Free Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) by Bill Hiatt

suddenly became one of the guys. The team members I tutored also did better, though the change was not as dramatic, since they had been having more trouble in math and science than in their other subjects. What helped them accept me was my music, oddly enough. Dan suggested I could help get the team pumped before games. How Dan knew that would work, I couldn’t imagine, since the Voice had told me specifically that ordinarily, he wouldn’t remember anything about my secrets. In any case, it did work. I did the school fight song and a couple other appropriate numbers, with a little something extra behind them—not enough to be like cheating, but just enough to get each player to do his best, just as Dan seemed to be doing already. Even the coach noticed the difference in the way the team performed; though he didn’t ever say anything directly, he looked at me differently.
    For Stan the experience was practically life-changing. A lot of the players offered him tips during his workout, complimented him on his efforts, and made small talk of a kind normally reserved for team members. It was the most sustained positive attention Stan had ever gotten from jocks in his life, not counting me, and it was clear that the whole experience was doing wonders for his self-esteem, just as I knew it would. But the workouts were just the beginning. High school society is like a complicated ecosystem, and our interaction with the team changed our relationship to the rest of that system. Sometimes the players hung out with us outside of workouts. Sometimes we had lunch with them before practice. Rapidly our social status soared far above its earlier position. I was used to being something of a loner, except for Stan, and so I didn’t really care…oh, who am I kidding? I loved it, I loved it just as much as Stan did, if only because being part of the football clique gave me times during the week when I could forget about whatever diabolical forces were hiding just out of sight, waiting to pounce on me.
    Stan liked our changed circumstances for a completely different reason. He put so much effort into running with me and weight training with the football team that it wasn’t long before he started looking more muscular. Not that he was ripped, or anything—that would take months and months, if it happened at all. Not all guys can build muscle that way. But he was clearly getting some definition; his arms and legs looked less like match sticks, and his chest had begun to make his shirts look a little too tight. As if on cue, puberty started giving him some breaks. In just a few weeks, his voice got decidedly less squeaky, and he began a growth spurt that made him seem, if not like a junior, then at least like a sophomore.
    Imagine my surprise to overhear two cheerleaders talking about “the little cutie,” and then realize that they were talking about Stan!
    “That’s my boy,” I said to myself, and walked off whistling, not for some magic purpose, but just because I felt like it, something I hadn’t done since I was twelve.
    As for me, I knew I was much more combat-ready now. I also knew that my rise to social prominence made me a more desirable catch, and that I even had a potential choice of girlfriends. Sure, their attraction might be somewhat superficial. I was, after all, the same person I had been when those girls hadn’t really known I was alive—a little more muscle and a different rung on the social ladder hadn’t changed that—but, when all is said and done, sixteen-year-old guys, with or without memories of a thousand prior lifetimes, aren’t necessarily looking for spiritual fulfillment in a relationship. They are, almost invariably, looking for…oh, let’s just be honest, sex. Now I would like to think that wasn’t all I was looking for—I’m not a complete dog. Nonetheless, I’d be lying if I’d said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. The societies in which my earlier selves had lived had somehow generally