“All right, now put the water buffalo back wherever you found it,” I tell him.
Hall waits expectantly.
“Oh, right.Make my wish come true.” Hall grabs the remote and changes the channel now that my joyride is over. “What else can you do? Can you communicate with the dead?” I visualize a tea party with Cary Grant (I think he ought to have been my true love, but alas, the age gap was too vast and we’re ships in the night), Leonardo da Vinci (he’s there to paint my portrait), and a velociraptor.
“No.”
“Establish world peace?”
“Afraid not.”
“Start a war?”
“No. And I can’t do mind control, emotional manipulation, or create a real-life Jurassic Park, either. Those are all out-of-bounds operations, as included in Section: Primarily to Avoid Narrative Scrutiny, Clause:But Why Doesn’t He Just.” He draws a breath, looking grave. “The most dire of consequences would await me for even attempting the Number One Most Forbidden Thing, which is to bring back the McRib when it isn’t in season. Such is the corporate might of the Golden Arches.”
Interesting. “Why can you say yes to some wishes but not to others?”
“For the most part, magic is left to my discretion, and I can grant your wishes if those wishes seem to bring you joy.” His gaze flicks to the television. “But I may reject a wish if it would be damaging to history, the spacetime continuum, that sort of thing. Or if it would cause real harm, physical or otherwise, to others. Some wishes I might not personally reject, but holiday magic would, for unknown reasons. Which isn’t something I knew before I arrived here, but that information’s just been conveniently dropped into my head now that I’m in need of it.” He stops on the local weather channel, leaning forward.
The weatherman’s bedecked in a reindeer tie and a headband with antlers. “Look at this man, wearing his little tie and his little antlers on television,” Hall says, utterly charmed. As he watches, the same tie and antlers appear on his person.
From over on the coffee table, my phone lights up, and I browsethrough a crop of texts from Mom that I haven’t known how to respond to.
How are you doing
We love you very much
Your dad loves you too
Don’t forget, Grandma and Grandpa’s house, December 18 at 5:00!!!!
Ahhh, the holidays with Bettie Watson, who isn’t impressed with any of her grandchildren but especially not with me, the stain on her legacy. She’s an EGOT hoarder who worked for everything she’s got, and here I am just waltzing around with her famous name, not living up to my potential. Which is quite a trip, because I’m supposedly a millionaire. What more does she want from me? I do love seeing Grandpa, though, who adores me to pieces, and who I avoid at all costs because I want him to keep on adoring me. I wish we could only go every other year, break up the pressure with trips to see Granny and Grandad Hughes in Cornwall, but my paternal grandparents feel our brood is too large and too loud for their small cottage.
I can elude most family functions, like the billion gender reveal parties thrown by my two older siblings, and pregnancy reveal parties, and soon enough it’ll be ovulation day parties—but nobody tells Grandma they’re not showing up for Christmas andlives to tell the tale. She will not be deprived of her yearly opportunity to lament, for a week straight, what a disappointment we are, and we must soldier through if we are to inherit anything. Like ten million dollars, or her collection of blood vials harvested from headliners of the ’98 Warped Tour.
If she’s disappointed in menow, when she thinks I’m flush with Instagram sponsor cash and relaxing in my beach bungalow, I shudder to think what she’d say if she knew the truth.
I’m especially dreading seeing my dad. He and I got into a fight over FaceTime when I said I wasn’t visiting him and Mom in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving. Truthfully, I couldn’t afford the plane ticket, and my car wouldn’t survive the drive from Colorado. But I couldn’t tell him that, because money talk is a dangerous thread to pull, and I’m too busy trying to look like I’m just as prosperous as my siblings. So I had to lie about having other plans.
“Your mom will be devastated,” he’d said.
And then he’d corrected himself. “Yourmumwill be devastated.”
(Too many years of living in America has sanded down the edges of his British accent. All of his British friends have been poking fun at him.“Listen, Patrick. Listen to how he says the wordblueberry.”)
My parents were firm about giving us a normal upbringing—public school, making Kaia and me share a bedroom. We all had chores, we all had to get jobs when we were teenagers to buy our own cars, et cetera. Dad’s a photographer who earns a modest living, and he and Mom have been together since he took her picture for a magazine spread when she was twenty and he was twenty-four. She had been an actor in her teens but didn’t love the job. Soshe tried ballet, but it was too hard on her joints. She didn’t discover her true passion, which is cooking, until she was fifty and finished raising all her kids. Now she writes cookbooks and hosts a holiday baking show on Netflix, which tapes in the summer. She does some voice-over work for a weird two a.m. show on Adult Swim, too.
While I was growing up, they wouldn’t take any money from Grandma and Grandpa Watson. It was drilled into us kids ever since we were embryos that we’d be expected to forge our own paths as well. My brother and sisters have risen to the challenge, each famous for their achievements. I’m famous for being famous, for being related to famous people. And for my failures.
My older sister Athena is a commercial model who’s worked her way up from Proactiv to Burberry. She doles out lukewarm fashion takes for E! during red carpet season, taking care to mention L’Oréal and bareMinerals because both companies contractually own her soul. She’s got a sheet of shoulder-length white-blond hair, skin like a vampire, and wears pastels in solid colors, never patterns. She graces covers of parenting magazines with her latest (and therefore most favorite) child in her lap, the baby dressed like a Puritan. Athena has cultivated this soft-spoken, I-only-use-organic-oat-diapers-for-my-babies environmentally responsible persona that is patently false, with a loud, stupid husband who makes sure, everywhere he goes, that everyone knows he’s married to Athena Hughes. I called her Ivanka Lite at her rehearsal dinner, and she had my car towed.
My younger sister Kaia’s loved to sing all her life, but Dad wouldn’t let her pursue any career avenue that might lead to fame while she was still a minor. She went on a road trip with a friend when she turned eighteen to hit up every open mic night on theWest Coast, and within a month she had a record deal. Of all of the Hughes siblings, she’s the one with genuine talent. She’s got a raspy, bluesy sound—she’s been in four bands so far, an indie darling—but I’ve heard a couple tracks from her upcoming album and it’s scary, how huge she’s going to get. She’ll be mainstream by this time next year.
Felix, my parents’ only son as well as firstborn, has assistant-directed two films that both tanked at the box office, and he thinks he’s Tarantino. After each divorce (right now he’s on wife number four), he does something tragic to his hair, stirs media buzz by getting violently kicked out of a bar, and steals another man’s wife. He pursues married women almost exclusively, as persuading a woman to love him is one thing, but persuading a woman away from someoneelseis an even headier achievement. A year after each divorce, he tones up, gets a new tattoo, and lands interviews with teasers likehe’s back, and he’s ready for you to take him seriouslyorthe prodigal grandson, reformed.“I’m feeling better than ever. This is the happiest I’ve ever been—I’m done messing around. I’ve grown up, found a new project I’m passionate about, and you’re going to see a Felix Hughes like you’ve never seen before.”
There’s a saying about the dysfunctional black sheep of the family, the one who makes the others look better by comparison but, overall, makes the family look worse:Every family’s got one.My family has two: Felix and me. He and I are pits of lawsuits and rumors, some of which we started ourselves. We’re layers of abandoned passion projects, struggling to find meaning in our lives, stumbling over and over on a world stage. The difference between us is that nothing ever keeps him down. Felix’s success is his inability to quit trying.
Then it dawns on me: for the first time, I have an edge over mybrother and sisters. I don’t have their cherubic offspring or a Grammy in my future, but I’ve got unfettered access to any limited-edition, coveted, out-of-stock thing I can possibly dream of, and what’s the use of having that if I’m not rubbing my loved ones’ noses in it? If I can transport Niall Horan to a random Taco Bell in Chicago (I did that an hour ago and it was marvelous) and decorate a gossip columnist’s apartment with a water buffalo, what else can I do?
