Zacktastic (6 page)

“All in due time, Zack. All in due time. But here's something I need to tell you now, and I can't say it strongly enough: You need to hang on to that bottle. You don't want it to end up in the wrong hands. That would be bad—very bad indeed.”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

“Unfortunately, there are evil forces in the world,” he goes on. “I've done my best to keep this world safe from them. But you can never be too careful.” Uncle Max pauses. “Zack, are you listening to me?”

“Yup. Bottle, evil forces, be careful.”

“A little bit of distance can go a long way. Remember that.”

“I'll remember,” I say. “But wait—how am I supposed to keep my eyes on the bottle if I'm sucked up into it and spit out a different one? If they're portals, like you said.”

“We call it sides of the bottle,” Uncle Max explains. “You look out for this bottle when you're here, on this side. When you're called away to the other side on genie business, there'll be another bottle for you to keep a close eye on. It'll be your ticket home, too.”

“Quinn's not going to believe this,” I say.

“You can't tell Quinn about this,” Uncle Max says.

“Oh, come on,
please
,” I say. “Just a little bit. Or maybe I could do some sort of trick in front of her. You know, to prove it.”

Quinn thinks she's so much cooler than I am. This will certainly show her!

“No, I mean you
can't
tell her,” Uncle Max
says. “You're physically unable to. If you try telling anyone outside the genie world, the words that come out of your mouth won't make any sense. You'll just sound a bit strange until you change topics.”

“How can I even be sure you're telling me the truth about that? Maybe you don't want me to tell Quinn, so you're telling me lie number three.”

“You don't believe me?” Uncle Max asks. “Stay here. I'll be right back.” He leaves me on the back porch and goes inside. A minute later he's back with a phone in his hand. “Here. Your sister is on the line for you.”

I press it to my ear. “Uh, hi, Quinn.”

“This better be important, Zack. Madeline and I are in the middle of doing spa treatments.”

“It is,” I promise. I pause to take a really deep breath in, and then I exhale out.

“Gross, I heard that!” Quinn shouts.

“What's gross about breathing?” I ask,
but then I change my mind. “Never mind. I have something to tell you. Something crazy. Something amazing. Something
crazmazing!
”

Crazmazing
. Adjective. When something is crazy and amazing at the same time.

“Ugh,” Quinn says. “Just spit it out. And use actual words that exist in actual dictionaries, please.”

“Okay. I know you're not going to believe this. But I'm a genie.”

“I'm not going to believe what?”

“I'm a genie,” I repeat.

For a couple of seconds there's just silence. And then Quinn starts yelling: “Zachary Noah Cooley, I told you to use real words! But if you're just going to speak some fake alien language to me, then I'm hanging up the phone!” And that's what she does, without waiting for me to answer. The next thing I hear is a click and a dial tone. I lower the phone from my ear and look over at Uncle Max.

“I told you so,” he says.

“Aw, man,” I said. “That stinks!”

“Sorry, Zack,” Uncle Max says. “It's a safety mechanism put in place by the Genie Board in the seventh parallel. Decision number two hundred and fifty-eight. We've had trouble in the past.”

There's something called a
Genie Board?

“Okay,” I say. “Can I use some of my spark plug energy to do magic in front of her? Not accidental magic, though. Real stuff, just like you did to me. Then she'll totally believe me. Or maybe she won't, and she'll think she's turning into a nut job herself!”

“That's not the way you're supposed to use your power, Zack.”

Not supposed to
doesn't mean
not possible
.

“But you can come to me with any genie business,” he continues. “
I'll
be able to understand you. And you
must
tell me if you feel anything out of the ordinary. Like if you have any strange sensations. Those tend to pop up when people
make wishes around you. It's a little like an allergy. It'll be different than when you're actually called upon to grant wishes. But still, you should tell me about them when they occur.”

“I had a strange itch today,” I tell him. “Quinn's friend Madeline said she wished something. And by the way, my toe didn't itch a little bit. It itched like crazy.”

“How crazy?”

“Like a hundred fire ants bit me in the same spot,” I tell him.

“Hmm,” Uncle Max says. “It's happening sooner than I thought. On Monday I'll make a call to SFG.”

SFG? As in the initials on the bottle? Who could he—or she—be?

I don't have a chance to ask. “Uh, Uncle Max,” I say. “Something's happening right now.”

“Your toe is itching again?”

“No, it's not itchy. It feels . . . I don't know . . . it feels alive.” I guess toes are always alive, as long
as they're part of a living body. But when was the last time you were aware of the life in your toe? “It feels like it's about to take off.”

Tingles travel from my toe up my whole body. Suddenly I'm lifted up. For
real
. I'm floating in the air, and spinning around and around and around. You know that pins-and-needles feeling you get when your foot falls asleep? That's what my whole body feels like. “What's happening to me?!”

“You're being called away for your first genie assignment,” Uncle Max says. He's on the porch still. Standing up now, but
his
feet are still planted firmly on the ground.

“Aren't you coming with me?” I ask.

“A genie works alone,” he says. “But I didn't think this would happen so soon.”

“Uncle Max!”

“It's all right, Zack. It'll be all right. Just . . .”

His voice is fading away. I'm headed right toward the green bottle. It looks bigger than before. In fact, it looks gigantic. Did it grow? I
whip my head toward Uncle Max, and he looks like a giant. Holy smokes, I'm shrinking! How small will I get? Down to nothing? I want to cry out,
Help me!
But my voice is gone.

“If you need me, call me through—” Uncle Max says.

But whatever the end of his sentence is, I don't hear it. I'm sucked inside the bottle instead.

6

D
UMPED

I
'm twisting and turning and hurling superfast. This must be what the Speed of Light roller coaster feels like. My heart drops down to my stomach. My stomach is in my throat. And my throat, well, I don't know where it is. I can't feel it anymore. I can't even tell if I'm screaming, because the sound of wind is too loud in my ears. There are so many twists and kinks and turns—it's as if I'm traveling through someone's lower intestine.

They say the speed of light is the fastest speed there is. But this has got to be faster—even
if that's not technically possible.

Very few things are impossible
, Uncle Max had said.

Ah, I'm slowing down now. I feel myself being pushed out of something.

But
pushed
is the wrong word. It's more like I'm being
squeezed
. I have to suck in my stomach and hold my breath.

And I'm out.

There's no time to be relieved about it because I'm flying through I-don't-know-where. The sky? Outer space? I don't have time to look around before my body remembers there's such a thing as gravity, and
NOSEDIVE!

I'm heading toward something dark and blue. It looks just like a lake. That is, if you're looking at a lake from high above.

Holy smokes! I'm heading toward a lake?!

It's getting closer. I don't know how to swim, which means I'm about to drown! I'm too young to die!

I squeeze my eyes shut, tight as I can. I can't bear to watch.

And then . . .

Nothing.

No smash, no splash. This doesn't mean I'm dead, does it? I don't
feel
dead—not that I know what being dead feels like. But I feel, well,
alive
still. And not like I'm nose-diving anymore. I open one eye, just a slit.

The dark blueness is right below me. I'm hovering above it. I guess gravity doesn't apply to genies after all. Man, that was close. Probably broke the record of closeness in the history of close calls.

I open my other eye. Hmmm. That's not water. It's . . . well, I don't know what it is. It's kind of, uh, cushiony looking. I reach out a teeny, tiny arm. But I'm not close enough to actually touch it.

The pins-and-needles feeling all over my body is back, and suddenly:
Pop!

Whoa. That's my right hand. My GIANT right hand. Or maybe it's just back to the regular size, but it looks giant compared to the rest of me.

I can reach the blue now. It
does
feel like a cushion.

Pop!
goes my left hand.

Pop! Pop! Pop!
Just like popcorn kernels, my body's growing bigger in bits and pieces. One of my eyes bugs out before the rest of my face goes bigger, kind of like a bubble bursting out of my eye socket. I can't even imagine how strange I must look.

There's one last enormous pop, and I'm back to my same, wonderful, state-of-the-art Zack-body. And then
SPLAT!
The cushion breaks my landing, before I roll off it and onto the floor.

Oh, beloved floor! Glorious floor! Floor of solid ground! I could kiss you!

But that would be weird, so I don't.

Instead I do a quick inventory of my body. Fingers and toes: check! Eyes, nose, and mouth:
check! Two arms, two legs: check! I think I've got it all. Phew.

Now to figure out where I am exactly. I sit up and look around. On the far wall, colors are spiraling like pinwheels. I stand slowly, blinking, blinking, blinking. I realize I'm actually staring right into an enormous stained glass window as the afternoon sun glares through it. I spin around and see rows and rows of dark pews. That must be what I landed on: one of the dark-blue cushioned pews.

The last time I was in a place with cushioned pews was the chapel for Dad's funeral. My breath quickens once again. The boom-booming of my heart is back to full force.

There's a staccato
pop! pop!—one
pop on one side of my head, another on the other side. Oh, my ears are back. I hadn't realized they'd still been itty-bitty.

The first thing I hear is a scream: “OWWWWWWW! GET OFFA ME, YOU
DIRTBALLS!” Quickly, I duck back down to the ground, out of sight.

“Ooh, he's a slippery little sucker,” a different voice says, presumably a dirtball. “Come back here, ya twerp!”

“Help me!”

Could this “twerp” be my genie assignment?

“Shut up!” shouts the dirtball.

“Yeah, twerp, you're the one who got us into this mess,” yet another voice says. I'm betting it's dirtball number two.

Wait, who am I supposed to help? The twerp or the dirtballs?

I slide on my stomach, commando-style, in between the pews to the back of the chapel, where the voices are coming from.

Along the way I pass an overturned backpack and a trail of items strewn across the floor. Items that must've once been inside it: a broken pencil, a pen without the cap, notebooks flipped open and pages scrunched up, a couple of books, plus
an iPod, an iPad, and an iPhone. Holy smokes, that's a lot of electronics for one backpack. I don't have any of those things.

I see a hand reach out toward a blue binder.

“Oh, Trey-ey,” one of the dirtballs calls, turning a one-syllable name into two. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

“There he is!”

“Aha! Where do you think you're going, twerp?”

That's when I see him—Trey, aka the twerp. He's a skinny red-haired kid with glasses that are lying crooked across the bridge of his nose. One of the lenses is smashed up. Two larger boys pounce on top of him. By process of elimination, they must be the dirtballs. One has shaggy blond hair and freckles, and the other has a brown buzz cut. All three boys are wearing khaki pants and white button-down shirts, with
MA
stitched into their front pockets.

MA? Like for Massachusetts? But I live in Pennsylvania. I know from the map in Mrs. Hould's classroom that they're separated by at least a few states. It would take hours in the car to get there. Genie travel sure is quick.

“OWWWWWWW!” comes another scream. The shaggy blond kid has a tuft of red hair in his fist, and he's yanking hard. “Hey, you!” Trey calls. He's looking right at me. “Do something!”

Do something? What could I possibly do? Take on Shaggy and Buzz Cut? I may be a genie,
but I don't know how to use my powers yet, and these guys are two of the worst Reggs I've ever seen. Plus, they're big—WAY bigger than I am.