Jon felt a tightness in his gut the entire rest of the evening, wondering what his errant wish must have done. Until he knew, he couldn't try to reverse it without potentially making things worse. And he was the only person to hear the wish, so maybe he'd be the only one to notice anyway?
What his dad did notice was that Jon was acting fidgety at dinner, so he asked about it. Jon said he was just tired, and not that hungry. It had been a big day, the teenager added, vaguely. Could he be excused? He felt like going to bed early.
Both parents nodded, and Jon left the dinner table after clearing his place, and then went to bed.
In his struggle to shrug off his current state of consciousness, and with it the current day, Jon found himself looking up at his walls. At the posters it had slowly accumulated over the years. Above his computer was a promotional poster for Minecraft. next to his book shelf was a Lord of the Rings poster. On his door hung a poster of the Periodic Table of Elements. Jon took comfort in these. He could remember purchasing and hanging each of them. They helped distract him from his mistake of earlier in the day, and ground him in a sense of normalcy.
And so, they were the last thing Jon thought about before successfully losing consciousness and ridding himself of the day. One final thought broadcasted into the aether, swirling in the air, caught up in a channel of magic, and looking for a place to land.
Across town, three other teenagers suddenly found themselves looking at the three posters that adorned each of their own bedrooms. Karyn Black blinked and turned around, admiring in turn her poster of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, the big white-and-green 4-H Club logo, and a poster of soccer players Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe. Biff Meadows put down his kettlebell to glance at his Seattle Seahawks poster with Russell Wilson's arm cocked, football in hand, then at the JROTC poster he'd gotten at a recruitment table when he went with his father to a veteran's convention, and a shirtless wrestling poster of John Cena flexing his arms.
Elsewhere, Sarah McMillan stopped removing her makeup at her vanity for a moment to look at her much more organized and straightforward design choices: to her left was a cheerleader with white uniform and pom-poms on a pink background, arms extended right and her right knee bent to the left, the word "CHEER" in bold, gold lettering across the top. To her right was another cheerleader with a white uniform and pom-poms in almost an exact mirror image, "CHEER" across the top once again. Sarah looked up to see her third poster, above her vanity, of a cheerleader with a pink uniform and pom-poms against a white background, standing up on her toes, legs stick straight, arms held up and out in a "ta-dah" pose, this time standing atop the word "CHEER," as though having just conquered it.
In that moment, the four teenagers were linked by Jon's wish, through their posters. When they woke up the next morning, their bedrooms would not be decorated the same as they were when they went to sleep.
