SPECTRAL START

1. Ghostly Gossip
2. Mysterious Murmurs
3. Cryptic Clues
4. Enigmatic Echoes
5. Wicked Whispers

I hadn’t realized I was a witch.  The conversation replayed in my head as I blasted my music and glared down at my screen.  

I blazed through my social media, seeing everything and nothing.  Mostly what I gathered from my incessant scrolling was that all my friends were living their best life, while I was living my worst.  

I stopped my scroll on a picture of my friends.  Bikini-clad and sporting mixed drinks, likely containing alcohol despite our age, they lounged by the pool, duck-faced and posed with plenty of attitude.  

I was supposed to have been there.  But I couldn’t be.  Not now.  Because I was a witch.  

Anger burned through me again as the scenery rolled past me.  Green pasture after endless green pasture.  Instead of the swanky suburb I’d grown up in, I was in the country.  

Why?  Because my parents had the poor judgment to be out late enough to get creamed by a drunk driver.  Neither one survived.  

As if that wasn’t painful enough, instead of stability, I got the boot.  No one could take care of me.  My aunt lived just down the street.  I could have stayed in my neighborhood.  But no.  She couldn’t take me.  

She had her own family.  She didn’t have room for another.

Whispers at the wake suggested she’d swap houses.  My parents had bought the larger house with two extra bedrooms.  We could all fit comfortably there.  

But she whispered back, “I don’t want to do that.  I can’t take care of Carly.  She’s…a witch.”