Make A Wish

• Cameron Dodds, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2012

Pete was awoken by a sharp, high pitched yell, it was three in the morning, and his little sister… hadn’t changed overnight, sadly. It was a tired Pete who got ready for school, and walked to school. He was so tired that several different cars ended up screeching to a halt as he walked in front of them, too tired to care.

He found school hard already, but with only four hours sleep it was even worse. In English, working was like swimming through honey, and maths was like swimming in solidified cement. He didn’t do any work in maths and ended up sleeping through the first half of the lesson, which was until the teacher yelled in his ear.

The teacher in question, Miss Vinson, looked exactly like a nice teacher should, and when she had first walked into the classroom the whole class had relaxed. However after the first five minutes had passed they were all firmly convinced of her evil.
She was a short woman, but her shouting had left a ringing in the ears of her classes that hadn’t stopped. Not to mention how old-fashioned she was, she always brought a blackboard and some chalk into class with her. The whole class had to struggle to read the grainy, partially disfigured words, other wise she would yell and give detentions, and her handwriting only made it harder. Anyway, Pete got a full week’s worth of detentions for what she called, “not paying attention and distracting the class,” but Pete was too tired to care.

By the time he arrived home that afternoon he was pretty much dead o his feet, and wishing that his life did not involve a noisy three year old sister. The next day though, there was no screeching sister with the day chorus, no loud noises at three in the morning, in fact Pete slept in until about ten thirty a.m. But he wasn’t comfortable enough to sleep any longer than that, his bed was not under him, he was lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. Embarrassed, Pete glanced around, there was no one there, luckily, so he got up off the tiles, and went about making breakfast as normally as he could. He grabbed a tin of spaghetti, humming the SPC jingle as he did so, and also brushing against the weird metal teapot his mother kept cinnamon in.

Suddenly there was a loud explosion, rocking the house, and when the smoke cleared Pete was no longer alone. There was another boy in the house; this boy was completely ordinary, apart from the strong smell of cinnamon, unlike Pete, who looked classically eccentric. This strange boy then said the strangest thing Pete would ever hear, not to mention the person asking it. “Well I suppose you’d better stop gawping and make a wish, then put me in the nutmeg bottle would you; if I ever smell cinnamon again I shall slit my wrists.” This question took Pete completely by surprise; he was so surprised that he fainted, enlarging his eccentric image tenfold.

However when Pete awoke, the other boy was still there, grinning at him, “Are you going to make a wish yet?” he asked, seemingly not at all put out by Pete fainting. So Pete wished for what we all wish for when we haven’t thought about it much, he wished for tons and tons of money. Suddenly several dozen large cases, of what, when Pete checked, he found to be hundred dollar notes. Just as he was starting to work out where to store them, and how to explain them to his parents, sirens sounded in the street outside his house. Police swarmed into the front yard, and the door was broken down. The cases were checked, and Pete was pinned to the floor, a gun was found in the pocket of what had suddenly become dark clothes. As he was led away, several other boys, dressed similarly to how he suddenly was were led away from the same room as he. He was certain he’d never seen them before, but he knew their names, likes and dislikes, and even remembered stealing the money alongside them, which he also remembered, had never happened.