Jon got out his phone and called Karyn, who answered after two rings. "Karyn," he explained, "something weird happened. Mind if I wish you over here?"
"Go ahead," she said.
"I wish Karyn is here." As she heard the wish over the phone, she knew she had just appeared. Anyone else would think she came over to Jon's house the normal way. "It's like this..." he explained. It was hard to get the words out.
"You zapped your sex organs into a girl's."
"Umm," said Jon. "Yeah. It was exactly that. How did you know?"
"I told you it was a bad idea," explained Karyn.
"What?" replied Jon. "I just wished it in my sleep--how could you even know?"
"You didn't wish it in your sleep," said Karyn. "Have you looked at the calendar? It's Saturday. You wished it yesterday by accident. First of all, you turned yourself into a girl by wishing you could get your hands on a model in one of your porn magazines. Then you realized what you did and you tried to reverse it."
"And?" asked Jon.
"The stone wouldn't let you change completely into a guy since that would reverse the wish. So you wished that you were mostly a guy and that only your sex organs would stay like the model's."
"And?" asked Jon. "I mean that's not good, but it does sound like I reversed as much of the wish as I could. And better than all of me being a girl. No offense to real girls, Karyn, but I wasn't exactly born as one. You seem to think I really screwed that up."
"Of course you did. Jon! First of all, you should have tried to wish that the wish was over because you already touched the model. Second, if that didn't work, you should have wished for a toe or something, not sex organs. Third, you can't reverse wishes, so now that you named the sex organs you're stuck with them--you can't reword the wish to mean something else any more."
"Okay, let's say I did screw that up," said Jon. "Why is it Saturday?"
"Because you didn't want to remember what you did Friday, so you wished the memories away."
"I can always wish to know what happened."
"But knowing that something happened isn't the same as experiencing it."
"I see," said Jon. "If you tried to tell me it's a bad idea, thanks. But I'm going to find out. I wish I knew what happened yesterday." And suddenly Jon knew all about Friday, from his initial wishes to what happened next....
