After about ten seconds of staring at Jon, his Mom and Karyn looked at each other.
"Maybe it ran out of juice," suggested Karyn.
"Oh... silly me..." Mom replied, as she reached down to the floor. "It looks like I dropped it when all that dust appeared. Okay... here it goes again: I wish Jon were..."
"Mom... stop..." Jon begged in his ten year old squeaky voice... "You almost just turned me into a girl named Catherine Jane. You already made me ten, and gave me this ridiculous blonde hair."
With this comment, Mom went over to her boy and began stroking his hair. "Oh, honey, it looks so sweet, just like Karyn's did when she was your age."
Jon pulled away from his mom when he noticed his favorite baseball cap, now shrunken to fit the head of a ten year old, sitting on the table. He picked it up and embarrassingly pulled it over his head.
"Oh, I'm sorry honey. Before I knew what the rock did, I must have said 'I wish you were a little more like Karen.' You know how highly I think of her."
And with those words repeated, Jon felt a tingle, follwed by a sharp pain around the circumference of his head. On pure reflex he yanked the hat from his head and threw it to the ground.
A tangled mop of thick blonde hair tumbled to his shoulders.
