The Wish

Chapter 1: Happy Birthday Henry

All eyes turned to Henry’s mom as she carried the cake to the table. In the dimly lit room, the thirteen candles glowed. Henry knew that underneath the white coconut-covered frosting he’d find his favorite dark chocolate cake. His mom always made his favorite on his birthday. She made chocolate chip for his sister and chocolate orange for his dad. Birthdays were always special at their house. And everyone in the family loved chocolate.

“Twelve plus one for good luck,” Grandpa James said. There was a slight hesitation between the word ‘good’ and the word ‘luck,’ but no one seemed to notice. It had taken almost the entire year, but now it was hard to tell that he’d ever had a stroke.

“Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Henry. Happy birthday to you,” everyone sang, more or less in unison.

“Make a wish Henry,” his dad said, “Make a fantastic wish.”

His mother placed the cake down in front of him and he took a deep breath. Things had been pretty good for the first few months of sixth grade. He was actually having fun with the whole ‘middle school’ schedule of classes. But he’d had a terrible time in fifth. His tics were noisy and the medication the doctor gave him made him so sleepy he kept dozing off during school. Worst of all, most of the kids teased him, and some of the teachers took their side.

“If you cluck like a chicken, Henry, they are going to call you names,” Ms. Stanford said.

“Maybe you should try a little self control?” Coach Adams suggested. “There are successful athletes with tics. Give it a try.”

Henry looked at his friends and family. These were the people who cared about him most — his best friend Gary, his uncle Dave, his aunt Judy, his cousin Mark, his sister Alice, his parents and most of all, his Grandpa, James. They were the people who never rejected him, not even when his Tourette Syndrome caused him to do the most embarrassing things.

There was the time he just couldn’t stop coughing at a movie theater with Uncle Dave and Mark. People turned around and scowled at him and then told his uncle to “quiet that boy or leave the theater.” There was the time his dad took him to work and he had to touch each and every pencil on every single desk. And the time he blurted out a curse word at Alice’s birthday party.

Everyone at the table understood and never made a fuss, but he knew that each and everyone of them would, given the chance, wish his TS was gone. No more

cursing, embarrassing coughing, or repeating weird movements over and over again. They would wish him free of his tics, and compulsions, so he wished as hard as he could and…

THEY WERE GONE!

Henry felt an odd tingling in his hands and feet. He cleared his throat and there was no compulsion to cough. He touched the table with his right hand and his left hand did not automatically fly to the table to ‘even out’ his feelings. He felt free. He felt wonderful. He felt changed. The TS was gone. And not just the TS, the obsessive compulsions, the jittery energy, the anxiety and all the other things that went along with his TS were suddenly, absolutely, gone!

Of course, everything had changed, too. He looked around the table and Gary wasn’t there. He was replaced with three kids from the softball team: Alan, Ed and Zack. Alice was still there, but she was UNDER the table, tying shoelaces together. His uncle, aunt and cousin were there and so were his parents, but Grandpa James was missing.

His family looked different. His mother was obviously worried as Alice’s hand tugged on the tablecloth from below.

“Who wants ice cream with the cake?” His dad asked and all the boys shouted, “Me, me, me!” Alice stuck her head out from under the tablecloth. “Me too!” She said. “I want ice cream with my cake! Me, me, me.”

“Alice, you have to come out from under the table. I won’t serve you dessert down there.” Mom didn’t hide the exasperation in her voice.

“Alice, right now. Out here!” Dad yelled.

He was angry, on the verge of losing his temper. He almost never lost his temper — and never with Alice. It only made her behavior worse. Everyone in the family knew how to handle Alice, but somehow they had forgotten.

Cousin Mark, who was almost sixteen, looked bored. Henry saw his cousin’s fingers, quickly sending text messages just below the sightline of the adults. Mark got up and wandered into the kitchen. Henry heard the back door clank shut as his older cousin went out into the back yard. It wasn’t like Mark to be that rude.

“See that,” Uncle Dave said to Henry’s dad (his brother-in-law). “He’s been like that since he turned thirteen. You have one more year before your kid doesn’t care what you think about anything.”

“Well, maybe that’s true for you, but not for me and Henry, right son?”

Henry looked up at his dad and smiled. But something felt off. He didn’t really want to smile and his lips curved into a smirk. Dad seems so nervous and defensive, not like his usual fun self. Why would he want to smile at his dad when he was so moody and strange?

Alice finally came out from under the table, and the cake and ice cream were served. Henry and his softball team friends took their plates down to the basement. They joked about kids at school and talked about how much they liked Coach Adams. Henry kept quiet.

“I’m so glad the Coach cut that idiot Jason from the lineup. He stinks!” Zack said, holding his hands spread out behind his ears. “Can’t have ‘Dumbo’ on our team, can we?”

“He could fly with those ears,” Alan laughed. “If he could fly around the bases it’d be OK, but those big ears weigh him down.”

They had mean nicknames for half the kids in their class, from ‘Susie the Giant Bug Eater’ — because she described lobsters as the cockroaches of the ocean in a science presentation — to ‘Vomiting Victor’ after Vic got sick on the bus during flu season. They were cruel names, but kind of funny, too. Henry found himself laughing despite his best efforts to stand up for the other kids.

What was going on? Was he in some backwards universe? He didn’t have TS in this universe, but everything else was wrong! His best friends were the mean kids who usually taunted him and his best friend, Gary, wasn’t even at his birthday dinner.

Dad stood at the top of the basement stairs.

“Henry, your grandpa is on the phone. Come on up and talk to him.”

The other boys continued to make jokes about the kids in school, while Henry flew up the steps to get to the phone.

“Da, da, da, Dave ‘er Hen…” It was Grandpa James, but he sounded exactly they way he did right after the stroke, when he struggled with each and every word. “Hen… ry… birthday, birthday.”

The old man paused; there was absolute exhaustion in his voice.

“Thanks, Grandpa.” Henry managed a short reply.

He heard his new friends calling from the basement. He handed the phone back to his father and ran down the steps. Part of him wondered why he wasn’t, at

least trying, to communicate with his grandfather, but part of him — the new part, the part that felt at home in this alternative universe — knew that Grandpa James was a very sad, old man who could no longer talk about the great baseball games he’d been to, including the one where he caught a pop fly hit by Mickey Mantle.

Henry had the ball. Grandpa James had given it to him, but…. No, he didn’t have the ball. Grandpa James had never given it to him. Not in this alternative reality. The ball was lost. Someone had stolen it from Grandpa James’ room at the nursing home. Grandpa James had cried. Henry remembered that. He had never seen his grandfather cry. He didn’t want to see it again. This new world was full of awful things like that.

Henry went back to his friends in the basement. They talked about computer games, goofy You Tube videos and who had the most ‘friends’ on Facebook. Henry, the old Henry, had never really cared about the competition to have the most electronic friends, but the new Henry had tons. He was Mr. Popularity.

“If you can just get the nerds to friend you, you could beat Nancy,” Ed said.

“But then you’d ruin your rep,” Alan replied. “Can’t have the band geeks and the theater freaks crowding up your page.”

“Did you see that freaky video Nancy and her friends posted?” Zack asked. “It’s them pretending to eat giant bugs.”

“Nah, didn’t see it,” Henry admitted. “My dad doesn’t want me on the Internet all the time. He uses it, too.”

“Well, you gotta get him to give you your own computer.”

“Yeah, right,” Henry shook his head as he spoke. “In what universe is my dad giving me my own computer before I get to high school?”

And then he paused, maybe in this one? Everything else was off kilter. Maybe in this world he could get his parents to give him a laptop like Zack’s.

“They got this plastic lobster…” Zack continued to tell his story.

“It was a plastic crab,” Alan corrected.

“Lobster, crab, spider…. Who cares? It was gross and they pretended to eat it.”

The boys all laughed.