"Did you know one of the students killed herself?" Jen said.
"No!" Karyn gasped.
"Yeah, the quiet gi... I guess you might remember her as a guy. The quiet person in the back left corner of our math class who had no friends. She shot herself this morning. Or maybe I should say he shot himself. He deserves that respect in memorium, I guess. Especially since he shot himself. In the FACE! That's a manly way to kill yourself. He didn't take 5 sleeping pills, he shot himself in the face. That's how you get it DONE, gentlemen."
"I didn't want that to happen!" Karyn said.
"Of course not. You just wanted to forcibly turn a bunch of guys into girls, show that they're miserable, and somehow construe that as proof that women have it tougher in our crazy crazy patriarchial society. Or so you assume that's how it is. Of course that doesn't prove any such thing, it just proves that you put them under crushing psychological duress by turning them into girls. It wouldn't have proved anything if they hadn't remembered, because they wouldn't remember it the other way, and as you have seen now, it doesn't prove anything with them remembering it either. You have taught zero people any lessons on the female or male halves of the human condition. The boys you hurt to try to prove your point, didn't have that duress because of the time they needed to spend putting on fucking makeup in the morning, they had that duress because they were turned into girls and had their whole lives erased! Of COURSE it was never going to prove anything. At least not what you thought it would prove. It proves your petty vendictiveness and misandry. I can't even imagine how boy-me in that alternate reality came to be your friend in the first place! Or why you'd even WANT to have a guy as a friend. Was it sexual? I say this as I try to make sense of my own memories as I think back on them, and put them in a context of some sort. I mean, I know what I REMEMBER, but those memories are all counterfeit fake memories and I'm not even a real person, not really, so I don't know what to trust in my own memory. But anyway, I also notice you only recently are showing the slightest sign of empathy over it. I've kind of figured out the timeline of all this on my own."
"Ok, so I fucked up! But why are you siding against me anyway! You know you were a boy originally, but all your memories are of being a girl. How can YOU possibly come to their defense? How can you possibly take the side that boys have it harder, you don't even remember being a boy!"
"You're still talking about that now? Ok. Well, I could say, because I'm not an idiot, Karyn. But I'm not even taking that side right now. You just assume that I am because I refuse to take yours and say that guys have it tough too in ways that you can't even imagine. I'm not taking either side. I have MEMORIES of taking that side. As you say, it's WEIRD, it doesn't make any sense, I remember being a girl, and actually arguing with you yesterday and taking the position that girls have it way easier. I don't understand that. And I don't know how to make sense of my own memories. You screwed with my memories and I don't know if what I think is hard about being a girl is actually what's hard about being a guy, because I WAS a guy in those memories originally. That's a great way to win an argument there, Karyn, destroying the mind of your opponent. You've really proved how much of a bitch you are. But you know what, if I step back and take an impartial view of it, maybe boy-me was dismissive and conceited, even if he was right and girls have it easier, he was still being dismissive and conceited. But SO ARE YOU. What I'd really like to get through your thick skull right now is that the side you have chosen is one of pure conceit. You don't know how boys have it. I guess I don't either, I don't even know how girls have it, I know nothing since I don't even know what my own memories apply to. But as for you, you just ASSUME males have it easier because the things you think about are not issues to them, while you conveniently are oblivious to the mere possibility that there are things they have to worry about that are not issues to you. If I can trust that most of my memories are part of the male condition, then I can tell you, you have NO IDEA the things boys go through, the expectations others have on them, the abuse they routinely take and are expected to just be stoic about, to just suck it up and be a man. You just look at your concerns and think those are the only possible issues anyone in the universe could possibly have, because you don't bother to try to walk a mile in their shoes. In short, you have no empathy Karyn. This is why you did this in the first place. Even with your supposed proof, what was your method there? You wanted to show ME a thing or two, and never considered you might have anything to learn yourself. So you turned me and a bunch of guys into girls out of what, some hysterical notion of petty vengeance? For.... being masculine? For not praising you for TRIUMPHING in the face of SUCH advertity that us boys could never conceive of? If you weren't conceited, you might have instead tried turning yourself into a guy and walking a mile in their shoes. Because that's how self-assured you were that you were right and I was wrong. Whatever it was I even said. I don't even know, since I can't trust my own memories, since they were falsified by you. But I can infer how it went. I can tell you that right now if I'm kind of disgusted to share the same gender as you."
Karyn sighed. "Is this the end of our friendship?"
"I don't know. Were we ever friends? Like I said, I'm not sure I even count as a real person! All my memories are fake. Who the hell am I? I'm nobody. How can I be your friend. You stole the stone from me too. I, or boy-me, shared this amazing thing with you, showing you absolute trust, because he wanted to share it with you, and you instead completely betrayed him and took it away from him. For that OR this boy-girl fiasco, if you want forgiveness, ask boy-me, not me, oh right, he doesn't EXIST any more. But don't worry. I'm not going to snitch on you. I'm not going to tell annnnyone who you crushed like a bug that you're the one who did it to them. So rest easy I guess. You just go on thinking only of yourself. If you want any help from me, you give me back the stone so I can figure out a way to fix it. As far as I am concerned, you're not my friend and you can't be trusted."
Karyn was alone. Powerless to say anything against this tirade from the only one who might have been her ally on Earth. She was thinking that everyone hates her, and worst of all, that maybe she might deserve it. That she was the scum of the universe. Maybe Jon... Jen... Jon, was right, and she needs to stop being so conceited and not try to prove how right she is and think of other people for a change. And then it hit her what she must do. Jen said it herself. She needs to walk a mile in their shoes. She had betrayed her best friend. It occurred to her she was completely unreasonable, that she had done to him something he had never done anything close to her, and would never do to her, right after she insisted that she would never do anything to hurt him. And she had actually enjoyed it at first. But she knew what she had to do.
At the end of the day, she rushed home and got the stone. "I wish," she said pensively. "I wish that I would turn into a boy, for the next da.. wee.. for the next, for the next YEAR and everyone except Jon would remember me as always being that way for that time!" It couldn't be short-term. It had to be fair. Like Jon, Jen, said, just like the guys had been crushed by having been turned into a girl directly, not by petty issues, that come from being a girl all their lives, she needed to truly give it time to REALLY experience being a guy. She owed it to Jon and to the whole town. She had done to them something that would take something drastic to be forgivable. Not that this would earn her forgiveness. She also needed to fix what she had done. Could the stone bring back to life that poor kid who had killed himself? Was even that possible? To die alone and in despair, with no one there for you, with no way out except to shoot yourself in the face. How awful. What a monster I am, Karyn thought to herself.
But for now, he looked down at his new body and gasped. "I'm committed to this now." Looking at the stone in his hand one more time, he said "I wish I and the stone would be teleported to Jon's, or Jen's house." No sense teleporting into the middle of her room unannounced. That wouldn't be very gentlemanly. It occurred to Karyn that it wouldn't even be bad if Jon had teleported into her own room in the course of things, for by any fair standard, he really was a gentleman. That was a big reason why she made friends with him in the first place, after all. It saddened her, him, it saddened Karyn, that "Jen" couldn't even remember or figure that out now. How Karyn had wronged other people recently.
Karyn rang the doorbell.
Jon's mom answered the door. "Hi Kaine! Jen isn't home yet. Would you mind coming in and talking while we wait for her? I have some things to ask you. Some strange things, that I have heard about. Jen called me on her cellphone a few minutes ago."
