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we love you so much."

    "Shove it, Shar."

    I found Jo in her room carefully combing her hair. She had only recently begun to worry about her appearance, the way most girls did at age nine. She had fallen in love. His name was Jeff Nichols, and he was Big Beth's boyfriend. I knew it was going to be a hell of a party.

    Jo was fascinated with the occult. She was into the usual New Age fads such as astrology and crystals. Yet she leaned toward the darker edge of the esoteric circle. Nothing excited her more than a method to tap into a supernormal power. Her latest craze was a magnetic pendulum that she said could be used to broadcast or send substances into a person's body from any distance. When I was sick with a cold the week before Beth's party, she had called and told me she had broadcast vitamin C into my throat. It was ethereal vitamin C, of course, but she said it worked as well as the real thing. I can't say I felt a thing.

    Did she believe in all that stuff? I don't know. When I was alive, I never gave it much thought, and now that I'm dead, I consider myself too close to the subject to voice an objective opinion. But Jo was no one's fool, that I can say.

    "Dan's got the car running," I said as I stepped into her room. Friends at school who knew of Jo's interest in the supernatural were often disappointed when they visited her house and discovered that her bedroom was perfectly normal.

    In fact, it was usually the cleanest place in the house. The only things in her room that suggested her hobby were a box of incense and an incense holder on top of her chest of drawers.

    Her appearance was also fairly normal. Although we resembled each other, her hair was dark enough that I made fun of her every time she described herself as a blonde. We had the same petite builds, the same kind of mouths that laughed at the same kind of jokes. But whereas I did have striking green eyes, hers were at best hazel. She did have great taste in clothes, however. I was forever borrowing outfits from her. The yellow blouse and green pants I wore to Beth's party actually belonged to Jo.

    "Tell him I'm going to be a minute," Jo said, finishing her hair and hurrying to the closet.

    "It'll take me more than a minute to walk down to the car," I said, sitting on her rock-hard bed. Jo also practiced yoga and would never stand for a mattress that would let her spine sag.
    "You look fine. Let's just go. I don't think Dan's in the best of moods."

    Jo glanced up from digging in her closet and grinned.

    "Does Spam feel uncomfortable around you now that you two have engaged in bestial activities together?"

    "I didn't say we had sex." Jo always called Dan "Spam."

    I had long ago ceased trying to free her of the habit. It is interesting that I was one of the few people Jo never gave a nickname to, and I was her best friend.

    "Yes, you did," Jo said, finding what she was looking for, which appeared to be a lump of metal. "You said he undressed you, you undressed him, and then the two of you let things take their natural course."

    "Stop," I pleaded. "We have to drive to the party in the same car in a few minutes, for Christ's sake." I paused.

    "What's that? Another magnet?"

    "Yeah."

    "What happened to the last one?" I asked as I picked up a small pile of typed papers lying on her bed.

    "I still have it. But this one's stronger. It's used for a different purpose." She squeezed it into the pocket of her black pants. Like any good witch, Jo loved to wear black.

    "We can talk to the universe with this one. We'll play with it at the party." She gestured to the papers in my hand. "You know what that is?"

    "What?"

    "A short story by Peter Nichols—Jeff's brother."

    A couple of years back, when I was a sophomore and he was a senior, I had shared a biology class with Peter. He was great—he could crack me up like no one could. He would tell me these totally ridiculous stories about all the weird things that kept happening to him. For example, once