Jon waited for a bit after Jason had left the room, then asked to go to the bathroom. Once he was out in the hall, he made a beeline for the stairs. Something was definitely up here. Steve was the school's most notorious womanizer, and now he was gone and there was a girl with his last name that everybody remembered instead. Now Jason Alder, the most violent kid in the school, had been called to the same room as Steve.
Of course, it could be just some kind of odd coincidence, but given that there was clearly some kind of reality-alteration going on, Jon wasn't too sure about that. He made his way down the stairs to the basement and, giving it his best Solid Snake impression, stealthed through the cramped hallways of the basement. Luckily for him, there was nobody in the hall, and there were enough boxes and loose objects blocking the way to prevent his footsteps from echoing all the way down and back.
Jon quietly made his way down the hall, stopping just short of Room 21. He was in luck; that side of the basement had one of the giant, outdated central-heating ducts running down the entire length. Back when he and Karyn had first started high school, they'd done a little basement exploration and found that they could fit inside pretty easily; the pipes were almost the size of those giant playground hamster-tubes. Jon was bigger now, and it might be a tight squeeze, but he figured he could make it.
But did he want to? If there was really something sinister going on, he might be risking a lot if he were to get caught. But then, what could they do to him that he couldn't wish away? It was just a pity he'd left the stone at home, or this would be even simpler. Oh well, he wasn't going to give up on his chance to figure out what was going on. Jon removed his shoes, climbed up on a chair in the disused storage room next to 21, and gently pried open the vent on the heating duct.
It was a tight fit; Jon hadn't realized until now just how much he'd grown in the past few years. But it was workable, and thankfully, the noise from the school's ancient heating system covered up his clumsy attempts to climb inside. Once he was in, Jon slowly worked his way down the pipe until he was over the vent in Room 21. He was in luck; the slats on the vent were slanted at just the right angle for him to see Jason Alder, sitting in a folding chair and looking as surly as ever.
Stacy was not having a good day. Of course, the biggest problem was that she even was Stacy, but there were others as well. For one thing, it seemed that what that Fletcher bitch had meant by her being "the same" was that she, as a person, was mostly unchanged; her life, on the other hand, was notably different. Steve, as Steve, hadn't been on the top of the social heap, but he was pretty damn close. Stacy, though, seemed to be...well, not un-popular, but about average. Nobody hated her, it seemed, but she was among the many people Sarah McMillan wouldn't talk to, for example.
She had a hard time comprehending this until she thought back to how she'd gotten popular in the first place. Until seventh grade, Steve had been just another average boy, but when he was thirteen, there was this one girl he got to know. Anna seemed like a good kid whenever there were adults around, but the first time she and Steve were alone, it became apparent that there was a whole other side to her. Steve kissed his virginity good-bye about a month after he met her, and then about a month later she moved away. Left unattached, he'd gotten involved with another girl, and before long he'd begun to build a reputation for himself. And you don't get laid on a regular basis in junior high without attracting the attention of the popular kids.
But Stacy was still a virgin. Not that she had checked; she didn't even want to think about inspecting her new equipment. But if Fletcher were to be believed, nothing like that had ever happened to her, and inside, Steve was really kind of a loner; he hung out with the cool kids as a sort of professional matter, to the extent that being suave constituted a profession, but he didn't really form many attachments. So Stacy, with no similar experience with which to launch herself into coolness, had apparently just kept to herself for most of her life. On the bright side, this meant that she didn't have a boyfriend, something she was very grateful for, but on the other hand, it left her without any of the cool-kid leverage she'd enjoyed as Steve.
But by far, her most distressing problem at the moment was that her next class was P.E. She was standing outside the girls' locker room, indecisive. This was the kind of thing most guys her age dreamed of being able to see; at least a dozen teenage girls, all in various states of undress, and absolutely no recrimination for the viewing. By rights, she should be raring to go. But she had this horrible fear that she was going to walk in and...nothing. That she wouldn't react any more than Steve had in the guys' locker room. Had they made her like guys? She supposed they'd probably justify that by claiming they'd left her heterosexual. That would be bullshit, of course, but it would be standard administrative bullshit. But right now, she was just afraid to even find out.
"What are you standing around for?" one of the girls asked her, poking her head out into the hall. "You better get in here, or you're not going to be changed in time!"
Once again resigned, fully and painfully aware that there was nothing she could do, Stacy sighed and went inside.
