Even when you KNOW what's going to happen, you can't look away...

Travis held the heavy window up while I slithered through into the ancient kitchen. After sneezing twice—the dust was vicious—I scooted over to a doorway, took down the keys on the hook there, and unlocked the double cylinder lock on the kitchen door.

Travis came in, grinning. “Way to go, Jonny,” he said. “I knew it would work.”

“I told you I had spotted the keys hanging there when you boosted me up to look through the dining room window,” I said.

Travis kept grinning, and his big Irish face lit up under his red hair, blue eyes twinkling. “I knew it would work because our plans always work.”

We both laughed at that because it certainly wasn’t true. In fact, our plans would be legendary for their frequent screwups if high school boys getting in trouble were the stuff of legends. Not going to happen, not in 1974.

But this one would turn out to be almost worthy of grand tragedy—or high farce, depending on how you looked at it. And it did have something to do with legends.

We had just committed breaking-and-entering at the abandoned house next to my family’s home in West L.A. The place, known as Welker’s place, had been empty for years and had turned into the neighborhood eyesore, the paint peeling, many of the windows boarded up, the yard overgrown and the fences sagging.

We didn’t intend to steal anything, but we had learned that the owners, the heirs of Josiah Welker who had died there five years ago, had settled their lawsuits and that the city had ordered the place to be fixed up, demolished, or sold.

Whatever happened eventually, it would be Halloween in two weeks, and Travis and I had decided to scout the place for maybe using as a haunted house location. It wouldn’t take much added spookiness on the outside to turn it into a good place for scaring the heck out of a few girls. But we wanted to see the inside—I guess just because we never had and might not ever get a better chance.

Despite us living next to each other for ten years, he and I made unlikely friends. Two years older than me, and eight inches taller with scads of muscles, Travis was a senior at our Westside high school, and offensive captain of the football team. (Go Buffaloes!) He had a date any time he wanted one with the best looking girls in school, including the head cheerleader, Beth Nowak.

On the other hand, I was no athlete—just Jonny Wilson, a scrawny sophomore of no particular distinction who had yet to have a date that wasn’t some fix-up with the younger sister of one of Travis’s many girlfriends.

In return, I did help Travis with some of his homework—the big guy got bored with reading and math, two subjects that I considered to be fun and not work at all. Travis wasn’t stupid, just intellectually lazy, I guess.

Whatever, our symbiotic relationship worked for both of us.

We hadn’t been inside a minute when I opened what I thought was a broom closet and found a hidden staircase. We had come prepared with dust masks, gloves and flashlights because the power had been off in the old house for years. I shined my light into the darkness of the stairwell and saw mostly cobwebs. “Check it out,” I said. “I bet the old guy kept his best stuff in the basement.”

Travis shined his light directly in my face. “Why would he do that?” he asked.

“Dude! I can’t see!” I yelped.

But what two teenagers exploring a haunted house could resist a spooky subterranean lair? Flashlights in hand, down we went, just as soon as I stopped seeing purple.

Travis used a broomstick to clear the cobwebs out of our way, and I followed him down the steep, narrow stairs. The underground chamber proved to be maybe twelve-by-sixteen feet, about the size of the kitchen above, and filled with boxes, suitcases, wooden chests, and other containers.

“Jackpot?” I suggested.

“Just a lot of old junk,” scoffed Travis.

Well, frankly I thought that, too, but I wasn’t giving up so easy. I started opening cabinets and looking in boxes. Travis was more interested in using the broom to sweep up spider webs. “I hate spiders,” he muttered. The dust he stirred up doing that would have had us coughing if not for the painter’s masks we wore.

I found one wooden box that had an odd collection of items, antique-looking bottles, a strange old mirror and a thing that looked like a powder horn made of brass mounted on a stand. I picked it up because I had never seen anything like it before. “What the heck is this?” I asked.

Travis put his flashlight on it. “I dunno. Looks a little like one of those old lamps they had in cartoons. You know, like in Aladdin?”

“No, it doesn’t. Those didn’t have a powder horn-shaped body, and they were flat like a bowl.”

Travis shrugged. “Well, other than that,” he admitted.

I snorted, looking at the thing more closely. It really could be a lamp, I decided. I ought to be more sure of that since my Dad was a professor of medieval history at UCLA and he specialized in the Middle East, but what kid pays that much attention to what their father does? A lot of musty old books in the den at home and more, I imagined, in his office on campus.

But a fancy old lamp? “It would be cool if there was a genie in it,” I suggested. I reached out to open the lid which seemed to be stuck.

Travis had wound a big ball of web on the bristle end of the broom, and now he tried to use his toe to push it off. Of course, it stuck to his shoe. “Ick,” he said, scraping the spider stuff off on the concrete floor. “Well, if it does have a genie inside, I want one like on that old TV show, not Robin Williams with a beard.”

I snorted. I remembered that show too—they ran it all the time on one of the local channels. Gorgeous blonde in a skimpy outfit, who wouldn’t want a genie like that?

Suddenly the top did come off, and a dark cloud came out of the hole. I dropped the lid which had a hinge and chain, so it fell back into place.

“Hey!” I said. “Who turned out the lights?” It had gotten completely, totally dark and I no longer had my flashlight in my hand.
 

---

 
In case anyone wonders where I may have gotten some of the ideas in this story, consider:

I Dream of a Jeannie Bottle

And of course, the original:

I Dream of Jeannie - Original Intro on You Tube

I made it a lamp because I found such an excellent picture of one. :)

Hugs,
Erin

P.S. - Oh. This intro and maybe the first few chapters are really G-Rated but since I know where I'm going with this, I rated it Mature for what I intend rather than what I'm doing right now. -- Erin

Wishing is supposed to be the easy part...

 

“Jonny?” I heard Travis call out.

“Here!” I yelled back, even though I had no idea where here was. Wherever it was, it was cold and seemed to be getting colder. I dropped to my knees and felt around. The floor seemed to be made of metal, cold and hard, and there were no walls in reach.

“Jonny, if you’re hiding in the dark to jump out and scare me, I swear I’ll hit you with this broom full of spider boogers,” Travis warned. I couldn’t see him, but I imagined him swinging the nasty broomstick in front of him.

I tried to answer him. “No, I—”

But he was talking over me. “Where are you, Jonny?”

“I think—”

He did it again. “Damnit, Jonny. It’s not going to be funny when I clean out your ears with this broomstick!” He was definitely annoyed, and I could feel his dread of someone—me—jumping out of the dark. Travis might be a big guy, but he had his fears—like spiders.

And he couldn’t hear me, I realized. I was a lot more alone than I had thought. I almost broke down crying, and I might have done so if the cold of the metal floor hadn’t got to me. Shivering, I wrapped my arms around me. No wonder I was cold, I thought, I’m naked! How did that happen?

I tried slapping myself to warm up but apparently that only works in books and movies. Slapping yourself really stings when your skin is cold, and it’s definitely no substitute for getting warm.

Crawling around on my knees, I kept looking for a corner or something in the featureless darkness, and eventually, I blundered into a wall, of sorts — at least a place where the floor bent up to become a vertical side. It struck me that I was inside the lamp, it would explain the metal floor. If so, I must be about one-inch tall, I realized.

I choked on a sob. How did this happen? How long would I be in here? In stories, genies in lamps complained about being imprisoned for hundreds of years. I didn’t think I would last that long. It was too cold, and I was already losing my grip on my sanity. And I wasn’t a genie. Was I?

Genies were immortal or at least lived for very long times. Assuming they were real, which given my predicament seemed less like an assumption. But I was an ordinary mortal. If I didn’t get out of here in a short while someone would likely find my corpse eventually, like a cricket in the bottom of an empty Pepsi can.

I could still hear Travis blundering around in the spooky old basement with his flashlight and his warm jacket and gloves. “Jon-n-ny-y!” he called. Then I heard him say, “Here’s that lamp he was talking about. Huh?”

I had been trying to look inside the lamp when everything went dark. I was inside the lamp—could Travis get me out? I tried calling to him again, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Of course, if I was inside the lamp, I must be about the size of a cricket, no wonder he couldn’t hear me. Pinocchio didn’t listen to his cricket and Travis wasn’t listening to me.

I thought about trying to make more noise, maybe banging on the wall or, or rubbing my legs together. Rubbing my legs together? Did I mention that I thought I was losing my mind?

Travis, it must be Travis, made humming noises, and I felt whatever it was I was standing on move. I dropped to a sitting position on my heels and cried out again, useless as all the other times. “Travis! Travis! Help me! Get me out of here!” I called, but he still couldn’t hear me. “Oh, please, please,” I begged. “I’ll do anything if you just get me out!”

I heard the sound of friction, and the wall beside me vibrated. Was Travis rubbing the lamp? “Wouldn’t it be something if it really was a magic lamp?” he mused.

“It is!” I chirped. “It’s a magic lamp, and it’s got me! I think I might be inside. Get me out of here, Travis!”

More humming. Travis couldn’t carry a tune in a dump truck, so all his humming sounded the same. Then I recognized the rhythm—the theme song for that TV show about the genie and the astronaut.

He laughed suddenly. “In the show, it’s a bottle,” he said. “But genies come in lamps, too. And if any lamp should be a magic lamp with a genie inside, this one is old enough and funky enough. Hah! Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Travis? Travis? I’m inside. I’m inside. If I’m a genie now, I’ll grant you wishes. Anything you want, I’ll do it. Just get me out.”

“Jonny!” Travis called out again. “You better come out of wherever you’re hiding! I’m about to rub the lamp and make a wish—you wouldn’t want to miss that!”

“Yes!” I shouted. “Rub the lamp and wish me out of here!”

But Travis had gone back to mumbling to himself. “If this were a magic lamp, I could rub it and make a wish. I know what I would wish for,” he said.

I felt the space around me vibrate. “Travis? Do it! Do it! Make the wish!” I tried calling out one more time. “Anything! Anything! If I can do it, I’ll do it!”

Travis took a deep breath and in a dramatic voice straight out of some old movie announced his wish. “I wish I had a beautiful sexy genie to grant me more wishes and fall in love with me forever,” said Travis.

Wait. What?

Suddenly there was light where I was, and I saw an odd-shaped volume with a brass wall next to me and a ceiling about ten feet above my head. Before I could react to that, a wind of incredible force came up from the wide end of the room. I could feel my body turning to vapor and being blown toward the more narrow end.

“Travis!” I screamed, scared out of my wits and hoping that this was rescue. And I knew right then that I loved Travis. Forever.

Television is not real life...

 

 
After a brief sucking sensation, as if someone had run a vacuum cleaner all over me, there I was, standing in front of Travis who had the lamp in one hand. Both of the flashlights sat on the floor on either side of him, making a bubble of light around him.

“Whoa!” he yelped, running backward and crashing into a pile of boxes that came down on his head, knocking him sprawling on the concrete floor. The lamp fell from his hand, too, and clattered and rang metallically.

I screamed. I’m not sure why I did that, but a lot had happened in a few moments, and I thought Travis might have hurt himself which scared me badly.

Wisps of smoke lingered in the air between us. “Where did you come from?” he asked, staring at me, and not even trying to get up or untangle himself from the debris of the busted boxes.

I blinked. Something wasn’t right. “I think I was in the lamp?” I said, making it a question and pointing at the object. My voice didn’t sound the way I remembered and sort of ended on a squeak. My hand didn’t look right either.

“I’ll be damned,” said Travis. “It really is a magic lamp.” He rubbed the back of his head. “Or I bumped my noggin a lot harder than I thought.”

He tossed a few odds and ends off himself, still looking at me and grinning. “Jonny!” he shouted. “If this is some kind of trick, it’s a good ’un!”

His shout startled me. I was right there in front of him—he didn’t need to shout. “It’s no trick,” I said. “It’s me!” I smiled at him, feeling more than a little loony. Travis looked so good, I heard myself giggle which didn’t seem nearly as odd as I would have thought. Why shouldn’t I giggle? I was happy to be with Travis, and he hadn’t hurt himself. And…?

He laughed, standing up and retrieving the lamp, all in one movement. All six-foot-three of him towered over me, more than usual, I thought. I swear he might have grown another inch since his eighteenth birthday in September.

I looked up at him, my smile getting wider and wider, and he looked at me. But it seemed he wasn’t looking at my face. I glanced down to see what had attracted his eyes.

I’d never seen cleavage from that angle before, and at first, I thought I was looking at someone’s butt. At the same time, a mass of blond hair fell around my face, and I raised a hand to push it back—a small delicate hand with pink-painted nails, wearing several gaudy rings. Breasts? Hair? Nails? Rings?

I grabbed a double handful of cleavage and spangled gold bra then screamed a strangled scream right in Travis’s face. He ran backwards again, knocking down more boxes but he didn’t fall this time.

“Stop that!” he shouted at me, and I cut off the yelling like he had thrown a switch.

Gasping, I stared at him. I wanted to ask if he was all right but I was busy using my hands to touch my hair, an impossibly slim waist, and what felt like a huge soft pillow where my ass should be.

“What the hell?” Travis asked. “Why did you scream? I’m not going to hurt you. How did Jonny get you to go along with this gag? Are you a h-h-model he hired or something? I wouldn’t have thought he had the money.”

I hadn’t been answering his questions, but now he paused and looked at me as if he wanted me to say something. I made fish faces at him, but nothing came out.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he ordered.

So I told him. “Travis, it’s me! I was in the lamp, and you wished for a genie, and here I am!” I gestured at myself. “I’m y-y-your genie!” Why had I said that!?

“I wish…” he began.

I panicked. “No, no, no! No, Travis! Don’t make any more wishes until we figure this out!”

He grinned at me, but his eyes looked puzzled. “You’re my genie?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes, yes, m-m-master!?” Had I said that? “Augh! Travis, please don’t make any wishes until we can talk! P-please, m-m-master!”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what Jonny is paying you for this gig but it ain’t enough. You’re a heck of an actress, sugar, but I ain’t buying.” He turned away, peering into the darkness. “Jonny!” he called. “You can come out now!”

“I’m right here!” I shouted. “T-tr-t-master, I’m—I’m your J-jo-j-genie!” Crap!

“You said that,” he commented. “I’m looking for Jonny. He’s got to be here somewhere. It’s not that big of a room.” He still had the lamp in one hand, and he looked at it as he said, “I wish we had more light down here.”

Light from somewhere sprang into existence, illuminating the room and its squalor, wiping out all shadows. “Damnit!” I wailed. “Please, master, don’t make any more wishes! You’ve got to use one to change me back!”

“Change you back?” He squinted at me. “You’re glowing! You’re making the light in here! How are you doing that?”

I shrugged, which was an amazing distraction with about six pounds of boobs on my chest. “I don’t know!” I pointed at the antique in his hand. “It’s a magic lamp, you said so yourself. It sucked me in, and I was inside it, and you made a wish, and now, I’m your genie!” I sobbed. “Master. Please, master, change me back!”

Travis stood there, blinking, staring at me. “Can you turn the light down a bit? It’s hard to see you in the glare.”

I don’t know if I did anything but the light in the room dimmed by about half. “T-t-m-m…” I stammered. I couldn’t say Travis anymore. “M-master, you have only to ask.” I don’t know why I said that either!

He looked a bit owlish, examining first me, then the lamp, then coming back to me. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re Jonny?”

I nodded. “Yes, master. Exactly! Can you make a wish to change me back?”

He nodded, absently, deep in thought. “Mrs. Franks?” he asked.

“Uh, snake in her desk. It was a garden snake we caught.”

“Mr. Byrd?”

“Uh, dog poo in his lunch sack. Your dog, not mine.”

“Glinda Shook?”

“Green finger paint on her telephone. She got it in her hair, but it washed right out.”

Travis looked at me with awe and wonder. “I never told anyone about those pranks! Did Jonny tell?” We got away with all that stuff because we never bragged about them!

“I wouldn’t!” I said. “You know I wouldn’t, m-master.” Damnit! I squirmed a bit, realized what that probably looked like, and tried to stand still. And yet, I knew that whenever I looked at Travis, I smiled.

He glanced again at the lamp, then at me, then the lamp again. “It is you, Jonny,” he said, “isn’t it?”

Relief! “Yes, it’s me! It’s me. Oh, please use a wish to change me back!” I hesitated, realizing I was about to start pogoing. Wouldn’t that be a sight with my new chest puppies? And wouldn’t Travis enjoy watching?

I had to say something before I started jumping up and down and giving myself a concussion. “Master! O, kind and benevolent and best of masters!” I meant it but, jeez, did I have to say it?

I was begging him to save me, yes, but I sounded like some character in a fantasy. A male fantasy! I wanted to squirm and wriggle in embarrassment and because I knew Travis would enjoy watching me do that. Instead, I shook myself, shrugged and blinked repeatedly, squeezing my eyes tightly shut each time.

He grinned widely, enjoying my antics. “Okay, okay, this is not a wish, but I want you to tell me how many wishes do I get, and how many do I have left? And are there any gotchas?”

“As many wishes as you want, master,” I said. “As long as I am your genie and you have the lamp.” Oop! No! No! Don’t tell him that! I stood there trembling, wondering what I could say now. I tried to make up some terrible gotcha to tell him, but I knew, I just knew, I couldn’t lie to my master! Damnit! The only thing I could think of was obvious. “Wishes have consequences that sometimes you can’t predict?”

He stood there thinking. Why did he have to pick now to spend energy thinking?

I started to speak but he shushed me, and I couldn’t say a word. Remember I said Travis was not dumb, just lazy? Well, he was putting lots of effort into thinking up a good wish. I wished he wouldn’t, but I didn’t get any wishes.

He looked up and asked me another question. “Can a wish have a ‘but’ or an ‘if’ or an ‘and’ in it?”

Somehow I knew the answer immediately. I nodded but tried to look as if there were more to say. I didn’t actually know if there was. But he didn’t ask, just went back to thinking.

I fidgeted. I wanted to talk, but I knew Travis wanted me to be quiet while he was thinking so…. I couldn’t say a word! It should have been frustrating, but it really wasn’t. In fact, I felt an odd sense of satisfaction, as if I were helping him… helping him think, I guess.

I tried to think of something to say, but nothing at all occurred to me. Nothing. If I tried harder, my mind went blank. I’d never experienced anything like it.

I wanted him to make a wish to change me back. I needed him to do that!

Didn’t I?

Who knew being a genie was so much fun?

 

 
While Travis pondered my fate, my mind seized on the way he had looked at me only moments before. He certainly seemed to like what he saw. I would have wished I could see myself, but genies don’t get wishes.

I knew I had lots of blond hair, a small waist, a large bust and ass, and I could look down and see what seemed to be long legs ending in small, narrow feet and cute little toes with dark red nail polish.

I’m probably beautiful and sexy cause that’s what Travis asked for, I decided. A giggle escaped from somewhere, and a shiver that started behind my eyes traveled all the way down my back, ending… ending where my dick used to be.

Oh, shit. That felt good. Could I do that again?

I tried to backtrack on what thoughts I’d been having and remembered that Travis wanted me to be beautiful and sexy. Bingo. Giggle and shiver and thrill. Oh, shit.

Could I make that happen any time I wanted? I did it twice more before I managed to stop and by that time, I was panting a little.

I tried to distract myself. Looking at Travis did no good at all. I looked down at what I was wearing. A thing made of white silk and gold bangles supported my bust then a wide white leather waistband with gold embroidery and more bangles hung above my hips, holding up a pair of white silk -uh- harem pants I guess you would call them. They were slit down the front from the waistband down to cuffs around my ankles.

Okay, sexy, yes. Bingo. Giggle. Shiver. Thrill.

Stop that, I told myself. Distraction, distraction.

What else was I wearing? I took half a step to get a better look at my feet and almost fell off my flesh-colored high heel sandals. The kind with the sharp, pointy, spikes? Yikes! No, no, no bingo!

Wrists. I had gold-colored bangle bracelets on each wrist. I had a necklace of flat, shiny stones at my throat. I had big hoop earrings. They must be five-inch diameter! Oh, sexy! Bingo. Giggle. Shiver. Thrill! Oh! Oh! Oh!

“Jonny,” said Travis.

Augh! My hands had been about to go inside the slits in the front of my harem pants, and I had thrust them behind me to try to keep a bit of sanity when Travis spoke, bringing me back to earth before I could burst like a runaway balloon.

I looked at him. He smiled at me. I knew I was smiling back. What the heck did I have to smile about?

“When I made the earlier wish, I just said it out loud. Is that all I have to do?”

Like I would know? I nodded.

“I wish,” said Travis, “that you would become Jonny again whenever I command it but that you will still be my genie and able to grant my wishes.”

I wasn’t sure I liked that wish but what was I going to do about it? We stared at each other a moment. I felt an insane urge to cross my arms on my chest and nod vigorously.

“Nothing’s happening,” Travis said. “Did the wish work?”

I shrugged again — still a distracting sensation.

“Tell me if my wish worked,” Travis commanded.

I couldn’t resist any longer, I crossed my arms under my boobs, closed my eyes and nodded sharply. The universe seemed to snap! into place and I felt a surge of…I don’t know what to call it—wish energy?—flow through me.

It felt a heck of a lot like an orgasm, I decided, a bit smugly. I’d discovered orgasms, the solitary kind, a few months earlier and considered them to be pretty neat phenomena.

“It worked!” I announced. “Your wish worked, master.”

Travis looked around. “Nothing’s different,” he said.

“No,” I agreed. “Your wish hasn’t changed anything yet. But you can now change me back into myself.” I looked at him with as much pleading in my eyes as I could manage. “Please change me back, master. I’m afraid if I stay like this too long….”

Travis grinned. “You might start liking it?”

Resisting the urge to squirm in embarrassment, I just nodded. I’d never before in my life felt sexy or beautiful, and the sensations were definitely…seductive is the right word.

“Genie,” said Travis, “change yourself into Jonny.”

It started to happen immediately. I felt the magic surge through me again, but this time I felt other definite changes. My hair shrank back to my usual unruly dark brown mess. The bust I had grown disappeared, leaving me with a flat chest and my ass also shrank. I could feel the bones in my face, hands, and feet changing. But it stopped a lot sooner than I expected.

“What?” I said. I looked down, the harem costume I had been wearing no longer fit and looked ridiculous on me now. I felt my face turning red, looking at Travis for help.

Travis seemed amused. “When you change shape, change your clothing, too,” he said.

I blinked and instantly I was wearing a version of what I had had on earlier: blue jeans, a Dodger t-shirt, a navy windbreaker jacket, my Skechers, plus the painter’s mask hanging around my neck. It was the same, but it wasn’t the same. The blue jeans were new and a different cut than I had on before. The t-shirt was a lighter blue, and the fabric was different. The windbreaker had no collar and no pockets. And the shoes instead of being white canvas were tan suede.

Travis stared at me.

I looked down at myself, trying to get an impression of what was wrong with what I was wearing. Because something was wrong. For one thing, the fit was wrong; not that the clothes didn’t fit but that they fit too well. My shoes had been a size too big, and now they were snug. The t-shirt was not baggy at all, and the blue jeans fit like a second skin. I could feel them stretched tight across my butt.

Travis cleared his throat. “Jonny,” he said. I looked at him. “Jonny, check the front of your jeans,” he suggested.

I did. Smooth blue denim or something very like denim but smoother and softer. “Huh?” I said, stupidly.

“No fly,” he said.

He was right. My jeans had no fly and no belt loops. No pockets, either, front or back.

I put a hand down to my crotch, something I hadn’t done while wearing the harem outfit for fear of finding what I knew must be there. Or not finding what I thought should be there….

And now….

“I’m still a girl,” I said, in a tiny voice. I felt a sense of what I could only call dread satisfaction. Was I still a girl because Travis wanted me to be a girl?

Travis took a step back. “Uh, sorry, guy,” he said. “That’s why you’re wearing girl’s clothes?”

“I guess so,” I said, running my hands down my sides. I wasn’t shaped quite like a boy but not like a girl my age either. I had a bit more narrow waist than I remembered and my hips seemed wider. I felt of my chest. There was a softness there, two softer places around where my nipples must be, but not actual titties.

“Can you change me back to the real me?” I asked Travis.

“I dunno. I just make the wishes. You’re the one doing the magic,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, huh?” I said, noticing now that things didn’t sound right either. I’d hit puberty more than a year ago and had gone through the squeaky phase. My voice had settled on a tenor note which sounded much deeper inside my head. Now I must have my little kid voice back.

I touched my face. Very smooth, I’d started shaving in the summer though I didn’t need to more than once a week, but now there was nothing there, not a trace of even the fine stubble I had gotten used to.

“I wonder what I look like?” I said. Hadn’t there been a mirror in one of the boxes?

“You look like your sister if she were twelve instead of eight,” said Travis. “This is going to be hard to explain to your folks.”

I rolled my eyes. “Understatement,” I commented. “This is worse than when we put the golf cart in the country club Christmas tree.”

Travis grinned. “They never proved we did that,” he said.

I went hunting for the mirror I knew I had seen before. “With my parents, suspicion is nine-tenths of the law,” I said.

“They’re too Dr. Spock to spank you, what did they do?”

“It was cruel and unusual,” I said. “Can we leave it at that?”

He laughed.

I found the mirror, diagonally wedged into a box. “Come to mama,” I said pulling it out. Wait. Did I say mama? Shaking that off, I held the mirror at arm’s length and tried to see what I looked like through the dust and grime of the neglected surface.

I could feel Travis moving up behind me. Speaking in that same fake dramatic voice he’d used to make his first wish, he said, “Mirror, mirror in Jonny’s hands, who’s the strangest in all the lands?”

A face that definitely wasn’t mine appeared and a voice answered him. “There are a number of candidates, master,” said the mirror. “Shall I list them in order of proximity or do you prefer alphabetically?”

I almost dropped the damn thing.

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.

“Not until you’re eighteen,” Travis said, shaking his head.

 
I think we both stood there thinking about things for a minute or so, not talking.

Finally, Travis said, “I’m sure you know things you don’t know that you know.”

“Huh?” I said, possibly proving him wrong.

“When I asked how many wishes I get you said as many as I want as long as I have the lamp. That’s a lot, that’s a lot of power. Good grief! But how did you know that?”

“I dunno? I knew it because you told me to tell you the answer.”

He blinked. “You have to do whatever I tell you to do?”

I squirmed a bit and closed one eye and nodded. “If I can…, master.”

He grinned. “See you started calling me that and I didn’t tell you to do so. I wouldn’t have. So why did you?”

“I’m not sure…. I can’t…. I’m supposed to respect you and your wishes, even if you don’t make an actual wish? I guess?”

“But why call me master?”

“So… So you’d know that I belong to you.” I paused. “Master.”

He blinked. “Uh, don’t call me that when anyone else is around.”

I nodded and smiled at him.

“Hoo boy,” he said. “What am I going to do with you, Jonny?”

“Keep me?” I said. “Let me make you happy?” It occurred to me that this was the kind of thing Jeannie in the TV show said to her master. Maybe it was a documentary?

“Not until you’re eighteen,” Travis said, shaking his head.

“I can make you happy, now!” I protested, even though that was a very squirmy thought.

“Jonny, I—.” He looked confused. “This is so weird. You’re Jonny, and you’re not Jonny, and it’s making my head hurt.”

I went right over to him. “If you can sit down, master, I’ll rub your neck.” I could reach his neck with him standing—he wasn’t that much taller than me, but I wouldn’t be able to do an excellent job of massage without being above him. I had it all planned out and looked around for a good spot for him to sit down—maybe one of the stacks of sturdier looking boxes? I took his hand and tugged in that direction.

“Not—not right now.” He disentangled himself, putting a hand on his forehead and pushing his hair back. He looked exasperated.

I just wanted to help him! I started to say something but he motioned me to be quiet for a bit, so I did. I almost hummed but didn’t—happy to be helpful by being quiet.

After a bit, he looked up at me and said, “I’m trying to work out a wish here. I know I have to be careful with wishes. Tell me what you think of this wording. Now this isn’t a wish until I say it is, but what I intend to wish is that you have the feelings about me that you had before we came into this house and that you looked like you did then, including wearing the same clothes, and that you were as smart now as you were then.”

“I think it’s a wonderful wish, master!” I said, beaming at him. He was going to make a wish, and I could grant it for him!

He rolled his eyes. “Useless. Jonny, you’re the brains of this outfit, or you were until you fell into that lamp!”

I felt my lower lip tremble. Travis was upset with me, and I wasn’t sure why. Wasn’t he going to make a wish?

“Okay, I’m gonna do it,” he said. “Jonny, I wish that you have the feelings about me now that you had before we came into this house and that you look like you did then, including wearing the same clothes, and that you are as smart now as you were then.” He said it all in a rush.

I crossed my arms across my chest, giggled, nodded and blinked. The transformation took no time at all, and I almost came unglued when I realized what I had been doing and saying. “Travis! Oh, ick! Travis! Ick!”

He laughed. “There’s my Jonny!”

“Oh, don’t say it like that!” I protested. Because it was still true and I knew it—I belonged to Travis. Only now, I had enough sense not to be sure it was a good idea.

He waved a hand. “I’m just glad you don’t look like a sultan’s dream anymore!” He looked me over carefully. “You do look like the old Jonny now. Are you a boy again?”

“Uh, no,” I said. I didn’t have to check, I knew. “I’m still a girl, even if I look like me.” I sighed. “I’m not sure if you can change me back to a boy.”

“That’s going to be a problem,” he said.

I nodded. Understatement.

“We need lots of questions answered,” he noted, glancing at the mirror. “Is that thing really broken?”

“I don’t know?” I admitted. I tried to get a look at myself in the reflection it still provided, even if it no longer answered questions, but it really wasn’t big enough to get a full body view.

Travis appeared to be considering things, and I didn’t want to interrupt him. I thought about that for a bit, myself. If his wish made me feel about him how I had before I became a genie, why wasn’t I willing to interrupt him? I mean, I used to do that all the time. I puzzled over that quite a bit but couldn’t quite resolve what the problem might be.

I became aware that Travis was staring at me again, I looked up at him and smiled. A bit shaky, but a real smile.

“If I can order you to answer questions, can I be sure your answers will be true or are you just gonna tell me stuff your genie magic thinks I want to hear?” he asked.

Wow. That got pretty deep for Travis. Well, I had always said it wasn’t that he wasn’t smart, he was just lazy about thinking things through. “Uh,” I said. “I guess, you have to try?”

“Okay,” he agreed. “Jonny, I wish that if I ask a question, that you will answer me truthfully as best you can.”

I blinked, feeling the magic pulse through me. I didn’t feel the need to make a bigger gesture since the wish only affected my own behavior. Weird.

“Okay. Ready?”

“I’m always ready for you, master,” I said. Oop! Jeez!

He laughed. “All right, let’s try something. What’s wrong with the mirror?”

I glanced at the object and considered. “You only get a limited time or number of questions for each invocation,” I said, wondering how in the world I knew that. But I did.

“Invocation?” he said.

His voice made that a question, too, so I answered. “When you said a little poem starting, ‘Mirror, mirror,’ you invoked the magic on the mirror. Uh, just like when you say, ‘Jonny, I wish,’ to me, you invoke my magic.”

“Damn. Is that all it was?”

“Yes, master,” I said.

He looked at the mirror. “But if you can answer questions, too, what do we need the mirror for?”

I thought about that for a moment. “There might be questions I don’t know the answer to. The mirror could double check, I guess.”

Travis did some more thinking, and his brow wrinkled up so much it looked painful. I found myself wanting to help him somehow. This was not how I would have felt about him before. I’d have been more likely to make fun of him, wouldn’t I? So that wish hadn’t really worked either. I sighed.

What had the mirror said, something about my essential nature can’t be changed even with a wish? Hoo, boy.

Suddenly, Travis spoke. “Mirror, mirror, on the table, answer me if you’re able, is there any way that we can restore Jonny to being the boy he was before?”

I clapped my hands and laughed because it was really a clever little rhyme and I didn’t know Travis had it in him.

“No,” said the mirror, his face reappearing in the reflection. “Only a new master or the Great Djinn could change Jonny’s nature now.”

“Damn,” said Travis. “Do I want to know about how to give Jonny a new master or contact the Great Djinn?”

“I cannot accurately answer a question about your own desires, but from what I know of your situation, neither would offer you a satisfactory solution to what you perceive as a problem,” said the mirror in its primmest voice. “Sorry, master.”

“Double damn,” said Travis. “I’m sorry Jonny, I guess you’re stuck as a girl.”

I sighed. Somehow, I had already known that. “That means I’m stuck as a genie, too. Your genie,” I said. It seemed less bad when I said it that way.

“Mmm, yeah,” he admitted.

“So, I’m your girl…whether I’m eighteen or not,” I pointed out.

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.

Thinking about that made me grumpy for a bit.

 
The book started out with a caveat: “Nothing in this book is definitive because Genie Magic by its nature is fluid and ever-changing. Nevertheless, this is a compilation of everything that is known to be true in the field along with some educated speculation.”

Ah? Right! Even magical spirits used disclaimers written in legalese, apparently.

Then there were some guiding principles:

1) Genie Magic is not free. Something must be given up for every magic effect. If not now then someday, if not here then somewhere, if not the caster then someone else.

2) Genie Magic is finite. Every magical effect must be bounded in time, space, number, and/or other measurable dimensions. No wish can affect every and all of some unbounded group for eternity.

3) Genie Magic is a mystery. There are those who know magic exists and those who do not. It is against the rules of the Djinn to increase the number of people initiated into mystery unnecessarily.

4) Genie Magic has limits. You can’t wish someone dead or back to life, and you can’t take away their free will. You can’t alter the past either if doing so would break any of the other rules. There is a limit to how much wealth can be conjured.

That last sounded interesting and important and had a footnote that explained that the current limit at the time of going to press was not more than 1000 dinars a week. A footnote on the footnote revealed that a dinar was a small gold coin worth approximately $30 US. Yikes!? That was a heckuva lot of money in 1974.

Thirty thousand dollars a week? That was like $1.5 million a year. Okay, not a J. Paul Getty level of income, but… Holy Cow!

I was reading over Travis’s shoulder now, and I reached around him to point out the footnote. “See that?” I asked.

“Mm, hmm,” Travis grunted like it wasn’t important.

“We’re rich,” I explained. “You can wish us rich.” It made me want to bubble.

“I’m rich,” he countered. “If I make the wishes.” He pointed to another paragraph.

At first, I didn’t see what he meant. It looked like a bunch of irrelevant detail.

There were some definitions, like, who knew there were different tribes of genies? And different classes. Aboriginal genies, subdued genies, exiled genies, refused genies, retired genies….

I was a recruited genie of the Jinn tribe and technically a jirini rather than a jinni since I was endowed with a female essence. Thinking about that made me grumpy for a bit.

But the next paragraph…

“A genie may not own anything, even her clothes and her body belong to her master. Her one possession is the inside of her vessel, the space she inhabits when her master does not allow her presence in his world.”

I stopped reading because I couldn’t see through the tears. I remembered the cold, dark space inside the lamp. That was all that I owned now? “Tra-a-avis,” I sobbed.

I’m not sure how it happened, but I ended up in his lap, all curled up in a ball with him awkwardly patting me and saying, “Jonny, Jonny, it’s okay, it’s okay. Maybe the book has a way to get you out of being a genie. Huh? Would that make you feel better?”

“Huh?” I said intelligently. “M-m-maybe?” At that moment, I had just realized where I was and that Travis was patting me on the shoulder. I wanted to snuggle in and… and… I didn’t want to think about just what I wanted to do.

Already I felt a bit better, but the emotional whipsaw was beginning to feel like a carnival ride from hell. Was this happening because I was a genie or because I was a girl?

“Is there an index in this thing?” Travis asked. Meaning the book, not my shoulder.

“I dunno,” I whimpered. He had stopped petting me and was paging through the book.

It did have an index. Who knew? “Freeing a Genie, page 179, okay,” he said. Flip, flip, flip.

I squirmed a bit there on his lap, and put my arms around his neck, looking up into his eyes. But he was looking at the book, not me. My lower lip pooched out all by itself.

“Here we are,” he said. He paused to read, and I licked my lips, wondering why I was doing that.

“Travis,” I began, but he read part of the page he found out loud.

“A genie may be freed from her servitude only after she has fulfilled all of her master’s wishes unto his complete satisfaction and has served him a minimum of seventy years.”

“Seventy years!” I yelped, having forgotten whatever it was I had intended to say.

“A freed genie must journey to the City of Brass and appeal to the Great Djinn to be accepted as a citizen of the city and live out her days there, or she may accept the assignation of a new master and return to the realms of men,” he continued reading.

“That’s not fair!” I wailed.

Travis put the damned book down and wrapped his arms around me. “It’s okay, Jonny,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

I cried myself out in a few minutes and felt better but didn’t try to stand up, just enjoying being held. No one had held me like that since I had been a little boy and it was nice. But I made the mistake of snuggling into the hug and Travis pushed me off his lap onto my feet. There went my lower lip again.

“We, uh, we had better cool that,” he said. Maybe I pouted at him, I certainly felt like doing so. He added, “For now, at least.”

We read some more in the book, but really, it was only sort of helpful and kind of depressing in parts. It amazed me. Travis wanted to read the whole thing, but I was bored.

I sat on the floor while Travis read, just watching him. My feelings were confused. Travis was still my friend, but he was also now my master. I belonged to him, and I didn’t really want it any other way. And he was male, and I was female, and that was confusing, too.

I shook my head, trying to clear some cobwebs out of my thinking, wondering if there were some room I could blink imaginary webs to like I had the real ones in the room.

Travis suddenly spoke. “We need to own this house. There might be other stuff here we don’t want anyone to know about. Can I just wish that it were mine?”

I nodded. “You could, and the paperwork would all be okay, but the people who own it now would still think that they owned it. I can’t change other people’s memories, ‘cause those are protected by their free will.” Wow. I hadn’t known that. Was it in the book?

But Travis had another question. “Hmm. We could buy it then?”

“I guess so.” I glanced around. “How much would they want for it?”

“I dunno. It’s a big house in a nice neighborhood, but it’s old and needs work, no one has lived here for years. And I don’t know how much it might be worth.”

“I can conjure up the money,” I offered. “A thousand gold coins!”

“Not just yet,” Travis cautioned. “We’re only kids, even though I’m eighteen. We might have to explain where we got the money. And we couldn’t legally own that much gold. I don’t think.”

I thought about it a moment. “It doesn’t have to be in gold. I think I could conjure up currency, too.”

Travis looked at me curiously. “It wouldn’t be counterfeit?”

“Uh, no. Real bills, though you might want to include that in the wish, just to be sure the spirits don’t cut any corners.”

“That bothers me. If they’re real bills, then they have real serial numbers and must have already belonged to someone.” The book had explained that invisible, intangible spirits actually did genie magic. Silent, tasteless and odorless, too, I suppose. Not that that mattered.

Travis made a questioning noise. I blinked, unable to think of something to say.

“Jonny,” he said, “tell me where wished-for money is going to come from.”

“Oh!” I grinned. “From lost bills and money that has been destroyed,” I said, happy to know there was a solution.

“Okay,” said Travis, nodding. “That sounds kosher. I’d hate to think we were stealing stuff when we wish for it.” He looked at the book, lying on the table where he had left it. “But that book? Did it belong to someone?”

“Uh? The paper did, I guess, but the book and the information in it were created by the wish you made.” The flavorless spirits, really.

“Created,” said Travis. “But magic isn’t free so if the wish created knowledge does that mean that someone somewhere had to get stupider?”

“Probably me,” I said. I don’t know why I giggled.

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.”

“Your disguise as a boy is lots better from in front than from behind,” he said with a grin..

 

 
We were going up the stairs to find the phone when we heard Neary ask in a strange voice, “You’re not going to leave me down here alone for another six years, are you?”

Travis squeezed past me to go back and retrieve the lonesome mirror, then he followed me up the stairs. He muttered something just as we got to the top and I responded with an intelligent remark. “Huh?” I said.

“Your disguise as a boy is lots better from in front than from behind,” he said with a grin.

“Hmph,” I said, not admitting that I might have added a bit of extra wiggle, knowing he was back there. I’m pretty sure I blushed. My feelings for Travis were in total conflict with my former self-identification as a straight boy. I couldn’t help but smile, though, absurdly pleased that he had been looking at my butt.

Travis handed me the mirror which I put down on the kitchen cabinet, leaning it against the wall. “Thank you, Jonni,” Neary said. “I hate being left in the dark.”

“Were you really alone in the basement for six years?”

“Yes,” said Neary. “I can see out of the mirror, even while not summoned, but there was nothing going on and no one to talk to.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Wonder you’re not as nutty as a pecan pie,” I commented.

“I did have other avenues for entertainment,” he admitted. “Anytime anyone talks to a mirror anywhere in the world, I can listen in and see out for a time.”

I thought about that for another moment. “Yikes,” I said. “Remind me—”

But Travis had dialed a number and was talking to Sol Berger, the lawyer, by then and motioned for us to be quiet.

“Mr. Berger,” he said, “I’m interested in hiring you regarding a real estate transaction.” He listened for a bit then said, informatively, “Uh-huh.” Then later, “Yeah, we can do that.”

We? I wondered.

Travis said, “Let me get something to write with.” He looked at me, and I magicked up a pencil and a pad of paper for him. He scribbled a downtown address on the pad and promised to be there at 3 p.m.

“Can I go, too?” I wheedled. “Please?” The “we” had encouraged me.

“Sure,” he agreed. “And I think we should start by creating some new identities for ourselves. Mirror, can Jonny do this? Create IDs we can use that won’t attract attention?”

I blinked, startled at the idea. But Travis had a point. One way to avoid having problems with our own identities would be to have alternates.

Neary spoke. “You would want clean IDs that no one would be looking for but would stand up to scrutiny. Yes, I believe such could be found.”

“Can we be just a little bit older? Like make me eighteen at least,” I suggested. I couldn’t resist giggling, remembering Travis’s restriction on dating girls under seventeen. Well? I’m a genie, maneuvering and manipulating seem to be part of the job description.

“Mmphm.” Travis was non-committal

“Via Genie magic, almost any sort of ID could be created and supported with documentation,” said Neary. “What you want is unused identities, with documents that can be altered to fit you two.”

We discussed this with the mirror. One thing got settled early during this.

“Either we figure out how to change me back to me,” I said, “or we don’t. If we do, all is keen and hunky-dory, and I’m me, and we have no problems. If not, then I’m stuck as a girl, a genie, or both.”

“Uh,” said Travis.

“If I’m stuck, then I’m going to need a female ID since part of the magic makes it hard to disguise me as a boy.”

“Okay,” Travis agreed. “I see where you’re going with this.” He looked at Neary. “Who would be the best two, safe and unused, identities we could assume, both for the purpose of seeing the lawyer to acquire this house and for long time use?”

“Good question,” said the man in the mirror approvingly. “Thomas Mikkelson, of Davenport, Iowa and Marisol, Texas, was twenty-six when he disappeared in the Caribbean last year. He was a minor member of a drug cartel, and no one misses him. Do you want to know what really happened to him?”

“No,” said Travis with a shudder.

“It’s not so much gruesome as just stupid,” said Neary, “but he had no close relatives, and there are no good recent pictures of him anywhere. He even has the same initials you have.”

“Okay, he sounds perfect,” Travis said.

“For Jonni,” Neary began, and I leaned forward to listen. “There’s Jacqueline Waalfort, of Great Neck, New York, age nineteen, sneaked out of the country to elope with her boyfriend two years ago and is currently living under an assumed name in South Africa and extremely unlikely to return to the US. And no one is looking for her because her family knows where she is now.”

“Jacquie?” I tried the name out.

“Here’s a picture of her from her high school yearbook.” The mirror changed image to show a blonde with curly hair and dimples.

Travis shook his head. “You don’t have to look like her,” he said to me. “I’d prefer you looked like yourself, but, uh, but I guess, you know, uh, female?”

Was he blushing? I giggled and nodded, taking the thought that he preferred me to be female as progress of sorts. Well, if I were going to be stuck, anyway….

We discussed the wording of the wish with Neary, it got long and complicated but we wanted to be able to see ourselves before we went to talk to the lawyer and we wanted to include business-appropriate clothing. Travis used his fifth question to double check with the mirror that we had a good wish that wouldn’t have any bad side effects.

“As good as may be,” Neary admitted. “Please don’t wait too long before you call me back,” he pleaded before his image disappeared from the mirror.

“We won’t,” Travis promised. Then he looked at me. “Do it,” he said.

I giggled. I had a picture in my mind of what I wanted Jacquie to look like, something like some of the old photos of my mother. This might be the face I used for a long time. I did my wishing job, ending with the blink.

And there stood Travis, very handsome in a blue-gray Western-cut business suit which alone made him look older. He stared at me, and I stared at him.

“You look lovely,” he spoke first. “Very demure and grown-up, Jacquie,” he added, using the new name.

“Thomas,” I said. “You look scrumptious.” And I giggled.

He grinned. “Jonny,” he began but left off. I might have been wrong, but I thought I could guess what he was thinking.

“I am all grown-up, now,” I said to tease him. I stood on tiptoe in my sensible, business heels, still six inches or more shorter than he was.

He shook his head. “We both know you’re still only fifteen,” he said. “Let’s check our documentation.” He pulled a tooled leather wallet out of his inside jacket pocket.

I checked in the mirror first. I wore a pink and white business ensemble with dark blond hair down to the middle of my back and some very good makeup. I’d have to learn to do that, I thought. I also had a purse that matched my suit, and I took it out to look it over. We had included in the wish that we would have California IDs, Neary had said that the magic would have no trouble inserting the appropriate information into records to make our paperwork legit.

I did have a California ID in the name of Jacqueline Constance Waalfort, showing my age as nineteen but it wasn’t a driver’s license. I pouted a bit over that but reflected that it was just as well since I really did not know how to drive. In fact, Travis’s real DL was less than a year old.

Travis, or Thomas, grinned at me. I used my dimples back at him. I magicked up a briefcase (my own from my closet in the house next door) and we filled it with the money.

“Don’t wait up for us, Neary,” Travis called out. The mirror blinked once. “Okay, Babe,” he said to me, “can you nod us downtown about half a block from Sol Berger’s office without a wish?”

I nodded, resisting the temptation to wiggle all over. ‘Babe” was what he called his girlfriends!

He pointed at me. “Do it,” he said.

I did.

“Flapjacks,” I said. I have no idea why....

 

 
We appeared near the little downtown park a block from Sol Berger’s office. Evergreen bushes lining both sides of the sidewalk concealed our magical arrival from anyone who might have been startled. Travis set out immediately in the right direction, carrying the briefcase full of money and I scurried to catch up.

I’d included low heels in my costume but I wasn’t used to walking in them yet. At least they fit much better than most women’s shoes seem to—they didn’t hurt my feet at all; I just couldn’t match Travis’s length of stride.

It occurred to me that there were lots of things I did not know about how to be a girl. I could magic such knowledge up but it would cost me. I guessed I could afford to forget some things about being a boy or male activities like football and car mechanics. Not, I realized, that I knew that much about such things to begin with.

Travis had gotten three or four of his long steps ahead of me when he stopped to look back. “Sorry, babe, am I walking too fast for you?”

Being called ‘babe’ again derailed my thinking and all I could do was giggle. Apparently, I did know how to do that like a girl.

Travis laughed, waited for me to catch up, then took my arm. “It’s easier to relate to you as a girl when you look less like Jonny or that harem girl fantasy.”

“Huh,” I said. And, “Oh.”

“Let me do all the talking with Mr. Berger,” he said.

I had to take that as an order, so I just nodded.

The office building was older gray brick construction with visible new steel reinforcement earthquake retrofit. Travis held the door open for me, which confused me for a moment but I went in, smiling, and he followed. The building directory showed S.A. Berger, Esq. as having an office on the third floor so we rode the elevator up.

We found the office. The sign said Berger, Tiburon and Remora, Attorneys-at-Law. Again, Travis held the door for me and it confused me again when he did it—I was the servant, shouldn’t I be holding doors for him?

The receptionist smiled at me as I entered and I realized I was grinning and giggling. Travis followed me in and answered the woman’s question with, “Thomas MIkkelson and Jacquie Waalfort to see Mr. Berger.”

Jacquie! That’s me, I thought. I wanted to wiggle in excitement.

Mr. Berger turned out to be a middle-sized, middle aged man with thinning black hair. He came around his desk to shake hands with Travis and give mine a little squeeze before going back to sit down and inviting us to do so in front of his desk.

But Travis had introduced us during the handshaking. “Mr. Berger, I’m Thomas Mikkelson and this is my fiancée, Jacquie Waalfort.”

Fiancée! Fiancée? Fiancée!

I didn’t hear anything for several minutes. Part of me wanted to squeal like a cheerleader after her team scores an exciting touchdown and part was just stunned. Another part vibrated like a tuning fork between being pissed about the most awkward proposal of marriage in the universe and being horrified at the idea of being someone’s wife!

But not just anyone’s wife—Travis’s wife. Travis who, due to Genie magic, owned me body and soul. Travis for whom I felt an unresolved and unaccountable—well, frankly—lust.

Wow. My brain had turned to oatmeal and all I could do was show Mr. Berger my back teeth in a monkey-style grin as I collapsed into the chair beside Travis. I felt my skirt wrinkle under me and attempted the flounce-in-place maneuver to straighten it that I had seen women and girls do almost without thinking.

That ended badly, with me half-in and half-out of the chair and my skirt almost high enough to show my panties. Mr. Berger appeared to be trying not to watch as I sat up straight, half-stood, and smoothed my hand over my very round butt before sitting back down.

Travis glanced at me in the middle of whatever he had been saying and I gave him another monkey grin with a giggle on top. Mr. Berger put a hand over his mouth and his eyebrows did calisthenics before he pulled his gaze away from me and back to Travis.

I still didn’t hear what they were saying. Travis and I were going to get married!

How soon was the wedding? What would I tell my parents? (A real problem since as far as they knew, I was a boy who didn’t even date yet.) Omigawd! What would I wear to the wedding? I had an image of myself as a girly-looking Jonni in a white tux thing like a Rockette costume. No, no, no.

Another image came to mind, me as Jacquie in a wedding gown. I felt my face go hot and my grin turn to wood. I don’t know what Mr. Berger thought was going on with me but he was keeping his eyes on Travis now, so maybe he didn’t notice.

“We’ve found the house we want to live in,” Travis was saying. “We just don’t know who owns it now.”

Mr. Beger nodded. “Not that hard to find out,” he said, going on to elaborate how he would do that.

But I had gotten sidetracked mentally again. Me as a housewife in a pink dress, white apron, and of course, pearls? I giggled and naturally both of them turned to look at me. I put my hands up in front of my face, shaking my head and snickering like a loon.

“Flapjacks,” I said. I have no idea why.

Travis laughed. “Jacquie is still recovering,” he explained. “We just got engaged this morning.” He put a hand out and I grabbed it like a lifeline.

Then I did something I should not have done. As I brought up my left hand, I magicked a ring onto it—a big beautiful diamond engagement ring onto my ring finger. Travis did a subtle double take but Mr. Berger looked impressed.

The ring, in fact, was so gorgeous, it took my breath away. White gold with a yellow gold setting around a rock as big as the end of my pinkie and a bunch of little stones surrounding it. Since magic has to be paid for, I wondered if there was any money left in the satchel we had brought. But I couldn’t worry about that. I had my master glowering at me while trying to smile fondly.

“Malamute,” I said. I have no idea why.

“Congratulations!” said the lawyer, beaming at both of us. “I see why you want a house.”

Travis gave my hand a squeeze and turned back to the business we had come to do.

Mr. Berger had soon agreed to pursue acquiring the house for us after Travis gave him the address and a cash retainer from the briefcase. Travis offered him more of the money to use as bargaining leverage, perhaps, but Mr. Berger refused.

“Money for real estate should go into escrow,” he explained. “Banks are set up to handle that. Put your cash in the bank and we can deal with checks from here on out, Mr. Mikkelson.”

Travis stood, sort of tugging me with him. Then our new lawyer shook his hand again and squeezed mine gently.

A few minutes later, we stood in front of the building again. Travis pointed, “There’s a bank down the block, let’s open an account with the rest of the money. It sounded like a good idea.”

I nodded, glad that he didn’t seem angry with me.

“Where did you get the ring?” he asked as we waited for a stoplight at the corner.

“Same place you got calling me your fiancée?” I offered. He was still taking strides that were too big as we started across the street and I had to scurry to keep up.

He snorted. “Burma,” he said.

A truck driver beeped at us and when I looked at him, he grinned and tipped his cap. I almost tripped. That distracted me from giving the right straight line. “What?” I said.

We reached the curb and Travis paused to hold my hand with the ring still on it up for a better look. He seemed to be admiring it despite himself “Why did you say flapjacks?” he asked.

I was finally on the same page so I delivered the punchline in the best Cockney accent I could manage, “Oi panicked,” I said.

With both of us laughing like two loons this time, we took our money into the bank.