"And one other thing. I want you to be a girl for a while."
"What?"
"I want you to be a girl," repeated Jonnie. "You get me. Shouldn't I get you?"
"But you don't mind being a girl... right? And you like me as I am."
"Just because I'm a girl doesn't mean I can't want a girlfriend."
"But Jonnie... you are attracted to me just the way I am now, right?"
"Of course," said Jonnie, "but it's not as if I can't be attracted to any other version of you... And we both know that it's a strange kind of exception. Anything about you, if I imagine it on anyone else, doesn't have the effect on me that you would. Like if we're watching a movie and I imagine myself as the girl, I'd never want the guy in the movie to get intimate with me, even if he kisses like you... When I think about it it makes my head hurt."
"Hmm." Jon considered the problem. They were supposed to be pretty much identical, and once again, the problem was that that's exactly what happened. "I don't want to be a girl. There's got to be some other way. We could try the normal route. Get a girlfriend the old-fashioned way." Then he shook his head. "No, we'd have to break up with each other for that. There aren't as many people interested in bisexual threesomes as you see in porn.... Wait, here's an idea. We could clone you. If there are two of you you could be either with each other or with me..." He shook his head again. "I sound like the people who came to us when we set up that festival booth. A clone would be permanent. How about temporarily splitting you into two?"
"It could work," said Jonnie, "but the simplest is to just turn you into a girl and make you not care about it. You did that with me, after all."
"But I don't want to."
"But you will. And it really isn't fair to do it to me and not let me do it to you."
"You know what, Jonnie?" said Jon. "We don't want to get into arguments, and we really don't want to stop being able to trust each other. So I think..." He got out the stone and said "I wish that I'm a girl and don't mind being one, until Jonnie tells me I can change back."
The change that was most immediately noticeable wasn't the usual clothes, or room decor, or anything like that. It was Jonnie's stomach. She was about three months pregnant, minus a week or two, and was starting to show. Once Jon became a girl, the pregnancy vanished--the father wasn't a father, after all. Of course, Jon and Jonnie then did start to check out their room. The amount of pink there wasn't large, but to two people who were basically one single boy, it was very noticeable. The clothes were hardly a surprise since there was just a little more of the ones Jonnie was wearing already.
"Wait," said Jonnie, reaching a hand to her face. "Where did this lipstick come from?"
"I think," said Jon, "that someone who's a girl from birth is probably closer to average than someone who's cloned into a girl as a senior in high school. and since you were cloned from a girl you're closer to average too. So we both have more lipstick. Anyway, it's done. What do we do now?"
"Do you really have to ask?" replied Jonnie, kissing the new female Jon and leaving a lipstick smear.
