”Let’s see,” said Kyle. “I could give you a few piercings, a few tattoos, a more seductive voice, a higher IQ, a modeling career --“
”A modeling career?” asked Jennifer. “You mean Playboy, or something worse?”
”Well, I was going to let you pick,” said Kyle. “Playboy’s not bad, but I think you’d get more attention in something like Score --“
”Forget it,” Jennifer said. “Okay, higher IQ -- what’s the catch?”
”No catch,” said Kyle. “You’ll be the smartest girl at this school.”
Jennifer still couldn’t believe there was no catch, but it sounded like the best of a bunch of bad options. “Okay, I’ll take the high IQ,” she sighed.
”Aw, you should be a little happier about it,” said Kyle, and then, “I wish the conditions I wrote down earlier for the ‘Jen’s Higher IQ’ wish were fulfilled.”
Jennifer almost snapped, “It’s Jennifer, not Jen,” her automatic comeback to anyone who tried that, but the world was already beginning to swirl around her.
When the swirling stopped, she was sitting on a stool in front of a stove and a counter; on the counter was a small pile of cookware and various packaged ingredients. She looked around the room -- everyone else was a beautiful, scantily-clad, over- accessorized girl, sitting at an identical setup.
But I don’t take Home Ec, she thought, looking back toward the front of the room. The 40-ish Home Ec teacher, Ms. Kendall, looked the same as Jennifer remembered -- apparently Kyle hadn’t gotten around to the teachers yet.
Ms. Kendall said, with what Jennifer detected as seriously forced cheerfulness, “All right, we’re going to try again today to make chocolate chip cookies.”
A girl from behind Jennifer exclaimed, “Ms. Kendall, Ms. Kendall! Like, I thought these were chocolate chips! But they’re icky!”
Ms. Kendall rolled her eyes briefly. “As I told you yesterday, these are what’s called semi-sweet chocolate chips. They are chocolate, but they don’t have as much sugar in them as the chocolate you eat straight. And please, Tanya, don’t eat your ingredients! You need to put those in the cookies.”
Jennifer turned around. The only Tanya in school, she knew, was on track to be the school valedictorian. She shouldn’t be in Home Ec, either -- she should be in all the Advanced Placement classes. But now Tanya had big bleached-blonde hair, big pink earrings, big pink lips, and, well, she just looked like a bimbo.
Jennifer reached for her school bag and pulled out the notebook that had her computer-printed class schedule stuck between two of the pages. Her eyes widened when she saw that it was completely different: two hours of Home Ec, something called Receptionist Skills that she’d apparently had as her first period instead of English, then P.E., Extended Girls’ Lunch, Sex Education, and at the end of the day, a class titled Very Basic Academics for Girls.
”Um, um, this doesn’t taste like cookies yet!” exclaimed another high-pitched voice.
”That’s because all you’ve done is poured your flour out,” said an already- exasperated Ms. Kendall through gritted teeth. “And you didn’t even do it into a bowl!”
”Oh,” said the girl with the pigtails and the blue minidress. She looked at the mess on her countertop. “Um, um, which thing is the bowl again?”
Jennifer’s eyes widened at that, as she realized what Kyle had done. He’d made her the smartest girl in school by turning all the other girls into nearly-brainless bimbos!
She looked at the clock. One hour and fifty-eight minutes to go in this double- period class.