Once Upon a Time Warp

Wendy held out her hand to her. "Hi! Nice to meet you, li'l gal," she said.

"Li'l gal"? I'll give you "li'l gal," you... Nina's first impulse was to rip Wendy's arm off of her and bludgeon her to death with it, but clearly, for a dozen different reasons, she couldn't do that. Her good manners compelled her to be cordial and shake her hand, stifling the revulsion invading her mind. So she did—as much as she hated to, she shook the woman's hand.

Ugh...even her hand feels all soft and warm and cushy. She cringed in disgust. You'll have to forgive me, lady. Nothing personal; it's just that I kinda, well...hate your freaking guts and would like to murder you, that's all.

"Mm-hm," Nina forced out, pushing her facial muscles into as much of a smile as she could manage. "Nice to...meet you too."

"Well, thanks again for walking me out, Nina," said Gerald. "We've gotta get going now; we're going to the symphony tonight."

Something shattered. Oh, God, please tell me you did NOT just say that, thought Nina, realizing just what that something was, feeling it crushed to a billion tiny shards. Her eyes welled up.

"ALL his idea," Wendy chuckled. "Trust me, he loves that kinda thing. To me, though, it's a yawner. Real snooze and a half."

Suddenly, her blood boiled.

I'm going to murder her. I am. Somebody stop me. I am going, to shoot her, in her rotten little heart. If I can find it.

"S—...sounds like fun," Nina replied, trying to sound like her world wasn't crashing apart around her. "H-have a good time."

"Nice to meet you, young lady," Wendy repeated to her.

"Young lady"...look who's talking, b!+¢h, Nina thought, forcing her mind to censor the harsh 'b'-word.

She gave them a little wave as the wife took him away from her and they got in the car. Just when she believed it wasn't possible to feel any worse, she thought she heard Wendy giggle to Gerald, "Y'know, hon, I think that cute little girl likes you."

OH-HO-HO...she clenched her fists, strangling her backpack straps. You better hope you never meet me alone, lady...

Her energy gave out. She didn't have the drive to be angry anymore. This time she didn't watch the car drive off. She sadly retired to her own car, unlocked the driver door, slung the backpack off and started to get in, but...couldn't. She turned her back to the car, leaned against it, let her body slide down until she was sitting on the pavement, dropped her face in her hands, and out it all came.

The lot had almost entirely been vacated, except for Nina. She and her car sat isolated in the middle of a hundred empty parking spaces. Should any non-deaf person go anywhere near the parking lot a few minutes after all of this had happened, they'd hear the faint echo of Nina Elizabeth Sidler sitting on the ground, inconsolably sobbing.

All of a sudden, it wasn't so hard to hear Steph's warnings and discouragings to her. Oh, Nina, you stupid girl! she thought, kicking herself while she was down, You KNEW he was married; why would you open yourself up to such heartache like that?? Unfortunately, she knew the answer was that it wasn't a decision she made with her head, but with her heart, and with such a shortage of romantic companionship or experience, her heart remained naïve and innocent and easily led. Well, next time she thought she was in love with someone, she'd catch herself and think long and hard about it first before letting her heart take over.

"Oh, God," she wept in heartbroken despair, "Gerry, I wish you could just be mine..."

After about ten minutes of lacrimal therapy, once her eyes were starting to redden and puff up, she opened them to give them a soothing rub, and saw something she hadn't before. To her left, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a pair of faded, worn old sneakers.

She curiously eyed the sneakers, moving up from them to a pair of legs in torn nylons, a frayed bluish-purple dress, and finally all the way up to see a woman standing beside her, also leaning against her car, a beat-up looking purse over her own shoulder, snapping and popping gum in her mouth and shining up her nails with a file.

When she saw Nina had noticed her, the other woman nodded down at her flatly and said in a low, monotone voice, "A'right, sis, let's do this and get it over with, whaddaya say."

Nina had no idea who this was, or what she was talking about. She looked around her for another clue, but seeing no one and nothing else, she returned her teary blinking eyes to this shabbily-dressed lady and sniffled, "I'm...sorry?"

The woman just concentrated on her nails. "That's right. C'mon, I ain't got all day here; let's rock and roll."

Nina gazed up at her, very bewildered, still not standing just yet. "...I reiterate: say what now?" she asked.

The lady shifted her eyes from her nails and looked at Nina for the first time. "You want me to spell it out for ya, kid?"

Nina waited a second, then nodded. "That'd be good..."

"Your call. Name's Lindsey." The woman's tone was fantastically disinterested. "'M here to make all your dreams come true."

Nina's eyebrows raised and arched. "...Uh-huh," she said. "Yes, well, I certainly appreciate that, but, eh—"

Lindsey went right back to her nails, focusing on a particularly troublesome one. "I go wherever the work is, chick-pea. You wished, I showed up. But hey, you don't want me around, no skin off my nose."

This short elaboration only befuddled Nina further. She let a few more seconds pass, then queried, "Who are you?"

Her especially bothersome fingernail proved so irritating Lindsey just gnawed it right off. "Who the hell ya think?" she replied mid-gnaw. She chewed it all the way off, spit it out in the other direction and turned back to Nina, proceeding filing where she left off. "I'm your fairy godmother, kiddo."

An interesting diversion...

Nina stood, momentarily forgetting about her broken heart and chortled at this new development. "Really?...That's...hilarious."

Lindsey nodded, having heard every reaction to it in the book. "Laugh riot."

Nina watched her curiously as she blew a bubble and let it pop back into her mouth. "Uh, right..." she replied. "And, I suppose next you're going to tell me I get three wishes."

Lindsey shrugged lackadaisically. "Three...three hundred, three million. How many ya want?"

Nina chuckled in amusement. "You're really funny!" she commented. She took one of Lindsey's occupied hands and gave it a pat. "Well, nice to meet you, Miss, uh...Lindsey, whichever. Listen, uh...you wanna take a little ride? We could go see my Mom and Dad's friend, Dr. Reynolds. He's a psychiatrist."

Lindsey nodded knowingly and sardonically. "Save it, Nina; I've heard it all."

"Ni—" Her face turned serious again, and she let go of Lindsey's arm. "Uh...how'd you know my name?...Do we know each other?"

Lindsey reached into her purse and retrieved a bent and creased folder. "Got it all right here..." She read. "'Nina Elizabeth Sidler, born August 2nd, 1993, unemployed, living with folks, enrolled in Denmore Academy...'" She skipped some of the unimportant details. "...Yadda yadda yadda...blahbbity blahbbity blah...here we go: 'In love with professor, just met professor's wife, heartbroken, still wants him...'" She looked back up at Nina. "'...Help her.'"

Nina suddenly felt a little frightened and creeped-out. "A—...are you...stalking me?" she asked. "Is someone else?"

For the first time, Lindsey seemed to show some actual emotion towards her. As this was a totally normal human reaction, she looked into Nina's eyes and assured her, "No. I know how impossible this is to believe, and I know I seem like a real whack job right now, but even if you do not yet believe I'm your actual fairy godmother, believe this: you're in no danger."

Nina stared at her in a mix of bewilderment, embarrassment and amazement. "Where'd, uh...where'd that come from then?" she inquired, indicating the folder with her personal info inside.

Lindsey waved the nail file at her. "Same place the wands came from, baby doll."

Well, maybe this woman wasn't a total loony tune, but...Nina was still skeptical. "Okay...um..." she said, "Prove it. If you're really my..." She couldn't believe she was saying these words. "...Fairy godmother...I'm gonna need some solid, concrete, scientific proof."

Lindsey gave her a half-hearted shrug. "Make a wish."

Nina stared at her, baffled. "That's...all I've gotta do? Just...say anything I want?"

"Go for it. Be a wild girl. Name it, 's yours."

Nina nodded with an affable chuckle. "Right...so if I just said something off the top of my head, like, oh, I don't know...'I wish there was a hundred bucks in my jacket pocket.'"

Lindsey gave her a light tap on the head with her "wand."

"Done."

Nina just stared at her briefly. "Mm-hm," she uttered. She reached into her pocket, felt something made of paper that wasn't there before, and her facial expression changed dramatically. She removed it, unfolded it, and sure enough, a crisp new Franklin stared her right in the face. As soon as it registered, she audibly yelped and dropped it on the ground. She turned back to Lindsey, eyes now wide open and mouth agape. This being of course nothing out of the ordinary for Lindsey, she simply maintained her apathetic attitude, polishing up her nails.

Nina was now understandably dumbfounded. "Y-y-y-y-you...you..." Her bamboozled mind refused to process any more words.

Lindsey didn't answer. Nina gazed at the $100 on the ground. She recovered her faculties. "All right...okay," she said, "If you can do that, how about this. Just for the heck of it, I wish my friend Steph would call me right now and tell me she won the lottery."

Lindsey repeated the gesture, this time tapping her wand on Nina's purse, and inside it, her phone rang. Now starting to become a little excited—albeit also freaked out—Nina frantically dug into her purse to find the phone, grabbed it, checked the display, and...that was Steph, all right. She answered in a meek voice. "Steph?...Hi...what?"

"Nina, you are NOT gonna believe this," Steph's voice crackled through. "Y'know that hundred bucks you gave me yesterday? Well, I don't know what happened to it, it just seemed to disappear. But never mind that. I was just in the store, and...don't ask me why—something inside me made me buy a lottery ticket. And I scratched off the numbers, and it hit!! I won a million dollars!!"

Nina screamed and dropped the phone on the ground, right along with the $100. Now practically in shock, she backed up a few steps away from her fairy godmother. Lindsey, natch, couldn't care less.

"Interesting news?" Lindsey asked her in her regular monotone.

"My God," Nina whispered in disbelief. "H—...how did you...oh my God, you really...you really are my f—..."

She was too flipped to finish the sentence. She put her hand to the side of her face and gave her head a shake.

"I don't believe it...this is too wild..."

Something occurred to her. "But...wait a sec. If this is real, and you're actually my...fairy godmother...where have you been all these years? How come you never showed up until just now?"

"You never seriously wished for anything until just now."

Her heart started pounding. She looked at Lindsey. "How, uh...how many more wishes do I get?" she whispered uncertainly.

Lindsey tossed off another indifferent shrug. "How many you want?"

Nina thought. Her mind was racing, but she made herself stay under control. She was definitely familiar with the concept of being careful what you wish for. She knew there was a distinct possibility that if she wished for something, and this apparently real fairy godmother of hers could grant it for her, the details could be twisted around into something she really didn't want at all. She would have to choose the wording very carefully.

"Okay, then, if this is actually for real...first, I wish that $100 was back wherever it came from."

Lindsey gave her a quarter-hearted nod. "You're the boss." She wrist-snapped the wand towards the ground, bringing about a light breeze, and the $100 bill was swept off the ground into the air and floated down, like a feather, until it slipped back into Nina's purse. Oh, right. She had forgotten, she gave this to Steph twenty-four hours ago.

"You've got to be kidding me..." whispered Nina. This truly was for real, wasn't it...

"Well, then, um..."

There was only a single one thing she really wanted, but...how to go about phrasing it.

"Can...can you come home with me, Lindsey?"

***

February 12th, 6:11 p.m.

It had just started to get dark by the time Nina got to her lovely home. Her parents might have been, well, loaded, and they kept a beautiful, generously-sized two-story domicile (three if the attic counted), but they were modest enough not to live in a mansion. She sprinted up the stairs straight to her room, threw her backpack on the bed and booted her computer. Once the desktop came up, she opened a document and started typing up her wish. And then a scary thought popped into her head.

"Lindsey?" she asked, looking around.

"Behind ya, kid," came her voice, startling Nina. She whipped her head around to see her fairy godmother there with her.

"Question," said Nina, "Does the wish still count if I just type it up? 'Cause I don't want it to, y'know, uh...take effect, before I'm totally done with it."

"Only once I tap you with the wand. But you're the boss; I won't tap you till you're sure you're ready."

Oh, good. Nina did some more editing. Another moment later, she heard footsteps approaching. Realizing someone was coming to her room, she let out a small gasp and quickly minimized the document.

It was her mother, Sally. She gave her a little knock on the open door. "Hi, honey," she smiled.

"Oh, hi, Mom."

"Steph just called me a little earlier to tell me the amazing news. That's incredible about her winning the lottery, isn't it? I didn't know she even played it!" her Mom said.

Nina couldn't think of much with which to reply, except, "...Yup; pretty amazing." She remembered her fairy godmother was standing behind her and added, "Oh, yeah, Mom, this is my...uh...friend, Lindsey."

Sally turned confused. She looked all around the room. "Erm...where, hon?"

At this point, Nina's face would have turned equally confused, had Lindsey not said right away, "Oh, yeah, uh, this might be a good time to tell you this, kiddo: she can't see me."

Before she could stop herself, Nina whirled back around on her and said, "What??"

She heard her mother's voice behind her again. "I said where, Nina? Where's your friend?"

Whoops. "Ummm..." Thinking on her feet, Nina came up with the best explanation she could. She took a quick bound over to her bed and picked up a floppy-eared stuffed animal. "Right here! Yeah, I've, uh, I-I've named her Lindsey."

"How flattering," Lindsey smirked.

Sally replied with a blank stare.

"O—...kay," she finally said. "Well, I just wanted to tell you that Daddy's making some popcorn along with dinner. We're gonna watch a movie a little later. If you want to come watch it, we'll let you know when it's time."

"Oh, cool!" said Nina, glad to move on from the 'Lindsey' business. "Yeah, that sounds good."

Sally left her alone. Nina let out a "whew" and returned to her computer and documented wish draft. She did just a little more tweaking, then—

"There! I finished it."

She took a breath, rolled the chair back from the monitor and read. "Okay, my multiple-part wish. I hope this works. 'I wish Gerry Watkins was not my professor anymore, and that he was my age, and that we were..." She was unsure about this last part, so she'd phrased it this way. "...Both single, and liked each other, and were really really really good friends.'" She exhaled. "Period."

"You sure?" Lindsey asked.

Nina took a sec to think about it. As she reread it, it seemed pretty selfish, but then when she thought about this afternoon, and her broken heart crushed like glass into a trillion grains of sand, it was more difficult to care. And besides, she reasoned, if this worked, it didn't seem as though she were breaking up a family or anything. It seemed that if he were thirty years younger, he wasn't married to Wendy and wouldn't ever have been.

...And, as long as she had Lindsey with her, she figured she could always wish things back to normal.

"Oh!" she said. She repeated the wish, then added, "...And that I still had my fairy godmother there with me. Period."

"Yeah, well, that's a given, don't worry about that," Lindsey assured her. "Now, again, you sure?"

Nina sat back, closed her eyes, took another breath and said, "Yes."

"A'right, you got it." Lindsey waved the wand over Nina's head and tapped her. The next thing Nina knew, everything went black.

***

February 13th, 8:52 a.m.

"Ohhh," Nina moaned, getting herself up, "My back."

She got to her feet.

"...Why was I sleeping on the floor?"

She was still too half-asleep to be very concerned. She made her way out into the hall, rubbing her eyes. Looking only straight ahead, Nina saw someone come out of the kitchen. It was a 17-year-old girl.

"Oh, hi," said Nina, surprised to see someone here so early. "I didn't know we had company. I'm Nina."

"Uh...hi?" the girl said, surprised and bemused to see this young woman. "I'm Sally. I, like...live here."

Sally? What in the...

Nina focused her eyes and looked her closer in the face. Her own face went into shock.

"Mom?!" She gasped into a squeal. "Mom, what happened to you?!"

"Excuse me??" the girl replied, taken aback. "'Mom'? Whoa, chill, dudette...you're, like, kinda totally going freak city on me here."

"Mom, what is going on here?? And...why are you talking like that?"

The girl turned around and called back to the kitchen. "Uhhh, Mom, Dad, there's, like, a very weird stranger in the house!"

"Oh my God, Mom, what h—" Nina started to say. "'Stranger'?! Hey, wh—I'm not a stranger! This is my h—"

She stopped again as the girl's two middle-aged parents emerged from the kitchen.

"She thinks I'm, like, her Mom or something," said the worried and alarmed 17-year-old Sally. "Make her go away."

Nina gasped again, recognizing the parents. "Grandma! Grandpa! You...y-you're so young!"

The parents, now also startled, looked at each other.

"Um, Miss," said Sally's Dad, "May we ask who you are, exactly?"

She was dumbstruck. "I...I'm Nina!" she said. "Nina Elizabeth Sidler! Don't you recogni—..." She stopped. Something clicked. "Ohmygosh...you're the Mortons, aren't you?"

Morton was Nina's Mom Sally's maiden name. Nina suddenly got a startling clue what was going on.

"...Yyyyyes, we are," said Sally's Mom, "But, I'm afraid we don't know you."

"Like, how do you know us?" Sally wanted to know.

Nina's heart was starting to pound. She felt a panic attack coming down on her. "C-can I ask you guys a really weird question?" she said. "What year is it?"

The Mortons were bewildered beyond belief, but so was Nina. "It's...1984, young lady," said Nina's Granddad, this to them being obvious information and indeed, a really weird question. "Has been since last month. Monday, February the 13th, 1984. This time last year it was 1983."

Nina threw her hands over her open mouth. Another high-pitched squeal emitted from deep inside of her. So it was true.