He sighed and rolled his eyes toward the sky. “I can’t say you didn’t warn me,” he said, clearly not speaking to me.

We went to a little café on Morton Street called Pete’s. It’s mostly frequented by kids from the university, but some of the high school kids hang out there as well, especially kids from the theater group.

“Not bad,” said Melvin, as we entered. “Brings back memories.”

Things were slow, and we found a corner table where we could talk in private.

“Okay,” I said, “what’s going on?”

I won’t relate the first part of the conversation, because you’ve probably read a lot of things like it before. I couldn’t believe what he was saying was real, so I kept trying to figure out what this was really about—Candid Camera, an elaborate practical joke, that kind of thing. But after he instantly dried my puddle-soaked pants by snapping his fingers, I had to accept it: Whether or not he was actually my fairy godfather, this guy was doing real magic left and right.

“Okay, if you’re real,” I said, lifting my coffee (which had changed from plain coffee to Swiss double mocha while I was drinking it), “then tell me how come I never heard of fairy godfathers before.”

“Because I’m the first.”

“Care to explain that?”

“Certainly. Once you buy the farm, you get some choices on the other side. What kind of choices depends on the usual stuff—how good you’ve been and so on. Well, I was going up and not down, and it was pretty much expected that I would just opt to be an angel; they’ve got these things all planned out for you. But I said I didn’t want to be anyone’s guardian angel. I wanted to be a fairy godfather.”

He took a sip of coffee and rolled his eyes. “Let me tell you, that caused a hullabaloo! But I said people had been calling me a fairy all my life, and now that I was dead, that was what I wanted to be. Then I told them that if they didn’t let me be a fairy godfather, I was going to bring charges of sexism against them. So they let me in. You’re my first case.”

“Does that have any significance?” I asked nervously.

“What do you mean?”

“Me being your first case. Does that mean I’m gay?”

I didn’t mention that I had been trying to figure out the same thing myself for about a year.