A couple of days later, Karyn and Jon were walking through the school halls wondering how their geometry test went.
"I think they're all graded by now," said Jon. "I don't know when we'll get the results, though."
"I think I know," said Karyn. "Mr. Jenkins said he was going to give them back next week. He may have finished grading them already, but no matter what, we're not going to see them until then."
"But I don't get it. They're finished, right?"
"Yeah, they are," replied Karyn. "But Zach bugged him one too many times about it. He decided to make us all pay in return, so we have to wait a week to get the tests back."
"No we don't!" said Jon. "We have a wishing rock! And if anything goes wrong, we can always reverse the wish. Aardvark!" The stone was magically in his hand and he made the wish, "I wish that we'd find out our geometry test grades today."
The magic was not long in coming true--when Jon and Karyn entered the classroom, they found the tests lying in a pile on the teacher's desk. They searched through the tests for their own--Jon got an 86 and Karyn a 91. The rock's magic seemed to have worked, completely... until a week later.
"Have you heard?" said Bobby.
"Well, I've heard a lot of things," said Jon, but can you be more specific?"
"About Zach! They suspended him for three days for stealing the tests."
"Stealing the tests?" wondered Jon.
"Right. Last week when Mr. Jenkins wouldn't give us the tests back, Zach picked the lock on the cabinet and got all the tests out, remember? Well, they finally decided what to do with him."
"But that's terrible!"
Suspension was a nasty punishment because it affected good students more than bad ones. The students would not only be not allowed in school, but they would receive zeroes for not doing the work that they weren't being allowed to do.
And it was all Jon's fault. That night, Jon explained what had happened. "Look, Karyn, I'm the one to blame here. I wished we'd get the tests--and we got them in a way that hurt Zach. We know what the test results are anyway, so I'm going to tear that wish out of my notebook."
"Are you sure it's safe?" asked Karyn. "Remember what happened last time you did that. If a wish never happened, then a whole bunch of other things connected to it would never have happened either. You were in a different place doing different things just because you tore up a wish for tacos."
"It's perfectly safe," said Jon. "What could possibly have happened differently this week just because Zach never stole our test grades?" He slipped the notebook from his backpack and opened it up to the wish, then ripped the sheet out and tore it up. Things shimmered.
Then Karyn saw what had changed. She pointed at Jon and said "... THAT could."
