A bonus story from me for Halloween. My regular post will follow later today.

I’m Mike Smith. All my life I’ve felt like I was haunted by a ghost. Weird things happen around me. Stuff gets moved without explanation. Sometimes I hear a voice off in the distance calling my name, but there won’t be anybody there if I go look. Sometimes I feel something touch me for a moment, and then it gives me the weirdest chill as it feels like it passes right through me.

When I was little, I blamed things on the ghost, and my parents always thought I was just trying not to take responsibility for things I had done, even though they were silly little things I would have had no reason not to own up to if I had actually done them. When I got older, I did confess to them to avoid the controversy, even though I hadn’t done the things, whenever somebody explained what it was I was supposed to have done.

It really messed me up when I started dating. My dates would sense the ghost, too, doing creepy things, and even though they couldn’t see how I could have done the things, they’d just be too creeped out and stop dating me after two or three dates.

But the ghost didn’t bother other people when I wasn’t dating women. I ended up finding board gaming fun with a group of guys and even occasionally a girl, though I knew better than to put any moves on any girls who showed up. I was glad just to be able to be in the same room with them in a social setting.

It was October 2025 when I was in a game store and a game literally fell off the shelf in front of me. I caught it as it fell and put it back on the shelf. I didn’t see a place for it so I just set it somewhere there was space. When I tried to go past it, it fell again, hitting me in the shoulder.

I took a second look at the game. It was called Haunted, and it seemed like a Halloween-themed party game. The picture on the back of the box showed cards with instructions like “Tell a spooky story” and “Describe the worst Halloween costume you ever wore.” Some of them also made the players do silly things, like “Sit with your back to the group until your next turn.”

Since the box fell from the shelf a third time when I tried to put it back up, I decided maybe I should buy the game. I didn’t see a price, though, so I took it up to the register.

“This game jumped out at me. Do you know how much it costs?”

The guy at the register, whose name tag said Store Manager in small letters and then Matt in large letters below it, picked up the game and looked at it strangely.

“Weird. I’ve never seen this before. Where’d you find it?”

“It was the only one,” I told him, but I led him over to the area where I found the game.

He followed, and after seeing there were in fact no more copies of the game there or even a shelf tag for it, he took it back to the register. He continued to look at the box, and also typed something.

“No bar code. Not listed in my inventory by name. Heck, even the Internet doesn’t know about it. There’s an entry on BoardGameGeek for a game called Haunted, which maybe could be this game in a different edition, but the entry has so few details I can’t tell.”

Just as he finished saying this, the box fell over from where he had it standing on end to read some of the text. And then it kept going, standing up on the other end and falling flat again until it was right in front of me on the counter.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Matt asked me.

“Honestly, I’ve only seen it for a couple minutes longer than you have. But I did mean it when I said it jumped out at me.”

Matt started to pick up the game again, but then turned in surprise and looked behind him. There was nobody there.

“Look, this is all pretty creepy and I literally have no way to record a sale of this game. I’d have to make up one of those private use UPCs like I do on the joke products and it’s not worth it for a one-off item. Just take it. If you want to pay some money for it, leave it in the tip jar.”

I pulled out a five and put it in the jar. He could easily have asked two or four times that, but I could also have not bought it.

“If it’s any good I’ll double this,” I told him.

Matt pulled out a bag and put my game into it. He handed me the bag and I walked out of the store with it.

Since it was clearly a Halloween-themed game, I brought it to the gaming group on Halloween night. By chance, Halloween was on a Friday this year, and trick-or-treating was happening, but Pete had confirmed he was still hosting. As per the post-Covid tradition, there was just a bucket of candy in front of the house for people to help themselves, and one group of kids was leaving the house with their treats as I arrived.

Pete opened the door for me and I went in to see that only Neil and Fred had shown up.

“Thanks for showing up, Mike. Now we have enough for Tichu.”

I went in and hung up my coat and we all sat down. Pete grabbed a well-worn Tichu deck and started dealing as I set the store bag with the Haunted game in it on the table. I ended up partnered with Neil and we were pretty successful, winning the game in six hands.

Before we could shuffle the cards and deal them again, the game I brought, still in its bag, flipped over toward the middle of the table.

“What’s that?” Fred asked.

“Oh, the ghost recommended a game for me.”

A round of laughs and snickers followed. I had told the guys about the ghost, but they had never seen any evidence of it until just now. I told stories about how it tried to get me in trouble for silly things, ruined my dates, and was probably the reason I ended up becoming a regular here instead of doing something else. Not that I didn’t like the games, but it was something the ghost usually didn’t bother me about.

“Well let’s take a look,” Pete said.

He pulled the game out of the bag.

“Huh. Never seen this one before. Still shrink-wrapped. You guys up for a blind play of a new game?”

Blind didn’t mean we couldn’t look at the game, just that we hadn’t looked at it in advance and would be learning the game as we played it. We all agreed to try it, and Pete unwrapped the box and opened it.

He started reading the rules to us, which were pretty simple.

“Deal four cards to each player and leave the rest in the middle as a draw pile. Choose someone to start by any method.”

Pete shuffled and dealt the cards, and Neil grabbed the Who Starts deck. Who Starts is a deck of cards sold like a game but the only purpose is to choose someone to start a game by a silly method. It had become a house tradition to use it with games that didn’t specify a method, and also for ones whose start rule would give the same starting player all the time, if we thought that doing so tilted the odds of winning.

Neil fanned out the cards on the table face down, and I picked one and read it.

“The youngest player starts.”

It turned out that I was the youngest player out of those who showed up today, by three days younger than Neil, so I would start the game. Once Neil had put the Who Starts cards away, Pete put the remainder of the deck in the middle of the table, then continued reading the rules.

“On each turn, the current player picks any card from his hand, plays it, and does what it says. Some cards have an ongoing effect, such as making you sit with your back to the group until your next turn, but most are completed during the turn. Place your card face up on a discard pile next to the draw pile and draw a new card. Play passes to the left unless a card instructs otherwise.”

Pete paused before starting another section of the rules.

“Winning conditions. Some cards have a winning condition on them instead of an instruction. If you play one of these cards and the condition is true, you win the game. Otherwise the game continues.”

I played my first card and read it for the group. “Tell a story about the spookiest date you ever had.” So I told them about one of the dates the ghost ruined.

Pete was next. He played “You are invisible until your next turn.”

“Hey, where’d Pete go?” Fred said, jokingly. The rest of us joined in the joke including pointing out the card floating spookily in the air as Pete drew the replacement card.

The game went on with spooky stories and silly actions, including me sitting with my back on the seat of the chair and my legs on the back for a whole round. After I got out of that position, I played a card that made me sing and do the Hokey Pokey. After I had put three body parts in, out, and shook them all about, the guys said I’d done enough and I drew my replacement card and sat down.

Pete’s next card said, “Jenna is visible until her next turn.” He went on to say, “I have no idea who Jenna is, but I have three winning condition cards I’m still hoping to make true, so I’m playing this just to get rid of the card.”

But Neil was pointing across the table at me, and when the other players’ attention was drawn to a spot above my left shoulder, I turned and looked, only to be greeted with a young woman’s face uncomfortably close to mine.

“Gah!”

I jumped, and in looking more closely at her, I saw she was completely naked, though she was mostly behind me and I don’t think Neil or Fred could see that. Pete certainly could, though.

“So that’s Jenna.” Pete said. “She looks cold.”

I got up, allowing the other two guys to see Jenna’s naked body, and grabbed my coat from where I had hung it upon entering. I tried to drape it over her shoulders but it just fell through her body. I shrugged and put the coat on the back of my chair, and sat down with Jenna still as close behind me as she started.

Neil said, “I have one of those Jenna cards, too.” The card he played said, “Jenna can be heard until her next turn.”

After Neil discarded the card, Jenna pointed at Fred and said, “Play.”

It was his turn, so Fred obeyed the ghost and played a card. “Jenna is tangible until her next turn.”

I looked at her and she grabbed my head with both hands and pulled me in for a kiss as the other three guys cheered and made catcalls. When she finally let me loose from the kiss, she stood up, took the jacket I had offered her earlier from the back of my chair, and put it on, so she was no longer nude; it hung down to the point where it served as a very short dress. Then she grabbed a folding chair where some were stacked against the wall and unfolded it and sat to my left, and drew a hand of four cards from the deck.

Neil asked, “Is she, per the rules, allowed to join?”

Pete glanced through the rule sheet and said, “Yes. She did it right. Players can join during the game in any position if everybody agrees, and they draw a hand of four cards when they do.”

There was a cycle of nods and “OKs” around the table. Then Fred drew a card and said, “OK. Your turn, Mike.”

I looked at my hand, having entirely forgotten what cards were in it after what had just happened. But when I did, it was obvious which card to play.

“Winning condition: There are more players now than when the game began.”

“You win!” Pete shouted.

“And what a winner,” Neil commented.

“We’ve never had a win like that in all the games we’ve played,” Fred added.

Jenna started gathering the cards the other players had set on the table and stacking them up with the deck and discards. I was flabbergasted at what had occurred, but she took my cards and put them with the others. Jenna got up and started to leave the table with the cards.

“Hey, wait, isn’t it Jenna’s turn now?” Neil asked.

“Nope. Game’s over,” she replied. And why should I risk ever taking a turn; the game rules say those effects carry over until another game of Haunted is played.”

Pete picked up the rule sheet, “There are a lot of rules for special situations at the end, but we didn’t have any of them come up until now, except the one about players joining. Some of them are clearly intended to satisfy rules lawyers. One of them says that ‘turn’ refers only to a turn of Haunted, so you can’t cheat by playing another game at the same time. Another says that if any ongoing effects are active at the end of the game, they technically continue until the next time you play the game, though you are free to not sit, stand, or do whatever the card said if it’s impractical. When the next game starts, though, you have to announce those effects and resume the position.”

Suddenly we saw a flame erupt in Pete’s kitchen. Jenna had set fire to the deck of cards in Pete’s sink, and by the time we got over there, it was a mess of ashes.

“So, what, does that mean she’s here for good?” Pete asked.

“Of course not,” Jenna replied. “I can go home with Mike.”

This led to a renewed round of catcalls that went on for several minutes. Only two guys had ever gotten dates during events here, generating similar reactions each time. I guess I was the third, without really trying. But she was my ghost, it was clear. A ghost who’d followed me around all my life. And I didn’t have any other date. I couldn’t deny her.

“You came here with me, right? Even though I couldn’t see you.”

“Yes,” was all Jenna said.

“Then I suppose it’s my responsibility to take you out of here.”

I intended that to mean it was my responsibility to Jenna to take her home with me. But Pete commented, “I wouldn’t mind,” and the other guys snickered. I realized my comment could be interpreted to mean it was my responsibility to Pete not to strand people at his place.

After that, Jenna munched on the snacks that were always a feature at these events, while I played another game with the guys. Jenna wasn’t interested in playing the games, but she saw Pete’s cards and at one point whispered to me about something he had.

“Stop it, Jenna. That’s cheating.”

“OK,” she said, and stayed silent after that until I finished the game. By that point she had stopped eating and sat next to me rubbing my chest.

As soon as that game ended, I told the guys, “I think Jenna’s impatient to get out of here, so I’m going to leave.”

Jenna grabbed the empty Haunted box and the rules before leaving, maybe to keep somebody from making their own version of Haunted and tricking her into playing it, or something. My parents didn’t expect me home early, and as I came in the door, Dad asked, “Hey, what happened?”

As she followed me in, I pointed to Jenna and said, “My ghost showed up.”

Mom and Dad were both startled to see the girl, who was still wearing my jacket as a makeshift dress and nothing else.

“Mom, Dad, meet Jenna, the ghost who has been following me and occasionally torturing me all my life. Jenna, you probably know my parents Stan and Julia already.”

“Yes, I’ve seen them,” Jenna commented.

Dad said, “I’m inclined to believe you only because you haven’t brought a girl home in two years since accusing the ghost of scaring off your other dates.

Mom asked, “How did this happen?”

I related the story of how the game literally jumped off the shelf at me, and how the game played out at Pete’s place.

“It seems obvious Jenna was behind the appearance of this game, though I have no idea how she did it.”

“I wasn’t technically a ghost, but let’s stick with that term for now. As a ghost, I had a limited ability to interact with the world. I have a little psychic energy that collects over time, and I used it occasionally to try and speak to you, touch you, appear for you, move objects, etc. But I could only do so much at once. I’ve been saving that energy up ever since your last date, only rarely using any of it. And I waited for the right moment. I knew that certain kinds of objects could be imbued with spells, and I’d figured out how to change just the right game. This game started out as some Halloween truth-or-dare sort of game, and I changed the card backs, box art, and the rules, and those last four cards you guys read. I dropped the enchantment to bring back as much of the energy as I could, and burning the cards released most of what I put into them. See?”

Jenna held out the game box, which now had only faint traces of the name Haunted on it, mixed with another game I couldn’t quite make out.

“So why have you haunted my son?” Dad asked.

“Because he sleeps in my room and I really had no other choice.”

Mom asked, haltingly, as if barely able to get out the words, “Did you... die... in that room?”

“No,” Jenna replied. “I’m not actually dead.”

I responded with the $64,000 question, “If you didn’t die, how did you become a ghost?”

“As I said, I wasn’t technically a ghost. I, um... I got into magic waaaaaay over my head. OK, so first, you should know, there is real magic in the world. It’s not actually accessible to most people, because the magical energy you need to perform magic exists up on the astral plane outside the existence of ordinary people and things.”

I sat down on the couch next to my parents to hear the rest of this explanation, and Jenna sat in a chair opposite us, crossing her legs very carefully to avoid exposing herself to the three of us, since the jacket barely covered her and she had nothing at all on under it.

“There are certain exotic crystals in the world that defy the usual rules of chemistry and geometry because they exist partly in the astral plane. To those not in the astral plane, they appear to intersect themselves. I acquired a large number of these and used them to amass a significant amount of magical power while still being in the physical world myself. And I used that power to propel myself into the astral plane.”

“And that worked?” Mom asked.

“Yes. I made it into the astral plane. And I mostly accomplished what I intended to do there.”

Dad asked “What did you do there?” before Mom or I could.

“I got this body. I was originally male, but I wanted to be female. You don’t really have a body in the astral plane, but being there lets you change the form of your body in the physical world. And I cast another important spell that was supposed to let me blend back into society in my new form once I came back. It changed my clothes and belongings to those that made sense for my female body, and it would have made people who knew me remember me as being female and named Jenna. My male name was Jethro.”

“Ew,” I said. “I might almost have considered changing sex just to change away from that name.”

“I admit I didn’t like the name, but it wasn’t any factor in me changing. But there were two things I didn’t count on. The first was that I couldn’t get back out of the astral plane into the physical world. The spell I thought would get me here only left me in the kind of limbo I was in where I can interact in slight ways with the physical world. And even that took magical energy each time I wanted to do something. The second was that the limbo I put myself into didn’t have magical energy, and I couldn’t access the energy in my crystals in the physical world at all. I was still partly in the astral plane and so had some access to its magical energy, but I could only gather it at a very slow rate. Building up enough to cast a real spell took years. Just gathering enough to interact in small ways with the physical world took a day or two.”

“So what happened after that?” Dad asked.

“The limbo I was in anchored me to my room in the physical world. That’s where I was trying to go. I could really only leave by latching on to somebody when they were in the room. And that only worked for about a day at a time. When I let go, or when I lost my grip on the person after a day, I was pulled back to the room. So while the house was vacant I was stuck there, and after you moved in, I could escape the room only by piggybacking on Mike or one of you. Mike was the one most often available and I tried various ways to make myself understood to him, but I mostly wasted those efforts. I was never trying to scare off Mike’s dates, just make them and Mike understand that I was there.”

“And what did your family think?”

“I was seventeen when this happened. My parents reported me missing, and the spell on memories and my belongings worked, up to that point; they reported Jenna missing, and my female things were in the room. The police investigated and saw the remains of the magical spell I used to enter the astral plane. That left a few bits of flesh behind, and some ashes, and the police took it as either a cult murder or a bizarre suicide. But they couldn’t really find any other evidence either way. Not finding any evidence that anyone else was in the house to commit the murder, and having cleared the few suspects, they went with the suicide. My parents and brother were distraught. Mom couldn’t stand it, and she boxed up all my possessions in a big trunk which is still up in the attic of this house.”

“The locked one,” Dad commented.

“Yes, she locked it and buried the key in the back yard.”

Mom said, “We always wondered what was in it, but not enough to try and bust the lock off, and it was too heavy to move.”

“That’s because all those crystals are in there. Their self-intersecting nature, or at least apparent nature when viewed only from the physical world, makes them denser than ordinary crystals and close to the density of gold. There are enough of the crystals to fill the bottom of that trunk about 4 or 5 inches deep. Imagine that much gold; that’s why the trunk’s so heavy. That, along with a bunch of my clothes filling the rest of it. Speaking of which, I’d really like to get into it, since the only thing I am wearing now is Mike’s jacket.”

“Do you think the key’s still there?” Dad asked. “Wouldn’t it have rusted away buried in the ground for however long that was, at least the 22 years we have owned this house?”

“She put it in a sealed box, so there’s still a chance. And I know exactly where it is and can help you locate it.”

So we went out to the yard, me holding a flashlight, Mom holding a second, Dad digging with the shovel, and Jenna helping us aim the flashlights and showing him where to dig. This was the creepiest thing I had ever done on Halloween night, but we found the box. Fortunately, it wasn’t buried really deep, about 6 inches. We could have found it at any time if we’d just wanted to plant flowers in that spot or something.

We took the key up to the attic, and it opened the trunk. Now it was Dad and me holding flashlights as Mom helped Jenna go through the clothes. Most of the clothes had rotted over time, but there were still some good ones. Mom had me and Dad turn our backs to them, aiming the flashlights blindly toward Jenna, so she could remove my jacket and put on some real clothes.

After that they went through the rest of the clothes and came up with 4 outfits worth of usable clothes. We got some trash bags and Dad and I helped carry the ruined clothes down to the trash, while Mom helped Jenna set herself up in the guest room, which was my big sister Caroline’s room before she went off to college. We also moved some of Jenna’s other possessions from the trunk down to her new room, but left the crystals up there.

Jenna explained, “Nope, no way am I messing with those crystals any more. I gathered some of the magic that I could out of the cards for one last spell after I got back into the real world, and I’m done with magic now.”

“What was your last spell?” I asked.

“A good luck charm. My hope is that it helps with the difficulties I am going to have trying to get back to my life after decades, and that it makes the earlier spell I cast, one that is supposed to make people remember me as female, actually make people remember me at all.”

It was pretty late by the time we got done with that, so Mom helped Jenna with some sheets for the guest room bed, and then everybody went to bed. I could hear faint moans coming from her room, though I wasn’t sure the reason for them. They didn’t keep me from getting to sleep quickly.

So on Saturday, November 1, we were all up for breakfast. Me, my parents, and Jenna. Jenna’s clothes weren’t great, but they were actual clothes that fit her. Mom made an extra plate of breakfast for Jenna and then a second when Jenna wanted more.

“Thanks, Julia. I think it should stop soon, but I’m more hungry than I should normally be because of this body just incarnating.”

“Right, you’ve never eaten at all as Jenna,” Dad said.

“I ate some of their snacks at Mike’s gaming session,” Jenna commented.

I said, “Yeah, you finished off three partial bags of snacks. It was roughly one whole bag combined.”

“Was it that much? I was hungry.”

After Mom put the plates away and returned to the table, she asked, “Jenna, do you know how to contact any family members you may still have around?”

“There’s only my brother David and anyone else he might have, unless the spell made more family for me.”

We went online and tried to find him with the information Jenna was able to provide, but we were surprised to learn this didn’t happen just before my parents bought the house.

“David would be what, about 40?” Dad asked.

“No. Let me think. Um, David was two years younger than me, but after he finished high school he moved away. My Dad died in the 90s, and Mom stayed alone here in the house for the rest of her life. It was ... 1979 when I got stuck in the astral plane. David was 15 then.”

“1979? So you’ve been stuck there 46 years?”

“I guess so. It gave me a lot of time to ponder why my spell failed and test other ideas. Ultimately I determined that I needed someone already in the physical realm to cast part of the spell, and that was how I came to the idea about the game. I could cast a spell to write the components someone needed to read out loud on the cards, while casting other parts myself to free me so that I could be pulled out of limbo, and to lend them magical energy to make their reading of the cards magical.”

Further questioning about David led my parents to discover he was the man they bought the house from, which made sense as the only heir... though if Jenna’s spell had worked, she would also have been an heir. We decided that didn’t really matter, though. Jenna wasn’t present and the house went through the legal procedures to be transferred to David. The paperwork still showed my parents bought the house from him and gave an address he lived at then, which let us track him down. He stayed in Portland, Oregon, where he eventually got married... to another man.

“I never knew David was gay, but I didn’t ever hear about him dating. My family rarely came into my room after my accident, so I missed things, but I still heard most conversations in the house. He was on the football team in high school. He moved away after graduating, and I didn’t hear where he went or why. I rarely heard from him after that.”

David and his husband Brad didn’t have any kids by adoption or otherwise, and Brad died in 2019. David made arrangements to have his property go to an LGBTQ charity when he died, which happened in 2023.

“So I really have nobody. Can I stay with you for a little bit to help figure things out?”

“That seems fine,” Mom suggested.

“Sure,” Dad agreed. “My daughter Caroline will be visiting at Christmas, so you might need to be gone by then.”

“Thanks,” Jenna replied.

We started trying to help Jenna figure things out right away. Jethro’s wallet had turned into Jenna’s purse when she cast the spell to change her belongings, and somehow, either because the original spell kept her documents “young” or the good luck spell had altered them, she was still 17 according to her ID. That meant she was born several years after her mother died, which might cause some confusion.

However, that was enough to get her enrolled in school, and they found a transfer record for her, somewhere. I’m sure it didn’t make any sense and it was the good luck spell that made people overlook the irregularity. So a week after she arrived, she was going to the same school as me and trying to catch up on her classes.

Jenna didn’t have her birth certificate, but my parents helped her apply to have a reproduction sent to her. Her ID still had our address on it, since she hadn’t ever lived anywhere else, and that worked for this. A couple weeks later a certified copy of her birth certificate arrived in the mail. Jenna was born female, named Jenna, and at the hospital she was actually born at as Jethro, with the same parents listed, but 46 years after she was really born.

We thought trying to claim any inheritance was beyond hope; the money and property was still distributed the way it had been when her mother and brother died. But we found one thing. Jenna remembered her parents setting up a college savings plan for Jethro, and after some digging we determined that it still existed! The plan records showed it being originally for Jethro, and inherited by David after his death. But David never went to college and never used it, nor did he use his own, and maybe it was overlooked when disbursing his estate. Whatever happened to it before, the records now showed that both Jethro and David’s accounts were then inherited by Jenna after David’s death. If you knew that Jethro was Jenna, this looked insane. But the combination of different names, time, and control being transferred three times among companies managing the account, with different account numbers and records each time, effectively hid the insanity.

Because the money had sat there so long, it had accumulated loads of interest and capital gains, but college had also gotten a lot more expensive. It seemed like it was still going to pay for her to go to a good college today, assuming she could get into one, and based on the way it was set up, any part of it used to pay for tuition, room and board, fees, and books while she went to college would be tax free. If there was anything left after she got a bachelor’s degree, she’d be able to either leave it in the plan to pay for further education, or claim it but pay taxes on it as regular income.

Jenna’s good luck spell worked again when we found out Caroline had gotten engaged. Instead of visiting us at Christmas, she was visiting her fiance’s family, with just a brief stop here. When she did come, she wasn’t expecting her fiance to sleep with her on her tiny bed in her old bedroom. They had gotten a hotel room for the two nights they were here. This kept Jenna from having to move out of the guest room, which was formerly Caroline’s room, and had been where she slept the other times she had come to visit from college.

We told Caroline about Jenna. Caroline assured us, “I didn’t take the hotel room just because Jenna is staying at the house. I would have done it anyway.”

Caroline also gave Jenna $100 as a Christmas present. Jenna had me take her back to the game store after that. She felt bad at having sort of stolen the actual game that was disguised as Haunted, which she knew would have cost $12 if I’d paid the proper price for the game. So she put a twenty into the tip jar there, together with my five from earlier paying for the game twice over.

“Isn’t it worth paying double for, for what it did?” Jenna commented as we walked out of the store.

Before I could respond she kissed me. We had only kissed once before, and that was part of her spell to get out of limbo.

I had been reluctant to kiss her after finding out she used to be a boy. I wasn’t sure she’d want it. I wasn’t sure I wanted it. But over the last two months, I had watched her develop as a girl. Mom helped her a lot, and bought her new clothes so that she didn’t have to wear the ones from the 70s. And she was definitely all girl; she was somehow simultaneously irritated and elated when she had her first period. The only reason I hadn’t made a move on her over Christmas break was that I hadn’t found the right moment when it wouldn’t be too weird.

This was the moment. I leaned into the kiss, trying to show her everything I knew from my little actual experience at kissing, and she didn’t shy away. I’m not sure how long it lasted. Three minutes? Five? Seven? When we finally broke apart from the kiss we were both gasping for breath.

“You want to make this a date?” I asked.

“Sure!” Jenna responded.

We didn’t go anywhere in particular, but we walked holding hands, and talked.

“I wasn’t sure you’d want me,” Jenna commented at one point.

“I wasn’t sure I did, either,” I replied.

“I worried it was too weird because I used to be a boy, and you knew I was.”

“That was part of my concern. But over your two months here you’ve shown yourself to be all girl, in body and in mind.”

“Thanks,” Jenna replied. “I think I’ve always felt all girl in the mind, but some aspects of the body took more getting used to than I thought.”

“Haven’t you had the girl body for 46 years in limbo?”

“Yeah, but it’s not the same. It wasn’t tangible. I couldn’t eat, drink, piss, or masturbate. It took magical energy to let me hear my own voice, see myself, or touch myself for brief moments. And I was stuck to you most of the time, living vicariously the life of a boy.”

“How much of my life did you see?”

“Practically all of it. You don’t have any secrets from me.”

I gulped.

“Yeah, that’s also going to be weird, but it makes it even more difficult for me to be with someone else. How could I ever have sex with another guy after having seen you masturbate a thousand times?”

“A thousand? ... OK, it probably is a thousand. And I didn’t think of that. I didn’t realize how much you would feel like a part of me. But I barely know you.”

“Yes. I know that I’m going to have to be completely honest with you if we’re going to have a real relationship. Tell you all my secrets.”

“But a lot of those secrets were as Jethro.”

“True. So if there is something you don’t want to hear you can stop me at any time. Don’t be afraid to interrupt. But you must realize that I spent years as Jethro longing to be female. It’s not going to be the same as your experience and it shouldn’t make you feel like we’re a gay couple. But if it does, if any part of it is uncomfortable, you can tell me to stop.”

Jenna told some pretty sad stories.

“As Jethro, I wasn’t ever out, but I got bullied because of my long hair and my hesitancy to date girls. I was called gay, faggot, girly boy, and other names many times. The girly boy part was basically right, but I didn’t let them know that.”

I nodded and hugged Jenna.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to date girls, but I sure as heck wasn’t going to date guys under that peer pressure. I found girls who were outcasts in their own ways and dated some of them. I confessed my true nature to them, and lost several who couldn’t take that truth about their dates.”

“How many?”

“Five or six. I didn’t care, though. Eventually there was one, Lara, who accepted me as Jenna. She knew about magic and helped me get going on that path. My parents knew her as my girlfriend for a while, not knowing she was really my magic tutor. But at some point my parents found out about some of the stuff Lara was involved in and didn’t let me date her anymore. So then I was on my own. Fortunately, they didn’t know about the crystals, yet.”

“Where did the crystals come from? Wouldn’t something like that be expensive?”

“They were Lara’s. And yes, they are probably quite valuable. If I can, I’d like to get them back to her or whatever family she has now, and if there’s nobody left in her family who does magic, maybe sell them. She didn’t expect to lose them permanently; she expected me to perform my ritual and give them back to her. She couldn’t visit me at the house, but I would have found a way to get them back to her, even if it was taking one to school each day to give to her, which is how I got them in the first place. But then I got stuck.”

“And you couldn’t contact her to get you out of limbo.”

“Oh, she stayed far away. My parents suspected Lara of killing me and put the cops to investigating her, but she had an iron-clad alibi. I managed to leave the house attached to my parents several times during the investigation, and I overheard things from various people, even Lara. She explained to the police that the crystals were used to cast magic spells, feigned ignorance about what I was casting with them, and once she was cleared, she stayed away. I don’t think she understood that you could get stuck the way I did, either, so she thought I had died, too. She didn’t come back to the house later, so clearly she gave up the crystals as a loss.”

When we passed a drugstore, Jenna led me in. She picked up condoms.

“Are you sure you want to?” I asked her.

“It may not be tonight, but I do want to have sex with you eventually, if you are willing.”

“At first it was too weird, but it no longer bothers me that you used to be a boy. I might have asked you already if I hadn’t been worried the question would hurt you.”

“I’m over that, and ready to enjoy this body I worked so hard and long for!”

And she hugged me briefly as we went to buy the condoms. Jenna continued her stories as we went home.

At dinner that evening, we let my parents know we were a romantic couple now.

Dad said “Congratulations,” but when he thought I couldn’t hear him, he muttered, “Finally.”

Mom reminded Jenna of the need to not get pregnant, but Jenna showed her the condoms.

I guess Dad was right about the “Finally” in a way. The past years weren’t my fault. But I brought a girl home two months ago and she had been here all that time, and we were finally acting like we were dating. We didn’t go all the way that night, but we did get naked and touch each other. I had never gotten to touch a girl’s pussy before, thanks to Jenna scaring my dates away. Jenna had not touched a penis in 46 years, apart from feeling me touching mine.

We didn’t have sex the next night, either, though we went much further, sending each other to orgasm with our hands. Then it was back to school and we didn’t even get naked together during the week, though Jenna told me more stories each night. Stories of younger Jethro. Stories of Jethro with Lara. Stories of the years alone and the things she overheard from her unexpected prison in what is now my room. Even stories of the things she remembered about me from my younger years.

Friday evening she came to my room carrying the condoms and I knew she meant to actually do it. She was wearing her filmiest nightgown, one that was meant to be worn with a corresponding bra and panties under it, but without those, so she was practically as nude as the first night she entered the world in her female body at the gaming session.

We didn’t do it immediately. Jenna told me how wonderful it was just to feel my body against hers, just to feel anything at all after all those years in that unintentional intangible prison. Once she felt my hardness between her legs, she pulled away long enough to put the condom on me, and when she returned to the position with her back against my chest, I put it in her, gently, just rocking slightly against her for a good while. I knew I was so aroused that if I did much more I would come too quickly, and I think Jenna knew it too.

So she did it herself, getting herself to her own arousal, and I took over with my hand next to hers. I waited until I felt her body tremble, having reached its own orgasm, before I started thrusting in her, bringing her to a second orgasm at the same time I released my own load within its latex sheath.

That was our first time, but far from our last. We did it most Friday and Saturday evenings. During the daytime on the weekends, while we sometimes went out to do things for ourselves, more often, I was helping Jenna deal with her own ghosts, the type of ghosts most people actually mean when they use the word. That often meant searching old newspapers. They were online now, and there was a subscription to let us access them all.

We found stories of David’s life easily enough. Also of her mother. Weirdly, the newspapers reported Jethro’s disappearance, rather than Jenna’s, though Jenna was sure that part of the spell had worked and it was Jenna who her mother had reported missing.

We solved that mystery when we started looking into Jenna herself. She had had a high school record transferred from another city neither of us had actually been to, and we found some modern mentions of her on the web. The recent good luck spell, or the 46-year-old spell to let Jenna merge back into society, or the combination of the two had given Jenna a fictional history, a childhood she didn’t actually know, and another mother with her own mother’s name, who died several years ago. As she was an unwed mother, this left Jenna an orphan.

David, her younger brother in her original timeline, and apparently some distant relative now, had taken her in, and that was how the college fund had gotten turned around and passed on to her. David hadn't officially adopted her, but had named her his heir. Due to her being someone else, it wasn’t as nonsensical as I had first thought. David’s death had left her an orphan again, and we had no idea where, in this new history, she was supposed to have lived since then, except from the school she supposedly went to during that time. Clearly, though, she had moved into my family’s house, since she had ID showing our address, but it had happened recently.

Jenna and I graduated from high school together, and we both enrolled at the local college. I had some scholarships, and Jenna had more than enough in her inherited fund.

When we weren’t studying for our classes, we continued our investigations. We found Lara online. She was still in town, running a kitschy psychic parlor, supposedly, but she didn’t answer her phone or email. So the next weekend after we found her address, we went over to the place, which appeared empty.

I told Jenna, “Something about this place seems weirdly eerie, and yet strangely familiar to me.”

“Yes, there is something off magically about it, but I’m not sure what.”

There was a door from the empty, open psychic parlor at the front entrance of the house to the rest of what likely served as her home, but it was locked. Jenna put her hand against the lock and felt it for a moment.

“It’s magically locked. It’s a simple spell, though, only protecting from physical intrusion. It should be easy to open magically, and I have a little magic left in me, the magic I got from burning the cards. I said I was done with magic, but I’ll use some safe spells to help Lara.”

Jenna cast a brief spell and the door opened just like that. There was nothing else on the first floor, but Jenna felt a direction in which the magical disturbance was stronger. We went upstairs, and toward the stronger area. In a bedroom, we found a grisly scene.

“Lara!” Jenna exclaimed.

I assumed what we were looking at was parts of her. Not parts in the sense of a dismembered body, not quite. She was still alive, and we could see blood coursing through the veins to the pattern of a regular heartbeat. The problem is that the veins weren’t inside a human body, and the other parts weren’t arranged correctly, either.

From somewhere among the body parts, we heard a faint voice moan, “Help me.”

“Are you Lara?” I asked.

“Yes,” came the faint response.

But Jenna was studying the scene. There were more crystals like the ones I saw in the trunk in my attic, arranged in a pattern on the floor beneath where Lara’s body parts hovered in midair, and other magical-looking gizmos.

“She’s partially in the astral plane,” Jenna concluded. “She tried to do something like I did, not exactly the same, to change her body, and her spell to return was stronger than mine but still not strong enough because of the need for someone here to help bring her back. I know what to do.”

Jenna went down to the psychic studio and came back with some blank cards and a quill pen and a bottle of ink.

“It’s magical ink,” Jenna explained. “I can use it to make spells that will do real magic when you read them, but you’ll need to stand close to the crystals. There’s not much energy in them; she used it all not long ago, perhaps a week or so, to get herself into the astral plane.”

Jenna wrote something on one of the cards and handed it to me.

“Holding this, you will feel the magic energy when you get close enough to the crystals. I’m sorry that I can’t explain what that feels like, but you will sense it.”

I stepped close to the crystals, and I was almost touching the nearest ones as well as the nearest parts of Lara when I did.

“OK, I feel it here.”

“Read it.”

“Until such time as Lara chooses to end the effect, Lara shall be entirely within the physical world, and properly connected.”

But it didn’t work. The parts moved around, some of them seeming like they moved through a wormhole connecting two different parts of the room, but Lara remained in pieces.

Jenna asked, “Lara, can you re-cast the spell to escape the astral plane?”

The weak response was, “No. Not enough energy.”

Jenna said, “That must have been the problem with the spell I had you read, Mike. Ironically, though Lara is more in the physical world than I was, having her split apart makes this spell require more energy to cast. The crystals here do not have enough energy for me to do it, either. We have to get the fully charged ones from our attic.”

“OK,” I said.

“Lara, we’ll be back soon with energy I can send to you for the spell,” Jenna said as we left the room.

Soon we were back at my house and loading up the car with crystals brought down from the attic four at a time, as that was as many as we could comfortably carry. Jenna was satisfied after five trips for each of us had gotten a total of forty crystals. It took the same number of trips to unload them at Lara’s place.

Jenna rewrote the spell on another card with some small changes in wording, and handed it to me. Then she cast a spell to send energy from the crystals to Lara.

“Read it now,” she told me.

I read the spell that was similar to the failed one. This one did not fail, though. The body parts passed through the various wormholes that crisscrossed space in the area above the crystals Lara had used. They materialized as a whole and naked young woman just to the one side of the crystals.

“Lara?” Jenna asked.

“Jenna?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

The two women came together and hugged, and cried, and laughed.

“Thanks for saving me,” Lara said. “But how are you so young? Did you do what I did?”

“I don’t think so. Not what I think you did. I got stuck coming back from the astral plane when I changed from Jethro, but I didn’t have even a part of me in the physical world. I was able to use the limited magic I could draw on from the astral plane to project bits of me into the physical world periodically, and eventually I convinced this guy, who for most of his life has occupied what used to be my bedroom, and his friends, to do what was needed to bring me fully into the world.”

“Did this happen last Halloween?”

“Yes. I made the spell text needed appear as elements in a Halloween-themed game when I knew he was going to be at a gaming group on Halloween night. I made some other arrangements to ensure they played the game. And when they read the cards I set up for them, I sent each of them enough magic to make the spells work. What I did to bring you out now was similar to what I had them do for me.”

“I sensed that something changed then, and I knew that your spell had somehow worked, even though you had disappeared and everybody thought you were dead for all those years. I didn’t realize you were still as young now as you would have been then, though.”

“Yes. Except for brief moments with my magic, I didn’t have a physical body and didn’t age during all that time, so when I came out, I was still the way I’d changed myself way back then. How about you? Did you cast a spell to rejuvenate yourself?”

“Yes, that’s what I did. I was in my sixties, and once I knew that kind of transformation was actually possible, before I got too old to manage it, I tried to do it myself, but just to be younger. That was a week ago. I got all the spells cast, but the one to bring me back instead splintered me the way you saw.”

“Yeah. One thing we didn’t know is that to fully return from the astral plane, somebody in the physical world has to cast part of the spell, effectively inviting you in.”

“I wish I’d known. Could have saved some trouble. But there are two matters of business before we talk any more. First, I need to find some clothes to wear, and second, food. I’m starving!”

I went down and waited in the psychic parlor while Lara took care of business. She and Jenna came out carrying two plates heaped with food.

“Oh, I’m not sure I need anything to eat right now,” I told them.

“This is all for me,” Lara said. “Jenna needed to eat when she came out, but she had only about a day’s hunger, which was about the total time she had been in the physical world over all those years. I was about 30% in the physical world, and I moved around and different parts of me were in the world over a week, so the effect on my body was about like I hadn’t eaten in two days. I probably don’t need two whole days of food, so this is about one and a half days’ worth for me to eat over the next couple hours, or until I can’t eat any more.”

Lara needed time for her body to digest the food, so it wasn’t like she wolfed all that down. She had plenty of time to tell her story between bites. And Jenna and I told our story, at least the condensed version.

When Jenna got to discussing the crystals, she mentioned, “I wanted to give you back your crystals, the ones you let me borrow to cast my spell way back then. Mike and I brought over half of them back to send you the power to cast your spell just now, but there are perhaps another 30 still in my attic where my mother put them after I failed to complete my spell.”

“Keep them. I have bought what I need, and the ones you brought back provide more than adequate spares.”

“I was so relieved to get back here that I kind of wanted to get out of magic entirely, and that’s why I came looking for you. I wanted to return the crystals and end my involvement with magic. I didn’t think I’d ever cast another spell, but when we found you that way, I did what was needed.”

“Jenna, if I had you working with me, we could do something more. Learn more about magic so we don’t fall in the traps we did. Have each other as backup to get ourselves out of trouble. Go do real magic in the world instead of running this stupid psychic studio with the very limited magic I’ve mastered.”

“Huh. Maybe I could. I’ve been accepted to college, but of course there’s no magic program. The vast majority of people in our world still know next to nothing about magic. But maybe if I get into the right program, something historical, maybe anthropology, I might have the opportunities to find what we need. And we could even teach this guy.”

I looked at them and shrugged. “The only magic I’ve cast is in role-playing games.”

Lara replied, “Some of the common ideas people have about magic, ideas that some of those games incorporate, are based on real laws of real magic.”

“I’m enrolled into an engineering program in college, so nothing about magic, but I’ll help if I can. I’m pretty committed to working with Jenna anyway.”

“Well I think an engineer is perfect. Engineers are problem solvers. Analysts. If you take an engineer and give him magic, you get a sorcerer.”

So I joined their little group and prepared for a life as a sorcerer. It didn’t happen quickly, of course. I barely started casting any magic of my own before we finished college, at which point Jenna and I got married. More typically, I worked and supported our family of three while Jenna and Lara theorized about magic. They tested their theories, either one being there to help the other if something went wrong. And they did. I never had to pull both of them out of a trap together, but I sometimes helped one of them rescue the other. The sessions I participated in helped me gradually learn the fundamentals, enough that when they devised some spell for me to cast, I would understand how to do so.

But we had the rest of our lives. And based on what Lara had done, and might have done fully successfully the first time if we had been here to invite her back into the physical world, perhaps unlimited lives.