On 3:46 PM on Tuesday, Lauren O'Brien was at cheerleading practice with team captain Sarah McMillan. But she wasn't practicing. "I don't feel up to it," she told Sarah. "I caught something ..."
Sarah scanned her redheaded teammate. Was Lauren acting? Could she take the risk of having an unstable base? Endanger her teammates? No. "You'd better go home. And get better."
Lauren wished obeying that command was easy. But she doubted the virus within her would listen. "Okay --"
Her next word would have been uttered at 3:47 PM. But Sarah never got a chance to hear it. The two girls and most of the squad disappeared and were replaced by other girls from other parts of the campus. Two had once been Sarah and Jennifer Taylor. Some had once been women - faculty and staff at the high school. Two girls remained on the field but had swapped parents. Amber Levine and Allison Wright had become black Amber Wright and Jewish Allison Levine.
Those were now just names to Lauren, who materialized on a futon in the Meshida household. In this new reality, she was still sick -- being Japanese wouldn't have changed that -- but she wasn't on the team, so she had gone straight home after her last class.
And she had stayed there to recover. At 3:47 PM on Wednesday, she still wasn't at school and therefore was not subject to the next swap. But at that moment her memories adjusted to fit the reshuffled female half of the school while everyone else's memories of Lauren Meshida remained intact.
Of course, everyone else didn't include Jon who hadn't seen her housebound Japanese incarnation. It hadn't yet occurred to him to check his yearbook to survey the effects of his wish. What he saw firsthand was already too much for him to handle. Like the group of teenage girls walking past his family at the mall. They had once been ...
