One Year Earlier. Two days post Karyn's Reckless wish.
The first shock was her boyfriend, apparently, she was dating Tom Wells, as the texts she received informed her too late, before she was stuck in a school hallway with him pawing at her, as lovers do. She did her best to avoid being kissed outright, using a cold as an excuse. Tom was a jock, tall and athletic with sandy blonde hair, and very much someone who she was supposed to date. Sarah had Biff, Mellissa had Moose, even Steve and Tiffany had each other, but they were open with their relationship (more or less). Popular people paired off, and Karyn and Tom were a pair, that was the way things were.
The first red flags that went off was her breaking up with him suddenly, which in retrospect was a mistake. All the girls wanted to know why, a question Karyn would have to answer multiple times, often with protest of varying degrees. To Karyn this was fine, this was just a step on the way back to reclaiming her life, but to everyone around her it seemed to be no different than her standing on the edge of a very tall building, a confusing act of social suicide.
This was only made worse for both of them when people saw her with Jon, and assumed she had left Tom for Jon. Suddenly Jon was on the hit list of every jock and bully in school. Jon was used to flying under the radar, to a low profile low key life, so was Karyn for that matter, but now Karyn was constantly fielding questions and battling rumors, while Tom was trying to win her back, in a romantic enough way to make her blush. The hardest moment was when Karyn looked in his eyes and saw that he really did care for her, or at least who he thought she was, he even offered to give her space to figure whatever she was going through out. He was so sweet that she couldn’t think of him as a villain even if she tried, not that she wanted to date him. For all of his charm though, he still did not like Jon.
For as confusing and strange as this was for Karyn, Jon had it worse, every time they were seen together it raised suspicions and fed rumors. Jon would get slammed into lockers, knocked out of lunch lines, and Karyn would have to say again and again that they weren’t dating and this had nothing to do with her breaking up with Tom, and each time she said it she could feel the person not believing it, till it felt like she was lying too.
This was just the start of what would lead to Karyn falling ever so slowly into her role.
