Page 8 of Witch You Would
“Guess the echo remembers how to catch fish,” I joked as more tentacles wound their way around my legs and chest. I pretendedto struggle, shifting my expression fromhahatoyikes.
The central arms grabbed my shoulders and pulled the whole jellyfish body down, until I was wearing it like a hat. I yelpedas the jellyfish sucked my head into its mouth.
The audience cracked up. For extra comedic effect, I wiggled and made a few more muffled sounds that could have been bad words.Once the laughs slowed down, I got one of my arms loose and tried to push the jellyfish off my head. It didn’t work, of course—itwasn’t supposed to—but the laughing came back. The tentacles got me again, and after a brief but mighty battle, I freed myself.
My whole body glowed in neon blues and purples, coated in a sheen of spectral residue. My mustache in particular probablylooked ridiculous. I wiped the color off my glasses with my fingers and everyone lost it.
The jellyfish brightened, and I froze, hands and one leg up in a defensive pose. With a sound like a rushing wave, the creaturedissolved into a cloud of glitter that spiraled up into the night. The laughter changed tooohs andaahs. For a moment, it was like the whole Milky Way spread across the sky instead of just a few random stars and planets, andthen it was gone.
I shouted, “Presto!” as everyone clapped. The show was over.
Sam and Ed stopped filming and I joined them for our post-spell routine. Ed climbed back up the swing set to get the sport cam. Ipicked up the lanterns, still covered in faintly glowing neon stripes. Sam started playing back her video, and we all hunched over the tiny screen. I was a little more stiff than usual, but it was good enough. With this, we had a solid buffer to last through myCast Judgmenttime.
Some people left; others went back to the playground or stood around soaking up the vibes. Some hovered like they wanted toask me questions but were too shy. I’d mingle in a minute, though I couldn’t stay long. I had to check in at the hotel whereI’d be staying during filming.
The replay finished. I said, “If Ed adds some silly sound effects and a few funny captions where my energy drops, I thinkit’ll be okay.”
“Are you nervous about the show?” Ed asked, adding quietly, “I know spending so much time in character is a lot for you.”
It was, but this would be a good opportunity forMage You Look. More exposure hopefully meant more subscribers and sponsors and ad revenue, which meant a bigger budget, which meant wecould raise rates for everyone who worked for us. Might sell extra merch, too, if we were lucky.
Grandpa Fred thought I could get my own cable show out of this, but honestly, I had the feeling the producers had signed meup to be comic relief. I wasn’t one of their stars or some fancy CEO; I was the latest Jinxd account to go viral on the regular.I was there to “capture the youth market,” to paraphrase my agent.
Most importantly to me, though, I was competing for my grandpa’s charity: Alan Kazam’s Schools Are Magic. Funding for classes in anything beyond basic, boring rote-memorization casting kept getting cut from public elementary schools, along with art and music and anything else deemed insufficiently essential. AKSAMprovided a free magic curriculum, appropriate to the grade level and with all necessary reagents included. And it was fun! I’d done some school visits as Leandro Presto, and guiding crowds of adorable, excited kids through the lessons was incredibly fulfilling.
More than these videos, if I was being honest with myself. Especially if we cut the explanations. Not that I’d tell Sam andEd that.
Fundraising was tough in the best of times, especially when so many people were broke. AKSAM donations had dropped, and thecharity was on the edge of shutting down if they couldn’t get a cash infusion, fast. If I wonCast Judgment, the check for $100,000 would keep the lights on for a while longer and pay for a hell of a lot of magic classes. Even ifI lost, they’d get $10,000, which would be a huge help.
I’d do my best, but I was up against industry pros way further along in their successful careers. It wouldn’t surprise meif I lost in the first round and spent the rest of the shoot reading in my hotel room since we couldn’t leave early becauseof our NDAs. But I was damned well going to try, for the kids and my grandpa.
Sam finished packing her cameras while Ed checked his phone. Frogtail walked back over to her friend in the crowd just asSam nudged me to start mingling.
“How did you like the spell?” I asked them.
“It was awesome!” Orange Polo replied.
“Yeah, doing a spell like this at night was really nice,” the guy across from her said.
“You could do it at the beach next time,” someone added.
“Nah, the parking sucks,” someone else said.
“What about you?” Sam asked, pointing at Frogtail, who was even cuter up close.
Before she could answer, one of the teenagers jumped in. “She wouldn’t shut up about how he was doing it wrong,” he said.
Oh. Ouch.
Frogtail looked down at her sneakers. “It was cool. Just, you know, the star anise.”
“Too much,” I agreed.
“Way too much. Half a seed would have been enough. Though if you had used more shrimp, you would have a bunch of small jelliesinstead of one big one?”
“Right, the size would be proportional to the ratio of the catalyst to the reactant.”
Her eyes widened like I’d surprised her. Oops. Leandro Presto shouldn’t be rattling off variations on the theory of compositionalconformity. Grandpa Fred’s rule number two: stay in character.
