Meanwhile, Gary's father, Jon's grandfather, Jack sighed and stopped scrying with his mobile phone. The phone was a useful substitute for an actual crystal ball or divining pool, but its lack of connection to the fundamental elements of the earth meant it could only catch brief glimpses of events and people as opposed to sustained visions.
Of course, that didn't mean he couldn't use it for the function for which it was intended. Tapping the icon for his facebook app, Jack logged on and searched for the profile his former grandson had said would explain many of the changes for which Mikey had wished. After a minute he found the profile and felt a pang when he realized it hadn't been a typo.
It wasn't Joe Morgan. It was Jo Morgan. His fears were confirmed. The girl he had been seeing at Linda's new home was actually Jon or had been.
Jack sussed things out from the profile fairly well. Jon Madison, who should have been a twenty-one year old white male, was now Joanna Shanti Morgan, a biracial thirteen year old girl at Bricksford Middle School. She played clarinet in the school band and she was a member of the gymnastics team. She did well in school it seemed, except for history and geography, subjects Jack recalled Jon had excelled at. Next year she would be a freshman at Lake Point High. One post said she wanted to join Peace Corps or possibly work with animals, maybe horses, when she got older. Typical enough aspirations for a young woman, but also a sign of how much Jon had changed.
All in all, Jo appeared to have adapted as well as she could, but she seemed sad in many of the family photos and there was usually a haunted look in her eyes when someone (Linda, Jack presumed) captured shots of her during various life events, blowing out the candles at her thirteenth birthday (Jack could imagine what she was wishing for), shyly posing for the camera in her first two piece swimsuit, getting her hair braided at a slumber party by someone tagged as Tyshelle, and so on. There was a gap of two months in Jo's posts over the summer last year. Jack managed to figure out from some posts just prior to and just after the gap that Jo had been sent to juvie hall on a shoplifting charge, ostensibly to learn, according to the judge, to not be like her "father."
Getting the stone was imperative. He had a considerable, but finite number of "wishes" store in his icebox, but those were for emergencies or very strategic moves. In order to have any chance of returning Jon, and by extension his family, to normal they needed the stone itself, especially because Mikey could use it to undo any substantial fixes Jack might put in place.
A direct confrontation was out of the question. It occurred to Jack that, strained as their relationship must be, Jo was still friends with Mikey on facebook. Following the link to Mikey's profile, Jack decided to do a little scouting. He should be able to learn something of Mikey's new social circle and hangouts from his profile, essentials whenever it came to targeting an opponent, especially one as dangerous as the bearer of the stone.
