Wishes Read Online Free

didn’t. I just wanted him to love me more.
    My eyes stung. Don’t be a baby, I told myself. Just because he’s not obsessed with you doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you at all.
    But my pep talk to myself wasn’t doing any good. Sensible or not, Peter should have been in the woods with me. He should have been looking after me. He should have cared about me more than he did.
    I reached into the pocket of my jacket for a tissue and pulled out the little box I’d found.
    Sniffing self-pityingly, I turned the box around in my hands. In the light, I could see that it was really beautiful—translucent, shimmering with every color in the rainbow. Its tiny lid, no more than an inch across, fitted so perfectly that no light shone between it and the body of the box. I placed it on the table and then carefully lifted the lid, admiring its exquisite craftsmanship.
    I was thinking about wrapping it up and giving it to Gram next Christmas when I noticed that the box wasn’t really empty, as I’d thought. There was a leaf or something inside. Certainly no treasure, but it was surprising that anything at all could have squeezed beneath that perfectly constructed lid. I pried it out with my fingernail. Then, frowning, I laid it on the table in front of me.
    It wasn’t a leaf at all, as it turned out, but something that looked like the contents of a Chinese fortune cookie. Or it would have, if fortune cookie fortunes were printed on paper as delicate and transparent as the wing of a dragonfly.
    I held it to the light, careful to keep it far enough from my face that my breath wouldn’t blow it away. And then I saw it: writing. It was a fortune-cookie fortune, but written so small that I had to get out Gram’s magnifying glass to read it.
    A fortune? I wondered as I tried to make out the words. Was I going to meet a tall dark stranger? Or would it be one of those sayings that nobody ever wants, like that there is no I in “ team” ? Worse yet, what if it said something like “Will you marry me?” I mean, that was possible. Someone had evidently dropped this box. There may have been a ring inside it, and a proposal. Now everything was lost to whoever had planned a romantic evening in the woods and ended up with a pocket full of nothing.
    But it wasn’t any of those. When I finally got the magnifying glass lined up right, the only words on the paper were these:
    Your wish will come true.
    Ugh, a saying ! The worst! Crap, crap, crap !
    Realizing I’d been holding my breath, I sighed as I tossed the so-called fortune back into the box. The night had been a bust from beginning to end.
    Well, what had I expected, I told myself. That was life—senseless hopes followed by inevitable disappointments. Boyfriends who’d rather work than hang out with you. Friends who ran away when you needed them. There were no fairies, no treasure. Just one boring day after another.
    I quaffed the rest of my hot chocolate, turned out the light, and went to bed.

4.
    I awoke to the aromas of bacon and toast. Gram was in the kitchen scrambling eggs. A bandage was on her wrist.
    “Katy, dear,” she said, flashing me the big showgirl smile that made her wrinkled face always look so fresh. “Hungry?”
    I shrugged. “I guess,” I said, still depressed from the night before. “What happened to your arm?”
    “The Creature,” she said, jerking her head toward the cast-iron stove. “I didn’t move fast enough.”
    “You ought to get rid of that thing,” Aunt Agnes said from the bottom of the stairs, where she’d magically appeared. Even though it was early in the morning, she was dressed in a pretty flowered floor-length gown.
    “Goodness, Agnes, how lovely you look,” Gram said.
    Agnes blushed furiously. “I just wanted to see if the dress still fit,” she mumbled.
    Gram and I both tried not to laugh. Agnes had only bought the gown a week before, and had kept it hanging over the door in her room since then, covered with rose-scented