I'm a Gay Wizard (Wattpad Books Edition)

Chapter 2

1 MONTH BEFORE EXTRACTION 

Alison's basement was so hot and dusty it was like being trapped inside an overheating vacuum cleaner. Twice as smelly too. I wondered whether anyone had worked on the air conditioning system since the house had been built, which was probably sometime in the late nineteenth century. Summer heat waves hit like firestorms, turning the old Victorian's insides into a sauna. It didn't help that Alison's mom and grandma refused to hire a gardener to chop down all the ivy overtaking the spooky-looking thing. I felt like I was being baked inside one of her grandma's greasy cabbage rolls.

I sneezed once. Twice. When my nose stopped tickling, I looked down at the magic book staring up at me. We'd snatched it up in our most recent Candle Creations haul, Alison's favorite witchcraft store. Our trips to Candle Creations consisted of Alison buzzing around like a witchy bee gathering occult nectar and me ogling the hot store clerk.

Smelly incense? Check. Oddly named candles? Check. Crystals that promised to absorb evil spirits? Check. The instructions in the book read, "To cleanse your chakras, imagine the negative energy clogging them as little bits of string and pull them out." A diagram showed where all the chakras were. The little naked man in the drawing had two chakras on his palms, so I tried pulling invisible strings of bad mojo out of my hand.

"This isn't working," I said. "I don't feel anything." I was getting on Alison's nerves. Nothing bugged her more than when I tried to shake her faith in magic. When she was ten, her mother had bought her a toy magic kit, and Alison made me sit and watch her learn how to pull stuff out of a collapsible hat. I told her magic wasn't real, so she made my shoes "disappear," forcing me to walk home barefoot across the sizzling sidewalk.

"Johnny, the book's legit. Maybe you're doing it wrong." My name's Juan, but everyone just calls me Johnny. Juan "Johnny" Diaz.

"I've been sitting here literally all day trying to 'cleanse' my chakras." 

"Figuratively." 

I flipped my black hair to the side. "What?" 

"That's not what literally means." Alison tossed her long brown hair behind her shoulders. "You mean figuratively."

"Okay, I've"—I air quoted—"'figuratively' been sitting here all day cleaning out my chakras, and I don't feel any better."

She batted her green eyes at me. "Maybe if you paid attention at the store instead of checking out the clerk's ass, you'd know what you were doing."

She was right. The only reason I went to Candle Creations was because I hoped the hot clerk would one day devirginize me. "Shut up!"

"You should just ask him out the next time we go." "He's, like, twenty-three. Plus . . . he'd just think I'm weird." She laughed and blocked her face with a big fat grimoire we'd found in the bargain bin. "You're going to be a virgin forever if you don't do something about that pathological awkwardness."

You could say Alison was goth or emo or whatever. She wore way too much black, watched way too many vampire movies, and kept a My Chemical Romance poster enshrined in her locker. Sometimes, she'd twist her Hot Topic rosary around her fingers, slap her hands together, and hail Gerard before planting a big red lipstick smear right on his lips. She had everyone at school con- vinced she was a Satanist because she wore a Hail Seitan pin on her vegan leather jacket. Alison's sense of humor had always been a little more sophisticated than most high school students'. She said it came from being hopelessly trans in a hopelessly cis world.

I guess she rubbed off on me. After my parents got divorced, I stretched my earlobes, put little tunnels in them, and filled my closet with black T-shirts. She even got me listening to a bunch of old punk bands like Against Me! and AFI.

Alison slammed down the book on the floor next to her, keeping it open on the page she'd been reading. With a piece of chalk, she copied a pentacle from the book onto the cement. Then she set down a piece of paper in the middle of the symbol.

"Okay, Johnny," Alison said, "get across from me." I stood up and walked around the chalk image, knowing if I stepped on it, Alison would gouge out my eyes. Reaching the side opposite her, I knelt. "We're going to do this levitation spell by chanting some- thing. The book says what we chant isn't important, so long as it helps us focus on what we're trying to accomplish. The chanting and the pentacle—they're just there to help us imagine the spell. Now, put your hands down around the ring and chant something."

"Like what?" "I don't know, just something that makes you think about float- ing . . . stuff."

"Floating stuff?" 

"Johnny." 

"Okay, okay . . . floating stuff." I placed my hands around the ring and closed my eyes. She started chanting in Latin—it sounded like Latin, but it could've been anything, I guess—so I muttered something in pig latin: "Oatflay, aperpay." I focused on making the paper float; imagined it hovering up into the air like a feather and dangling there.

We chanted until my stomach growled. Alison shushed me. I tried focusing on the spell, but little floating hamburgers kept spinning around my head. Alison would've killed me if she'd known I was daydreaming about fast food while we were trying to cast a spell, but I didn't believe in magic. Whenever she forced me to sit through Harry Potter movies or Criss Angel videos on YouTube, I'd stare at my phone the whole time, looking at guitar tabs or browsing cute guys on Instagram.

Alison gasped. I cracked open an eye. Then I gasped too. The piece of paper was floating in the air right in front us, dangling like it was being held up by an invisible fishing line. Awestruck, we smiled at each other, then slowly turned our gaze back to the paper. We didn't even have to keep chanting. So long as we imagined it floating, it stayed.

"Alison!" her grandma called from upstairs. The piece of paper fell, and Alison threw a tarp over the chalked pentacle so her very Christian grandma wouldn't see it and ban us from using the basement. She already suspected we were down here worshipping Satan, anyway.

"Coming!" Alison said. She motioned with her head for me to follow. Before I did, I shot one last glance at the tarp, not quite believing what I'd seen.