Free Autumn Falls by Bella Thorne Page A

row, so I don’t know if he looks my way during the period, and he’s out the door before me. I don’t expect to see him in the hall, but he’s there with Reenzie and Zach. Reenzie’s babbling about something, but when Sean sees me he cuts her off and falls into step next to me.
    Reenzie’s nostrils flare like a bull’s as she witnesses this. It’s not an attractive look for her, but given the cause, I very much hope I get to see it more often.
    “So I feel bad I had to un-ask you to hang out yesterday,” Sean says as we move down the hall.
    “Un-ask?”
    “Dis-ask?” he suggests.
    “Un-ask’s good,” I say. “And it’s okay. Extenuating circumstances.”
    “Very. How about this afternoon? Would you be up for watching practice again and then …” He trails off.
    “Sure,” I say. “That’d be great.”
    “Cool.”
    We’ve already walked past his next class, so he turns and heads back the other way.
    “Oh, wait,” he says.
    I turn around and he digs in his pocket. “Here.”
    He hands me a quarter. I don’t get it.
    “Now when I see you I can ask for my quarter back. Did I mention I play quarterback?” He smiles in a knowing way that makes me melt inside, then heads down to class.
    I squeeze the quarter and grin. One afternoon together and Sean and I already have an inside joke.
    I’m in the middle of French class conjugating verbs in the pluperfect tense when I realize something. Sean and I have an in-joke not because we had ADAPT together, but because we hung out
after
ADAPT. We were both scheduled for ADAPT long before I wished for time alone with him, but the hang-out happened
after
the wish. Or to use the pluperfect tense, I
had wished
to hang out with Sean when he asked me to come with him on a walk.
    Of course, that doesn’t prove anything, really. Maybe he would have hung out with me either way.
    Or maybe not.
    What’s for sure is I will lose my mind if I keep going back and forth. I need to test the journal. I excuse myself to the bathroom
—en français, bien sûr
—and bring my bag. I lock myself in a stall.
    Bad idea. In theory, great for privacy; in practice, disgusting. I leave the stall and the bathroom and opt for a corner in the hallway. I only need a couple of minutes. Ideally no one will come out and bust me. I pull the journal out of my bag and almost scrawl down the wish, but I remember all my other wish entries started with a note to my dad.
    Maybe the journal’s into that.
    Dear Dad, I write,
    It’s possible I’m insane, but it’s also possible you gave me a diary that makes wishes come true … which sounds even more insane now that I put it down on paper. I’d really like to know for sure, so I’m going to try something and let you know how much I wish the Tube would serve pizza instead of tamales today.
    I take a second to congratulate myself on my genius. I know the lunch menu for the week. Today is tamales. They’re set. There’s absolutely no reason for that to change, aside from some supernatural interference.
    I go back to class and somehow manage to survive through the next two torturously slow periods. The second I can, I race to the Tube as if the food weren’t as likely to give me dysentery as it is to fill my stomach. I force myself to not look ahead in line. I know it makes no sense; the food either is or isn’t tamales, but I feel as if peeking would jinx the result. Like the wished-for pizza would morph back into Mexican food the second before it entered my line of sight.
    I even close my eyes as the lunch lady plops it onto my tray.
    “Are you saying grace or praying it doesn’t kill you?”
    It’s Sofia Brooks. I don’t know her, but I recognize her from algebra. I toss her a smile then look down at my tray.
    Pizza.
    There’s a slice of pizza on my tray.
    “Excuse me,” I say, feeling my pulse quicken. “Isn’t it tamale day?”
    “It was, but the tamales were rotten,” the lunch lady says, “so we swapped out with pizza. Got