Page 82 of Witch You Would
“So. Leandro Presto.” Gil took a swig of his beer and sighed. “Flashback to a few years ago. I started myDoctor Witchblog when I was getting my PhD. Some of the other people in my cohort, and my professors, thought it was a neat idea andspread it around. So did my roommates, Sam and Ed—my friends who work onMage You Lookwith me.”
“It seems pretty popular,” I said. “Your blog, I mean.”
He shrugged. “Not compared to Leandro Presto, but at the time, yeah, I was happy about my hundreds of followers. I thoughtit would make me look good as a faculty candidate, you know? That’s not why I did it, but it seemed like it could help.”
“I assume it didn’t?”
“Not that I know of. It was on my résumé, but nobody ever brought it up in an interview. All anyone cared about were my academicpublications and teaching experience and letters of recommendation.” He drank again and rested his arm on the desk. “At first,I applied for tenure-track positions all over the country. Anywhere that was hiring for their magical theory program, I triedto shoot my shot. Either they ended up promoting internally, or they went with someone who had already been teaching somewhereelse. My faculty advisor tried to help me out, but no luck there, either. I was broke, and it only got worse.”
“That sucks a lot,” I said.
“Yeah.” Gil zoned out, then shook his head and came back. “I started applying for adjunct jobs. I’m not sure why, but a wholebunch of them asked for video auditions. Present-certain-topics-you’d-be-teaching-in-a-class kind of thing.”
“Did Sam and Ed help with the videos?” I asked.
“Not at first. I didn’t want to bother them, even though they were both film people. I couldn’t pay them for their work, whichwas important to me. Still is.” He took a drink. “Anyway. It was hard, harder than just teaching. I’d never had complaintsfrom students on my course evals when I was a TA—aside from, you know, how I gave unfair grades or I wouldn’t let them turnstuff in late or whatever. The usual shit. But I like to get interactive, call on people and answer questions and stuff. Talkingto a camera was so... blah.”
“Your videos sucked?”
“So much. I got like one interview. Eventually I told Sam and Ed, and they gave me shit for not asking for help sooner.”
I leaned forward in my chair. “And you started pretending to be Leandro Presto. To be more funny and interesting.”
“Sort of. Sam said I should loosen up, be less professor and more cool guy.” Gil grinned. “I actually did mess up a spelldemonstration because I was trying so hard to make jokes. Turned my skin pink, like neon highlighter pink. Sam and Ed totallylost it laughing. I told my grandpa Fred about it, and he reminded me that one of the ways we taught magic through the AlanKazam volunteer work was by pretending to do things wrong and letting the kids correct us. I think I mentioned before howthey love that. It’s an old stage magic thing.”
“Did you send that video somewhere?”
“Hell no. But we started joking about how pink-skin guy wasn’t me, it was my alter ego. Leandro is my middle name, and Prestois, you know, a magic word. Eventually we thought, maybe we could do the thing on purpose and post the videos online? Seeif we could make some ad revenue from it.”
“And then you went viral?”
“Not from those videos, no. It was Sam’s idea to post shorter, edited versions on Jinxd, and the seventh one took off. Thenpeople found the other ones and shared those, and within a week we had tens of thousands of followers. We added subscriptions,started doing live stuff and taking requests, and it just... kept going from there.”
“And now you’re a Spellebrity.”
Gil laughed. “Yeah. It still doesn’t feel real. Maybe because so much of what we’re doing is fake.”
I winced, thinking of my hair albondigas and wild makeup. Nowhere near as fake as his mustache, but still. And of course, there was our Isaac-mandated flirting . . .
“Is all this why you never asked me out before?” I asked. “Because you didn’t want to say anything aboutMage You Look? Or did you... were you not interested in me, like that? When we were just emailing each other?” My face burned gettingthose words out, but I had to know.
Gil put his drink down and wheeled his chair closer to me. “Mage You Lookwas part of it. You know from our emails that I’ve been teaching as an adjunct—until this semester, anyway. I quit to dothis show, which...” He huffed out a breath. “I hope that wasn’t a huge mistake.”
“Mood,” I said.
“Yeah, when you told me you got fired the first night, I was like, ‘Cool, being unemployed is one more thing we have in common.’”
“Not for long, hopefully.”
“Fingers crossed. So yeah, I could talk about teaching, but I’d have to lie about being Leandro. I’d be randomly unavailablebecause of filming, and I’d have to hide stuff at my apartment if you ever came over. All kinds of shit.”
Leading a double life like that would be exhausting. Probably was exhausting. “You said that was part of it. What’s the rest?”
Gil gripped the arms of his chair. “I told you about my hands-off-the-fans rule? A thing happened that made me go hardcoresecret identity about Leandro.”
I wanted to know, but I wasn’t going to ask.
“I never flirted with anyone online, and that didn’t change when we started filming stuff live.” He hunched over like he was trying to hide inside his own body. “This one woman started showing upwhenever we announced a taping on our Jive server. She just lurked at first, then she would talk to me, and I was nice, you know? Rule number six: everyone is important.”
