But the closet was empty too. And only Max’s clothes were hanging up inside.
Max ran into the hall, opening the nearest door. Behind it he should have found Elfie and Elsie’s room. Instead, there was what looked like a home office. No posters on the walls. No clothes and sporting equipment all over the floor. No twins yelling at him to get out.
“This isn’t funny anymore,” Max said as he checked Arthur’s room and found a generic-looking guest room instead of his baby brother’s nursery. He shut the door and ran down the stairs. His parents, still in the living room, looked at him, startled.
“What’s with all the yelling?” his father asked.
“You can stop pretending,” Max said. “I’m sorry I wrote the wish about wanting to be an only child. I was just angry.”
His parents looked at each other. For a moment, Max felt his hopes rise. Any second now they would turn to him and tell him that everything was okay, that they had only been trying to teach him a lesson about appreciating his family. And he had learned his lesson. He did appreciate them. Now he needed them to tell him the game was over.
But when they looked back at him, their expressions were ones of worry. “I really think you might be coming down with a fever,” his mother said, standing up and walking over to him. She placed her hand on his forehead.
Max swatted it away. “I don’t have a fever!” he said. “Now stop pretending! Go back to being like you were before.”
“Before?” his father said. “Before what?”
“Before I—” Max started. Then he stopped. Before I made my wish, he thought to himself. And that gave him an idea. “Nothing,” he said. “I guess I don’t feel so great. I’m going to go lie down.”
He went back to his room. Going to his desk, he took out a pen and paper and wrote out a new wish: I WISH I HAD NEVER BOUGHT THE WISH EATER. He folded the paper up, then picked up the Wish Eater. Turning the key to open its mouth, he placed the paper on the wooden tongue and closed the mouth again. Then he set the Wish Eater on his bedside table.
It was too early to go to bed, so he tried to distract himself by reading comic books. But every minute or two he found himself glancing over at the Wish Eater, as if maybe he could catch it in the act of chewing up his wish and swallowing it. Every time, though, it was just sitting there, unmoving.
It’s not alive, he reminded himself. It’s just a piece of wood.
Except that wasn’t true. If the Wish Eater was just a piece of wood or whatever, his wish would have never come true. But it had. Which meant that the Wish Eater really was magic. And that made Max very nervous.
A little while later, his mother brought him some dinner. Fortunately, it was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and not sushi. Max ate it, staring at the Wish Eater the whole time, imagining the sandwich was his wish. He hoped the Wish Eater would eat too and that in the morning its mouth would be empty.
Finally, it was late enough to go to bed. Max was so anxious about what would happen with his wish that he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. He lay in the dark, wondering if the Wish Eater was silently chewing, or when it would decide whether or not to eat his wish. A couple times he almost turned the light on to check, but he worried that it might keep the magic from happening.
Eventually, he could no longer keep his eyes open and fell asleep. When he woke up, the first thing he did was look for the Wish Eater.
It was gone.
Max jumped out of bed. He looked all around the nightstand, in case the Wish Eater had somehow gotten knocked off it during the night. It was nowhere to be found. His heart beating excitedly, he ran out of his room and down the stairs, not caring if he woke anyone up. In fact, he hoped he did wake everyone up, because he suddenly couldn’t wait to see his brothers and sisters again. He dashed into the kitchen.
“Good morning!” he said cheerfully. “What’s for—”
He stopped in his tracks. The kitchen was totally empty. There were no Elfie and Elsie bickering over which one of them was the better pitcher. No Charlie spilling his orange juice. No Arthur refusing to eat his scrambled eggs unless someone made the choo-choo sound and pretended the fork was a train and his mouth was a tunnel. No anything.
Max turned around and went back upstairs. This time, he noticed that the photos on the wall were the same ones that were there yesterday, showing just him and his parents. He also noticed that all the bedrooms were still empty, and that the other bed in his room was still made up as if nobody had slept in it in a long, long time. He didn’t have to open the dresser drawers to know that they still held only his things.
He looked at the spot on his bedside table where the Wish Eater had been sitting the night before. Obviously, it had eaten his wish and granted it. It was like he had never bought it. But the Wish Eater hadn’t changed everything back to how it was before.
It wasn’t fair. If he had never bought the Wish Eater, then the wish he’d made should never have been granted.
Unless, of course, the Wish Eater hadn’t granted his wish. Maybe it hadn’t disappeared after all. Maybe someone had taken it.
He hurried down the hall to his parents’ bedroom. They were just getting up.
“Did you take anything out of my room last night?” he asked.
“Take anything?” his mother repeated. “Just your dirty socks, to put in the laundry. Why?”
“Nothing else?” Max said. “You’re sure?”
“Is something missing?” his father asked.
“A toy,” Max said. “A set of, um, teeth. It was sitting on my bedside table.”
His father and mother both shook their heads.
Max sighed. “It’s the toy I got at the store the other day,” he said to his mother. “You remember it, right?”
His mother shook her head. “We didn’t get anything but the vase for Aunt Maxine,” she said.
“Not at the Gingerbread House,” Max said. “At the other store. Frightville.” Surely, he thought, his mother would remember the store filled with strange things.
“I think I’d remember a store with a name like that,” his mother said. “Are you sure you didn’t maybe dream about it?”
Max was about to argue with her that they had gone to Frightville, and that she had bought him the Wish Eater. Then he remembered—if his wish really had come true, and he had never bought the Wish Eater, then she couldn’t remember it because it had never happened.
“Maybe,” he said. “I mean, yeah, that must be it. I think I saw this thing in the window and wanted to go in, but we didn’t.”
“Tell you what,” his father said. “Why don’t we go over there today and have a look around? Maybe that thing you saw will still be there.”
Max nodded. That was actually exactly what he wanted to do, to see if the Wish Eater was still on the shelf at Frightville. Now he didn’t have to figure out a way to get there.
“I’ll be down in a minute to make breakfast,” his mother said, putting on her bathrobe. “We can go over after that, okay?”
“Thanks,” Max said, leaving their bedroom and walking back to his own room. Just to make sure, he checked once again for the Wish Eater, finding nothing. It made sense to him that if he had never bought it, his mother wouldn’t remember going into the store and buying it for him. But why did he remember it? If she had forgotten all about it, shouldn’t he have forgotten too?