The rest of the morning went by about as smoothly as Jenny could possibly have hoped it would. The bell had rung not long after the Great and Terrible Mrs. Finch had given her her class schedule, sparing her a while from that lengthy chat Karyn apparently wanted to have with Jon. She wasn't entirely off the hook, though; the talk had just been postponed to lunch, at the insistence of both Karyn and Nadine. Jenny knew it had to happen, but she wasn't much looking forward to it. As for the meantime, it turned out Math was still Math, Chemistry was still Chemistry, and the group project Jenny apparently had in American History was just about handled by Nadine, whom she should have figured would be a teacher's pet and doing it all herself, albeit while displaying absolutely no sympathy for Jenny's situation while doing so. The only part of morning classes that really stood out to Jenny was PE, and that was solely because it meant she had to change clothes as a boy, with the boys, in the locker room for the boys. Jenny counted herself lucky neither Nadine nor Karyn could be in there with her; they'd have just made it soooo much worse for her. Besides, all the changing thing really meant for her was a few minutes staring at a wall and trying not to blush as she changed into and out of Jon's old gym clothes; the rest of PE was spent just jogging, a task for which Jenny was actually grateful, since for her it basically meant a half hour of running away from her stresses while contemplating what she was supposed to do as Karyn's newest oldest BFF.
That, however, had just been the morning. Now, the lunch bell was ringing, meaning Jenny had to get to a chat with Karyn, a chat about which she hadn't the slightest clue what to expect. So, Jenny composed herself, took a deep breath, and then headed to the lunchroom (this, thankfully, was a near-exact duplicate of the lunchroom she'd known decades earlier, aside from some changes to the menu and the branding on the vending machines. And whoop di doo, the price of just about everything had inflated).
As promised, Karyn found Jenny within seconds of her entry to the lunchroom, and from there escorted her to the line for food. "How're ya feeling, Jon?" she asked. "Has everything gone alright?"
"Everything's gone so well it's surprising," Jenny replied, honestly.
Karyn didn't quite seem to believe it, but she didn't say anything. "Are you ready to talk?" came instead.
Jenny sighed. "You aren't gonna believe a word of what I'm about to tell you, Karyn," she said dejectedly. "But yes."
"The long and short of it is, your friend here's gone completely off his rocker." Nadine had appeared as if from nowhere behind Jenny and Karyn, joining their quest for poor cafeteria food. "You'll find that out real quick, once he starts spinning you the yarns he spun for me this morning."
"Nadine, would you butt out!?" Karyn asked with scant pleasantry. "What were you even doing with Jon this morning, anyway!?"
"Just saving his life, nothing special." Nadine rolled her eyes.
"It's alright, Karyn, she can join us," Jenny said with a sigh. "Whatever it is you need to tell me, you should probably be telling her, too."
"What!?" Karyn gave Jenny an incredulous look. "Look, Jon, I don't mind the girl herself so much, but I don't think we want word getting around about the you-know-what, you know?"
"The what?"
"You know..." Karyn leaned in for a low and furtive whisper. "The stone."
"What stone?" Jenny asked, just as quietly.
Karyn's stare was focused and penetrating, her mouth agape. Jenny could see a lot of wheels turning in Karyn's head, something was starting to dawn on her, but Jenny hadn't the slightest clue what it could be.
"You guys know I can still hear you, right?" Nadine interjected, breaking the focused silence. "Something about a stone?"
"Yeah, yeah, don't be so loud about it!" Karyn snapped back to Nadine. "And fine, you can tag along, but you gotta swear you're keeping all of this secret!"
"If it's something an adult should know about, an adult should know about it. Should an adult know about it?" Nadine asked, cocking a suspicious and judgmental eyebrow.
"It's not like that, Nadine," Karyn said, wearily putting a palm to her face. "Nobody's getting in trouble or anything, here!"
"Then yeah, I can keep a secret like that."
"I'm sure you can," Karyn replied in obvious disbelief, and let the conversation drop there.
Soon enough, the three each had a light meal in hand, and had found a nice, isolated corner of the courtyard where they could talk in relative peace. The same corner, in fact, where Jon had made Linda cry in 1986, though none of them had any idea about that.
For a little bit, nobody said anything, and just ate quietly. Jenny had no idea what to say; there wasn't any way to say anything she could think of without coming off as insane. Imagine her surprise, then, when Karyn, unprompted, suddenly broke the silence by telling her exactly what Jenny was thinking of how to say.
"Welp, I've been thinking. I have a guess at what's going on here, now. You aren't Jon Madison, are you?"
Jenny then picked her jaw up off the floor, and exclaimed "No! No, I'm not! I'm supposed to be a girl, named Jenny Pierce, and a teenager of the 1980s! How did you know!?"
Karyn gave a long, sad sigh. "So that's what it is," she muttered. Jon hadn't come back after all, at least not mentally; the disappointment of that was written clear all over her face, hung low. "And how I know... I uh, have a lot of explaining to do. We both do, actually."
"If you know anything at all, then please, oh please, don't be shy! Do share!" Jenny's eyes had lit up in excitement. "How is something like this even possible!?"
"It's possible with this." Karyn produced a round, flat, metallic reddish stone from her back pocket and set it on the table before her. "This is that stone Jon and I were wanting to keep secret."
Jenny then proceeded to inspect the stone as though she were Sherlock Holmes on a pound of cocaine. Bringing it close to her face, she carefully made note of just about every scratch, crevice, crystal grain, and feature the stone had; but for all that, all it really seemed to be is a plain if slightly unusual rock. "What does it do?" she asked Karyn.
"Hand it to me and I'll show you. And don't freak out, either of you, okay?" Karyn replied, and Jenny was swift to obey. Taking a deep breath to compose the wish, Karyn then said, "I wish you were dressed in clothes that fit you, and suited Jon's sense of style."
The stone flashed, but at first nothing else seemed to have happened, at least to Jenny. Nadine, however, gasped sharply, and turning, Jenny could see she was staring, mouth covered, at what had once been Mr. Ferguson's button-up and slacks. Then she looked herself. Both of these had transformed: the shirt into a simple, plain black tee that fit her male body perfectly, and the slacks into a set of similarly well-tailored denim jeans. They weren't what anyone would call very fashionable, just simple enough to get the job done, but that didn't matter so much; Jenny was astounded all the same.
"No way..." Jenny began slowly. "No, freakin', way! Can that grant any wish!?"
"Almost any wish," Karyn explained. "There's a few major caveats. The biggest of these is that wishes made with this thing are irreversible, and can only be reinterpreted at best. For instance, if I said 'I wish your clothes would turn back into what they were' while holding the stone, like I did just now, nothing would happen, as you can see." Jenny went back to reinspect her clothes, and Karyn was right; they were still just the same tee and jeans they were a moment ago. "I can, however, say 'I wish your shirt were green instead of black,' and probably have that granted, like so." The stone flashed, and when Jenny went back to look at her shirt, it had turned a deep forest green color. "I should also note that nobody who's not in earshot of the wish when it's made is going to notice anything being different; it'd be like it's always been this way, to them. We aren't getting any stares right now, as you can see; they all just think you came to school dressed like you are now. I think there's also some rule that it can't affect anything more than a few miles away, but honestly I'm not sure about that; it's not usually that important, anyway."
"Oh, my, god." For once, Nadine had no comment on the swearing; she was just as awestruck as Jenny at what she was seeing. "Oh my freakin' god! And you're telling me that's the reason I'm like this now!?"
"That's my best guess, yeah," Karyn said. "What I know happened is that Jon slipped up some time last night and idly wished for something interesting to happen with the stone still in his hand; I made a wish to learn that, just to be sure. What I'm pretty sure happened next is that he- well, his mind, went back in time to 1986 and replaced yours just before you were struck by a car, saving you- uh, your body from that death. Your mind must've come forward in time to replace his, up here."
"That's impossible!" Nadine interjected suddenly. "Jenny Pierce was struck and killed by a car in '86, Mom was absolutely sure of it! If Jon, in Jenny's body, had lived through that event back then, wouldn't she remember the event differently now?"
Karyn opened her mouth in reply, but then closed it. She had no answer; why wouldn't Nadine's mother, or Jon's for that matter, remember it differently if Jon-in-Jenny had in fact survived the car incident? "Time-wimey... wibbly-wobbly... stuff? I don't flippin' know, Nadine! All I know about time travel comes from movies and stuff, I'm not suddenly an expert or anything!"
"Hang on, hang on, how do you know Jon's mind went back in time, then?" Jenny asked, curiously. "Nobody else but you and me seem to have any idea of what's going on here."
"I told you, I've been making wishes with stone to figure it out," Karyn explained. "The first thing I wished was to know where Jon was, and it conjured up this old newspaper clipping from 1986, describing the near-miss of the car back then. Here, I still have it; give it a read-through." Karyn produced the article from her back pocket and gave it to Jenny and Nadine, to read through as she kept talking. "Another wish I made directly told me in my head that Jon had wished for something interesting, so it sent him back in time. Later, I saw this message addressed to 'KB', pointing me to this novel about people who travel through time by swapping minds with people from different eras," Karyn said, presenting her copy of The Mirror. "That was what gave me the idea that you weren't Jon, but Jenny, actually."
Nadine was frowning with some intensity at the newspaper clipping, as though she didn't quite understand. "Karyn, this doesn't describe a car's near-miss in '86," she said bluntly. "It pretty clear shows Jenny being killed back then." (Jenny, for her own part, had taken one look at the picture on the clipping and averted her eyes with a shudder, not particularly thrilled at seeing an image of herself mutilated and dying in the past.)
"What? No, it doesn't!" Karyn said, leaning over to see the clipping with Nadine. "It says right here: 'nearly hit by an out of control vehicle. The teen was miraculously unharmed,' and so on, right?"
"Uh, not right, no," Nadine countered. "What I'm reading says 'in mourning after the death of a local teenager. Jenny Pierce, 14, yada yada, she was hit.'" Nadine gave Karyn a curious look. "Are you not seeing that?"
Now it was Karyn's turn to show the wonderstruck face. "I'm not seeing that, no," she replied quietly, taking the clipping back for another rereading herself. "That's very interesting," Karyn muttered.
"You didn't include anyone else in the wishes to know where Jon went, right?" Jenny asked thoughtfully. "Maybe this is the magic's way of showing you what it wants to show you, and only you."
"Maybe..." was all Karyn said. Jenny could see the wheels turning again, though this time with less revelatory feeling and more pure confusion. "I guess that doesn't matter immediately, though. The point is, I'm pretty damn sure-"
"Language!" Nadine interrupted.
"...pretty fucking sure," Karyn continued with a glare at Nadine, "that Jon's mind is now in your body in 1986, and living out life as though you hadn't been hit by that car. Well, he isn't there now now, but, you know what I mean."
"Yeah, I do," Jenny nodded. "And whatever it is he's done and/or doing there, it's not affecting anything here, besides your, uh, visions, that you're getting from the wishes on the stone. I think. Right?"
Karyn nodded. "That's the leading theory, at the moment, yeah."
"And we just can't reverse it? There's no wish we can make that just makes this whole situation simply go away?" Jenny asked, her tone full of anticipation.
Karyn shook her head. "I tried a few of those already. None of 'em were granted. Whatever the interesting thing really is, it definitely wants him over there."
Exhaling a great lot of air, Jenny deflated. "Can't make this too easy, now can we?" she remarked with possibly the least humorous sarcasm Karyn had ever heard.
"Hey, hey, chin up, man!" Karyn went on over to Jenny, putting a hand on her shoulder. "I want him back, too. Remember, we still have the stone! Maybe we can't reverse the wish directly, but we can definitely take some steps to fix things, play a bit of damage control, right?"
"Yeah... there's that at least."
Karyn leaned in and gave Jenny a hug. It just felt right. She knew what Jon looked like when he needed one, and right now, Jenny looked exactly like that.
"Thanks, Karyn," Jenny said, much more comfortable with it than she had been that morning in the library. "I guess if I could wish for anything right now, it'd be a way to somehow communicate with this Jon character in 1986. Let him know his body back here is in good hands, and get some peace of mind about what he's doing with mine."
"You wanna make that official?" Karyn pulled away from the hug and reached for the stone, offering it to Jenny. "That's not a bad idea at all, I say! Just be careful with how you word it; there's no going back, after all."
"Yeah..." Jenny took the stone carefully from Karyn's hands. "Thanks for everything, Karyn! I'm glad to have met you here, if nothing else."
Karyn nodded, holding her breath at Jenny with the stone. Jenny herself then took a long, deep breath to compose the wording of the wish, and started to speak.
