I go through the day looking for changes. There's not much. Certainly not much that I can be sure of. I overhear a snatch of conversation between Sarah McMillan and one of her posse that implies that Karyn is a friend, but Karyn never even talks to Sarah once in the day.
Maybe not a full friend. Maybe a partial friend, the kind of person who you leave off the teasing list and who you may occasionally trust to spread gossip, but whom you keep away from your important plans. Then I hear Karyn talk to a freshman girl whom I'm sure I never saw her with. Finally I figure it out.
Jon, I give the lowdown to. "It seems that Karyn knows a number of people slightly better. If she's not friends with you, she's friends with someone else. But it's not one someone else. It's little bits of friendship spread out among several different people, an invitation to a party here, advice to an underclassperson there.
"Underclassperson?"
"A freshman."
"Why didn't you say "freshman"? Anyway, I appreciate your help. Anything I can do for you? I mean..." He glanced towards his magical stone. In detective stories rocks were gems. This rock was different. It would never have looked good on a brooch on my neck, but it was so much more. I could demand so much that a detective from one of the stories would consider himself well-paid, for once. But I didn't want to lose my sense of scale; whatever my future goals I knew I was closer to Shirley Holmes (and that was a real show), than to Philo Vance.
"One emergency wish," I told him. I resisted the temptation to ask him to wish for Shirley Holmes on DVD.
"An emergency wish?"
I had to explain to him. "It's a precaution. You wish that you have an emergency wish when you need it, so you're not in trouble the first time someone swipes the stone and runs away."
He looked flabbergasted. Obviously he had never even though of such a thing. Then he was about to say something, and I had to warn him, "Make sure I can only use it on purpose."
"All right, I wish Betty has an emergency wish that happens next time she wants it, without the stone, but only on purpose." I felt like I had to look away. The wish worked.
"Well, you paid me in wishes," I explained, "so I'll pay you back in advice. I don't think that your bad wish caused any tragedies to unfold, so you just need to reverse the wish. From what you've told me about the stone, you can rephrase wishes. So you can tell it that Karyn has another name, and you were that named person's friend. You can play on the 'at first'--maybe you were friends with her after someone else. Turn yourself into twins so you're not her friend in the singular...."
"I see. I wish that I wasn't Karyn's friend in the first place because I'm friends with her but was friends with someone else before that."
Needless to say that ellipsis would be accompanied by a warning that this teenage possessor of the most powerful thing in the universe did not wait for. Still, that wish could have turned out all right.
Aw, who was I kidding?
