As Biff was finding his center in a conversation about yarn with a woman he'd just met named Maressa, and as Karyn was finding her center alone on a ladder, pulling muck out of a gutter, Jon found himself completely unraveling.
He had big problems and nobody to talk to. He was pretty sure that Biff's mind was in Karyn's body, but he had no way of knowing for sure. And Karyn had made it very clear that she needed some space. But now he was home, and he had his eyes right on the magical rock that could fix all of this. Or it could make everything so much worse.
Jon paced the length of his room and back, stepping over the discarded laundry and the game controllers that populated his bedroom floor. Could he even trust this version of Karyn to give him good advice? Honestly, he didn't even need good advice, he just needed another voice to bounce ideas off of.
They say that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and that was how Jon felt about his own thoughts. Like, as long as they were in his head they made sense. But any flaw, any error, became manifest only after speaking those ideas into reality.
But if he just applied his ideas directly from his head and onto the wishing stone, he'd have no chance to change them. No chance to test them out and see what a different brain was thinking.
But it was right there. The stone was right there. And Jon just wanted to use it. To fix things. To make everything go back to normal.
Jon passed by his desk and picked up a piece of paper where he'd scribbled down a few different potential wish wordings. Then he looked at the clock display in the corner of his computer monitor. It was getting late. He was getting impatient.
He picked up the stone.
"I wish that Karyn Black had a body that matched her mind. And I wish that Biff Meadows had a body that matched his mind."
The stone flashed twice in succession. And Jon put it back down before throwing himself onto his bed and pulling his blanket over his face. As though to hide from the consequences of what he'd just done.
