“Bill, what did you do?” squeaked the newly plump and pockmarked Tammy Ackerton, the handsome athlete turned geek girl shocked by her unflattering new appearance. She squeamishly poked at the flab on her belly.
“Tammy, I...I didn't mean to...I...” Bill stuttered, in equal disbelief as he stared at his girlfriend with eyes that shifted between distress, guilt, and subconscious disgust. What the hell had just happened? The lanky teenager couldn't understand what part of his wish had caused Tammy to transform into a four-eyed pizza faced blimp!
A foreign part of Bill felt guilty about thinking of Tammy that way as he rubbed his eyes to remember something that had just slipped his mind. He knew how much the female bullies of the school like Carol Ingerman liked to torment her, just like how the male bullies such as Jules Harper enjoyed tormenting him. Bill knew that overeating and other eating disorders were a common if unhealthy way many people dealt with stress...
Wait. Who the hell was Carol?
“Honey, who is Carol Ingerman?” he asked Tammy.
“Someone who I’d never not talk about right now” Tammy answered sarcastically, sighing at the expansive rear end she now owned.
“Fine, I’ll figure it out myself” muttered Bill impertinently.
One part of Bill already who Carol was, a tall and tattooed troublemaker who came from a broken home in the bad part of town, and more or less Jules Harper’s gun moll, someone who Tammy was utterly terrified of, but something about that just felt wrong.
Another part of Bill, the part that felt less real and yet somehow more right, had never heard of such a person. This part of him felt a mental cavity, a gap in his memory of someone else who constantly caused drama for him and Tammy, someone who never failed to make him really, really angry. He knew that it wasn't Carol Ingerman. It was somebody similar to Carol, but not her.
He knew her name, it was just on the tip of his tongue. Greta? No, but it definitely started with a G. Gretchen? Gwen? Georgina? Grace?
Try as he might, he just couldn’t place her. It was such a frustrating, almost alien sensation, like a page torn in the middle of a novel you're reading.
And Jules? Jules Harper was a known bully, yet another member of the infamous Shermer Fields peanut gallery and nobody that Bill wanted to cross, but wasn't it somebody else who always gave him a hard time? Or was it? It was so hard to tell with his brain bearing the weight of two separate versions of reality. One version was telling him that Jules was the kingpin of Shermer High with Carol at his side, and the other one said that Jules was just a flunkie of someone else, someone bigger and meaner than him. Jesus Christ, what else had changed in Bill’s life?
He raged at the inanimate object he held in his hand, resisting the urge to throw it against the wall. Tammy’s head swiveled up from appraising her newly fattened physique, her rat’s nest of blonde curls limply falling to the back of her neck. She saw that her boyfriend was still not in a good place.
“The stone fucked us again, Tammy! First it erases my family, and now it's playing with my memories!”
Furious and frustrated beyond belief, his face flushed with red and his lungs breathing hard. He was about to give in to his urges childishly throw the stone against the farthest wall of the hallway, hopefully smashing the fucking thing into itty bitty pieces, when...
“Bill, stop! You're better than this” Tammy demanded. Impulsively, she clasped his hands. “This isn’t you. The man that I love isn’t a raging lunatic. He’s kind and compassionate and thinks things through!”
Instantly, Bill felt a surge of electricity course through his veins. Even though Tammy was chubby and to his shame admittedly less physically attractive to her now, her voice still sounded like honey, and her embrace still felt angelic. She was also, as she always was, the far more levelheaded of the two. Like a passing summer breeze, his anger went away.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. Tammy, I think that I’m going crazy! I’ve got two different sets of memories in my head. I mean, apart from the memories where we’re married, which I’m still having trouble accepting, and...”
“Honey, I know. I'm going through the same thing. Listen, I think I know what happened. When you lost your temper and slapped Carol in the face, I saw it fly out of her hand and launch towards the window. See?.”
Tammy pointed towards the window overlooking the backyard, where a spiderweb full of cracks in the glass could be clearly seen.
“Oh no!” Bill moaned again. “My new parents are going to kill me!”
“You're missing the point. I think the gem is broken.”
“Broken?”
Tammy nodded.
“Tammy, it’s not an X-Box controller. I mean gemstones are formed under extreme heat and pressure, right? They don’t just get damaged.”
“Yes, yes, they do honey. Trust me. I’m a woman who knows her jewelry. Remember all the pretty things you used to buy me for our anniversaries? I mean, emeralds aren’t as fragile as eggshells or anything, but they get scratched all the time, and if you throw them hard enough, they’re going to get chipped.”
“It’s not like Carol’s a professional baseball player or something!”
“Bill! Whether or not that awful bitch deserved it or not is not the point! She was scared.”
“OK, OK” stammered Bill impatiently. “So you’re saying that when I slapped Carol, she accidentally threw the stone against the window, and then it got chipped or something.”
“Or something. It’s probably worse than chipped to be perfectly honest.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know! Maybe the magic inside spilled out. Like, um, like...remember that episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer? The Wish?”
“I never watched Buffy. That was your show, not mine.”
“Oh for God’s sake. I’m saying that the emerald is like a vessel, OK? It’s filled with magical energy, and once it got broken, the magic spilled out or something. You made some kind of wish about her being nicer. Good luck with that by the way, but maybe once the emerald got damaged, it….misunderstood what you were saying? Goddamn it, Bill, just open your hand and let me see.”
Bill reluctantly opened the his clenched palm, and Tammy gasped.
Right in the center of the gorgeous gemstone was a deep fault line. Faint wisps of green and gold smoke could be seen billowing out from it like a burning ember from a campfire.
**