Okay, assuming I kind of understood what I was doing, we were supposed to blow out the candles, sit in darkness for a second, laugh and then turn on some lights and continue with our night. This is where things deviated from the planned schedule. Instead of us sitting in quiet darkness for a couple of minutes…
WARNING: The next part of the story is incredibly cliché
… But instead a ghostly purple light began emanating from the candles. We all three stared at the light as it slowly formed into a person-shape. Now, I am as skeptical as they come, but you have to admit, I had hard proof right there in front of my eyes that something supernatural was happening. I heard Julie gasp but the slowly forming thing distracted me. I realized slowly, about as slowly as it was forming, that it was male. Young and male…to tell you the truth I did not mind what I was seeing as I slowly was able to make out the very muscular (and shirtless) torso and soon very easy on the eyes face of our mystery ghost. This was seriously not a grandma ghost. "What do you want?" He asked.
Now imagine the best thing in the world that you've ever heard. Now magnify that by twelve and you'll have this guy's voice. I think I even heard Josh sigh and Julie and I have first hand experience of Josh's straight-ness (let's just say Suki, Josh's ex-girlfriend, was very into the PDA and Julie and I got front row seats to all the shows. I shudder to think what happened behind closed doors). To me it sounded like (and some of you are gonna have to broaden your horizons here a bit) my grandma's chocolate chip cookies baking and my favorite teddy bear that used to belong to my Uncle Richard and smells like a combination of him and my mom, two of my favorite people in the world beside my friends (and yes, I do see the pattern, but I'm sensitive to smell). Julie said later that he sounded like a masculine version of her mom, now dead for five years. Josh didn't say what he sounded like, but I'm assuming a memory of Suki came into it from the look on his face. We were all stopped in our tracks by that voice. It was hypnotic and sensitive. Open and closed all at the same time. And really incredibly irritated.
"W—what?" I finally pulled myself enough together to ask. He turned and I felt the full effects of his glare, but I was distracted yet again by his bare chest and his unbearably sweet voice, "I asked you what do you want? As in, why the hell did you call me away? I was winning a game of poker!" I was surprised enough to give a coherent answer, "They play poker in the afterlife?" At his intensified glare I painfully pulled my thoughts together, "That's not the point, Of course. The point is…hey guys, did we even have a point?" This guy looked dangerously close to boiling point so I hoped either Julie or Josh would snap out of it fast. "Oh, yeah." Surprisingly enough it was Josh who answered. I was fully expecting Julie. He thought for a moment and then he said the most genius, yet stupid thing that I've ever heard in my life, "We're running a poll. How did you die?"
If I knew it wasn't possible I would swear the room exploded with his anger (or perhaps the purple smoke-like substance he was made of). "Are you kidding me?! You pulled me away from a winning hand to ask me how I died?" I kept the ready-made comment to myself ("What were you going to win exactly?") and instead focused on the guy for one. Not his face, his body or his voice; him. "You're our age aren't you?" It was a random question straight out of left field, literally since Julie was sitting to my left. For some reason his face softened, "Yeah…yes I am. And the way I died…" But he couldn't say anything else because of the big boom and yellow smoke that occurred.
