned all the Djinn, 3000 years ago. Not King Solomon, he was a different guy.

Travis put a finger in the Yellow Pages to mark his place. “Let’s go find that phone. We gotta call Sol.”