Jon’s room was messy. Not overly so, he didn’t think of himself as a messy person, but he was certainly not as tidy as Sarah. There were some clothes that hadn’t quite made the laundry basket, a stack of books and video games that was just haphazardly stacked on the desk. The occasional paper had fallen from the piles on the desk and made its way to the floor. The bed was unmade and the drawers on the dresser were open, some because a t-shirt had gotten wedged in the gap when trying to close. It probably needed 10, maybe 15 minutes of a cleaning pass, the sort of thing Jon totally would have done if he knew that someone was going to see his room, much less one of the hottest girls at school.
Sarah was not impressed. She tossed the stone in her hand, considering. Her mother, Susan McMillian, was big on cleanliness and order, and Sarah had taken to the lessons well. Jon’s room offended her, in a way that she knew didn’t offend Jon. That was to be expected with a teenage boy. One of the reasons she and Biff were together now is that she had cleaned Biff’s room, and whenever he couldn’t find something, he called her and she would trade the knowledge for a date. That had been hard work, but rewarding.
But that was before she had a wishing stone. And while she mostly wanted to help, Jon was… deserving of some punishment. Not that he knew how he was involved, oblivious as he was. But it had been his fault. Somewhat. Probably more Karyn’s fault, or even Sarah’s fault. Fights were like that, sometimes. But a bit of punishment here, and at Karyn’s, would make Sarah feel better about the whole thing.
“I wish for a bag,” Sarah said carefully. “Anything put inside it will be removed from its owner’s life as if it had never been theirs. And anything taken out and given to someone will become theirs as naturally as if they’d always had it. The bag will never weigh more than a pound, no matter what’s inside, and it will hold almost anything without ever looking full.”
With a flash, a canvas bag appeared. The sort of bag that charities would drop off to be filled. Cheap looking, but sturdy. Not the sort of thing that Sarah would have as part of her ensemble, but something she would have no problem with carrying while working. She looked around Jon’s room, unsure of where to start. Her eyes landed on the stack of games on his desk. She flipped through the titles. Nothing really stood out, although the third one down, a game called Skyrim, had a symbol that matched the poster on the wall. She turned it to read the back of the case, when Jon burst in. His eyes went to the moved pillow, to an antique wooden box on a shelf, to Sarah.
“Sarah, what are you doing?” Jon asked, setting down the drinks and the bowl of snacks his mom had insisted he bring up.
“I’m helping you, Jon. You’ll feel better once things are in order. But just in case you get any ideas, I do wish that people would just sit and wait until I was done with helping get things in order.”
Jon’s eyes went wide at the word wish, and he lunged. But it was too late. Sarah placed the Skyrim game into the bag, and Jon stopped and sat on the bed. The poster behind him had changed from a dragon in diamond shape, to what looked like a exit sign person being pulled into a ring of some kind. Or a portal, if the word at the bottom was correct.
“What did you do?” Jon asked. He had felt what she had done. It had felt like something being drained away from his mind, but at the end of it, he couldn’t really remember.
“Nothing. I was just looking at a game I had brought.” She reached into the bag and pulled out Skyrim. “Did you ever play this?”
Jon looked at it quizzically. “Skyrim? No, I never played it. I’m more of a sci-fi guy, fantasy games don’t interest me as much. Why?”
Sarah smiles and puts it back in the bag. ”I was just wondering.” She slides the whole stack of games into the bag. Surprisingly, a black box next to the computer that Sarah hadn’t even noticed vanished as well when the last game vanished into the bag, which looked like it had just one or two things in it, not the stack of 20 games that it contained. The poster on the wall had some sort of band on it now.
The desk was certainly cleaner. It was a good start, but Sarah wasn’t anywhere near done.
