The Christmas Genie Read online

  The CHRISTMAS GENIE

  Also by Dan Gutman

  THE HOMEWORK MACHINE

  RETURN OF THE HOMEWORK MACHINE

  NIGHTMARE AT THE BOOK FAIR

  GETTING AIR

  The CHRISTMAS GENIE

  Dan Gutman

  Illustrated by Dan Santat

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people,

  or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters,

  places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination,

  and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2009 by Dan Gutman

  Illustrations copyright © 2009 by Dan Santat

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Book design by Tom Daly

  The text for this book is set in Horley Old Style MT.

  The illustrations for this book are rendered digitally.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gutman, Dan.

  The Christmas genie / Dan Gutman ; illustrated by Dan Santat.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When a meteorite crashes into a fifth-grade classroom at

  Lincoln School in Oak Park, Illinois, the genie inside agrees to grant

  the class a Christmas wish—if they can agree on one within an hour.

  ISBN 978-1-4169-9001-7

  ISBN 978-1-4391-5826-5 (eBook)

  [1. Genies—Fiction. 2. Wishes—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction.

  4. Christmas—Fiction. 5. Meteorites—Fiction.]

  I. Santat, Dan, ill. II.

  Title.

  PZ7.G9846Chr 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009017765

  To my editor, Emily Meehan,

  who always pushes me to be better

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Liza Voges, Nathan Katz, Deb Licorish,

  Laurie Bushey, Nina Wallace, Janet Goodman,

  Theresa Wolfe, Jane Babcock, and all the kids

  who shared their deepest, darkest wishes.

  The CHRISTMAS GENIE

  PART ONE Before

  That Thing

  That Happened

  You’re probably not going to believe this story. Fine. That’s okay. It’s a free country. You can believe what you want to believe. Or not. But I know what happened. Because I was there.

  Where is “there”? Lincoln School in Oak Park, Illinois. Fifth grade. This is what my class looks like.

  Well, that’s what my class would look like if you were hanging from the ceiling like Michelangelo and drawing a picture of it. But I have no idea why you would want to do a crazy thing like that.

  That’s me, in the second row on the left side, by the window. My name is Chase. My best friend is Alex. He’s on my basketball team, but we’re not allowed to sit next to each other because he’s always cracking jokes and distracting me. So we had to be “separated.”

  It’s a pretty good group of kids, I guess. Well, except for Abigail, who thinks she’s so great just because she’s got a cool cell phone; Mia, the wet blanket; Logan, who threw my umbrella up on the roof of the school last year; and Christopher, who is just plain dumb as a box of rocks. Everybody else is relatively normal. Our teacher, Mrs. Walters, always says we’re the “chattiest” group she ever had. I don’t think that means we’re brilliant conversationalists. It just means we talk too much.

  That’s her, in the front of the room. One time I saw Mrs. Walters at the supermarket and I kind of freaked out because it was like, What is my teacher doing in a supermarket?

  Okay, enough setup. None of that stuff is important, anyway. The important thing to know is that if you look at the picture, that’s where we all were when this thing happened that you may or may not believe. Like I said, I don’t care one way or another.

  It happened just before winter vacation, on December 21. That’s the winter solstice, and in case you don’t know what that means, it’s the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. It has something to do with the distance and angle of the sun. I’m kind of into science stuff. Anyway, everybody was excited about Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or whatever holiday it is that they celebrate. Nobody was really focusing too much on what Mrs. Walters was saying. We were all thinking about the presents we were going to get, the ski trips we were going to go on, and the family reunions we were going to have as soon as school let out. You know, all the holiday stuff. It’s a nice time of year. Mrs. Walters put cheery decorations all over the walls of the class. Everybody was feeling good.

  I do remember this much—when it happened, Mrs. Walters was talking about meteorites. She’s an astronomy nut, and at night she’s taking graduate classes because she’s working on her Ph.D. in astrophysics. She tries to bring astronomy into everything she teaches us. Like, we’ll be doing math and she’ll have us adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing stars or planets instead of apples and oranges. Or we’ll be doing health and she’ll start talking about whether or not germs can survive in outer space without oxygen. I feel sorry for Mrs. Walters’s family because they have to hear this stuff all the time.

  Meteorites are kind of cool. You may not realize this, but there’s a whole lot of stuff flying around in outer space, and it all has different names. Like, meteorites are rocks from space that hit the Earth, but meteors are still in space. Comets, meteoroids, and asteroids all orbit the sun. But meteoroids are small, asteroids are bigger, and comets have a tail. I know all this stuff because Mrs. Walters talks about it all the time.

  “One day in 1998,” Mrs. Walters told us, almost in a whisper, “some boys were playing basketball in a driveway in Monahans, Texas. And suddenly, they looked up and saw a meteorite come flying out of the sky! It crashed into the vacant lot next door to them. Can you imagine that? It was all over the papers and the TV news.”

  “That must have been cool,” said David, who thinks everything is cool, even stuff that is totally uncool.

  “You mean I might be outside minding my own business and a giant rock could come flying out of the sky?” asked Ashley. “That would be terrifying!”

  Ashley is the kind of kid who worries about every dumb thing that could possibly happen to her. Like, what are the chances that anybody would ever get hit by a meteorite?

  “Did the meteorite ruin the basketball game?” asked Jacob, who sits in front of me. I like sports too, but Jacob is obsessed. All that guy ever talks about is sports.

  “I would think so!” said Mrs. Walters.

  We were having this discu
ssion when suddenly there was this loud BOOM . . . BOOM . . . BOOM outside.

  I guess it could have been a sonic boom. That’s the noise that an object makes when it travels faster than the speed of sound—about 750 miles per hour—at sea level. I looked it up in one of my science books. But it wasn’t a plane. The sound was really close, like it was right outside. We all turned to look out the window. And then, maybe a second or two later, there was a crash and the window next to me just exploded! Glass was flying all over the place. Whatever it was that smashed through the window was heading straight for my desk.

  Everything happened so fast after that, there wasn’t a lot of time to react.

  Somehow, I had the sense to cover my eyes with one arm and dive off my chair. I hit the floor next to Madison, who sits next to me. There was a lot of shouting and screaming. I didn’t see anything after that.

  When I finally looked up, my desk was shattered. I mean shattered. There was something half-buried in the floor underneath it. It looked like a rock, and it was about the size of a small garbage can. If I hadn’t dived out of the way, it would have crushed my legs, or maybe gone right through me.

  I would have been dead.

  The Amazing Part

  It was amazing! But that’s not even the really amazing part of the story. I’ll get to the really amazing part in a minute.

  Naturally, everybody freaked out, even the cool kids who like to pretend nothing bothers them. We were all on the floor, hiding under our desks and covering our heads. The girls were screaming. Somebody was crying. I figured it must have been a bomb. Maybe our school was being attacked by terrorists.

  “What was that?” asked Ella, who sits in the back row.

  “Remain calm!” Mrs. Walters shouted, with panic in her voice. “Everybody stay under your desk!”

  Like staying under a desk was going to protect us from a bomb, right? I didn’t have a desk to stay under anyway, because my desk was in a million pieces. I just lay there on the floor, dazed.

  About a minute passed before anybody said anything.

  “Is everybody okay?” asked Mrs. Walters.

  We got up slowly. All of my body parts seemed to be intact. No blood anywhere. I was afraid another bomb might come flying through the window, and thought we should just get out of there. But nobody was making a move for the door.

  “I think there’s a piece of glass in my arm,” Ashley groaned. She sounded like she was going to cry.

  Mrs. Walters went to help Ashley, while the rest of us gathered around the thing that was stuck in the floor. There was smoke pouring out of it.

  “What do you think it is?” asked Olivia.

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” said Ava, the walking encyclopedia. “It’s a meteor.”

  “It can’t be a meteor,” I told her. “Meteors don’t hit the Earth. It’s a meteorite.”

  Everybody seemed to be okay. There wasn’t even any glass in Ashley’s arm. The big crybaby just hit it against something while she was diving under her desk.

  “It is a meteorite!” Mrs. Walters exclaimed as she got down on her hands and knees to look at it. Her eyes were wide with excitement.

  That’s when our principal, Mr. Hamilton, charged in the door. Mrs. Walters jumped up and stood in front of the meteorite so Mr. Hamilton couldn’t see it.

  “I heard a crash,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Is everyone all right?”

  Mr. Hamilton has to deal with lots of crisis situations all the time. Like, every year there’s always some dope who pulls the fire alarm for no reason. Or that time we were in fourth grade and Miss Rassky found a snake in the cloakroom. That was interesting! But I’m pretty sure this was the first time a meteorite had ever come flying into a classroom.

  “A desk broke,” Mrs. Walters said, lamely.

  Mr. Hamilton looked around suspiciously. “I’ll get the custodian,” he said. And he left.

  Once it was clear that everybody was okay, we weren’t afraid anymore. We were all excited about what had happened.

  “I can’t believe a rock fell out of the sky and landed right here in our class!” said Alyssa. “What are the odds of that happening?”

  “Well, it had to land somewhere,” Ella pointed out. “The odds are just as good that it would land here as they are that it would land anywhere else.”

  Ella is so sensible. Sensible can be annoying.

  “But it landed here just as we were talking about meteorites!” I pointed out.

  “This is the most exciting thing that ever happened to me!” Mrs. Walters said with wonder as we gathered around the hole in the floor. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to get my hands on a meteorite. I’ll be able to study this and write it up as a research project.”

  I wanted to touch it, but common sense told me that when something is smoking, it’s hot. And hot stuff burns your skin. And burning skin hurts. That didn’t stop William, who is on our school football team and looks like he’s in eighth grade. He’s really good at football, but he needs a common sense transplant. William put his finger on the meteorite and immediately pulled it away.

  “Owwwwwwwww!” he said, shaking his hand.

  “I didn’t mean I was going to get my hands on it right away, William,” Mrs. Walters scolded.

  I leaned closer. It didn’t look like a regular rock. It wasn’t smooth. Mrs. Walters got a magnifying glass from her desk and held it up to the meteorite. There were small pits in it. Abigail took out her stupid cell phone camera and shot some pictures.

  “This could be four and a half billion years old,” Mrs. Walters told us. “It may provide clues to the solar nebula, the swirling cloud of gas and dust that gave rise to the sun and the planets. If it contains water, that would suggest it had an encounter with a comet, which is essentially a cosmic snowball.”

  “Cosmic Snowball would be a good name for a rock band,” said Logan. What a dope.

  “What do you think it’s made of?” asked Josh. “Lava?”

  Mrs. Walters went over to the whiteboard and took one of the magnetic clips she uses to hold up papers and stuff. She touched it against the meteorite and it stuck with a click.

  “It’s made of iron,” said Ava, who knows everything.

  “Just think,” Natalie said, “this thing could have been flying around space for centuries. For eternity. Maybe it’s been to the edge of the universe and back.”

  “There are no edges to the universe,” Ava said. “The universe just goes on forever.”

  “How do you know?” said Ella. “The universe can’t go on forever. It has to end somewhere.”

  “And what do you think happens after that point?” asked Mrs. Walters.

  “Nobody knows,” Josh said.

  “God knows,” said Ava.

  “What should we do with it, Mrs. Walters?” asked Ella. “Should we call the police?”

  “No!” Mrs. Walters exclaimed.

  “What would the police do?” asked Ethan. “Maybe we should call the science museum. They would know what to do.”

  “No!” Mrs. Walters exclaimed.

  “I say we call the news,” said Andrew. “I’ll bet they’d send a camera crew over here. We’ll become famous like those kids in Texas. Hey, I bet we could make some money out of this thing.” Andrew is always talking about getting famous and making lots of money.

  “No!” Mrs. Walters exclaimed. “Don’t call anybody! I want to be the first to study it. This will be our little secret, okay?”

  “Okay,” we all agreed.

  The smoke had stopped coming out of the meteorite. Mrs. Walters leaned over and touched a piece of paper against it. The paper didn’t burn or turn black. Then she tapped a finger against it for a moment.

  “It’s cooling off,” she told us. “You can touch it gently if you want.”

  We all leaned over to touch the meteorite except for Ashley, who said she was afraid—of course. It felt warm, but not too hot to hold your hand against it. There were twenty-four of us reaching out to touc
h it at the same time. I rubbed a finger against it, and so did some of the other kids. Nothing came off on my skin. It didn’t burn.

  Let me just warn you that this is when the really amazing part happened.

  While we were rubbing our hands against the meteorite, it started to vibrate slightly and give off a humming sound. Then it started to glow yellowish red. It was like there was some kind of energy source coming from deep within it. There was the crackle of sparks. We all pulled our hands off and backed away. Something very strange was happening.

  And then . . . this thing started to rise up out of the meteorite.

  The Really Amazing Part

  Okay, this is the part of the story that you might find a little bit hard to believe. But as I said, I was there when it happened and you weren’t. So who are you gonna believe, your own sense of what’s possible, or me?

  The thing that rose out of the meteorite looked human, with regular facial features and long hair tied back in a ponytail. It was a little man! Like a genie. But he wasn’t wearing a turban. In fact, he was wearing a tie-dyed shirt and flip-flops.

  When the smoke cleared, I could see he was about three feet tall, and he floated a few feet above the meteorite like a balloon. It was sort of a Princess Leia/holographic/avatar kind of thing. His eyes were closed, but when everybody started screaming and freaking out, he opened them. Mrs. Walters said a curse word that I’m sure you’ve heard a million times, but never out of the mouth of a teacher. We all backed away from the meteorite. Abigail was trembling as she fumbled with her cell phone camera. Mrs. Walters just stared at the little man, her mouth open.

  “What is it?” asked Josh.

  “Maybe it’s a genie,” said Isabella.

  “Don’t be silly,” Ella said. “There’s no such thing as genies.”

  “He’s kinda cute,” said Abigail.

  William, who you would think would have learned not to touch stuff, went to poke the genie with his finger.