Read Online The Wish by Gail Carson Levine - Free Book Online

faced out, so everybody who passed by could see me. I hadn’t thought about that when Jared was sitting here. I felt like a spotlight in the sky was focused on me. My face heated up. If I fainted, Antoinette would just draw me sideways, with my tongue hanging out.
    She held out the pencil again.
    â€œWhy do you do that?” I asked, to delay things. Maybe she’d talk and forget about drawing.
    â€œExplanations aren’t included in the price.”
    Jared laughed.
    â€œI do it to compare the length and width of your face.”
    She started drawing. I started panicking. What was she doing? Was she already turning me into a joke?
    â€œAre you all right, Wilma?” Jared said.
    I pasted on a smile. “I’m fine. How does it look?”
    Antoinette didn’t seem to mind if her victim talked. She went on drawing.
    â€œShe hasn’t done much yet.” Then he added, “Wait. That’s good.” He grinned. “She just put in your shoulders.”
    What was wrong with my shoulders? I forced myself not to dash to the easel and tear off the page with poor mutilated me on it.
    A few centuries passed. I sat. People walked by, looked, did not gasp, and walked on. A woman and her son, about nine, stopped and watched. The boy stuck his teeth out at me.
    Oh no. My big beaver teeth. I clamped my lips together, but I was sure it was too late.
    Antoinette stood back from the caricature and studied it. “You’re done. I outdid myself.”
    I jumped up and zoomed to the other side of the easel.
    The first thing I saw was my teeth, popping out of my mouth, big and squared off as piano keys. My whole face receded behind those teeth, except for my lips, which smiled insanely around my bicuspids and incisors and molars and fangs and tusks.
    Then I saw my shoulders. In themselves they were fine. But they cradled my head. No neck. None. My head was like a golf ball resting on a tee. Like an egg in the palm of your hand. Like a horror movie.
    Jared’s voice got through. “—super. It’s even better than mine. Don’t you love it?”
    I nodded. Yes, I don’t love it. I hated it.
    â€œNever before in history,” Jared said. “There’s never . . .”
    If Ripley saw this, he’d put me in a museum.
    â€œ. . . been a popular girl before who would do this, who wouldn’t be too scared of how she’d look. The most popular kid at Claverford. No wonder.”
    He was serious. He actually liked me better than before, and he thought other kids would too. I was totally confused.
    Â 
    We left the park. Jared took my hand again, and we walked along Central Park South. He was going to walk me to my apartment and then get the subway home. We went a block or so without talking. I was thinking about how I didn’t act popular. Like I should have turned Jared down when he asked me to the zoo, and I shouldn’t be holding hands with him, and I definitely should have said no about the caricature.
    â€œWilma . . .”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œCould we trade caricatures? You can have mine if I can have yours.”
    I took my drawing out of its envelope. Suppose it weren’t me? If it weren’t me, then I’d think the smile was insane but infectious, and the eyes, although they were too small, were friendly. And the face itself was heart shaped, which would have been pretty if you could ignore the teeth and the lack of neck, which of course you couldn’t. But on the real me, you might be able to, if you tried.
    â€œCould we?”
    I should give it to him, since he liked it. But now I didn’t want to part with it. I was getting to enjoy it too.
    â€œLet me see yours again,” I said.
    He showed me. This time I liked his. It was just a joke. It wasn’t mean. Jared’s face was good-natured under the attic of his forehead.
    â€œDo you think we could find a copy place open on a Sunday?” I asked.