Fortunately, before she had to make that decision, one of the guys whispered, "Man, I wish this class was over."
The professor stopped in the middle of a sentence and said, "That's all for today. I've got copies of the syllabus stacked on the table here, so please come down and get one. See you on Wednesday."
The lecture hall got noisier as a couple hundred students all collected their notebooks, slid the wooden desks back into the armrests of their chairs, and moved out into the aisles and down to the front of the large room. Hitomi put her notebook into her backpack, stood up, and followed the crowd, trying not to attract any undue attention, especially from those two guys.
Once she got out of the lecture hall, out of the classroom building, and into the fresh air, the people having sex under a nearby tree reminded her of the original wishes Joe had made, the ones that had screwed things up in the first place. "I've got to figure out a way to change things back as much as I can," she thought, and to that end, she sat down on a bench and rummaged through her backpack.
She didn't find a wishing stone or anything like that, but she did find a cell phone, which she immediately used to call her own phone number. Ring, ring, and then the answering machine picked up. "Hi, you've reached the Smith family, at 879..." It was a little disconcerting because it was Hitomi's mother's voice; as she remembered it, her mother had gotten their next-door neighbor to record the outgoing message so there'd be a man's voice on the machine. After the beep, Hitomi left a frantic message: "Mom, please call me the second you get this. Uh, call me on my cell, I guess. Bye." She almost hung up at that, but then added, "It's Hitomi. Your daughter. Bye."
The guys behind her in class had provided her with one vital piece of information -- that she lived in a dorm. She rummaged through her backpack again and finally came up with two vital pieces of information: an envelope that had her address on it, and a campus map. She put the two together and realized that her dorm wasn't far away, so that's where she headed.
Frederick Hall turned out to be a relatively modern, co-ed dorm that had groups of a handful of rooms arranged around small lounge areas. As Hitomi walked around looking for her room, in fact, she came across two naked girls in a "69" position on one of the lounge couches. The redhead raised her head and said, "Hey there, Hitomi!"
"Uh, hi," said Hitomi, and kept walking -- what if one of them made a wish and she turned into a lesbian? Actually, that might not be so bad, she thought. And the cheerful hello was a good sign, she realized -- maybe she wasn't as much of a grade-A bitch as that guy had thought. Actually, now that she thought about it, she was probably only bitchy to that one guy in particular, assuming he usually behaved the way his talk in class would seem to indicate.
Hitomi found her room, found the keys that were in her bag, and unlocked the door. She walked in, noticed the bunkbeds, and realized she had a roommate. She wondered if she could trust her roommate, because if so, she had a plan for trying to get things back to normal.
