The Game They Weren’t Supposed to Play (A Short Story)

Suzi’s Secrets #37

Some games begin as pretend. Some books are never meant to be found.

They weren’t supposed to be in Chloe’s mother’s bedroom. They also weren’t supposed to get into Chloe’s mother’s stuff. All of them knew the rules. Which, of course, meant that on a slow summer afternoon, when the adults were distracted and the house felt too quiet, they broke both.

It was Clara who dared them.

Chloe hovered near the doorway, half-watching the hall, half-pretending she didn’t care. Catherine, the youngest, was kneeling on the carpet, peering into the shadows beneath the bed like she expected something to look back at her.

“It’s just a drawer,” Clara whispered, already reaching for it.

The journal was heavier than it looked. Bound in dark leather, edges worn soft as though it had been handled for years. There was no title. No name. Only a faint impression on the cover, like a symbol pressed so long ago it had nearly faded from memory.

“This is pretend,” Chloe said quickly, the moment they opened it. “Whatever it is.”

Clara giggled. “Obviously.”

The pages were filled with old and strange handwriting, slanted, looping, sometimes frantic. Symbols appeared in the margins. Lists. Names crossed out. Notes written over notes, as though whoever had owned it couldn’t bear to leave a thought unfinished. They didn’t understand most of it. So they did what children do. They turned it into a game.

They copied the symbols onto scraps of paper and hid them under pillows. They whispered the words out loud, laughing when nothing happened. They dared each other to “cast spells” on the trees outside or the old windmill in the field.

Catherine loved it most. She took it seriously in the way only children can. When she said the words, she believed them. When she pressed her palms together and closed her eyes, she felt something humming beneath her skin.

“Let’s make a spell.” Chloe suggested. “I’ll pretend I’ve lost my locket and we can make a spell to find it.”

Catherine was delighted. She insisted that magic must have rules. These weren’t the type of rules adults would make, but birthed from childish belief. “You must say the words exactly right. And no laughing. You have to mean it.” She said with all the seriousness a five year old could muster. Clara and Chloe were always laughing when they played pretend magic. Chloe giggled and rolled her eyes. 

“You’re not paying attention.” Catherine said as she wrote out the spell to find the pretend locket. “It won’t work if you don’t pay attention.” She held the paper up. “All done.”

The girls looked at the terrible handwriting and misspelled words. “You read it to us.” Clara said. “Then we’ll repeat it.”

‘Object lost, we want to find.

We want this image in our mind.

Help us find the object we seek,

As we will so mote it be.’

They all repeated it three times and then walked around pretending to be led by magic to find the locket.

“It’s gone.” Chloe said. “My locket was right here, in my box.” She started looking more frantically, but it was gone. 

After that Clara and Chloe stopped humoring her. The game made them nervous, they said. 

The summer Chloe’s mom died, things began to change. By then, Clara and Chloe were nearly grown. Catherine was still a child, not yet ten, watching the world she knew fracture while pretending it was all part of the same game. The changes started small. Chloe’s missing locket reappearing on her dresser. A storm rolling in minutes after Catherine insisted it would. Clara dreamed of fire one night and woke to find ash smeared across the hearth, though no one had lit it.

“This isn’t funny anymore,” Clara said, pushing the journal away one afternoon.

Chloe nodded, her hands shaking. “We should put it back.”

Catherine frowned. “Why?”

Because Clara and Chloe were older, they felt the shift first, the sense that the game had rules they didn’t understand. That the pages weren’t waiting to be filled with imagination, but memory. Catherine only felt wonder. She loved the feel of the magic, the heat in her tingly palms.

After the funeral, the journal was gone.

“Where could it be?” Catherine asked, frantically. She pulled open drawers and looked on the bookshelves. “It couldn’t just leave.”

Chloe said in a relieved voice, “good riddance, if you ask me.”

Clara didn’t say anything, avoiding everyone’s eyes. She just felt relief. With the journal gone. Maybe life can go back to normal, she thought.

Magic still bubbled out of them though. A name Clara once joked about showed up in a letter she hadn’t expected. A promise Chloe had whispered in pretend anger came true in ways she couldn’t undo. Doors opened that should have stayed closed. Dreams pressed closer to waking. Catherine noticed everything and was in awe. The others noticed too. Things they couldn’t explain and they feared. 

Years later, on a visit to her hometown, Catherine spoke of the magic, dull now. “This is what it was for,” she said once, her eyes bright with something that made the older girls uneasy. “We just didn’t finish the game.”

Clara turned away.

Chloe shut the door.

Neither of them spoke to Catherine again, because what Catherine called magic, they now recognized as inheritance.

And they were no longer children playing pretend.

Suzette R. Berry