Bella sits out, this year as every year, from gym class. It's just asking for a lawsuit. She does stretches and crunches and push-ups in the corner.
"If it was her Bella would know. She knows what she'd do if she got three wishes and what she'd do if she could fly and what she'd do if she won the lottery even though she thinks buying tickets for it is stupid."
"It depends on how the wishes work, obviously. Some genies are highly untrustworthy."
"Still depends on how much I can fit into a single wish. It probably can't be an arbitrary number of things connected by 'and', or I wouldn't need three."
"She has this all written down somewhere. I think there's a flowchart," says Andi in a stage whisper.
"But the short version is, insofar as I was able, I'd fix the world," says Bella, spreading her hands.
"Curing diseases, feeding starving children, she has this one really good rant about the educational system, stopping natural disasters, name any thing that is and she wants to replace it with a version that quote-actually-works-end-quote."
"I'm not omniscient, and using my first wish to become omniscient would have its own problems, but I am not made of cardboard, and therefore I can tell a difference between things that do and do not work when I look at them, and if I had the leverage I could make things that do not work more similar to things that do work. I don't think wanting to improve things is cute and I don't want to go into any more detail with someone who holds that impulse in contempt."
"I'm sorry I called it cute," he says. "Wanting to fix things is good. But when I ask you how you're gonna get it right and instead of talking about who you'll ask for advice and how you'll find out what you need to know, you get your back up about how you can get it all done by yourself, I don't start wanting to hand you a genie in a bottle."
"If only I had guessed that my prize was a genie when I had the opportunity to collect such a prize. In practice I'm thinking medical research."
Bella shrugs. "I didn't like how you asked a question. That doesn't mean you aren't allowed within a hundred yards of me by court order, or anything. If I were really mad I'd tell you not to come over this evening."