Gabe smiled and sauntered through the halls with Jon. They kissed briefly and went to their respective classes. A few people teasingly made wolf whistles at Gabe, but he decided to tease back and blow them kisses. After all, their homophobia was their problem, not his. His first few classes went okay, but he got a few odd looks. It was at Gym (in the locker room) where his real troubles started. Brad and Jake, two of his friends on the football team, laughed at him and started throwing wadded balls of paper at him.
"Would you please quit it?" Gabe asked nicely, trying hard to avoid giving into that macho aggression that once punctuated his life.
Jon looked up in shock. How could this be? The stone was supposed to make the changes normal! Usually the world would accept a change like this. Heck, it'd go out of it's way to change others to make it seem normal.
"Hey, stop picking on my man!" Jon shouted.
Brad shoved Jon back into a locker. "What are you going to do about it, squirt? Take me on a study date too? Don't tell me that we don't know what you two do together when you claim you're studying math. And we know that Gabe sometimes sneaks a bra and panties under his clothes on days when their isn't Gym. I saw it the bathroom once. Besides, why do you think he dressed as a woman last Halloween? He was way too passing for it to be a mere costume. He knew how to look that way. And, hell, he's dressed as a girl right now. And I don't think he lost a bet!"
Jon gasped as he got shoved back again. It made it so that people normally suspected Gabe was gay and crossdressed and all he did was confirm their suspicions. The stone wasn't supposed to work that way! What happened?
Gabe was trying to hold back his anger, but seeing Jon pushed around pushed him over the edge. He slammed the jerks heads together, then turned to see if Jon was okay. That was his mistake. They weren't as reeling in pain as he thought. One of them held him back while the other kicked him in the nuts, causing him to double over in pain. Jon took an old wooden chair in the corner the coach sometimes used (the kids were mostly stuck with the benches in the changing area) and cracked them over the head with it. They slumped to the floor in pain.
Jon went over to comfort Gabe and help him to his feet. "Don't worry. It's safe now."
The coach walked into the locker room and pointed at Jon and Gabe. "Fighting is against the rules! Detention for both of you!"
Jon sighed. How could this day get any worse? He and Gabe kissed after class, then went to their daily schedules.
Gabe spent most of the day wondering what went wrong. He must have been losing his touch. He could once have taken those guys on any day. Now he had to rely on Jon to pull his butt out of the fire.
Jon, meanwhile, was wondering about the stone. How could it go wrong like this?
Gabe sat down by Jon during detention and Jon hugged him close.
Reaching down into his pocket, Jon touched the stone and whispered "I wish I knew why people aren't accepting Gabe the way he is now."
Suddenly, Jon's mind was filled with information, but it wasn't the information that he was expecting. For some reason, Jon was under the false impression that when the stone made changes seem normal that people just accepted the changes, but that's not how the stone usually worked. It just made changes to reality seem normal, as if nothing were different. It didn't change people's opinions of things. Brad and Jake hated homosexuals, so of course they'd react that way towards someone that they suspected to be gay.
But this was fixable. All Jon had to do was wish that everyone didn't have a problem with homosexuals. Basically remove homophobia from society (well, the society within the range of the stone). Or maybe he could do something else, like seek revenge on those two jocks. He wondered how they'd react if they were suddenly attracted to one another. Being the types of guys that hated gays, they'd probably think they were in a nightmare. Jon smiled.
"Something funny, sweetie?" Gabe asked, noticing his boyfriend's smile.
"No, just thinking about something." He squeezed the stone in his pocket, then made another wish.
