I'm a Gay Wizard

  I'm a Gay Wizard

  V. S. Santoni

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Excerpt from The Diary of an Unknown Wizard

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  To Zak,

  For always pushing me to make my dreams come true.

  For never giving up on me, no matter what.

  Excerpt from the Diary of an Unknown Wizard

  There’s an old story wizards tell around the Institute. Some say they first heard it in the Night Market, that place where all the dream creatures slither around. It goes something like this:

  In the beginning, there was the Void. Darkness. But not nothing. No. Nothing is the absence of something, but this darkness wasn’t the absence of something. In fact, it had a lot of something in it. The darkness was alive. Maybe the Void was one consciousness, or maybe there’s no such thing as oneness in the Void—either way, some of the Void split away and became the immortal Asuras.

  Some Asuras were content to exist in the endless nothing, but others longed for more than the Void’s cold embrace. They longed to feel love. Even though they’d never known such a feeling, they dreamt of it. Some say their dreams took life, became Everywhen—the dreamworld. Those Asuras fled into Everywhen and, with the Void’s influence gone, they changed; they became Devas.

  The Void grew jealous, sending its loyal Asuras to destroy the world the Devas had created, but the Devas had planned for such treachery and built another world: this one. Using clockwork they’d forged in Everywhen, they built this world and gave it meaning, purpose. And so, before the Asuras could wipe them out, the Devas fled into this world, continuing on their quest to build a place of infinite love.

  But the Void’s loyal servants wouldn’t let the Devas go in peace—no, they chased them, fought them, hunted them down, even in this world. The war lasted for eons. Some say the Asuras eventually succeeded in their tireless quest to annihilate the Devas, but in doing so, they lost their way back to the Void, and the maze of Everywhen trapped them between our world and the dreamworld. As the story goes, the Asuras came to know our world, their new prison, as Samsara, a cursed land that damned their bodies to an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

  Still others in the Night Market insist that a shadow war continues between the Devas and the Asuras, and that wizards are their descendants.

  Wild story, huh?

  Chapter 1

  1 Hour After Extraction

  Rumbling under my head. A stink like rotten raspberries. I cracked open my eyes. The rumbling grew. Was I dreaming? Last thing I remembered, a couple of men in black suits threw me into the back of a van. I wobbled up to my feet. Built into the sides of the van were two metal benches across from each other, with grab handles suspended over them.

  My head cleared. My home. My dad. I had to get out of this van. Behind me was a pair of doors. I rushed over, grabbed the handles, and pulled, pulled, pulled. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. They weren’t opening. I battered my fists against them. “Help me! Let me out! What the hell’s going on?”

  I turned away from the doors. This couldn’t be happening. This had to be a dream. I looked down at my knuckles. Bruised. Skinned from battering the door. Clunk. The van shook and sent me teetering, wobbling, almost falling. Steadying myself, I searched the van’s interior for an escape. Metal floor. Metal walls. Metal roof. Everything completely sealed. I was trapped. Really trapped. This was actually happening, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I was going to end up the prisoner in someone’s sex dungeon or maybe—maybe they were selling me off to rich cannibals. What am I going to do?

  I prayed: Please, please, please make this stop. I’ll stop thinking about boys—in fact, I’ll do anything, just please, please, please make this stop. I swear, I swear, I’ll be good.

  I waited. . . . No miracles for me today. Defeated, I slumped onto a bench and imagined the horrible things that might happen to me. Escape was impossible . . . for now. So, instead, I recalled the events leading up to that moment.

  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 rig
ht. 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 convinced 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 something. 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 floating . . . 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.

  Chapter 3

  48 Hours Until Extraction

  This isn’t happening again.

  I’m just going to walk in there, tell them all to go to hell, and hope they leave me alone.

  Maybe if I pretend I’m someone different, they’ll treat me better.

  Or, could I just maybe disappear?

  Okay, Johnny, let’s just get this over with.

  That was me suffering through the five stages of grief every morning before school. No, no one died, just my soul. I went to Lincoln Park High School in Chicago.

  High school was like a petting zoo, and all the other kids were cute little frolicking goats. Me? I was Black Phillip from that movie, The Witch. I had a reputation for being the weird gay kid. It didn’t help that my best friend had been burning sage at her locker every morning since the start of sophomore year. That is, until Principal Welder told her it was against the rules. Alison declared it was against her religious freedom, threatened to go to the ACLU and make it into a big deal, but she never followed through. She lost interest and moved on to using a dowsing crystal to search campus for hidden gravesites.

  I was sliding up the handle of my dingy red locker when Spencer Pruitt slammed his hand on the door. “Hey!” he said, putting his face right in mine. Spencer was a tower with a neck like a honey ham. He took out his phone and scrolled through it. “I saw this movie about you on Netflix last night.” He chuckled and showed me the screen: Gayby. “Is that what they call baby fags when they’re born?”

  Spencer had started tormenting me in the ninth grade. I didn’t even know why. Back in middle school, Spencer was a quiet D&D nerd. Then puberty hit, and he turned into a six-foot-tall gorilla-

  human hybrid with a thirst for blood.

  I tuned him out, fidgeting with my locker until he slammed his hand against it again. “Hey, gayby, I’m talking to you.”

  “Hey, Spencer!” Alison called from down the hallway. Wedging herself between two sour-faced cheerleaders, she headed for my locker. Once she was beside me, she gave Spencer a curt smile. “You know, for someone with a micropenis, you sure do produce a lot of testosterone. Have you ever thought of submitting yourself to a scientific study?”

  “You’re both freaks. I should ruin you right here.”

  Alison flipped him off as he walked away. “That guy is such a troglodyte.” She leaned on the locker next to mine. “You see, J, if guys bottle up their gayness for too long, they become Spencer Pruitt.”

  “What?” I said, finally getting my locker open.

  “He’s got a huge crush on you. Duh. The only thing he wants to ruin is your—” She looked pointedly down at my butt.

  “Gross. What’re you even talking about?” I looked over at Spencer, still glaring at me from his group of equally boneheaded friends. “That guy hates my guts.”

  “Look at how he’s staring at you. That’s repressed longing. You remind him of what he can’t have because of heteronormativity or whatever.”

  I closed my locker and we headed for homeroom. “Sure, that’s what it is.”

  “What, you don’t believe me? He’s a wrestler, J. It’s scientifically proven that’s the most homoerotic sport in the world.”

  During English, Alison texted me memes while I watched the clock ticktock, ticktock, ticktock. My neck going slack, I laid my head on the desk and counted every tick. One. Two. Three. When I got bored, I turned my face to the side and stared at the classroom door, imagining a black mist filling the hallways. Some unknown force was invading, so while my classmates cowered, I darted to my feet, the only one fit to stand against the impending evil. The mist seeped in under the door and materialized into a giant talking troll, who then pointed a mechanical claw at me and said, “Johnny, you must be destroyed!” I threw back, “No, you must be destroyed!” as a magical sword appeared in my hands, then I charged the fiend, leaping into the air and bringing my blade crashing down on it. My classmates gasped as I—the weird, quiet, and probably gay kid—wowed them with my swordsmanship.

  One perilous swing after another, I forced the beast out into the hallway. Students hurried out of their classrooms to
investigate the clatter, raising hands to their gaping mouths as I kicked off walls and lockers, smacking my blade against the monster’s mechanical arm. Then the bell rang, snapping me out of my daydream. I really needed to stop watching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World so much.

  My torture continued in P.E. I always wore gym clothes under my regular clothes because I was too embarrassed to get undressed in front of the other guys. I wasn’t fat, but I certainly wasn’t fit. Just awkward.

  Spencer caught me sitting on the bench tying my shoes and clomped over, holding a jockstrap. “Hey, freak,” he said, dangling it in front of my face. “You perverts like this stuff, right? You sniff them or something, don’t you?” I continued tying my shoes. “C’mon,” he insisted. “Don’t you want to sniff it, pervert?” He snatched the back of my head and shoved my face into the jockstrap. Surprisingly, it didn’t smell like Spencer’s balls—close call.

  The coach passed by and caught Spencer holding me in a headlock. “Pruitt!”

  Spencer whisked the jockstrap behind his back. I popped up onto my feet and furrowed my eyebrows at him.

  “Just messing around with him, Coach,” Spencer said.

  “Move it along, Pruitt.”

  Spencer snarled at me and walked away.

  The rest of the day passed in more or less the same way, a metaphorical jockstrap-to-the-face kind of day. Because Alison didn’t live far away, after school she could walk home, but me—I had to take the bus. Slumping into a squeaky vinyl seat, I hoped the springs poking through would stab me to death. Kids screamed and shot spitballs and slung wads of paper at each other, their whining and screeching—like a swarm of doomsday locusts—a perfect reminder of why I hated my life.

  Thirty painful minutes later, the bus dropped me off not far from my house. Our neighborhood used to be middle class, but the crabgrass growing through the cracked sidewalks told the story of white flight into trendier subdivisions since then. My neighborhood was like a ghost wandering in an urban wasteland.