It was amazing. Everything was completely still and quiet.
His mom was putting away clean dishes from the dishwasher. Her hand still on the plate, as she put it in the cupboard.
His 10-year old brother Mikey was watching TV in the living room. He was tossing a ball up and down as he watched his cartoon. The ball was stuck in mid-air just two feet above his head. Jon tried to grab it. But just like the pencil in his room, it was stuck and wouldn't move.
He looked around the house and noticed other things that had stopped moving. Like his dog, Nikita. She was a Border Collie. Nikita must have gotten wet, because she was shaking herself off. It was weird seeing her frozen like that. And Jon noticed something when he was there: the water dropplets flying off of Nikita's hair. He couldn't move them either. When he touched them, they felt like ice pellets, except not cold.
When he was done looking all over the house, he decided he wanted to go outside and check out the rest of the time-frozen world. He saw that his Goth sister Zoe was leaving (probably to that Goth club she wasn't supposed to go to), so the door was open enough that he could squeeze through. But then he thought Why bother? I can just unfreeze time and open the door myself.
That's when he heard a beeping noise. It only lasted about five seconds, but it didn't take him that long to figure out where it came from.
It was the stopwatch. He looked at it and saw the minute hand on ten minutes, and the second hand continuing to spin around the clockface.
"Oh no," is all he could say. He knew what this meant, but he went ahead and clicked the stopwatch anyway. Nothing happened. Of course, nothing happened. According to the instructions, if Jon waited to click the stopwatch until after 10 minutes has passed for him, time would remain frozen until another hour had passed.
What was Jon supposed to do for an hour?
