Jon got Karyn a taco too, and they ate their free food, but an hour or so later Jon and Karyn began to feel sick.
"Hey, you look worse than me" said Jon. "Let's forget about the studying tonight, the test isn't until Friday.
So Jon and Karyn parted. Jon went home and rested in his bed for a little while, but then decided that since he had a stone in his pocket, he may as well find out what's wrong. He reached into his pocket, but the stone was gone!
Then Jon touched his thigh and realized that his pocket had a hole in it. He must have dropped the stone somewhere. But he had gone straight home--maybe the stone was still around the house.
Jon searched for the stone and it didn't take too long for him to find it. The stone had fallen out in the bathroom and was lying on the floor next to the linen closet. He picked it up and made his wish. "I wish that I knew why I was sick."
And suddenly he knew the answer. The supplier of Casa Mexicana's meat had delivered a spoiled batch. Many people had gotten sick from eating there. Since Jon wanted a taco exactly like those at the restaurant, he got one with spoiled meat too.
But that was easy to handle. Jon got out his binder and found the page where he wished for tacos. He tore it out and ripped it up. And instantly he was not the least bit sick.
He was also, for some reason, lying on the floor with his head under a bed, as if looking for something, when last he knew he had been standing.
Jon got out from under the bed. He was at Karyn's place. His and Karyn's notes were out, and Karyn was beside him, looking puzzled. "Jon?" she asked, "how did you get here?"
"I don't know" he said. "I just undid the wish about the tacos... of course! That's it!"
"What?"
"Those tacos I wished for, they made us sick. So I tore out the page from the binder to undo the wish. But if we never ate the tacos, I never went home and we came to your place to study, so now I'm here instead of at home. And... wait a minute..." Jon reached into his pocket. No stone.
"What was under the bed anyway?" asked Karyn.
"That's it. I must have been looking for the stone. It fell out of a hole in my pocket at home. But if I never ate the tacos, I never went home, and I lost the stone somewhere else. Then I'd be looking for it here.
"I've heard of something like that. It's called the Butterfly Effect. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane... what it means is that if you make a slight change in something, it can have big effects later on. By getting rid of some tacos, you suddenly found yourself under my bed looking for your lost stone."
"This could be bad! What would have happened if I waited a week and then tore up the wish?"
"Maybe you'd have retroactively lost the stone for a week, so not only did you undo the tacos, you undid all the wishes you made in that week, and maybe we never did study so you get a lower grade on the test. If you tore up the wish a few years later, and the test affected your GPA and your college admissions, it could put you in a different college. Then you're in the wrong place to save some famous politician, and someone else gets elected president and soon the world's destroyed in a nuclear war all because you undid a wish about some bad food."
"You can't be serious, Karyn."
Karyn laughed. "No, I'm not. But we'd better find that stone."
"We don't need to" said Jon. He concentrated and learned the location of the stone--he had dropped it in some grass at the side of the road, where it still was. "Aardvark," he said, and the stone appeared in his hand.
"Wow" said Karyn. "You thought of everything."
But Jon knew that he didn't. If he ever had to undo another wish, the Butterfly Effect could always happen again. Still, he hoped it wouldn't be too much of a problem....
