That night, as Jon trudged joylessly through a longwinded chapter of his history textbook, he had an unusual amount of trouble keeping his mind on his work. The wishing stone burned in his pocket, and its endless possibilities tumbled restlessly through his thoughts.
Halfway through the fall of Constantinople, he shook himself awake. He had no idea what he'd been reading for the last half hour. His history book, dull and overly wordy at the best of times, seemed absolutely colorless now in the shadow of the wishing stone.
"Too bad there isn't a better way to learn about history," he muttered with a sigh. Then a smile crept over his face, and a moment later he was dialing a phone number he knew better than he would ever know the date of the fall of Rome. Ten minutes later, Karyn was sitting on his bed, and Jon had thought through every detail of his wish.
"What's up, Jon?" Karyn asked, her own eyes blearly from forty minutes of algebra.
"Karyn" he said, "have you ever wished you could sing with the Beatles? Or meet George Washington? Or take part in a medieval jousting match?"
"Mmm, not really..." Karyn said.
Jon blinked. "Okay, whatever. But wouldn't it be cool to be able to travel through time? I'm sure there's SOMEWHERE you'd like to go."
Karyn thought a minute. "Yeah," she said, "that would be pretty cool. Have you been thinking about what you'd like to do with the stone? What have you got in mind?"
Jon pulled the stone out of his pocket and brushed it off theatrically. "I wish," he said, "that I had a time machine hidden in my closet. I wish that it would allow Karyn and me to travel to any time and place we wanted, and that we would take over the bodies of two people who lived in the time and place we wanted to travel to." That last bit had been inspired by a show Jon's mom had watched when he was a kid; he thought it would be easier to get a feel for the time period they travelled to if he and Karyn could do it as real people from the past rather than as two teenagers in modern dress with no connection to the actual culture. "I wish," he went on, "that, if Karyn and I are touching while we activate the time machine, that we will jump into people who are in close proximity to each other, and I wish that Karyn and I will always be able to recognize each other, even though everyone around us will see us as the people we've jumped into. And I wish," he said at last, "that, when we travelled back in time, we would have a gold coin that would allow us, when we blow on the coin, to return to the present.
"So," he said, turning to Karyn with a grin, "where do you want to go first?"
