That's seven years of bad luck, right?

 
The mirror had a voice like Vincent Price, liquid and vaguely Southern or English, maybe. The face that appeared in the gilt-edged ornate wood frame looked a bit like the old time movie actor, too, but fleshier.

Travis peered over my shoulder at the face that was not my reflection. “Never mind that, who are you?”

The mirror sighed. “I am, or was, Thomas Neary, master. A wizard who lived about a hundred years before this time. Now I am the spirit of this mirror. An oracle of information, if it please you.”

“Information? What kind of information?” Travis asked, reaching past me to take the mirror out of my hands.

I stared at the floor, resisting leaning into him while he was essentially wrapped around me. That damn wish, or maybe just the nature of being a genie?

“Many sorts of information, master. I can answer most questions of the who, what, when, where and how many sorts. How and why are harder, but I can provide relevant facts for making decisions.”

“Hmm,” said Travis. He glanced at me, and I smiled from reflex. “Ask him how to change me back,” I suggested.

“He just said he wasn’t so good at how,” Travis pointed out. “But it is a… the question we’re trying to deal with. I did wish Jonny to be able to change back but when-uh-well, she’s still a girl. Even though she looks like Jonny.”

“It is a conundrum,” said the mirror. “The problem seems to be that you set her essential nature with the wish that brought her out of the lamp. You wished her to be sexy and beautiful, and to you, those two things mean female. Also, you used the word forever. So now, she cannot assume a male shape, it would violate her essence, though she could counterfeit the appearance of one.”

“Hmm,” said Travis. “Sorry about that, Jonny. I didn’t know you were in the bottle.”

“Oh, great,” I complained. “You also wished me to be in love with you.”

“Oops? What about that, uh, Mirror? Mr. Neary?”

“Yes, well,” said the mirror. “As powerful as genie magic is, it cannot bring about love in a being with free will. Only a few magicks can, and none of them are permanent. But then, do genies have free will? It’s another conundrum.”

Travis stared at me. “Jonny, are you in love with me?”

I know I blushed, but I nodded, too. “I can’t help it, Travis. It was the wish!” I shivered in reaction to the admission but also a bit of relief, knowing that it wasn’t my fault.

Travis looked appalled for a moment. “You’re only fifteen,” he protested. “I’ve got a strict rule, no girlfriends more than a year younger than me unless they’re at least eighteen.”

“Huh?” I said. “That’s not fair!”

“Fair or not,” he said, “That’s the rule. You can’t be my girlfriend until you’re eighteen.”

“Who said I wanted to be your girlfriend?” I asked. “Poo!”

Travis laughed which infuriated me for some reason. Being a genie was complicated.

“Okay,” said Travis. “We’ve got our own Mr. Answer Man.” He grinned at me, and I forgave him for whatever it was I had been mad about. Now I knew how Barbara Eden had felt.

“You know, all this stuff belonged to Mr. Welker. Who does it belong to now?”

“Huh?” said Travis. He looked at me then at the mirror, but Mr. Neary had faded from view. Travis shook the mirror which seemed unlikely to do anything useful and didn’t.

He was holding it high, and I had to stretch a bit to get a good look at the surface. “What happened?” I asked.

“I think your question broke the mirror,” he said. “He isn’t answering.”

I glared at him. “You were holding it, why is it that I broke it?”

Travis waved a hand vaguely. “Karma?” he guessed. “No, kismet, that’s the Persian word, isn’t it? You were fated to break the mirror.”

I had no idea where he had learned any Persian. “Poo,” I said again. “You’re just being a meanie blaming me!”

Travis laughed at me again. “Poo?” he said. “Since when do you say ‘poo’ instead of ‘shit’? And calling me a ‘meanie’ instead of a ‘prick’?”

That made me squirm. “You are a shit and a prick!” I said defiantly.

He laughed some more. “What am I going to do with you, Jonny? As a girl, you’re so cute I can hardly believe it.”

“You-you think I’m cute, m-master?” Whipsaw my emotions why don’t you? And now I was calling him master again.

He nodded. “Too cute. The mirror said I can’t change you back to a boy, so what can I do with you?” He waved at the girlish version of my own clothes that I was wearing. “Can we even disguise you as a boy? That isn’t working!”

I sighed. I couldn’t imagine going up to my folks and telling them I had been changed into a girl by a misplaced wish, so some sort of disguise seemed necessary. “Uh. Master? Do we want anyone else to know about me being a genie?”

“Heck no,” said Travis. “That would probably end up getting you confiscated by the government or something. You’re my genie and my friend.”

I beamed at him. I wanted to wiggle like a puppy, and the thought made me blush, probably all over.

He shook his head, smiling. “You sure do act different, Jonny.”

I didn’t quite know how to take that. Did he like the way I was acting? I wanted him to like it, but he had turned away and wasn’t even looking at me.

Travis glanced around the room. We were still in the basement of the old Welker house, with piles of upset boxes and assorted junk around us. The lamp and the mirror sat on a small table. “I asked the mirror who all this stuff belonged to and didn’t get an answer.”

“I guess it belongs to Mr. Welker’s estate?” I said.

He nodded. “Yeah, and the city is going to make them sell it, fix it or tear it down.”

“Huh, yeah. I mean, I don’t want….” I stopped.

“We already found two magic items here, uh? I don’t want to let anyone else have them, but I feel bad about stealing them,” Travis said. “And what if there is more magic stuff here? Another lamp or mirror or… whatever?”

“Yeah, huh?” I said. When did Travis get smart enough to think of stuff like that? “We should, uh, you should buy the place.”

“Where would I get that kind of money?” he asked.

I crossed my arms on my chest and blinked and nodded.

He laughed. “Wish for it, yeah. I’m a little wary of making more wishes. But we’re going to have to, I guess. You can’t go home looking like you do now.”

I looked down at myself and what I was wearing. “Yeah, no,” I said. I sighed then remembered that I had originally been trying to see myself in the mirror. I propped it up against the wall and tried again.

It was an old dusty mirror, but I could see my reflection and yeah, that was my face. Sort of. I looked younger, or cuter, or something. It looked like a girl version of my face, like my sister but older.

I looked down again at my clothes which were also girl versions of my own stuff and my body which was the body of a girl who wasn’t very developed but still didn’t look much like the old me. I used to be kind of scrawny, but now my bones didn’t show at all.

Travis was watching me, so I looked up at him and sighed. “I guess you’d better make a wish, master.”

He frowned. “Maybe not. Can’t genies do magic besides granting wishes?”

I shrugged. “I dunno?”

“Jeannie in the TV show does.”

“Yeah, and Gilligan’s Island is a documentary about life in the South Pacific,” I said. Then I squirmed. That had sounded a bit disrespectful. I started to apologize, but Travis hadn’t noticed. The need to apologize faded slowly and only because I could see that he was thinking hard about something and it would be even more disrespectful to interrupt him.

Hoo boy!

It really started to sink in on me that I belonged to him. And more, that I liked the arrangement.

Shivers. In fact, the jackpot of all shivers. The idea turned me on more than anything ever had.

I needed to think about that.