"You said you had an hour," explained Karyn. "Plus the time for your parents to drive to the airport. That may not be that long but it's plenty of time not to make a hasty wish. Look at what happened with just wishing a branch blue--what's going to happen if you wish to fix this and you don't get it right?
"That's the thing," said Jon. "Even a simple wish can be unpredictable when it changes the past. But one thing I can do is wish that something happens without changing the past at all. Changing the past is no problem if I say it doesn't happen." He grabbed a notebook that had Julie's name on it and tore out a piece of paper. Then he began to scribble something and finally held the stone again. "I wish for the wish I just wrote down."
"What was that for?" asked Karyn.
"The wish ends when you take a breath. I don't think I could say all of that without taking a breath, so I had to write it down." He showed the wish to Karyn. "See? First of all, I wish I can transform into Julie and back magically, with or without clothes and possessions. Second, I wish that if Julie and I are supposed to be in the same place and I can't come up with a good excuse for one of us being missing, nobody notices it. For instance, if we're in school, the teacher won't notice that she's absent from class. If we're taking a test, I'd turn in one test and she'd grade it and write the score down twice--one for each of us--without realizing what she just did."
"Wouldn't you be better off coming up with the excuse?"
"Sure. This is just for when I can't do that. The third part is that I get teleported to the plane without anyone noticing, and the fourth part is no changes in history other than the ones we already have. The final part is that I can reverse this if I think of something better."
"So you accidentally created a sister, but she doesn't really exist, so you're going to take her place?"
"Pretty much. It's got to work."
"Hmm." Karyn grinned, "Can I meet Julie?"
Jon said "Sure." He wasn't sure at first how to do it but the wish gave him the knowledge. Something clicked inside his head and suddenly he was a girl. He raised his hands and looked at a hanging lock of hair; what he saw didn't look identical to himself--of course, a twin brother and sister wouldn't be identical--but he did look like the sister he might have had if he was a girl. He was still wearing a shirt and jeans but something felt different underneath it--not just his new body, but the new underwear too. "I'm Julie, Karyn," he said, marvelling at his changed female voice. "Jon's sister. Let's be friends." Then he paused and added "You know, I don't even know if Julie and you are supposed to be friends. I guess I'll find out."
"We can look around the room until you go to the airport, Jon," said Karyn. "Find out what Julie is like."
"You'd better call me Julie, not Jon. You have to talk about Jon as if I really am Julie and Jon is someone else. We've got to make it look good and we can't mess up."
"Sure, Julie. You know, I've been meaning to tell your brother, he can't seem to comb his hair very well. Can you tell him that..." Julie glared at her. "I was just doing what you said, Julie!" she exclaimed. "Besides, Jon roped me into this without even giving me a chance."
"I'm sure Jon didn't have a choice," said Julie. "What a strange thing, that wishing stone."
"You know, Julie, you really should give him that stone back. He'll get very angry that you took it."
"Now I know you're doing that on purpose, Karyn. But I can't really say that's wrong. It's probably easier to get used to acting like we're separate people if you do it all the time, even in private. So... Karyn, I can say this much: Jon knows that I have the stone, and he doesn't mind if I borrow it for a little while."
"Really?"
"Really."
"That's good. I'm glad you two get along pretty well. Now, as long as it's just us girls here...."
