The Christmas Genie

by Dan Gutman

  “Hey!” the genie suddenly shouted. “Getcher filthy paws off me!”

  We all jumped back. A few kids fell down.

  “You . . . speak?” Mrs. Walters croaked. “English?”

  “Any dope can speak English,” the genie said. “It’s Japanese that’s tricky.”

  Abigail took a picture of the genie with her cell phone camera.

  “Make sure ya get my good side,” he said, posing. And then, he let out a loud, nasty burp. It lasted about five seconds.

  “Man,” the genie said when the burp was finally done, “I been holding that baby in for thirteen million light years.”

  “You are a genie, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Well, I ain’t Santa Claus, buster, that’s for sure,” the genie said. “Lock the door.”

  Nobody moved. We couldn’t stop staring at him.

  “I said lock the door, you dimwits!” the genie shouted. “What does a guy haveta do to get some cooperation around this joint?”

  Mrs. Walters jumped up and locked the door. She did it just in time, too. Because as soon as the door clicked we heard the voice of Mr. Wilson, our school custodian.

  “Is everything okay in there?” hollered Mr. Wilson through the door.

  Mrs. Walters put a finger to her lips and told us all to shhhhhhhhhh.

  “Yes, everything’s fine, Mr. Wilson!” she yelled. “Just a little accident with a desk. You can clean it up later.”

  Everybody turned and looked at the genie again.

  “Now listen up and listen good,” he told us. “What I’m gonna say is private. Nobody breathes a word of this to anybody, you got it?”

  “Got it,” we all said.

  “You too, teach,” said the genie.

  “I won’t tell a soul,” whispered Mrs. Walters.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” the genie continued. “Ya ever been on a really long car drive? You get a little cranky, right? Well, I been traveling through space for a long time. But because you brats were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, I’m gonna grant you a wish. It’s just my little way of saying thanks for freeing me from the meteorite. Think of it as a Christmas present from me.”

  “He’s a Christmas genie!” gushed Madison.

  “Whatever,” muttered the genie.

  “Do you have a name?” asked Josh.

  “It don’t matter what my name is,” said the genie.

  “C’mon, what’s the big deal?” asked Alex. “Tell us your name.”

  “I’ll bet he has a funny name,” said Jacob. “That’s why he doesn’t want to tell us.”

  “It is not a funny name,” said the genie. “It’s a perfectly normal name.”

  “Then tell us what it is,” Ava said.

  “Yeah,” we all said.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll tell ya,” the genie said. “But then we get on with it. Deal?”

  “Deal!” we all agreed.

  “My name is Bob,” said the genie.

  Everybody cracked up.

  “Well, it is normal,” Ella said.

  “Bob?” asked Ethan. “Are you kidding?”

  “Who names a genie ‘Bob’?” asked Alex. “A genie should have a cool name like Alazar, or Hippocampus.”

  “That’s a part of the brain, you dork,” said Ava.

  “Look, my name is Bob,” said the genie. “Deal with it. I can leave, y’know. Maybe the class next door wants to have their wish come true.”

  “No!” everybody started yelling. “Don’t leave! We’ll take it! We’ll take the wish.”

  “That’s more like it,” said Bob the genie.

  “One wish?” said Logan. “You’re supposed to grant three wishes. “In Aladdin, the genie granted three wishes.”

  “Well, this ain’t Aladdin, smart guy,” Bob told Logan. Then he blew his nose into his sleeve.

  “I find it extremely difficult to believe that this . . . apparition . . . is actually a genie,” said Mrs. Walters. “Granting wishes is just a fantasy. Scientifically, it’s impossible.”

  “Yeah,” said Josh. “This could be some special effect. Like in the movies. Or maybe we’re hallucinating.”

  “If you’re really a genie, do something miraculous,” I said.

  “How about I turn one of you brats into a frog?” Bob suggested.

  “That would be cool,” said David.

  About a second later, Genie Bob whirled around and pointed his finger at David, who disappeared in a puff of smoke. On the desk where David was sitting, there was a big cockroach. Everybody screamed.

  “Where’s David!?” yelled Mrs. Walters. “What did you do to him?”

  “Kill it!” shouted Christopher. “There’s a roach in the class!”

  “No! Don’t!” yelled Ella. “Genie Bob turned David into a cockroach! Oh man, his mom is gonna be upset!”

  “I thought you said you were going to turn him into a frog,” said Alyssa.

  “I changed my mind,” said Genie Bob. “I’m in a bad mood today.”

  “You change that cockroach back into a boy this very minute!” scolded Mrs. Walters.

  “Okay, okay,” Genie Bob said. “Sheesh. Lighten up, teach.”

  A second later, the cockroach disappeared in a puff of smoke. Instead of the cockroach, on the desk where the cockroach had been sitting, was David.

  “David!” Mrs. Walters shouted as she hugged him. “Are you all right?”

  “That was cool!” David said.

  “I guess you really are a Christmas genie,” said Mrs. Walters.

  “You’re darn tootin’, sister,” said Genie Bob.

  “So we get to make a wish?” Natalie asked. “Any wish we want?”

  “Si,” said Bob. “Oui. Affirmative. Yes.”

  “Well, here’s my wish,” Logan said. “I wish for a million wishes. Ha! So there!”

  Genie Bob glared at Logan. I thought he might turn him into a cockroach too, or something even worse.

  “Ya think you’re pretty clever, eh, punk?”

  Genie Bob said. “Ya think I never heard that one before? You think I just fell off the turnip truck, pal? Look, this ain’t no negotiation. This ain’t no game show. I make the rules around here. You get one wish and that’s it. Take it or leave it.”

  “We’ll take it!” we all shouted. “We’ll take it!”

  “Now you’re showing some smarts,” said Genie Bob. “Okay, here are the ground rules. Ya get a wish. Anything ya want. But here’s the catch. I need your answer in one hour, because I can’t hang around with you chumps all day. I got things to do.”

  “You’ve been trapped in a meteorite for thirteen million light years,” Ella said. “What’s your rush?”

  “None of your beeswax,” said Genie Bob. “I got people to see, places to go. I’ll give you one hour. Think you can come up with a wish in an hour?”

  “Sure!” we all said.

  “Good,” Genie Bob said. “Because if you don’t, I’m gonna cancel your Christmas vacation.”

  “You can’t do that!” Josh said.

  “No?” Genie Bob asked. “I turned your friend here into a cockroach, didn’t I? Canceling a vacation would be a piece of cake. So make it snappy. Choose it or lose it.”

  I looked over at the clock on the wall. It was 1:50. We had until just before dismissal to come up with a wish.

  “We need to be fair about this,” Mrs. Walters said, walking over to her desk. “I’m going to pass out an index card for every student in the class. Think it over and write down your wish. Then we’ll look over all the wishes together and decide as a class which one makes the most sense. Does that sound fair to everyone?”

  “Yes,” we all agreed.

  I’ll tell you, Mrs. Walters can find a way to turn anything into an assignment.

  As she walked around the room passing out index cards, I thought about my wish. If I could have anything in the world, what would I want? There are so many things I wish I had. It’s hard to narrow it down to a
single wish.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Bob said. “Remember the old saying—be careful what ya wish for.”

  And then he let out a weird, otherworldly laugh.

  PART TWO During

  This was a very important decision, maybe the most crucial decision we would make in our entire lives. I looked at my blank index card and started to put together a list in my head of all the things I wish I had. . . .

  • A new video game system

  • And a bunch of cool games to go with it, of course

  • A snowboard

  • A new bike (I left my old one out in the rain and it got all rusted.)

  • A robot that would clean my room

  • The Cubs winning the World Series . . .

  This was going to be hard! There was so much stuff I wanted. How could I choose just one thing? But then I thought of the perfect wish, the wish that would make all the other wishes come true. I wrote it down. . . .

  WISH #1:

  I WISH I HAD ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD.

  Nice wish, huh? If I had all the money in the world, I would live like a king. I could buy every video game that existed. I’d buy all the snowboards and bikes and robots I wanted. I’d buy the Cubs, and then I’d buy all the best players in the game so the Cubs would finally win the World Series. The people of Chicago would love me!

  I’d buy my own private jet so I could go wherever I wanted and not have to wait at the airport and go through security and all that stuff. I’d buy a new house for my parents, because my brother and I have to share a bedroom which really stinks, especially when he snores.

  It would be great to have all the money in the world. I couldn’t imagine that anybody could come up with a better wish.

  Mrs. Walters collected up all the index cards and put them in a big bowl. Hannah was the last one to turn in her card. She just kept writing and writing until everybody started yelling at her to hurry up. Finally she turned her card in. Mrs. Walters swished the cards all around with her hand, closed her eyes, and pulled one out of the bowl.

  As it happened, it was mine! Mrs. Walters read it out loud to the class.

  “That would be cool to have all the money in the world,” David said.

  “You could buy anything,” said Abigail. “Anything you wanted.”

  “That’s the idea,” I said.

  “Yeah, let’s go with that one,” Matthew said. “What’s the point of wishing for anything else? We’re ready.”

  “So that’s your wish?” said Genie Bob. “That was fast. Ya sure ya don’t wanna think it over a little?”

  “Yup,” I said. “That’s what we want. All the money in the world.”

  “Is that your final answer?” asked Genie Bob.

  “Wait!” said Mia from the back row. “Can I just say one thing? If you had all the money in the world, Chase, a lot of people would want to rob you. Did you think of that?”

  “So what?” I said. “If I had all the money in the world, I could build an electric fence around my gigantic mansion. Anybody who tried to rob me would get the shock of their life.”

  Mia is a pain. No matter how good things are, she can always find some bad news. That’s why Alex and I call her “the wet blanket” behind her back.

  “You wouldn’t be able to go out in public, you know,” said Mia.

  “Who needs to go out in public?” I said. “If I needed anything, I’d send my flunkies out to get it for me.”

  “So you would just stay home all the time, Chase?” asked Mrs. Walters.

  “Sure, why not?” I said. “My house would have every video game and movie in the world. I’d have a cool game room, my own skate park, a food court, a swimming pool—”

  “Even so, I think it would be boring to stay home all the time,” Ashley said.

  “You know, it just occurred to me that if one person had all the money in the world,” said Natalie, “then nobody else in the world will have any money at all.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Logan. “Duh!”

  “But if nobody else had any money, you wouldn’t be able to buy anything,” Natalie said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “How could a store stay open if they didn’t have any money?” asked Natalie. “They couldn’t buy any stuff to sell to people. They’d have no inventory.”

  “Natalie makes a good point,” said Mrs. Walters. “All the restaurants would have to close too, because they couldn’t buy any food.”

  “And if you went into a store to buy something, they wouldn’t be able to give you change,” Natalie said, “because you’d have all the money in the world.”

  “If I had all the money in the world,” I said, “why would I need change?”

  “The point is, there would be no stores,” said Mia. “No McDonald’s. No Wal-Mart. No Staples. No malls. No nothing. They’d all go out of business.”

  “No Abercrombie & Fitch?” asked Abigail, visibly upset. “No Hollister? No Aéropostale? Where will I go to shop?”

  “You couldn’t shop,” said Alyssa. “There would be no stores. Chase would have all the money. You’d have to make your own clothes.”

  “The whole economy would collapse,” said Mia. “Your money would become worthless pieces of paper. We would have to go back to living off the land, the way people did thousands of years ago.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” I admitted.

  Maybe having all the money in the world wasn’t such a great idea after all. Hmmm, this wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought it would be.

  “So you’ve changed your mind, Chase?” asked Mrs. Walters.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Wait a minute!” Genie Bob said. “The kid had a good wish. You should go with all the money in the world, so I can get out of here.”

  “You said we have an hour,” Mrs. Walters said, “so be quiet!”

  Bob made a hmmph noise and shot a mean look at Mrs. Walters.

  “How about just wishing for a pot of gold buried in your backyard?” suggested Alex.

  “Then you would have to dig it up,” Ella said. “Why not just wish for a pot of gold in your living room?”

  “Let’s not be so hasty,” Mrs. Walters said. “Let’s see what the rest of you wished for.”

  “Fine,” said Genie Bob, looking at the clock impatiently, “Sheesh, I bet Santa Claus doesn’t have to put up with this aggravation.”

  Mrs. Walters pulled another index card out of the bowl.

  WISH #2:

  I WISH I HAD A MILLION DOLLARS.

  “That was mine!” said Abigail, who sits in the middle of the room.

  I couldn’t believe Abigail wished for a million dollars. She lives in this huge house and her parents give her every stupid piece of jewelry and junk she wants. They must be millionaires ten times over already.

  “Well, that seems a little more reasonable,” Mrs. Walters said. “A million dollars is also a lot of money, but it would still leave a lot more money for the rest of the people in the world. To be honest, though, wishing for money seems a bit . . . shallow . . . to me.”

  “I’m shallow,” William said quickly. “I wish I had a million dollars. Let’s go with that.”

  “Great!” said Genie Bob, clapping his little genie hands together.

  “What do you mean, let’s go with that?” said Hannah. “It’s not your decision, William! It’s our decision. We should have a class vote before we decide on anything.”

  “That makes sense,” Mrs. Walters said. “All those in favor of wishing for a million dollars, raise your hand.”

  About half the class raised their hands.

  “And all those opposed, raise your hand.”

  The other half raised their hands.

  “Wait a minute,” Ella said. “If we wish for a million dollars, who gets the money?”

  “I do, of course,” said Abigail. “It was my wish.”

  “I just thought of something. The wish was for us,” Elizabeth said
. “All of us. Isn’t that right?”

  “Ya get one wish,” Genie Bob replied. “What ya do with it is your business.”

  “It’s not fair if we wish for a million dollars and Abigail gets to keep it all,” said Matthew.

  “That’s right,” said Logan.

  “What if we divided the million dollars equally between all of you?” Mrs. Walters suggested. “That would be fair, wouldn’t it?”

  I rushed to take out my calculator. So did everybody else. 1,000,000 . . . divided by 25 kids in the class . . . equals . . . 40,000.

  “Forty grand?” I said, disappointed. “That can’t be right.”

  “It’s right,” Isabella said. “I got the same answer.”

  “Forty thousand dollars doesn’t seem like so much,” Abigail said.

  “What are you talking about?” said Anthony. “You can buy a lot of stuff with forty thousand bucks.”

  “You can’t buy a house,” Olivia said. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Walters? Houses cost a lot more than forty thousand dollars.”

  “That’s true,” Mrs. Walters said.

  “My parents paid almost a million dollars for our house,” Abigail bragged.

  “None of us even needs a house,” said Isabella. “We all have a place to live as it is.”

  “How about a car?” Christopher said. “Can you buy a car for forty thousand dollars?”

  “Absolutely,” Mrs. Walters said. “You can buy a very nice car.”

  “Can you buy a Lamborghini?” asked Christopher.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Walters said. “I think that might cost a lot more.”

  “Then forget it,” Christopher said. “That’s the car I want. A Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder. That car rocks.”

  “We can’t drive for, like, five years anyway,” said Ella. “Why should we want a car?”

  “Yeah, what’s the point of wishing for something if you have to wait years to get it?” Olivia said.

  “Because cars are cool,” said David.

  “I don’t even like cars,” said Hannah. “Cars cause global warming. Especially those sports cars and SUVs.”

  “Oh, here we go,” said Logan. “Save-the-world time.”