After Miss Jenny finished the first part of her story, she took a break for a bit, letting the kids wander around and look at books and play.
"That part where Karyn wished to be as pretty as the most pretty girl in school...and changed how she looked...why didn't she just wish she looked like she used to?" Wanda said.
"Miss Jenny said the wishes couldn't be taken back," Zahara piped in.
"Yeah, but you can wish for new stuff, right?" Wanda said.
Stephie looked at them. "If I had a real wishing stone, I'd wish for all sorts of stuff. Why did Jon want to hide it?"
"Because if you wish for something by accident, like Karyn did, then you're stuck," Zahara said.
"Nuh-uh," Wanda insisted. "You just wish for something new. Like she could have wished that the pretty popular girl looked like Karyn used to, maybe...and that could work."
"That's selfish...what if the pretty girl didn't want to look like Karyn?"
"She'd never know," Wanda said. "'Cause everyone who didn't hear the wish would think she was always like that, right?"
Her two friends kept arguing. Stephie remembered that she still had Miss Jenny's wishing stone in her pocket. She went to return it. While she was waiting for Miss Jenny to finish talking to her Aunt Thalia, she took it out and looked at it.
"I wish that story was real," she mumbled. It would be great if Jon was a real person, and this really was his wishing stone. Miss Jenny made all the characters in the story sound so real.
The stone began to flash. In the new reality the stone had created, Jon and company were merely a figment of Jenny's imagination...possibly a future children's book. But the wish that they were real didn't contradict Jon's original wish for things to be interesting...
