Miss Clarabelle

If you ever get in deep with a loan shark, be clever about how you sell them out if you're going to be that dumb. They will find you and they will try to hurt you. I got lucky and managed to run away after they found my witness protection hideout. I only had contact with one old friend, Kate, someone I trusted with my life. She got me through a lot of the misery. When I had to run for the fifth time, I messaged her from a new number. She had been trying to keep tabs but the stress was getting to her. She said she'd been thinking about ways to get me out of trouble, or at least not get tracked down so easily. Her best suggestion was Elixir. I was not happy with that suggestion, especially since I didn't know how I'd look. I mean, I'd heard about it, but I was a guy. A guy who would not look good as a girl. My friend was not taking no for an answer. She didn't want to be worried about me all the time anymore. She demanded I meet her at a hotel, and how could I say...

My big sister, Angie, was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever met. Annoyingly so. All of my friends had a crush on her, teachers went easy on her, and she was definitely our parents' favourite kid. I was just their loser son. I didn't even do anything that bad, I just wasn't as capable. I dated people on and off, while she dated no one. Our parents didn't bother meeting my partners because they believed that Angie should find love first. They respected nothing about me, but Angie could do no wrong. Not that she ever did anything. She had the looks and did nothing. I knew if I had those looks I wouldn't be so boring. I would actually try to do something with a body that nice. Thoughts like that let me led me to realise I wasn't actually a man. I just had to watch someone perfect waste what I should have had. I started looking into transitioning, but one day I was walking through town and found a magic shop. Like it appeared out of nowhere and disappeared...

On a dark night, my friends and I found ourselves in a large shed behind the school, standing over a pentagram. I held a book in my hands and was reading a spell that one of the guys found that said it would give us the lives we were meant for. We were a big group, almost twenty guys, but not one of us were popular. Not one could get a girlfriend. With our last year in school coming to an end, we wanted to fix that. The magic was a last desperate measure. I don't think any of us believed it was real. We just needed something to make ourselves feel better. No, the fact we were a group of about twenty close friends did not cross our minds. Magic was much more logical than developing those friendships. Right? The spell went off with a bang, literally blowing the walls and roof off the shed. We were surrounded in a bright white light as a half naked woman appeared in the middle of the pentagram, flexing wings as she stood. She folded them in to her back and let the light die down. She ...