"Who am I?"
"Jon, if you have some kind of amnesia, I swear..."
"No, I meant, who are we? I mean, you have red hair..."
"I've always had..." she trailed off, and grabbed his shirt. "You used it, didn't you? What color is my hair supposed to be?"
Jon felt himself pulled closer to her. Zoe was surprisingly strong, or...rather he was not exactly a fighter. "Umm...Black? No, brown...you dyed it black." This was a bit more like the Zoe he was used to, was was simultaneously comforting and terrifying.
"Why?" She growled.
"It was an accident..." he blurted out.
She took a moment, and he thought maybe she was going to hit him before she took a few deep breaths, apparently trying to calm herself down, another thing he'd never seen Zoe do. "Go on..."
"I wished something interesting would happen....I didn't notice the stone was there...everything seemed normal till this morning," Jon started, apologetically. "Until you showed up..."
Zoe deflated like a balloon, and started holding back laughter. "You know, it is kind of hard to be mad at you when you are so..." Zoe trailed off.
"Sorry?" Jon said.
"I was going to go for what a tremendous dork you are." She actually made it sound like a good thing.
He guessed he would take that for now.
"We both have to get to class. Quick then," she said, "so, I had black hair yesterday, and my clothes are different, probably because I have different hair...anything else?"
"I'm not sure yet," he admitted.
"Do you see anything else?"
"Well, umm..." he paused, trying to find the words. "I'm not sure." She'd never been mad at him for possibly changing her entire reality before. It was not outside the realm of possibility that Zoe of 24 hours ago might have actually hit him. "Other than you aren't mad at me."
"Oh, I'm mad at you," she said. "Just I get it...At least it was just hair, and not like I remember different hair...At least you didn't make me a braindead blond bimbo or something."
He exhaled. "I locked the stone away," he said.
"I'll see you after school, okay?" Zoe said. "Try not to panic too much. Remember...the only one who knows anything is different is probably you." She turned. "Just don't make any more wishes...or at least without me there to hear it, okay?"
He nodded. She hurried off, leaving him to enter a school in what might as well be a parallel universe. The troubling thing was, Zoe had shut him out in recent years to the point that his understanding and perception of her was usually fairly two dimensional. Not that it helped that she acted fairly two dimensionally. He'd always known there was more to her. The troubling thing was that even this brief interaction with her...this was a Zoe he could actually see himself liking spending time with, although the dork comment was a bit hurtful, it felt like something two people who got along would say.
He wandered into the school, distracted, nearly bumping into some nerdy girl, before he continued to his first class.
