I'm a Gay Wizard

Chapter 1 Bullies

My eyes almost rolled into the back of my head when my best friend Alison begged me to go to the witchcraft store again. She was obsessed with magic, so regardless of how much I protested, she would end up dragging me there anyway. The last warm days of summer were fleeting, and Alison had kept me in that damn witchcraft store almost every day that summer. Once we got there, she zipped through the store, throwing anything with an inkling of the occult into her bag: Smelly incense? Check. Weirdly named candles? Check. Crystals that promised to absorb evil spirits? Check.

While she burned through her allowance, I walked around and stared at corny dragon and wizard statuettes, laughed at overpriced stash boxes pitched as "tarot card storage," mock danced to the spacey music flowing out of the hidden speakers, and then I saw him: the clerk. I didn't know his name, but he had brown hair, dark eyes, and leaned against the glass display counter with his expressionless face cupped in his hands. He fluttered his eyes at passing customers, yawned, looked at his watch, and exhaled, blowing his stringy hair out of his face. In this situation, being stuck in the witchcraft store, bored out of our minds, he and I were soul mates. Honestly, the only reason I went to the witchcraft store was because I hoped he'd devirginize me.

Alison had been my best friend since back before she transitioned. She was the goth type: wore black all the time, had dark make-up, and kept a Siouxsie and the Banshees poster permanently embedded in her locker. Sometimes, she'd wrap her Hot Topic rosary around her fingers, clasp her hands together, and pray to it, saying, "Hail Siouxsie full of grace!" then she'd kiss the poster, planting a big, red lipstick smear right on Siouxsie's cheek. Everyone at school thought she was a Satanist because she wore a "Hail Seitan" pin on her vegan leather jacket (they didn't get the joke). The only thing she didn't do was dye her hair black. She said that was too "conformist" . . . whatever that meant.

Alison rifled through all the books on the racks near the front counter, looking for the one that seemed "most legit." Her guidelines for determining legitimacy were constantly in flux. Sometimes she liked books that looked older—leather-bound tomes with non-descript covers—and sometimes she liked newer books that looked like they'd fallen out of bargain bins—laminated paperbacks that probably costed more now than they did when they were first put on shelves. After she moved on from the books, she eyeballed the candles. She waved me over, and we laughed at the candles because they had little, plastic labels beneath them with names like "Sexual Entity" and "Sensual Mystery" and "Erotic Daydream."

When Alison finished spending all her money, we returned to her two-story brownstone in Hyde Park. Alison's house was spooky on the outside—perfect for her—mainly because her mom and grandma refused to hire a gardener to deal with the ivy that had overgrown on one half of the house, all but engulfing her front stoop. Alison's mom, who was sick with cancer, was usually asleep upstairs, forcing us to perform our "spells" in the basement. Her grandma, a crotchety, old German woman, was either in the kitchen, mashing potatoes and sauerkraut into some unfathomable mixture and scowling at us as we snuck by, or she'd be teetering back and forth in her rocking chair in the living room, knitting and side-eyeing us as we maneuvered through the house.

Once we had descended the creaky, wooden steps into her basement, Alison forced me to pore through all her discoveries with her. She burnt different colored candles or incense while we read all kinds of silly spell books. I never cared for all the "magic." Alison would say: "Ryan, why're you so lame? Don't you want to sacrifice a chicken?" I never knew if she was serious or just messing with me. You could never tell with Alison. Regardless, I'm happy to report, we made it through that whole summer without sacrificing a single chicken.

We spent one day trying to learn object levitation, a spell Alison found in one of those clean your chakras in five easy steps books. Alison drew a pentacle on the dusty, cement floor and placed a sheet of paper in the middle of the symbol. Her basement was filled with moldering planks of wood that were lined up against the walls and piles of rusted, empty paint cans, sitting on wooden shelves and draped in cobwebs. I walked around the image, knowing if I stepped on it Alison would gouge out my eyes. Reaching the side adjacent Alison, I went to my knees.