Zacktastic (14 page)

“Don't talk with your mouth full,” Quinn tells me, as if
that's
what I should be worried about right now. She turns to Mr. Heddle. “Please believe me when I say I have no idea what happened to that kid—to Trey. Zack keeps telling me he's a genie and Trey wished to turn into me, or something like that.”

“I do believe you,” Mr. Heddle says. “Do you believe him?”

“I don't know!” Quinn says. “I didn't think so. But I don't know what the real explanation could be. So many things are happening that I can't explain. Like, those teachers didn't believe me that Zack was invisible, and I knew he was right there.” She puts her bottle of water down, hard, and a bit sloshes out onto the desk. “Sorry,” she says.

“That's all right,” Mr. Heddle tells her.

“It's just hard to know what to believe,” Quinn says softly, shaking her head. “I wish someone would be straight with me about what I'm doing here.”

“I wish—” I start.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Mr. Heddle says, shaking a finger at me. “You don't want to waste your wish—trust me.”

Just like Uncle Max did, he licks a finger and holds it in the air. “Mr. Heddle?” Quinn asks.

“I'm not who you think I am,” he says.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“The question isn't who I am,” he says. “It's who
you
are.”

“Who
I
am?”

“You're a seventh-family genie,” he says.

“How do you know that?” I ask.

“Because I'm a genie, too,” he says.

“That's why you can see me!”

“Indeed it is. Mortals can only hear, see, and feel what they expect. But we genies know to expect the unexpected, and we see everything.”

“So you can help us!” I say. “We're trying to get home—or at least get in touch with my uncle Max.”

“You can help yourself,” he says.

“How?”

“We'll get to that. We'll get to everything, little sparkie.”

“Sparkie?” I repeat.

“That's what new young genies, such as yourself, are called—your powers come out in fits and sparks. You haven't figured out how to
harness your power and use it at will.”

“I'll say,” I tell him. “Sometimes things happen because I want them to, and sometimes nothing happens at all. And I don't know what I'm doing differently.”

“That's perfectly normal,” he tells me. “But give yourself some credit, too. After all, your sister is here because you successfully used your powers to grant a wish. That young man, Trey, wished to be someone else, did he not?”

“He did,” I say.

Mr. Heddle—or Mr.
not
Heddle—nods. “And that turned out to be Quinn.”

“But . . . But . . .” Quinn sputters. “But when we tried to call my mom, she said I was
there
at home.”

“That was a brilliant play on your brother's part—he did a Rutherford split. Part of you is here, and part of you is there. Neither part realizes she is simply a piece of a whole.”

He snaps his fingers, and a white shade falls
down over the window on the far wall. The room is suddenly darker, and a movie begins to play with the shade as a screen.

No, wait. It's not a movie. It's Quinn! Quinn and Madeline! They are sitting on the bed in Quinn's room. Unlike the Quinn here at MA with me, the Quinn on the screen has both sides of her hair in braids. She and Madeline are bent over their toenails, painting them a rainbow of colors. I watch Mom enter the room and say something about putting towels down and not spilling polish on the comforter.

“That's me,” Quinn says. Her voice is barely a whisper.

“That's the
other
half of you,” Mr. Heddle says. He turns to me. “Well done, young man.”

“Uh. Thanks,” I say.

“But wait,” Quinn says. “Is it dangerous that I've been split in two?”

Mr. Heddle shrugs. “Whole people are always stronger than the individual parts,” he says.

“Zack, how could you do that to me?” I turn to her to apologize, but my sister is yawning. She leans back against the red leather chair. “It's too much,” she says. “I think I need to close my eyes for a bit.”

I feel a bit light-headed, too. Maybe I made a sparkie mistake and accidentally did a Rutherford split on myself. Because the room seems to be spinning.

Oh, wait. The room is actually spinning! The walls are moving around us. I haven't moved a muscle, and yet I feel myself rising up, up, up. I reach down to grab the chair beneath me, but it's hard to get a good grip when things are going in circles. I manage to pull at the piping on the back of the chair with the tips of my fingers. But then I continue to rise and I can't even do that anymore. Below me, my sleeping sister is getting farther and farther away.

Mr. Heddle shoots up next to me. The fake Mr. Heddle. I'm still thinking of him as
E. M. Heddle in my head because I don't know his real name, whoever he is. Around us, the sky is dark except for the glow of stars like lights on a Christmas tree. I swing my legs around, trying to figure out if I can make myself move back down. Trey's flip-flops fall off, one after the other, and I can hear them whistling to the ground.

“Oh no!” I cry. “Watch out, Quinn!”

But she's too far away—and fast asleep—to hear me.

“You sound concerned,” Mr. Heddle says.

“Well, yeah, of course,” I say. “Do you know how many people are killed each year by things that fly out of windows, or off roofs of buildings? A shoe falling from this height—that's gotta be deadly.”

“I suppose it would be,” Mr. Heddle says calmly, evenly.

“Plus, we're just floating in space. I get maybe that's a genie thing, but I still prefer solid ground.”

“If that's what you prefer,” Mr. Heddle says. And with a snap of his fingers, a floor materializes under my swinging feet.

“Where are we now?” I say as my feet test the ground.

Mr. Heddle keeps snapping. A chair knocks me gently from behind, and I fall into it. Beside me a floor lamp appears, and a little coffee table. “Put your feet up,” he says. “This is the thirteenth parallel, where we aim to make our guests comfortable so they'll want to stay.”

“And Quinn?”

“Don't you worry about Quinn,” he says. “Let's talk about your heart's desires. You wanted a dog, right? A dog just for you and no one else? Do you still want one?”

“Sure, I guess. But now doesn't seem the time . . .”

“Nonsense! I won't even make you wish for it. This one will be a freebie.”

I spot something in the distance. At first it's
just a dot, like the sparkle of a star. But it's moving closer and closer, running toward me, seemingly through the air. Before I can blink, the world's cutest golden Labrador puppy has jumped up next to me. It settles its head in my lap. Could this really be happening? I lower a hand to the dog's back. It certainly feels like a real dog.

“Check out the tag,” Mr. Heddle says.

I feel around the dog's neck for the collar and look at the name tag:
I BELONG TO ZACK COOLEY
, it reads.

“You should name it. A dog needs a name. Speaking of which, I haven't properly introduced myself, have I?”

“No,” I say. My voice is barely a whisper.

“I am Linx. I am the head of the thirteenth family.”

17

H
ISTORY
L
ESSON

“L
inx,” I repeat.

Before my eyes, the man who was E. M. Heddle starts to transform. He grows taller and broader. Thick hairs sprout from the top of his head and flow back in waves like water. The whites of his eyes go whiter, so white they practically glow. And his pupils turn red—which is incidentally the same color that his skin has become.

I pull the puppy closer, onto my lap, and bury my face in its silky tan fur.

“Don't be scared,” Linx tells me. His voice
has changed, too. It sounds as deep as the ocean. “I'm not going to hurt you. You believe me, right?”

I look up. There in front of me, Linx looks more like a monster than a man. But I find myself nodding anyway, almost involuntarily, like I'm in a trance.

“That's good,” he says. He stretches his arms out, as wide as a pterodactyl's wingspan. “Whoa, it feels good to be out of Heddle's body. It was getting a little cramped in there. Those of us in the thirteenth have always been a bit bigger than average.”

Understatement of the year. Next to Linx, the guy cleaning up the chapel was practically the size of a toddler. “Did you say the
thirteenth
family?” I ask.

“Indeed,” Linx says. “But I bet your uncle Max told you there were twelve genie families.”

“You know Uncle Max?”

“Max and I go way back,” Linx says. “Way back to the womb. So I know he has a tendency
to lie when he needs to. Tell me this, Zack, has Max ever lied to you before?”

“No,” I say. But as soon as the word is out of my mouth, I remember—he lied about how we were related, and he lied about being a genie, and he lied about my being one, too.

“Ah, Zack. Really?”

“Uncle Max loves us a lot. After my dad died, he . . .” I let my voice trail off. “Anyway, like I was saying before, my sister and I just want to go home.”

“Here, Zack, catch.” Linx throws me a doggie treat. The puppy laps it from my palm, licking each of my fingers like they're lollipops. It's hard to tell just what is real. But this dog certainly feels real. “You still haven't named him. It's not right for a dog to go nameless.”

I shake my head. “I can't think of any.”

“Titan? Flash? Goliath? Hercules?” Linx suggests, and I shrug. “Well, you think on it. In the meantime, I have a story to tell you. Years
ago, years and years ago—before you were even a figment of your parents' imaginations, before your parents were figments of your grandparents' imaginations, and centuries before that—the thirteenth genie family was the most powerful genie family in all the world, and I was the most powerful genie.”

Linx pauses for a moment and smiles, like he's remembering fondly.

“Mortals would find my bottle and rub it,” he goes on. “But as you know, merely rubbing a genie bottle is not enough to summon a genie.”

“I didn't know that,” I tell him.

“Mmm, it seems that uncle of yours is a little behind in your education. Allow me to enlighten you—as a rule, only a man in distress can get a genie to emerge.”

“Trey isn't a man,” I say. “He is a boy—a kid, like me.”

“My dear Zack,” Linx says. “Trey was most certainly not ‘like you.' But I see your point—a
man, or a woman, or a
child
must be in distress, and rub the bottle at that very moment. And when that happens, the magic kicks in.”

“Trey said he rubbed the bottle before,” I remember, out loud. “But today was when Shaggy and Buzz—these other kids—were attacking him in the chapel. So that's gotta be what made the difference. He was in distress.”

“Precisely. You're catching on fast. And then you popped out of the bottle and Trey made his wish and you—”

“And I messed it all up.”

“Nonsense! You
interpreted
his wish, that's all. Back when I was granting wishes, I prided myself on my creativity when it came to wish interpretation. For example, there was a man who'd never had as much money as those around him. He made a wish to be richer than all of his neighbors, and I banished him to Antarctica, where he was certainly the richest—he didn't have any neighbors! Unless you count the penguins and the whale seals.
Another time a woman with a rather unfortunate face wished that people would think she was beautiful. I turned her into a rose, and people certainly exclaimed over her beauty after that.”

“That's not what they meant,” I say.

“Are you sure about that? Were you in their heads?”

“No, but anyone could tell,” I say. “Like I could tell Trey didn't really want me to turn him into Quinn—and Quinn sure didn't want me to split her into two and drag her here.”

“You know, Zack, you remind me of myself, when I was young. I think you may take after me. You worry about other people, and not having control. I have so much to teach you. And lesson number one is that control is what being a genie is all about. You can make things happen, simply by force of will.”

I'm shaking my head. Because I don't know how to make anything happen.

“I worked to empower the genie community,”
Linx goes on. “Not just the thirteenth family, but all genies. Genies like you. That's all I was trying to do until someone stopped me. He would've killed me, if he'd had the chance.”

I suck in my breath. Words echo in my ears:
I've only come close to killing someone once
.

“You know who I'm talking about, don't you?” Linx asks.