by David Lubar
I had. I planned to play baseball, go swimming, and just hang out with my friends. I looked at the clock for the five hundredth time that day. Ten minutes. And then, summer vacation would start. I turned my attention back to cleaning out my desk. After I got the last pencil stub and permission slip out of there, I felt around to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.
“What’s that?” I said as I felt something small and cold. I pulled it out.
“Yeah, what is that?” my friend Franz asked, looking over my shoulder from his seat behind me.
“Stupid magic wishing mirror,” I said.
“Why’s it stupid?” Franz asked.
“It doesn’t work,” I said. I remembered when I’d opened the package. My great-grandmother in Slovenia had sent it to me. There was a note saying it was a magic mirror that would grant any three wishes I asked for. It was a Christmas present, but it arrived two weeks late. I had a big test the next day, and I hadn’t studied, so I held up the mirror, stared into it, and said, “I wish it would snow so much that school is closed for a whole week.”
It didn’t snow.
I failed the test.
I was going to toss the mirror away, but then I thought maybe if I wanted to close the school, I had to make the wish at school.
So I brought the mirror with me and waited until a good time to try it out. When I heard that picture day was coming, I pulled the mirror from my desk and said, “I hope it snows so much that school is closed for a month.” I hated the way Mom stuffed me into a suit and nearly strangled me with a necktie for a stupid photo.
Naturally, I didn’t get my wish.
“You sure it doesn’t work?” Franz asked.
“Yeah. Watch.” I held up the mirror, and after glancing at the clock, where I saw we still had five minutes to go, I said, “I wish we were outside right now.”
“Thanks for including me,” Franz said.
I didn’t answer him. I was too busy wondering why my hand felt so warm. The mirror was heating up. It started to vibrate.
“Whoa!” I said as I dropped it on my desk.
Words appeared on the surface of the mirror:
Wish queue filled to capacity. Wish fulfillment activated. Processing the first of three.
“Huh?” I was slow to catch on.
“What’s a queue?” Franz asked.
“It’s stuff in a line, like in a Pez dispenser, or a pack of Life Savers,” I said. “Or us, waiting at the cafeteria.”
“It’s snowing!” someone shouted.
Everyone looked out the window. Snow was falling hard and fast. I glanced down. The roads were already coated. In minutes, it looked like more than an inch had fallen.
I remembered my first wish. I’d asked for so much snow that school would be closed for a week. It looked like I was getting my wish. But we were getting closed in, not closed out.
I guess about three feet of snow fell.
A new message appeared on the mirror.
First wish set in motion. Processing the second of three wishes in the queue.
The snow got heavier. I realized we’d be getting a month’s worth. Or a week and a month, depending on how the two wishes were combined. I couldn’t even guess how high the snow was. I thought about being trapped in the building for a month. Or a month and a week, if the wishes didn’t overlap. That’s when I realized all I had to do was wish away the snow.
I reached for the mirror, just as the words changed.
Second wish set in motion. Processing the third of three wishes.
And, like that, I was outside of the school, standing on top of a ton of snow, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Franz, who was next to me, let out a yelp. So did I.
Somehow, we got back into the building.
It was not a good summer.
THE HAUNTED CAMP
It was quite a bargain. Colton’s mother couldn’t resist. The ad in the newspaper caught her attention early in the spring of that year; at the top, the words GRAND REOPENING! were spread across the page. Beneath that, a subhead that was only slightly smaller read Give your child the gift of Camp Spruce Glen!
There was more, in a smaller font, proclaiming the reopening of this abandoned summer camp that had been closed for so long that Colton’s mother had never heard of it. The description sounded great, and the price was amazingly low.
When Colton heard the news, he couldn’t help shouting, “Yes!” He’d been begging to go to summer camp ever since last year when most of the kids he knew had gone. But those camps had been wildly expensive. So he’d had to settle for hanging out at the playground that summer, and at the town pool with the other kids who hadn’t gone to camp.
“This is great,” he said.
“It will be a wonderful experience for you,” his mother said.
Had they known the rumors about Camp Spruce Glen, they might have been a bit less enthusiastic. But Colton didn’t learn anything about the rumors until the day he got there, and his mother never heard the rumors at all.
“Looks like it could use a bit of sprucing up,” Colton’s father said as the family drove along the entrance road for the camp.
Colton didn’t get the joke. He was too busy looking around at the cabins, the lake, and the fishing pier to make the connection between Camp Spruce and sprucing up. And even if he’d paid attention, he was not a big fan of his father’s jokes.
His parents dropped him off with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and Colton went to meet his fellow campers.
The very first kid he approached greeted him with, “This place is haunted.”
“What?” Colton asked.
The boy, who was tall and thin, with thick glasses, a collection of freckles worthy of playing connect-the-dots, and a name tag with Darryl scrawled on it in dark blue marker said, “There’s a ghost. People think it was an old trapper who broke his leg in the woods and died when he was trying to crawl into town for help.”
“Oh,” Colton said. “Okay…” He didn’t believe in ghosts. Not a whole lot, at least.
“I read all about it,” Darryl said. “That’s why the place closed. Campers kept disappearing. One of us is going to die. I’m pretty sure of that. It won’t be me.”
Colton looked around for someone else to talk to. As he walked toward a small cluster of campers, Darryl followed him. “Stick with me, you’ll be safe. I know all about paranormal manifestations.”
Colton had no plans to stick with Darryl, or anyone else who tossed around words like paranormal and manifestations. But it turned out they were in the same cabin, along with Marshall, who was good at sports, and Norman, who cried the entire first day and well into the night.
The crying wasn’t enough to keep Colton awake that night, but the sudden slam that shook the cabin was more than enough to wake him.
“Depart!” a voice cried.
Two other sleepers awoke, disoriented and startled, joining Norman, who was already awake, and Colton. They leaped from their bunks and switched on the lights.
Colton walked over to the wall where the noise had come from. He looked out the window. There was nothing to see. All lights were off, and the clouds filtered out the light of the half moon.
“Someone’s playing a joke,” Colton said. “That’s all it is.”
“Yeah,” Norman said, nodding.
The boys went back to their bunks. There wasn’t another thump that night, but other strange and disturbing things continued for the rest of the week. Objects disappeared from the cabin. Twice, dead animals were awaiting them in the cabin when they returned from evening campfires. Cold night air would flood the cabin as the door swung open.
Colton didn’t believe in ghosts, but he also didn’t believe in spending all night feeling scared. He called his parents and told them he wanted to come home. They told him they were at the beach and he’d just have to make the best of things.
The thumps came back. So did cries of agony that made Colton’s skin crawl. Finally, toward the end of the second
week, he decided he was going to catch whoever it was that was trying to scare the campers. As soon as they turned out the lights, he sneaked out of the cabin and hid behind a tree on the side of the wall that had been the target of most of the thumps. The moon wasn’t up yet, but the stars were bright, and he was pretty sure he’d see anyone, or anything, that approached the cabin.
Sure enough, less than an hour later, a dark figure slipped out of the woods and glided toward the cabin. He moved so smoothly that, for an instant, Colton feared he really was watching a ghost. But as the figure moved closer, Colton saw it was just a slim man strolling along the path with the grace of a dancer.
“Got you,” Colton whispered. He thought about jumping out, but decided it was better to follow the man to see where he went.
The man banged on the cabin. He raced from there to the other cabins, giving the wall of each one a hard thump. Then he turned and fled back into the woods. The slightest sound of feet on the path, along with the thumps his fist had made, told Colton the man was truly not a ghost. He followed the sound, hoping he could keep up.
But he didn’t have to keep up for long. Five minutes into the chase, he stumbled to a stop. The man was standing right ahead of him on the path.
Colton’s gut churned as he realized he was alone with someone who had been terrorizing a whole camp.
“I wish you hadn’t done this,” the man said. He spoke with a quiet snarl.
“Why are you trying to scare everyone?” Colton asked.
“To protect you,” the man said.
That was so unexpected, Colton just stared for a moment before replying. But he also relaxed a bit. If the man wanted to protect them, no matter how strange a method he’d picked, he wasn’t dangerous. The moon had finally started to rise, revealing a man who didn’t seem to be a threat. He looked like the guy at the corner store back home who worked behind the deli counter.
Colton figured he deserved an explanation. “Protect us?” he said “From what?”
“Me,” the man said.
That single word sent a chill through Colton. “You?”
The man pointed toward the rising moon. “I’m bound to these woods, for reasons we don’t have time to discuss. And I’m bound to do terrible things when the light of the full moon transforms me. I’ve always managed to stay away from the cabins. But every two or three years, some foolish camper would wander into the woods at the wrong time. I had to stop them. So I did my best to make the camp seem haunted. I finally managed to get the place closed, ages ago.”
“They just opened back up,” Colton said.
The man sighed. “I know. But I suspect they’ll close it back down, after you disappear.”
“Why would I—”
The transformation happened so fast that Colton never finished his sentence. But the man was right. The camp closed up soon after that, right before the next full moon.
MILK-BOTTLE MAGIC
Lorna felt like a fish in a sandbox. She understood that her mom had a wonderful new job, and she understood why the family had to move, but that didn’t mean she liked leaving the city.
“Everything’s different,” she complained to her brother, Donovan. “And I’ll bet it will be even worse once school starts.”
Donovan looked at her and said, “Glerble.” Then he turned back to his blocks. He was a good listener, but at the age of eleven months, he wasn’t much of a talker.
“Yup,” Lorna said, “I know I’ll hate the school out here.” School would be starting in two weeks. Lorna turned toward the door as she heard her mom walk in. “Do you have to go out tonight?” she asked.
Her mother nodded. “I won’t be late. And the sitter is supposed to be very nice. I’m sure you’ll like her.”
“Sure.” Lorna doubted it.
The doorbell rang. Even that was different. It wasn’t like the buzz in their apartment in the city; it was a big loud BING BONG that echoed through the house. She followed her mom to the door.
“Hello, I’m Mrs. Gunderson,” a woman said, stepping into the room so briskly she almost leaped. She looked at Lorna. “And you must be Lorna.”
“I must be,” Lorna said.
The woman just smiled at this.
“Dinner is on the table,” her mom said. She looked at her watch and said, “Oh dear, I’m late.” Then she hugged her children and scooted out the door.
Lorna watched through the window as the taillights of her mom’s car were swallowed by the night. “It’s too dark here,” she said.
“What’s that?” Mrs. Gunderson asked.
Lorna jumped. She hadn’t realized that the sitter was right behind her. “It’s too dark. There aren’t any lights.”
Mrs. Gunderson was still smiling. “That just makes it easier to see the stars. Take a look sometime. There isn’t a view like that in the city. Now, let’s see about this dinner.” She left the room and headed for the kitchen.
Lorna trailed after her. Donovan toddled in a moment later. Soon, they were all seated at the table. “You don’t seem too happy with Amblington,” Mrs. Gunderson said.
“The city is better,” Lorna said.
“Things will improve when you start school.”
Lorna shook her head. “No, they won’t. I’ll bet the school here is as bad as everything else. I hate this place. I hate the quiet, I hate the dark.” Her gaze fixed on the table. “I even hate these stupid milk bottles. Why can’t we get milk in a carton?” She looked at the glass bottle on the table. Her mom had bought the milk from a dairy down the road. The place smelled like cows—like a whole bunch of cows.
“Oh, it’s not a stupid bottle,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “It’s a very smart bottle.”
“What?” Lorna had no idea what she was talking about.
“It’s very smart,” the sitter said again. She poured Lorna a glass of milk, then placed the plastic lid back on top of the bottle. “Watch,” she said. Then she put her hands on the bottle and said, “Bottle, will Lorna learn to like it here?”
Lorna just stared, wondering what kind of sitter her parents had gotten. The woman was trying to make a glass milk bottle talk. This was absurd. This was—
BLOOP!
Her thoughts were broken by the noise from the bottle. The lid rose up a bit, like a trapdoor, then fell back down.
Mrs. Gunderson smiled even wider. “See, the bottle thinks you’ll get to like it here. Right, bottle?”
BLOOP, BLOOP!
Lorna didn’t believe what she was seeing. The lid popped up and down like a red plastic mouth. “How…?”
“How do you think?” Mrs. Gunderson asked.
“Glerble,” Donovan said, giving his universal answer. He pointed at the bottle and laughed.
“Good guess,” Mrs. Gunderson said. She looked back at Lorna. “Do you want to take a guess?”
“I have no idea.”
“It’s very simple,” the sitter said. “You just need to remember one fact. First, do you know what expand means?”
“Sure, it means to get bigger. Like my stomach expands during Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Good. I like your definition. Now, the simple fact is that a gas, any gas, will always try to expand when it gets warmer and contract when it gets cooler. Simple, right?”
Lorna nodded. The sitter continued. “Now, what is in the bottle?”
“Milk,” Lorna answered. She looked at Mrs. Gunderson. The sitter just looked back, as if she was waiting for more. “And air,” Lorna said, realizing the answer.
“Right, again. Now, the milk is cold. And so is the air above it. What happens when I put my hands on the bottle?”
“You warm it!” Suddenly, it all made sense to Lorna. “The air gets warmer, so it expands. It needs more space, so it pushes against the cap. And the cap goes bloop.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Mrs. Gunderson told her.
“That’s really neat,” Lorna said.
“Glerble,” Donovan added.
Lorna felt a bit bad about all her complaining. Even if everything else was no fun in the country, at least she had found a wonderful sitter. “Will you be my sitter again?” she asked.
“Well, I only do this during the summer. I have to go back to work in a couple of weeks.”
“Oh.” Lorna hated the thought of losing Mrs. Gunderson so soon after finding her. “What kind of work do you do?”
Mrs. Gunderson smiled again. “I’m a teacher. I teach science at the school. It’s a good school, and we have a fabulous science program. I have a feeling you’ll really like it.”
“I have a feeling I will, too,” Lorna said.
“Now, if you can get me some baking soda, vinegar, and a balloon, I’ll show you something really amazing about gasses.”
“Great.” Lorna went to get the ingredients. As she moved around the kitchen gathering the items, she glanced out the window at the sky. There were a lot of stars, she realized—stars whose names she didn’t know. Not yet.
HAT TRICK
“Come on, Tommy! You’re holding us up!” My big brother, Donny, glared at me and shifted the bag of clubs that was slung over his shoulder.
“I’ll be right there,” I said. I was super excited about getting to play golf on a real pro course. But I was also excited to see they sold Lucky McMurphy golf clothes. He’s my favorite golfer. He gets a hole in one almost every time he plays. Nobody is as lucky as he is.
They even had shirts in my size. I looked at the tags and sighed. The price definitely wasn’t my size. I’d need a year’s allowance to buy one of them. Then I saw the hats.
