The door opened to reveal himself. Except it wasn't himself. It was a girl who vaguely looked like him, and may also have been about 17, but her hair was too light, and she had different colored eyes. He looked around the room and while it resembled his at first glance it was a girl's room--a calendar showed some cute-looking cartoon Jon would never watch, a pair of high-heeled shoes was on the floor, and innumerable other tiny things made it obvious that this was not his room.
"Who are you?" she said.
This was a problem. He'd have to guess if he didn't want her to call the police on him. "I'm not sure," he said. "But I think I'm you. But I can't prove it. I...."
"Don't tell me this is a wish," she said.
"It's a wish," replied Jon. "By the way, who are you? My name is Jon Madison... are you Jonnie or something like that?"
"No, my name's Alice Madison."
"Your name is Alice? That doesn't make any sense. Your name should at least start with a 'J'. Okay, now what day is it?"
"It's the 12th," said Alice. "There's a calendar right there." She pointed to the same calendar that Jon had seen as evidence that the room was a girl's.
"Two weeks in the future," said Jon. "I give up. I wish I know what just happened and why things are so messed up."
"You have my stone!" exclaimed Alice.
"I bet I don't," said Jon. "I bet yours is where it always is. Now let me explain...."
"We both made wishes," explained Jon. "Mine was for something interesting, but there was also Dad's. There was a Jon here too, a boy just like me except slightly in my future. He wished his dad back to life. Which is fine so far. But soon afterwards his dad got ahold of the wishing stone and made some wishes. He wanted to be close to Zoe, which made him a 14 year old girl, and then he wished to not be her twin. He's now a 13 year old girl named Toni."
"But are you saying I'm really you?" replied Alice.
"That's a matter of definition. You see, when you make a wish, reality changes to fit it. If you're someone's dad, and you become a girl, reality changes so that you never were a dad. In the new reality, Mom had children with someone else, and it so happened that the child was a girl this time. You never heard the wishes, so you think you were always a girl and that you always had a 13 year old sister named Toni. Whether you're me depends on definition--if Mom had had two children in the new reality, you wouldn't say that they're both me. If both Dad and Mom were gone and completely different people lived here, they wouldn't be me. On the other hand, this does look a lot like my room, and you're in roughly the same place in the world as me, and you must know some of the people I know. And you have a stone. I don't know if that's enough to count as being me. Maybe it is."
"So why are you here?"
"I wished for something interesting to happen. It sent me into the future. The stone changes reality, but that's not time travel. It makes things happen as if Dad was always a girl, but a time traveller from the past knows that he wasn't."
"Is it, er, interesting?"
"I would say so. Everyone remembers you instead of me, but we're both here. Everyone remembers a sister instead of Dad, but he and I know he's Dad. And I time travelled without asking for it. This is too much interesting for one day."
