After Jessie returned, Michelle handed her the stone back. "Thanks, sis! I had a lot of fun with this."
"What did you do?"
"Oh, nothing really. I made a magic gun which can change people at random... it'll be great for parties! The stone itself I didn't use a lot. Except once when a cop caught me speeding. I just wished he'd walk away and forget he met me."
"Well, that doesn't sound too bad, Michelle," said Jessie, taking the stone.
"You know you can trust me, Jessie. I never made a wish that I couldn't reverse. Though some of it was really tricky. It's hard to explain, why don't you just ask the stone?"
"Sure. I wish that I knew all the wishes you made with this stone today... Huh?" Jessie furrowed her brow.
"Is something the matter?" asked Michelle.
"I don't get it. Your first wishes were for a ten year old to leave you alone, and turn feminine?"
"I did not! My first wishes were to get a new wardrobe. You remember that whole stack of clothes I brought home from the mall yesterday, right?"
"Of course I do, Michelle."
"That was the result of a wish. You just remember that I always had them."
"Well, that sounds harmless enough, but the stone doesn't lie... does it? I wish I knew what was going on."
Jessie gaped.
"Jessie? What's the matter? Did I turn a ten year old into a pile of clothes by accident?"
"No, it's... oh, god, what did you do?"
"I didn't do anything, come on."
"No, Michelle, you did! You were a ten year old boy named Mikey. You didn't borrow the stone, you stole it. I was your older brother Jon, in high school. You transformed me and you had an accident with the gun. We aren't really in college and I never was a dead lookalike for Jessica Simpson. About the only thing you remember before my date with Robbie that really happened is making the gun."
"You're telling me I'm a little boy? Nothing I know is real? I shouldn't be on campus taking sociology classes, I should be learning to do long division? I shouldn't be dating guys, I should be having crushes on little girls anbd teachers?"
"That's right!" said Jessie. "It's hard to say it's even your fault, you're so different. Once you made yourself an older girl, history changed so you were one... which means you wouldn't have done childish things like steal the stone or use the gun to transform me. So now, you just borrowed the stone, and you think I haven't been transformed but was always this way."
"Oh, god. I'm sorry, Jessie, I didn't even realize. I mean if you're not even Jessie."
"But you're not Michelle either. You know, it's easy to change back. I wish your gun had a 'reverse change' switch on it so you could fire it at someone the gun changed and change them back."
Michelle took the gun out of her purse. The switch was there. She looked at it for a long time and then shook her head. "We have to change back, right? Everyone outside the stone's range would think Jon and Mikey vanished."
Jessie whispered something to the stone and then said "No, the stone has a range but the gun doesn't. The gun makes your change real all over the world. We can change back or not. Nobody will notice either way."
"I'm glad, Jessie. I don't want to change back. I think. I bet you don't really want to do it either, do you?"
"I can't," said Jessie. "I'd lose all I remember, I'd lose my boyfriend, I'd lose you. Yet from what the stone tells me I already lost something, and what I have is all fake."
"I can't either. I'd never want to go back to being a ten year old, or become a boy. I don't want to do school all over again even if I just remember doing it the first time and it didn't really happen. But we're really supposed to change back, right? Jessie, what do you think we should do?"
