by Mike Ford
“This is so great,” Ji-woo said. “You’ll be the first boy on the squad.”
Max looked at the three girls. “There must be some mistake,” he said. “I didn’t try—”
Tamyra kicked him in the leg.
“Ow!” Max said, looking at her. “What was that for?”
“It’s my wish,” Tamyra hissed in his ear.
“Our first practice is this afternoon,” said Pihu. “That’s when you’ll get your pom-poms.”
“Pom-poms?” Max said.
Amber produced a pair of pom-poms in the school colors of blue and gold. She waved them in Max’s face. “Goooooo Badgers!” she shouted, then twirled around.
Ji-woo and Pihu also shrieked, “Go Badgers!” They looked expectantly at Max.
“Oh,” he said. “Go Badgers?”
Pihu frowned. “More energy,” she said.
“Go Badgers!” Max shouted, earning himself looks from all the kids in the hallway.
“Better,” Pihu said. “I can’t wait to see your herkie.”
“My what?” Max asked as the three girls ran off, giggling and waving their pom-poms. He turned to Tamyra and scowled.
“I might have made one tiny little extra wish,” Tamyra said.
“To be on the cheer team?” said Max.
“I figured it wouldn’t hurt,” Tamyra said. “My other wishes all turned out bad, and I wanted something good to happen.”
Max groaned.
“The good news is, no one is mad at me anymore,” Tamyra said. “So that part turned out okay.”
“We’ve got to fix this,” Max said. “And fast. I can’t be on the cheer squad.”
“Why not?” said Tamyra, putting her hands on her hips. “Because you think it’s just for girls?”
“No,” Max said. “Because I’m totally uncoordinated. Haven’t you ever seen me try to dance?”
“Actually, I have,” said Tamyra. “At Tanner Bexler’s birthday party. It wasn’t pretty.”
“Exactly,” Max said. “And now they want to see my herkie. What even is that?”
“It’s a cheer move,” Tamyra said. “Where you—”
“I don’t want to know!” Max interrupted. “Because I’m not doing it. We’re going to fix this. All of it. We’re going to get rid of your new brothers and sisters, and I’m not going to be on the cheer squad.”
Tamyra looked sad.
“What?” said Max.
“It sounds so weird when you say it like that,” Tamyra said. “Getting rid of my brothers and sisters. I mean, I know they’re not supposed to be here. But they are. If we wish them away, what happens to them?”
Max thought about it. But he didn’t know either. And now that Tamyra had brought it up, it did sound kind of horrible. The new Elfie, Elsie, Charlie, and Arthur were real people. At least, he thought they were.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said as the first bell rang and everybody rushed to get to their homerooms.
The problem was, he had no idea how.
“Good overhead clasp, Amber,” Coach Digmore said.
She walked down the line, scrutinizing each person’s form as they worked through a series of poses she’d taught them during the first part of practice. She stopped in front of Max and gave him a steely stare. “Daggers!” she barked.
Max straightened his back and brought his arms up, his elbows at his waist and his fists touching his shoulders. He waited for Coach Digmore to tell him he was doing it wrong.
“Not bad,” she said, nodding approvingly. She blew the whistle that hung from a cord around her neck. “Take five,” she said. “When we come back, we’re doing it all with poms.”
The squad gathered around Max, patting him on the back.
“You’re doing great,” Amber assured him.
“Thanks,” Max said. “It’s harder than it looks.”
“Right?” Ji-woo said. “My brother and his buddies on the football team think all we do is jump around and make up cheers. He has no idea. Wait until they all see another guy doing what we do.”
Max didn’t say anything. He hoped nobody would ever see him doing this. If he finally wished correctly, and the Wish Eater granted it, it would be Tamyra on the squad and he would have his brothers and sisters back. But given how things had worked out so far, those were two big ifs. The Wish Eater seemed to play by its own rules, and the rules kept changing. He and Tamyra had arranged to meet at her house after school and sort their wishes out once and for all.
First, though, he had to make it through cheer squad practice. Coach Digmore came back, carrying a big cardboard box, which she set on the gym floor. All the girls who were new to the squad rushed over, reaching in and grabbing pairs of pom-poms.
“Come on, Max,” the coach called. “Get your poms.”
Max walked reluctantly over to the box and pulled out two of the fluffy bundles of plastic strips.
“Now shake ’em!” Coach Digmore ordered.
Max lifted the pom-poms up and rustled them. Strings of plastic got in his mouth.
“They’re not a snack, Max,” Ji-woo joked as the others laughed.
“Okay, squad,” Coach Digmore said. “Back in line. Our first game is Friday night, and we’ve got to be ready.”
For the next hour, Max and the rest of the squad ran through their moves. By the end of practice, Max was exhausted. When the coach blew her whistle, he gratefully stuffed his pom-poms into his backpack and headed for the doors.
“Good work today, Max,” the coach called after him. “We’ll have you doing cupies in no time.”
“Can’t wait!” Max called back.
Fifteen minutes later, he was in Tamyra’s bedroom.
“What’s a cupie?” he asked, as he opened his backpack and took out the Wish Eater. The pom-poms came with it, landing on the floor.
Tamyra picked the pom-poms up and waved them sadly. “It’s a cheer stunt where you toss a flyer into the air.”
“I am not getting tossed,” Max said firmly.
“Don’t worry,” said Tamyra. “The flyer is always the smallest person. You’ll be a base.”
Max raised an eyebrow.
“One of the people who tosses the flyer,” Tamyra explained. She set the pom-poms on the bed and sighed. “I’d love to be a flyer.”
Max held up the Wish Eater. “If we wish right, you might be,” he reminded her.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Tamyra said. “First, I think we need to do one wish at a time. Making two wishes backfired big-time.”
Max nodded in agreement. “So, which thing do we undo first?” he asked. “The extra and missing brothers and sisters, or this cheer squad business?”
Before Tamyra could answer, Charlie appeared in the doorway. He was carrying Arthur. “What are you guys doing?” he asked.
“Just something for school,” Tamyra said.
“Can we play too?” Charlie asked.
“We’re not playing,” said Tamyra. “Why don’t you go watch a video?”
“Catterbox!” Arthur exclaimed. He pointed his little hand at the Wish Eater and waved it excitedly.
“What?” Tamyra said.
“Catterbox!” Arthur said again.
“I think he means Chatterbox,” said Max. “He’s a dragon in a TV show. The Enchanted Castle. Arthur—my Arthur—loves it. Chatterbox has teeth that look like the Wish Eater’s. They chatter when he’s nervous, which he always is.”
Arthur wriggled in Charlie’s arms. Charlie set him down, and the little boy ran into the room, holding out his hands. “Catterbox!”
“This isn’t a toy,” Tamyra said, holding the Wish Eater out of his reach.
Arthur screwed up his face. A moment later, he began to wail. Tamyra looked at Max. “I’ve never had a little brother,” she said. “What do we do?”
Max looked around the room. Spying the pom-poms on Tamyra’s bed, he picked them up. He held them to his chest, then thrust them out and wiggled them around. “Huffle-
puffle,” he chanted. “Huffle-puffle. Badgers stomp and badgers snuffle.”
It was one of the cheer squad’s chants. Coach Digmore had handed out a sheet of them at practice, and Max had glanced over the words. Now he tried to recall them as he moved his hands into a high touchdown formation and grunted like he imagined a badger might.
Arthur stopped crying and sat down on the floor. He clapped his hands happily and laughed. Max lowered the pom-poms, and the little boy frowned.
“Do it again!” Tamyra said.
Max repeated the chant, stomping and snuffling as he waved the pom-poms in the air. Arthur laughed so hard that he fell over. Even Charlie and Tamyra were giggling wildly by the time Max was done.
“That’s so great,” Tamyra said. “I can’t wait to see you do that in front of the whole school.”
“Well, you won’t get the chance,” Max said. “Unless you want to make a wish about You Know What,” he added, looking meaningfully at Charlie and Arthur.
“We can do your wish first,” Tamyra said. She went to her desk and took out some paper and crayons. Sitting on the floor, she gave a sheet of paper and some of the crayons to Arthur. He took a purple crayon and started scribbling on the paper. Charlie, having lost interest in what Max and Tamyra were doing, wandered off.
Max watched Arthur draw.
“This must be really weird for you,” Tamyra said.
Max nodded. “For you too,” he said.
Tamyra shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I’m kind of getting used to them.”
“Even Elfie and Elsie?” Max asked.
Tamyra laughed. “Even them,” she said.
Max took one of the sheets of paper. “What should I wish?” he asked.
“What if you say something like ‘I wish my life was the way it was before I bought the Wish Eater and made my first wish’?” Tamyra suggested.
“That seems too easy,” said Max.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No,” Max admitted. He wrote the wish down on the paper, then tore off the piece with the words on it and folded it up. He took the Wish Eater and placed the paper in its mouth, then set it on the floor. “Do you mind keeping this here tonight?” he asked Tamyra. “I don’t want to be tempted to change my wish, or keep checking on it. Besides, if everything works out, you’ll need it next anyway.”
“Sure,” Tamyra said. “And I have a feeling that this time it will work out.”
“I hope so,” Max said. “The first assembly is Friday, and I do not want the entire school to see my herkie.”
The first thing Max noticed when he woke up was that it was pitch-dark. He thought it must still be nighttime. But he wasn’t tired, and something about the darkness seemed artificial, as if the windows in his room had been covered up. Then he reached out his hand to turn on the bedside light and touched something soft. He felt around some more and realized that his bed was surrounded by velvet curtains.
He pushed the curtain closest to him aside and discovered that it was indeed morning. And although he was in a bedroom, it wasn’t his bedroom. For one thing, this bedroom was round. Also, it was made of stone. The floor. The walls. The ceiling. All of it was made out of stone blocks. The windows were just holes in the stone walls, with no glass covering them, and a warm breeze wafted in.
Max sniffed. The air had a strange scent to it, like a burned-out match or a smoky campfire. Fearing that wherever he was might be on fire, he scrambled out of bed and ran to the window. Looking out, he gasped. He was in the tower of a castle. Spread below him was the rest of it, a sprawling pile of stones with more towers, a drawbridge, and a moat surrounding the whole thing. Beyond the castle were rolling green hills covered in flowers. A single, narrow dirt road wound through the hills to the front gate.
As he looked out the window, a huge shadow passed overhead, accompanied by another whiff of the peculiar smell. Max looked up and gasped again as a fat dragon with purple-and-blue scales swooped lazily over the top of the tower. It belched loudly, puffing out a stream of smoke.
“Chatterbox!” Max exclaimed.
He couldn’t believe it. The dragon from the TV show was flying around outside his window. And that could mean only one thing.
“We’re in the Enchanted Castle,” said a voice behind him.
He turned to see Charlie standing there. His Charlie. Not Tamyra’s Charlie. Max ran to his brother and gave him a big hug.
“Hey!” Charlie said. “What’s the big deal?”
“You’re back!” said Max.
“What do you mean back?” said Charlie, looking bewildered. “You just saw me last night when we went to bed.”
“But,” Max began. “Wait. You mean you’ve just been asleep this whole time?”
Charlie nodded. “I went to bed, and when I woke up, I was here. Where did you think I was?”
Max’s brain was racing. He still had no idea how the Wish Eater’s magic worked, but if what Charlie was saying was true, his brothers and sisters didn’t even know that they’d disappeared and been gone for almost a week.
“What I want to know is, how did we get here?” Charlie said, going to the window and looking out. “Is this, like, some kind of theme park? And how did we get here without waking up?”
“Have you seen the others?” Max asked him. “Elfie, Elsie, and Arthur?”
Charlie shook his head. “Wow,” he said. “That Chatterbox robot looks so real.”
“Come on,” Max said, going over and taking him by the hand. “We’ve got to find everybody else.”
He dragged Charlie out of the room and into a narrow corridor. They walked past a door to another bedroom (Max assumed this was where Charlie had woken up) and found themselves at the top of a staircase that spiraled down. Descending to the next level, they found two more bedrooms. They also found Elfie, Elsie, and Arthur.
“What’s going on?” Elfie asked when she saw her brothers. “Where are Mom and Dad?”
“Um, at breakfast, I think,” Max said, resisting the urge to hug them like he had Charlie.
Just then, Tamyra appeared, coming up the staircase from the next level. With her were the other Elfie, Elsie, Charlie, and Arthur. When they saw Max’s family, they stopped, all of them staring at one another.
“You look like us,” Max’s Charlie said.
“You look like us,” said Tamyra’s Charlie.
The two Elfies and two Elsies said nothing, but they stared at one another for a moment longer before saying “Cool!” all together, then giving each other high fives.
“We’ve never met other twins our age,” the two Elsies said simultaneously, then high-fived again.
The two Arthurs pointed to the window in the tower wall. “Catterbox!” they said.
Chatterbox the dragon was, in fact, hovering outside the tower, peering in at them with one big golden eye. His giant teeth started to chatter, clacking together nervously. Looking at them, Max was reminded of the Wish Eater.
“I think I know what happened,” he said. “Arthur—your Arthur—was drawing a picture while we were talking. I remember seeing him draw something that looked like Chatterbox.”
“Right,” Tamyra said. “And then he drew some people.”
“Elfie, Elsie, Charlie, and you,” Max said. “The whole family.”
“But how did that get us here?” Tamyra asked.
Max went over to Tamyra’s Arthur. “Arthur,” he said. “Did you do something with the picture you drew?”
Arthur laughed. “Fed it!” he said. “To Catterbox!”
Max turned to Tamyra. “He must have seen us put our wish inside the Wish Eater’s mouth. When we weren’t looking, he did the same thing with his picture.”
“Of course,” Tamyra said. “And the Wish Eater granted both wishes again. You got your brothers and sisters back, and Arthur brought all of us to meet Chatterbox.”
“What are you two talking about?” Max’s Elsie asked.
“Yeah,” said Tamyra’s Elsie. “
What’s all this about wishes?”
“It’s a long story,” Max told them. “And you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. The important thing is, how are we going to get out of here and back home?”
“Can’t Mom and Dad just drive us?” Max’s Elfie asked.
“Uh, it’s not that simple,” said Max. “Like I said, it’s a long story.”
“With!” the two Arthurs said. “Make a with!”
Max looked at Tamyra. “I don’t suppose the Wish Eater came along with you?”
“Nope,” Tamyra said. “As usual, it made up its own rules and sent us away. It’s probably still sitting on my desk back home.”
Max sighed. He looked out the window, where Chatterbox had given up spying on them and flown off. They were stuck inside a tower in the Enchanted Castle. “I don’t imagine anyone knows any spells to get us out of here,” he said.
“Wandsworth,” his Charlie said.
“Who?” said Max.
“Wandsworth the Worst,” said Tamyra’s Charlie. “He’s the wizard who lives in the Enchanted Castle.”
“Why is he the worst?” Tamyra asked.
“Because his spells mostly don’t work right,” her Charlie explained.
“Kind of like our wishes,” Tamyra said. “Well, unless someone has a better idea, I say we find this Wandsworth and see if he can help us. Where is he?”
The two Charlies looked at each other and grinned. “In the Dreary Dungeon.”
The Dreary Dungeon really was dreary. Located far beneath the Enchanted Castle, it was reached by a series of stone staircases below the kitchen. The stones were covered in slimy green moss, which was fed by water that dripped continuously from the low ceiling. The air grew colder and damper the deeper Max, Tamyra, and the others went, and even the lighted torches that were stuck into iron holders at regular intervals couldn’t make the place seem more cheerful. The two Elfies carried the two Arthurs, and the two Charlies led the way, since they were the ones who watched the TV show the most and knew where they were going.
Finally, they reached the bottom of the stairs and found themselves at a big wooden door. An iron knocker in the shape of a dragon’s head was in the center of the door. Max took hold of the ring the dragon held in its mouth and rapped it three times.
