Birthday Surprise

My students gave me a nice birthday welcome when I walked into my evening class. I had told them a week before the date of my birthday when we were doing a "When is your birthday?" introductory exercise. The students must have remembered.
As I entered, my five students stood up and shouted happy birthday at me. I was humbled by their gesture and thanked them.
Minneko, the part-time magician, shuffled to the corner of the room and started to slice pieces of cake for everyone. I was about to tuck into my tasty looking cake but Minneko ordered me to wait.


Minneko snapped her fingers and the class started to sing the Happy Birthday tune, whilst I was still dangling a piece of cake on my fork in front of my semi-opened mouth.
They finished the song and I clapped with brio. I then opened my mouth to eat the cake. I stopped when I heard Minneko shout, “Hip Hip Horay!”
These birthday protocols were all very nice but, to be honest, I just wanted to eat my bloody cake without interruptions.
".....and one for luck hip-hip hooray!" they concluded.
"Great. Lovely. Marvellous," I said, and moved the fork towards my mouth.
"Sam!" Kiomi said
"What now?!" I said irritably, the fork just millimetres from my mouth.
"What is your birthday wish?" she said with a smile
"To eat this cake," I replied, and shoved the cake into my mouth.
When we all finished our tea and cake, Minneko wanted to perform some magic and wandered over to a suitcase with brightly coloured spots on it. She cracked the case open and took out a bundle of cash and unfurled a sheet of paper with numbers 1-6 written on it. She handed me the cash.
"If your magic trick is giving me money, then it's the best thing I've ever seen," I said.
She said I might be allowed to keep the money if fate allowed it.
I didn't like the sound of that. It conjured up images of me schlepping through a perilous obstacle course involving swimming through shark infested waters, walking on hot coals and being chased by a Mayan tribe through a jungle - whilst Minneko waited at the finish line, holding the money in a fan-shape and cackling with glee.
It was more prosaic than that. She asked me to place the money on particular numbers written on a sheet. The money in my possession amounted to about £80. I put the bills on random numbers hoping it was the correct combination, according to fate.
Minneko then took out a small piece of paper with a chart written on it. She asked me, according to the chart, to replace certain bills with others, and give back particular bills to her. Eventually I was left with nothing but a 10,000 yen bill (£40). She said it was mine to keep.
I was rich! I let out a wicked laugh and pocketed the money. Before I could day-dream about what to spend it on, Minneko said, "Wait!"
I looked at her with suspicion. "What?" I said
"Fate says the money should be returned to the magician," she said, reading off her chart.
"Screw fate, this is mine!" I wanted to say. All I could do, however, was meekly laugh, and curse my bad luck and hand her back the money.
Minneko repeated this trick with the others in the class, and each trick ended in the same way as mine. No-one won anything. I questioned Minneko's judgement for magic. It's meant to spark the imagination with visual astonishments. It's not meant to leave a birthday boy bitter and blue.