Jon found himself lying on the ground looking up at Karyn, who was kneeling next to him. "What happened?" he asked.
Karyn smiled. "You were having a panic attack or something," she said. "How do you feel?"
Jon took a deep breath and realized he was still male. "Better I guess. I took this crazy Facebook quiz that was supposed to create a Snapchat filter that generated an image of my ideal woman based on my answers but when I finished it applied the filter over me so that it looked like I was her. Then it was like I really was her to the point that I didn't feel like I was me anymore and the idea of being me instead of her scared me to the bone."
"Quiz?" Karyn said. "It looked like you were just checking your Facebook when I came out."
With Karyn's help Jon stood up. He walked over to his computer and saw the quiz was gone. He sat down at his chair again and played around for a minute but he couldn't find any record of the quiz. The tab it had opened in was gone and the webcam window it had opened was gone.
"That's weird," he said. "It seemed so real. That wouldn't be your doing would it?"
"Really, Jon, do you think I would do something that would just last for a few seconds?"
"Okay, I guess."
Karyn sat back down on Jon's bed. "I promise I did something that will hopefully show you just how dangerous mucking with someone's identity can be, but it won't trigger until tomorrow morning at school."
Jon turned to face her from his chair. "What did you do to me?"
"That would be telling, Jon. Where's the fun in that?"
"Fine, I'll play along."
Karyn tossed the stone back to Jon. "If I might make a suggestion, you might want to do something so that you can always have the stone with you without necessarily having to keep it on your person."
Jon caught the rock and looked down at it. "Good idea. I wish that there was a tiny little uninhabited pocket dimension just big enough to hold the stone that only I could access via an opening kind of like those portable holes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit no matter where I am by saying 'Bingo' and snapping my fingers like so," Jon said as he snapped his fingers. "I wish that the hole will close as soon as I remove my hand from it but can always be reopened. I wish that if anyone ever takes the stone without my permission or if the stone is ever outside my or Karyn's possession for more than five minutes without our possession it it will immediately transport to this pocket dimension automatically and that I can always will the stone into this dimension at any time by thought no matter who has it or where it is. I also wish that if anyone other than Karyn or myself does have possession of the stone they will find they cannot willingly or accidentally use the phrase 'I wish' in any language unless they are given specific permission by Karyn or me to make a wish and that each subsequent wish will require further permission otherwise they will find that they are again unable to say 'I wish' in any language until that permission is given."
Karyn laughed. "That was oddly thorough, but good thinking."
"Yeah, I'd been thinking of something along those lines for a bit now, just hadn't had a chance to do it. So, if you're not going to tell me what you did to me, do you at least want to get a jump start on that chemistry homework? I hate balancing equations."
They spent the next couple of hours until Jon's mother arrived home working on homework. Jon occasionally would prod Karyn to tell him about her wish but she was insistent that he wait. That night as she walked home, Karyn felt a knot in her stomach. Jon had been so completely different in his female form. She hadn't expected her to be so beautiful...or so young and tiny. As soon as she looked at him lying unconscious on the floor her first thought was to wonder why some stupid little freshman was in Jon's room. She had to fight every instinct to slap her awake and berate her for sneaking into Jon's house. Of course, it took her a second to realize the room didn't look like Jon's room any more. In fact, it looked like a study or home office instead of a teenage boy's room. Even the computer wasn't Jon's. It appeared as though the one Jon's mom used at her little desk in the corner of the den had been moved upstairs onto a bigger desk and several bookcases now lined the walls filled with legal books and texts and several file cabinets noted with names and dates lined the remaining walls. A screensaver showing the name of the law firm where Jon's mother was a receptionist danced on the monitor atop the now massive desk that had erupted from where Jon's small desk had once been, except instead of Jones, Willis, & Sherman it now read Jones, Willis, Sherman, & Merlin. Karyn suddenly realized that Jon had somehow taken himself out of his own family but when she looked down at the girl she knew to be Jon it felt wrong to think of her as her friend. She forced herself to say her code phrase to remove the magic Snapchat filter, feeling wrong the entire time she did it until she looked down to see Jon was back and the girl was nowhere to be seen. She felt a wave pass through her and suddenly the room was the way it had always been, as if it had never been anything else and she saw that Jon was waking up so she knelt down beside him. Barely 10 seconds had passed.
She hadn't expected it to be so difficult to think of Jon's new form as him, despite her wish for exactly that. She had to make sure she was careful otherwise her surprising distaste for the teenage girl version of Jon might overwhelm her love of Jon.
