"I can't wait to wear more kinds of girl's clothes, have Mom treat me as a daughter, go out with...." She paused.
"What is it?" asked Karyn.
"I just got an idea. If this is really it... I wish I would travel back in time to my house before the stone was replaced, until I want to return."
Jo disappeared... and what she saw was the interior of her house, just outside her room. It was dark, in the middle of the night. She had to sneak into her own room to enter. She saw Jon lying there, asleep... funny how attractive she now thought her earlier self was.
But she wasn't there to stare at herself. She was there to come full circle. If she was wrong, then the intruder would appear sometime, perhaps even now, but he'd get the wrong stone. And if she was right....
Jo ever so carefully took the real stone from its place, and replaced it with the Genie Stone, which now showed a 2. But when she replaced Jon's stone with it, giving it to Jon, it changed to show a zero. Jon had zero wishes left and couldn't make any more.
Then Jo whispered a wish on the real stone: I wish that that Genie Stone would reset itself and forget that it can't give people any more wishes.
The Genie Stone on Jon's dresser, in the dim light, changed to show a 3 again.
"I want to go back!" she thought. Then she rubbed her eyes, because it was light again, and she was standing in front of Karyn. Jo held up the real stone truimphantly. "Karyn, I got it! The real stone! It's a time loop."
"What?"
"It's a time loop. The stone was replaced with a fake. So I went back through time to get the real one... but to get the real one I had to replace it with the fake, which started the whole thing in the first place. Anyway, here's the real stone."
"That's good. Are you going to change back from Jo to Jon?"
"Why would I want to do that?"
Karyn sighed. "I know this isn't really you, but if you really want to be like that...."
