I shivered again with pleasant terror.

 
“You don’t look like a girl at the moment,” Travis said. And he was looking at me but not like he used to.

I struck a pose, just to try to get his goat. “You could make me look like anything you want,” I pointed out.

“Hm,” he said like a man who is thinking about being horny.

I squeezed my eyes tight shut and shivered, letting him see my reactions. If I was feeling about Travis the way I had before I became a genie, I hadn’t known a thing about my own feelings. Scary.

“You don’t seem as upset about this as you were a bit ago,” he noted with a smile in his voice.

“Yeah, well, lot of good it would do me, huh?” I said, opening my eyes. “I’m stuck and I’ve got magical powers and I’m a girl and I belong to my best friend.” I shivered again with pleasant terror.

We stood there staring at each other in the middle of the basement of the abandoned old house. The mirror sat on the table near us, watching us with its creepy old face. Broken boxes and scattered trash lay all around us. Dust and cobwebs, too.

Something might have happened, but just then, Travis sneezed.

I don’t know how I did it but I suddenly had a handkerchief in my hand, so I offered it to him. My body language, I knew, signaled my submission. I couldn’t help it, I wanted him to want me, and right at the moment, I looked like a boy! A terrible disadvantage for sure.

He took the kerchief and blew his nose. “Thangs,” he said. “I guess I’m the one who is more freaked out about this, right at the moment.”

I shrugged, he wasn’t buying what I had on offer. “You can afford to be freaked out. If all this bothered me as much as it ought to, I’d probably go crazy.” I faked insanity, tongue lolling, eyes rolled back in my head.

The mirror made a throat clearing noise. We both looked at it, surprised. We’d forgotten we had a witness. From the expression on its bodiless face, it seemed to want to say something else but just looked at Travis expectantly.

“What?” he said, after a pause like a comedian waiting for a laugh—which did make me giggle. Hearing myself, I thought, sheesh, I am such a girl. And yes, it still bothered me, but it thrilled me at the same time.

The mirror looked pleased that we were paying attention to it. “That’s your third question in three minutes. I wanted to tell you that you get up to five questions or the twelfth part of an hour per invocation of my powers, but you hadn’t asked.”

“Oh,” said Travis. “Uh, thank you—what did you say your name was?”

“Neary. But I answer to Mirror, too.” He looked a bit exasperated, too, now.

“And I suppose that was my fourth question?”

“Yes, it was,” said Neary. He rolled his eyes and disappeared, the mirror again becoming a mirror.

Travis and I both burst out laughing. We stopped when Travis had another sneezing fit. He gestured with the hand not holding the scarf to his face. “Can you do something about this dust?”

“Yes,” I said. “I could do lots of things with it, but…” I trailed off.

“But I have to tell you to?” he guessed.

“Apparently,” I tried to look helpless, so he would give me another order. I was being truthful, as ordered when answering questions—just not the whole truth. I wasn’t quite sure myself why I was holding back, but Travis had all the trumps in this relationship so playing my cards tight and close made some sense. And yet, I wanted him to order me around. Maybe I was crazy.

He blew his nose and folded the hankie over. “Jonny,” he said firmly. “Get rid of all the dust in this room. And find me a box of tissue.”

I beamed at him, pleased that I had gotten him to tell me what to do and he hadn’t twigged to the manipulation. I did my act, nodding and blinking. For a brief moment, the dust on every surface lifted a fraction of an inch and then just disappeared. At the same time, I had a box of tissue sitting in my outstretched hand.

Travis traded the soiled nose rag for the tissues, pulled a couple out and blew his nose again. “This could be real handy,” he said.

“Ew,” I said, looking at the dirty hankie. That had not been part of my plan.

“You can get rid of that, too,” he said with a wave.

I decided that he meant that I should get rid of it so I piffed it to wherever the dust had gone. I had a brief image in my mind of a closet somewhere, now full of dust with a dirty handkerchief on top.

The basement room looked considerably different without the dust, and I had apparently piffed the cobwebs, too. Which made me wonder briefly about spiders, was my imaginary closet now filled with creepy crawlies? Or were the spiders still her but now homeless and…annoyed?

I peered around to see if I could spot any arachnid ambushers. I didn’t spot any, but now light came in through windows high up near the ceiling that we hadn’t seen before due to the nastiness of decades of neglect and lousy housekeeping, so if any eight-legged evictees were lurking, they had good camouflage.

Travis interrupted that thought with a bit of his own speculation. “A magic lamp, a magic mirror, do you suppose there’s anything else magic in this room? Or somewhere else in the house?”

“I dunno,” I said. He had asked me what I supposed. “That seems like the sort of thing you should ask the mirror.” I was still thinking about spiders and did not want to be poking my magic into the piles of boxes down here and the presumably still nasty rooms upstairs. Could spiders bite me through my magical presence? Why try to find out?

“Maybe,” said Travis, causing me to flinch but I realized he wasn’t on the same creepy page with me. “Do you think you find out that sort of thing, whether there is more magic around?”

Well, he hadn’t ordered me to find out, so I just thought about it. What were the limits of my sort of magic? Could I answer questions as well as the mirror? Could I conjure up anything at all as easily as I produced a box of tissues? Could I pifft things into non-existence without limit? Could I…Holy Shit!

I shivered from an entirely different reason than before. “Travis, Travis, we have to be careful. I’m like an atomic bomb! I don’t even know how powerful I am! If you give me the wrong order, I might go off like Krakatoa!”

Travis sniffed, maybe from the dust. “Why do you think I haven’t been making wishes right and left? I’m not an idiot.”

I cut my eyes at him and murmured, “Coulda fooled me,” but it was just our old style teenage insult humor. I didn’t mean it, and he knew I didn’t so we both grinned. He had a cute grin, I thought inanely. Damnit!

He did laugh out loud, apparently at my expression but then he shook his head. “What we need is some instructions on how this magic works and what we can and cannot do with it.”

I stared at him. “Uh? Are you wishing you had such a book?” I asked. I didn’t want to try to conjure such a thing on my own initiative or let Travis know I could do such a thing without a wish from him. At least, I thought I probably could and that I most likely didn’t want to…to…? My train of thought chased itself like a Lionel train on Christmas morning.

I must have looked as endearingly blank for a moment as he did, then he shook his head again. “Maybe I am an idiot,” he muttered. He held up a hand to keep me from saying anything while he thought about it then he said, “Jonny, I wish we had a book that explained genie magic to us in plain English, including limits and cautions that apply.”

Well, that did it. It was his responsibility if this wasn’t a good idea now. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but I folded my arms, nodded and blinked. It was a wish, and I had to carry it out. As usual, it felt delicious to be granting my master a wish, even one I wasn’t sure was a good idea.

A book appeared on the table beside the mirror. It wasn’t an ancient-looking tome covered in leather with burnt-in mystic symbols. It was a trade paperback with a black and yellow cover. The title read, “Genie Magic for Idiots.”

I laughed so hard I thought I would get the hiccoughs.