“If I had three wishes, I told myself, I know exactly they would be: Destroy Judith! Destroy Judith! Destroy Judith!” (12).
Samantha “Sam” Byrd is the tallest kid in the seventh grade. She is klutzy, uncoordinated, and easily the worst player on her middle school basketball team the Montrose Mustangs (it’s interesting to note that at Montrose Middle School the students call their teachers by their first names). Throughout the book, Sam is relentlessly bullied by two girls at school, Judith Bellwood and Anna Frost. They trip her, laugh at her, call her “Stork,” throw things at her in the cafeteria, sabotage her during math class, accidentally dump tapioca pudding on her new shoes, and taunt her by saying, “Why don’t you just fly away, Byrd.” Luckily, Sam has a close friend named Cory Blinn (a boy who always wears an Orlando Magic hat) and her dog named “Punkin.”
On one a particularly dark and stormy day, Sam is biking home when she arrives at a place called Jeffer’s Wood, a long stretch of trees connecting two neighborhoods. Suddenly out of the trees emerges a mysterious woman. She is pale with coal-colored eyes, thick black hair, and she wears a red shawl. She is almost ancient in appearance, perhaps like an old gypsy fortune-teller. She says her name is Clarissa “The Crystal Women” and she asks Sam for directions. When Sam tries to leave, Clarissa refuses to let her go. So, Sam helps her get across town to Madison Street, and in return Clarissa insists on granting Sam three wishes –in doing so, she clutches tightly to Sam’s arm with her frigid cold hand.
“I love the rain… Without the rain, what would wash the evil away?” (24).
Naturally, things go awry for Sam. Clarissa pulls a red glass ball out of her purple bag and Sam wishes she will become the strongest player on the basketball team. But the following day during a big game, instead of making Sam strong, all the other players on her team are instead rendered weak, almost unable to play as they suddenly start yawning. It is amusing to Sam at first, but soon she starts to grow paranoid that they are dying when they stop showing up to school. Feeling bad, she visits Judith’s house to check on her. But when Judith loudly accuses Sam of being a witch, Sam flees and runs into Clarissa again. This time, she wishes Judith would just disappear entirely. Notably, this second wish cancels out the first. But instead of Judith simply disappearing, the wish makes everyone in the whole town vanish and Sam awakens entirely alone to an empty town. She sits alone on a sidewalk, sad and forlorn with her head in her hands. When Clarissa appears again, she glibly remarks that ‘magic is unpredictable’ and that she wants Sam to think carefully about her final wish so she won’t be left unhappy again. Sam thinks for a moment and then wishes that everything will return to normal again… only now she wishes that Judith will regard Sam as the greatest person who ever lived. What could go wrong? Immediately at school, Judith starts copying Sam’s hairstyle, she helps her carry her books, and she wants to get braces, too.
When Judith takes things too far and sneaks into Sam’s bedroom at night, hoping to study algebra together, Sam runs away with Judith trailing after her. When Sam finds Clarissa, she wishes that she had never met Clarissa and that Judith had met her instead. Strangely enough, despite the three wishes rule, this fourth wish is granted. I guess her final wish wasn’t actually “permanent” as Clarissa had claimed. At any rate, the twist at the end of this book shows Clarissa speaking with Judith. Now it appears Judith is given three wishes. She uses her first to wish that ‘Byrd would fly away.’ And suddenly Sam gets hungry and eats a worm before she flies up into the sky, her feathers ruffled by the wind, all while Judith gazes up with a malicious smile on her face.
Be Careful What You Wish For… is a fairly ridiculous Goosebumps installment in my view. This is basically a less interesting “monkey’s paw” story. I appreciated the moody atmosphere surrounding the character of Clarissa, the gypsy fortune-teller, however the rules of the story don’t seem to make much sense to me. For example, at one point while playing basketball with her bookworm brother Ron, Sam wishes Ron would be shrunk down to no more than a foot tall. But curiously this offhand wish is overlooked, Clarissa never grants it. I guess it doesn’t count toward her three wishes for some reason? And yet at the end of the book, Sam is given one additional wish after her three (a fourth wish?) but this is never explained. Of course, Sam foolishly hands over her magical power to her arch-nemesis Judith who immediately uses it transform Sam into a bird (Sam shows herself to be the worst at this, only ever wishing for things that cause her harm). Clarissa’s magic is described as ‘unpredictable’ for Sam when her wishes inevitably backfire. Yet at the same time Judith’s wish instantly works exactly as planned in the end (i.e. it does not backfire on her). How does this make sense? Why is the magic not also ‘unpredictable’ for Judith? All of this serves to torment Sam and show her to be an incompetent buffoon. And Clarissa remains a mysterious, unexplained character –we are never given a reason as to who she is and why she chooses Sam for three wishes.
At any rate, bullying remains a serious topic explored in the Goosebumps books. I have already encountered characters in the series who are almost pitiable for how much they have been bullied. However, whereas Carly Beth in The Haunted Mask eventually learns a hard lesson about wanting to become a fearsome bully herself, in Be Careful What You Wish For… Sam Byrd is just a cartoonishly inept character who seems condemned to remain clueless and forever at the mercy of her enemies.
Stine, R.L. Be Careful What You Wish For… Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1993.