" you'd disappear someplace where you could never bother me again!" Sarah finished, glaring out at the fallen boy from her bedroom window.
From his crumpled position on the loam of the McMillan's garden, Jon raised a hand to protest. "Wait, Sarah, no!" he stammered out, futilely, before blinking out of reality. Sarah wasn't even compelled to turn her head away; Jon simply ceased to be, as if he'd simply been plucked from the world like a paper doll.
Sarah took a moment to be very pleased with herself. Though she hadn't gotten a good look at whomever it was that was spying on her, she didn't realistically see how it could have been anybody other than Jon, so she supposed that it was he who she wished permanently out of her sphere of influence. But she hadn't killed him, so her conscience would be forever unsullied; she simply punished him for not minding his own business by completely divorcing him from hers. A contented smirk crossed the cheerleader's face. Maybe she wasn't so bad at this wishing thing, after all!
The rich young girl didn't even bother to entertain the notion that she could have indirectly murdered Jon through the phrasing of the wish; she hadn't specified or intended that, so surely it didn't happen. Jon had probably just been teleported to some cornfield in Abu Dhabi or Kalamazoo or wherever it was when people referred to "the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere." Perhaps there really was a Buttfuck Nowhere, somewhere in a nook between dimensions, and Jon was stuck making the best of things in that inconceivable place.
Closing "” and locking "” the bedroom window, she took a seat on the bed and studied the stone curiously, as though a bland visual inspection might inspire her to wish herself out of this mess. It didn't, obviously, but that was of no matter to her. She had all the time in the world, now, so why worry about trivialities? She was a smart girl; she would figure out how to fully activate the stone's potential.
Jon couldn't tell how long he floated through blackness; he experienced complete and utter sensory deprivation, and a feeling of disembodiment like no living human could ever experience. It could have been an instant "“ probably was an instant, though for all he knew it could have been hours or even years. Jon was emotionally numb for the entire duration, though he was, as far as he could tell, completely conscious. He was alive, he existed in some form, and he was passing through a realm of seemingly endless nothingness.
But Jon wanted it to end, wanted to be back to Zodiac Beach, Illinois, so that he could thwart Sarah and take his stone back and make everything right- he wanted to prove to himself that he really could be responsible with his Grandfather's stone, and more importantly, get a chance to make a few wishes of consequence on it- thus far, he hadn't made any, other than changing the color of a fucking tree branch, and, dammit, he wanted his goddamn wishes already.
He wanted it to end; he wanted all these things. But he only managed to get an end.
A person might have described what happened next as a crash back into reality- but that would have implied multiple bodies of matter in motion, colliding with each other. But Jon was incorporeal, composed of no matter and no energy, and certainly no movement. The transformation that actually occurred was more of an acceleration, though not exactly that, either; Jon went from being a nobody in a state of nothingness, to being a body in a state of motion on a blue planet that was flying through the Milky Way galaxy at deceptively fast speeds. Of course, this planet was Earth, so nothing was new, really, and nothing spectacular was really happening. And the physics of it didn't really matter, because science and magic had not ended their Êons-long Mexican Standoff.
Far more interesting to Jon was that he was standing at the head of an unfamiliar classroom, in an unfamiliar place, with at least twenty or thirty unfamiliar faces staring up at him from unfamiliar desks. That was all the information that he could glean before he very nearly fell over, because the transition to a body in motion from being a nobody in no motion over the course of a quantum instant tends to confuse the muscles and cause a lot of imbalance to suddenly appear.
And even more importantly, this was not his body "“ well, actually, it was, it was very definitely his property, legally, and he would enjoy the right to have sole custody of it and make all decisions concerning its application and maintenance, and could even dispose of it entirely if he had a good reason to, or no reason at all, that was the point "“ but at any rate, the body was not one he was familiar with. He had no experience piloting this particular body, and no education in the subject of piloting foreign bodies, as could be expected, so, predictably he wasn't very good at using it.
Still, Jon managed to set himself right, retaining his balance and standing straight up, because, miraculously, the same mental command that got his previous body to stand up got the exact same output from this one. That was a good thing.
The bad things were, in the reverse order that Jon observed them, that he had lost between one to one-point-five inches in depth, three to six inches in width, five to seven inches in height, and his penis.
So he was smaller, and definitely a female. Ignorant of the stares the children in front of him were offering, Jon took an inventory of herself and her surroundings. An explosive emotional reaction was on its way, but it was being delayed until all the outstanding items had been identified and categorized, and this was a Herculean task.
Jon was facing a chalkboard; not the glossy steel boards that modern classrooms used in tandem with dry erase markers, but a dusty, scratchy green board that one wrote on with old fashioned white chalk. The children in front of her, assorted Caucasian boys and girls of around middle-school age, were all in school uniforms with blue blazers; the boys wore ties and the girls wore skirts. The whole classroom looked old-fashioned, right down to the cartridge pens the children had at their desks. The desks themselves were metal and wood, scratched up from previous years of use, and the room was devoid of the computers and fluorescent lights common to a classroom.
Jon wished she could get a good look at herself to see where she was and what she had become, but her whole body was restricted in a black dress and shawl that covered every inch of her except for her face and hands. She could feel some kind of headgear made out of the same stuff that composed her clothing, which was weird in its own right. It certainly didn't seem like anything she'd ever worn before in her life.
Her eyes went to a picture on the wall of what Jon could only describe as a "random religious figure." In fact, it was a picture of Pope Paul VI, but Jon, being an atheist and completely historically ignorant, had no reason to know that. Still, she plucked the picture off its perch on the wall, using the reflective surface of the glass to get a better look at herself. It turned out she was actually a very pretty young woman now, but she still shrieked and dropped the picture anyway, where it shattered with the lovely and familiar sound expected of that action.
"Fuck!!" exclaimed a pure contralto voice that was Jon's. "I'm a goddamned nun?!"
Many of Jon's students, who had been watching their teacher's actions with minimal fanfare all day but had suddenly become intrigued by the very abrupt change in her behavior, made the transition into a state of complete horror, accompanied by screaming. Of course, there was nothing uniquely terrifying about a young woman screaming, but there was a context here that qualified such behavior to occur.
The screaming drew Jon's attention to her students, though she wasn't very interested in alleviating their distress. "Hey, you," she said, pointing to one of the children who looked merely surprised, rather than terrified. "Where the fuck is this?"
"Uhm Your classroom, Sister," the young boy answered meekly.
Jon frowned. "My classroom where?"
"Umm Saint Francis Church School."
"Where the hell is that?!" Jon demanded, starting to get annoyed.
"Umm Staten Island?" the boy answered. He was feeling very conflicted. He was a reasonably well-behaved, pious boy who was clever enough to treat the authority figures in his life with some degree of respect, though nothing in his life up to this point had trained him to deal with a person of the Church who had instantaneously made the transformation from a sweet-hearted, passionate instructor to a raving, obscenity-spouting psychotic.
Jon gasped, her eyes trailing to the windows to confirm what the boy had said. "Oh, shit. This is New York?" She couldn't see much other than the courtyard of the church and the another wing of the building from her position away from the building, but what she did see was not suggestive of what she had perceived New York to be. Not that she had ever been there.
"Is this the year 2008?" she asked the boy, her tone increasingly taking on a tone of exasperation.
"What?"
"What fucking year is it?" Jon shouted.
The boy winced as if she'd just pummeled him. "It's 1964, Sister! What's happened to you?"
Jon's jaw dropped. The boy's answer had hit her like a sack of bricks. Sarah's wish had sent her some place where Jon could never bother her again. Jon was stuck in the body of some nun who lived in New York over forty years ago! Without the stone, and with Sarah not going to be born for decades, she would She was stuck as this!
Jon slammed her fists on the teacher's desk in front of her. The potential energy of her emotional reaction was released in one loud, ear-splitting "Motherfucker!!!!!!"
