Some Kind of Magic

Once I had told my family about the good news that I had been one of the few students to make the school’s senior band, Blade took me out for ice cream with Christabelle. Albeit, it was mostly because she was craving a big bowl of Super Fudge Chunk at that moment, but it was an added bonus that I had something to celebrate as well. And while I sat over my porcelain bowl of a hot fudge sundae, making small talk with Blade and Christabelle about my time at the school so far, between which they were discussing their plans for when the baby came, I spotted the magician boy again. He was sitting at a table with a little girl who was similar in facial features and hair colour, so it led me to believe that she was his sister of about three years old. It was only the two of them, and it made me wonder where his parents were but I didn’t bother to ask; also because he didn’t spot me until the tail end of his visit to the ice cream parlour. The little girl sat across from him, licking at an ice cream cone and trying to keep it in the cone, but it dripped right down her hand and had her giggling and constantly grabbing for napkins. In between that time, she kept asking her brother to show her another magic trick, but he seemed to be running out after the first ten and just settled on ruffling her hair and saying “let’s save it for another day”. She gave up easily and didn’t beg him to do another anymore.

They got up to leave first and when he picked her up off her chair, holding her in his arms all the way to the door, he spotted me over her shoulder. I smiled and lifted a hand, to which he returned with a wave and a quick friendly flash of his killer grin. When they got outside, he put her down on the pavement and took her hand. I looked away for a millisecond and when I looked back at him, they were both gone. I didn’t know how he did it.

The third time I saw him was during the weekend. I was at a book store on Saturday, picking up Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” for my English project and essay. This also gave my dad the opportunity to look at sports books and research the latest football game results on the store’s internet without having my mother harp at him from behind for not spending enough time with her. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to; she was like an annoying bird sometimes, and he couldn’t really help it if he didn’t get to see her a lot. If he wasn’t with her, he was working and the few times he got to himself, he literally had to run away from her. This was like his escape, but I knew that my mom would track us down eventually. My dad and I sometimes took days like this off for just us two to spend together, to get things done and to just have fun outside of the house. I was definitely closest with my dad, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get on my nerves. That was just the thing about parents; there would always be that one thing about them that annoyed you, no matter how much you loved them or everything about them but that thing. It didn’t outweigh it as much as I had hoped it would. And with my dad, it was that he was legitimately afraid of my mother so her word was always the final one. Even if he didn’t agree with her about something, he would say he did to avoid a dispute.

Today though, he took me to the book store for educational purposes and didn’t even ask questions when I brought one hundred dollars to buy one book. Obviously it wasn’t all I was buying. After that, we planned on going to the mall and searching for Christabelle’s baby shower gift, as well as a second gift for both her and Blade that would be more of a house-warming present than a necessity. Blade had a weird obsession with candles, so we figured that would be perfect. And following the trip to the mall, we were going to meet Blade and my mother for lunch and go to a movie. Saturday’s out with the family was really the only day I could handle them because for once, we weren’t all bickering and they weren’t comparing Blade to Eric. It had been a while since I had seen my eldest brother, and I really did miss him, but from the time that he distanced himself from our family more, things had been much less stressful, and there hadn’t been nearly as much arguments or stress on Blade’s career choice.

I had brought a notebook with me to the store with a list of books that I had planned on buying. Every time I found one that was recorded, I crossed it off with my pencil. When I was flipping through the pages of one of the books in the teen section that Elsie had recommended for me to read, I felt someone’s breath by my ear. For a second, I thought it may have been my father or maybe just one of the twins sneaking up on me since Robbie had a part-time job at the book store and Dylan loved to read, but then I remembered that Robbie didn’t work on the weekends, and they both had a hockey tournament in Washington for the next week. Also, my dad was still entranced by the computer on the other side of the store.

“Boo,” the person said and I squeaked, surprised, before turning around to come face to face with the boy. He smiled and stepped back, putting his hands in his pockets.

“Sheesh, you scared me,” I said, shaking my head. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

“I’m sorry. I came in to pick up something my mom ordered from the catalogue and I saw you over here so I thought I’d say hello,” he said. “What’re you up to? It’s too nice out to be inside.”

“Oh I know, it’s gorgeous out. But I’m having a day with the family. I just had to pick up something for school,” I said, holding up “Dracula”. “I’ll probably go down to the beach a little later, depending on the weather, if it holds out for me or not. Apparently we’re supposed to get some rain.”

“Yeah, I heard about that.” He shook his head. “It ruins it for everyone.”

“It does.”

The boy’s face lit up. “Do you mind if I see that?” he asked, nodding to my book. I passed it over to him and he opened it to the first page. “I’ve always been fascinated by nineteenth century literature; ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Northanger Abbey’, ‘The Idiot’. . .”

I laughed. “There’s a book called ‘The Idiot’?”

“Oh yeah. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Ever heard of him?” he asked and I shook my head. “You should check it out. It’s a great book.”

“How do you say that so fluently? I would struggle with his name so much,” I giggled.

He only shrugged. “It grows on you.”

“So what makes them so fascinating?” I inquired.

“You can just tell by their writing that they’re trying to hint at something bigger, a much more important story than what’s on the page. Like with Edgar Allen Poe, when you read his poems or his short stories, you know that he is mad but he spends his entire time trying to prove to you that he’s not.” He passed his hand over the book, not touching it, just letting it hover. But the pages actually began to follow him at a rapid speed as he moved his hand from side to side and I could only stare, amazed. “After you read so many, you get a much better idea of what they’re getting at. It’s not just the significance of themes in the books but the fact that they’re actually talking about things that are happening now.”

“How do you do that?” I asked, my mouth gaping opened.

He closed the book and smiled, passing it back to me. “Years of practice.”

“You’re . . . amazing.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

“And you’re so well-mannered too. You must have been raised with very high expectations. I can only imagine what your parents are like,” I said, shaking my head and tucking my books under my arm. The boy’s face fell for a moment, almost like he was disappointed with what I said and I almost apologized for it, but he quickly shook it off and the smile came back to him again.

“They’re pretty great. But I guess that’s the thing about parents; you’re more like them than you think,” he said.

“I agree completely,” I said, finally spotting the book I had been looking for. I pull it out from between the others and reached into my pocket for the pencil but it was gone. “Damn, where did I put it?” I mumbled to myself, looking around on the floor and on the shelves just in case I had already taken it out and placed it somewhere for a moment.

“Did you lose something?” the boy asked.

“Yeah, my pencil. I don’t know where it is,” I said, biting on my bottom lip.

“I do that a lot. Most of the time things just seem to . . .” He paused, bent down to pick something up off the carpet and stood up again. He held my pencil and my eyes slightly widened. “Disappear on me,” he finished, closing his hand around it. He flipped it up and opened it, revealing an empty palm. “But if you’re lucky, when you lose something important, somehow it always comes back to you.” He reached up to the side of my face and pulled my pencil out from behind my ear. It was almost as if it had been there the entire time, and I had no idea how he managed to pull that one off. He handed it to me and I took it cautiously.

“You never cease to surprise me,” I said to him. “Do you have any idea how intriguing you are?”

The smile stayed on his face, but this time it grew even bigger. “I have an idea.” He gave a little bow of his head and said, “It was lovely to see you again, Isabelle,” before he walked past me swiftly but when I turned around to call him back for a moment, I regretted the brief pause I had taken because he wasn’t anywhere in sight. And again, I had missed his name.



I spent my Monday night alone in my room, working on some textbook questions for my History of Literature class. I had never been so bored. My mother has forced me to do it, even though I had time to work on it in class tomorrow but the way she saw it, if I got it done tonight then that would give me more time to do other work during class. That way, I was always ahead of the game. It was times like these that made me want to literally throw myself through a window. She had also cut off all my methods of communication with my friends, which was driving me insane. She made sure my laptop wasn’t connected to the internet so I couldn’t get onto an instant messaging service, and had also taken away my cell phone. That made phone calls and texting out of the question as well.

Around eleven, I was still awake but I had moved on from my Lit. work to reading “Dracula”. It was very difficult to get through, because there wasn’t a lot of speaking between characters until around page thirty. It was easier than Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, but it was still an obvious struggle. My mom had stepped into my room to give me my phone back and my extension cord for the laptop so I could get internet as long as my homework was done but even with the offer, I wasn’t that interested. I was too into the book to tear my eyes away to give her my attention. She said good night before she went to bed with my dad and closed the door behind her, which left me alone in silence again. The only noise was the slight hum of the air conditioner in the hallway, turning on and off with the house’s change in temperature.

Suddenly, I heard something on the grass outside and pushed myself off the bed to open my window and peer outside. Nothing was visible from what I could see so I shook my head and looked back up. And right in front of me sat the magician again.

“Jesus!” I exclaimed without thinking, putting a hand on my chest as if that was going to help slow down the speed my heart was racing at. “How do you keep doing this?”

He just smiled.

“Not to be mean, but this is a little creepy. You’re sitting in a tree outside of my bedroom window and I don’t even remember giving you my address,” I said. “It’s all very ‘Romeo and Juliet’.”

“Except if you were Juliet, you’d be admitting some very deep, complicated feelings you have for me,” he said and held out my notebook from Saturday. I knew I was missing it when I got home, but I had just figured I had misplaced it somewhere in my room without paying attention. Now that I thought about it, it was a stupid assumption, seeing as my room was next to spotless because of my uptight mother’s cleaning habits. “You forgot this at the book store. I came back to look for something for myself and found it beside the cash register. The woman thought it was one of theirs and assumed I was stealing it. I had to pay ten dollars to get it back,” he laughed. “Anyway, you had your name, phone number and address on the back of the cover so I thought I’d return it to you.”

“You had to pay to get my notebook back?” I asked, dismayed. “Why didn’t you just tell them that your friend had left it by accident?”

“She wouldn’t have believed me, and I didn’t want to start an argument in the middle of the store. It would have embarrassed her when she realized she was wrong,” he said with a shrug. “It would have been rude of me.”

“But the customer’s always right,” I reminded him.

“It didn’t bother me. She was just doing her job and her job requires her to take precautions. Besides, theft is a big deal so I completely understand where she is coming from,” he replied.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re too nice,” I said and took the notebook from his outstretched hand. “Thank you so much for this. You say you paid ten dollars?” I tossed it on my bed and turned around, going for my savings jar in my closet.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Paying you back. What does it look like?” I suddenly felt this heavy weight on my wrists and ankles, as if I was being pulled back. I looked over my shoulder at him. He had his hands out in front of him a little, his fingers wiggling. My eyes went wide. “What the—”

“It’s all in your head,” he cracked up, putting his arms down again. “Just an illusion, really. Don’t pay me back, it was a favour. One selfless good deed a day.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Probably.”

I came back over to him. “You’re going to fall,” I said. “Wouldn’t you rather come in?”

He shook his head. “I have some boundaries. That’s basically intruding when I haven’t gotten your parents’ permission first.”

“And sitting in my tree isn’t?” I posed sardonically, cocking a brow.

“I’m musing.”

I laughed. “Right.”

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked and I shook my head. “So how come you aren’t sleeping?”

“I’m an insomniac,” I admitted, a little surprised with myself that I had told him that so easily. No one knew that except for my brothers and my parents. It wasn’t usually something I went around telling people, because it was like confessing I had a health problem, and I didn’t like to think of it that way. “Any sleep I get, I count it as lucky.”

“Oh,” he said, looking suddenly sympathetic. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

“How do you spend your time awake?”

I held up “Dracula”. “I read, mostly,” I answered. “I guess I don’t have to ask you if you do, seeing as Saturday pretty much cleared all that up.”

He nodded. “Occasionally, I read as well.”

“What do you read?”

“Romance actually,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows, taken aback. “Really? I didn’t take you for a romantic.” He pulled out a white rose bud from behind his back and handed it to me. I grinned. “I didn’t mean it like that. I thought boys didn’t read all that often and if they did, it would be either ‘Playboy’ or ‘Sports Illustrated’.”

“Except not so much with the sports,” he smirked.

“Exactly,” I agreed. “If it's not one of those, it's probably some lame, never-made-it-past-Amazon twenty year old soft cover called like, ‘Trashy Starship’ or something.”

He burst out laughing and the sound instantaneously made me all happy inside. There weren’t that many people whose laughs sounded so genuine, so full of joy. It was a breath of fresh air, refreshing, like music to my ears. “I don’t think anyone is stupid enough to make a book called ‘Trashy Starship’,” he said.

“Well it’s always a possibility.”

He looked down at his watch and pushed his mussed hair back a little. This time it was natural, styled to the front to create a little flip. It wasn’t like something the boys wore in Grease, but it definitely suited him. Hell, if he went bald he’d still be stunning. “I should actually get going,” he said. “My mom . . . well, she’ll be getting worried by now and I’d hate to do that to her.”

“Okay. Well thank you for returning my notebook,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

He smiled. “Any time.”

While I watched him climb down the tree cautiously, I thought about how it was the first time I would actually see him leave. He was always disappearing around corners or book cases, or into crowds. It was amazing how I hadn’t once actually been able to see him from a distance because he would always just vanish, as if he had evaporated right into the air.

“This is the first time I’ve actually seen you make an exit,” I joked and he looked back up at me from the ground, winking. He started to walk away but I called him back in a loud whisper. “Hey!” He turned around to face me again. “What’s your name?”

He grinned. “Ryan.”

What a name. What an simple, roll-off-your-tongue, absolutely perfect name. And I couldn't have asked for anything better.