May 9, 2005

• After her mom got out of the mini van and started to pump the gas, my camp friend Zoe tapped my hand.
  

             “I have something important to tell you,” she said under her breath.

  
  

             “Yeah…?”

  
  

             “You have to pinky swear you won’t tell anyone though.  Not even your mom.  Not even your cat.  Especially not your cat.”

  
  

             “Alright…I promise,” I said.  Because, you know, I always told the latest, juiciest gossip to my house pets.

  
  

             “Alright,” she sighed deeply.  After a brief pause, she leaned in and muttered in my ear.

  
  

   

  
  

             “I’m a….witch.”

  
  

   

  
  

  I snorted, letting out an obvious fake laugh.  The kind of laugh that has its own designated ha’s.  Ha Ha Ha.

  
  

            

  
  

  “No really,” she said, pointing to the abnormally large freckle on her leg, “See that? That’s not a birthmark.”

  
  

             That got my attention.  “Well, then what is it?”

  
  

             “A wart! And not just any wart.”

  
  

             “What kind? Hairy?”

  
  

             “No!” she said with a gleam in her eye, “Magical! My wart has magical powers!”

  
  

  I continued to stare at her.  But this was no joke.  Zoe’s face was as solemn as stone.

  
  

            

  
  

  “And what’s more,” she continued, “You have one too.” She jabbed her finger at the noticeably large spot on my leg.  I rolled my eyes.  “I’m telling you, Daryl.  We’re witches.  You have to believe me.”

  
  

            

  
  

  I had never seen her so serious.  This girl clearly knew what she was talking about.  I questioningly looked down at my freckle, and all of the sudden it didn’t look like it was potentially cancerous.  It just looked somewhat….possessed.

  
  

            

  
  

  My thoughts jumbled around in my mind.  How could I possibly be a witch? I mean, I was pretty average. Pretty normal. Not a single aspect of my character or lifestyle seemed to stand out in any way. Except for my black cat. And my ability to form one-sided conversations with snakes.  And that time that I was air-born on a broomstick for a good five seconds.  And that other time when I talked to five dead people at once.  And that day when I befriended a centaur.  And the way purple laser beams tended to protrude from my pupils whenever I was angry. And the fact that I had this strange instinct of exclaiming ‘Alohamora!’ in a British accent whenever I magically used my hand to turn the knob of a door and…open it. 

  
  

   

  
  

             It was no wonder I had few friends.

  
  

   

  
  

             “Hey, Zo…” I said just before her mom got back in the car, “You might just be onto something.”

  
  

            

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  I was nine when I came to that first realization that I possessed magical powers.  Living at the very start of my awkward adolescent years. However, at the time I denied it.  “I’m not awkward!” I’d say as I didn’t shave my legs, “You’re just jealous because you can’t move inanimate objects with your eyes!”  People just didn’t understand that I was gifted.  They’d merely turn up their noses to me, taking one look at my scrawny appearance and shaking their heads, constantly asking each other why I’d go around school muttering things like “Abra cada…bo! Abra cada….wobblegoober!…abra ca.…squickembozzle...no! stupid stupid stupid …..”  

  
  

   

  
  

  By the time I was about to turn eleven, I had already managed to convince my sister that she was in fact a ghost.

  
  

   

  
  

  “You mean….I’m dead?”  She had said, awestruck.

  
  

  “Well, sort of.  I mean, you can walk through walls.  And people."

  
  

   

  
  

  Because my sister tended to believe every word I ever said, that story ended with several bruises and trips to the principal’s office for ‘attempted suicide’ and ‘battery’. 

  
  

            

  
  

  I had also found a unique little spot to practice spells without being taunted by my peers.  Accompanied by my best friend Andrea, we would hide behind the largest tree in the cul-de-sac and mutter incantations.  When we really got into it, we would even jump around in circles, trying to resurrect someone from the dead.  “CAN YOU HEAR ME?” we would scream to our great grandparents, our great-great grandparents, Aaliyah. 

  
  

   

  
  

  As it turned out, our special ‘spot’ happened to be the backyard of some old lady’s house.  And after one of our intense games of “kill the squirrel using your laser vision”, she quite kindly told us to ‘get the fuck off her property’. 

  
  

   

  
  

  Because I really had no place to work without being suggested I meet with Dr. Judy, “a very…understanding lady”, I decided I would instead try to get everyone to follow in my foot steps.  Although I said I did this because I wanted to spread the fun, I really did it so that no one would be left to tease me.  However, my plan seemed to lead me in the exact direction I did not want to be heading in.

  
  

   

  
  

  Dragging along the first three Harry Potter books like they were the Bible, I often referred to them and lent them out to my peers with the hope of converting at least one other person.  By the middle of fifth grade, I was bringing tarot cards to school and told anyone who was not interested in what I had to say that, according to the cards, they would live their lives alone in the woods, develop some unpronounceable type of sexually transmitted disease that would be obtained due to intercourse with some homeless drug addict, and die early.   

  
  

   

  
  

  Despite my threats, people still didn’t believe.  “Oh yeah?” they would say, “Then turn me into a toad!”

  
  

  My response to this was always “No can do…if I do magic out here in front of all you ignorant muggles, the Ministry of Magic will flip a lid.”

  
  

   

  
  

  I was about ten years and three hundred and fifty-five days old at around that time.  My eleventh birthday was well on its way.  To any normal person, this just meant their second year in the double digits.  To me, it meant an acceptance letter to Hogwarts.  Therefore, for the ten days prior to receiving that fateful letter, I performed deeds that might be considered as desperate as the ones done by say…aspiring Princeton students.

  
  

   

  
  

  Gryffindor, I would say to myself.  I have to get into Gryffindor.  I would take tests on Harry Potter’s official website, screaming at the virtual sorting hat as he told me that no, no. You belong to Ravenclaw, Daryl. Ravenclaw.  And no, no, Daryl.  Hufflepuff.  The best part, though, was when I took the Quiddich test and the results read “Maybe you should try something safer…

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  …like pulling those screaming naked babies out of dirty pots.” 

  
  

   

  
  

  On my eleventh birthday, no letters came in the mailbox, the fireplace, the window.  Only bills and People magazine and advertisements.  “Ohhh, they’re probably just waiting for the right moment,” I would lie to myself.  But by the time I was eleven years and five days old, I knew it was no coincidence that I was still in Lower Gwynedd Elementary School, teaching Palmistry to my moronic peers.

  
  

   

  
  

  There I was: alone, magical, and rejected.

  
  

   

  
  

  Needless to say, I spent half of sixth grade cursing the injustice of it all and jumping off of steep hills while sitting on mops.  People would nudge me saying “Hey, Daryl…turn this pile of shit into a million dollars! Ha! Ha! Ha!”  And I couldn’t even blame it on the Ministry of Magic.  Clearly not special at all, I kept to myself for the remainder of the year.  "Muggle!" people would shout at me in the hallways.  I'd hold back the anger, telling myself "C'mon, Daryl.  You can do this.  Whatever you do, control your powers.  Problems can be solved without the assistance of telepathically eletricuting the organs of your classmates into blackened piles of ash.  You don't know your own strength..."

  
  

   

  
  

  That summer at camp, I reminded Zoe of the scene we had made in her mother’s car so many years ago.  “You weren’t really a witch, were you?” I had said.

  
  

   

  
  

  “Well, no,” she responded, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  
  

   

  
  

  I looked down at the magical wart that still inhabited my leg.  It no longer looked possessed, though.  It actually looked somewhat...cancerous.

  
  

   

  
  

  “Oh,” I said as I inconspicuously kicked away the invisibility cloak I had designed in crafts a few hours before, “Same here. I can’t believe we actually fell for that Harry Potter crap.”

  • 9:08 pm
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