Page 33 of Witch You Would

I ’ d imagined meeting Gil so many times, in so many ways, and not a single one of them involved being trapped in an elevator

with him after finding out he was Leandro Presto.

Seeing him in the restaurant, at first I had refused to believe the obvious. It had been shocking enough for the guy I’d crushed

on for so long to suddenly appear out of nowhere. Then I realized he was sitting with Leandro’s crew, talking and drinking

and being normal. And then! He did the thing! Where he tried to smooth down his mustache, except he didn’t have a mustache,

so he just rubbed his upper lip where the mustache should be. I don’t think he even realized he was doing it.

I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it before. But Leandro’s hair was almost black and slicked back, instead of dark brown and

curly. His big safety glasses hid his eyes, and he had that mustache, and the ridiculous shirts... This just proved I didn’t

know Gil at all. I didn’t really know either of them, apparently. Either of him.

How? Why? I had so many questions, so many emotions slithering over each other like snakes in a basket. My mouth struggled

to make words happen, so we just stood there in the elevator until it dinged and the doors opened.

Gil was facing me, so he didn’t see Quentin coming up the hallway behind him.

I jumped to press the button for the third floor, then held the one to close the door.

Quentin was far enough that he’d never make it, but near enough that his confused expression made me feel guilty for shutting him out.

No way did I want this conversation to be public, though.

“What...?” Gil started to turn, but I grabbed his face.

“Quentin,” I explained.

His eyes got big. “Thanks.”

“Where’s your room?” I asked. I hadn’t wanted to go there the other night because it felt too... bed having? But I wasn’t

going to do this in the restaurant, not in front of his friends or anyone else, and I had a feeling that the two of us being

seen together might make other people connect the same dots I had.

“First one on the left,” he said.

The doors opened. Nobody there. I pushed him out backward and toward what I assumed was his room. He pulled his key card from

his back pocket and struggled to get it to work. I’m glad it wasn’t just me with those damn things. The “Do Not Disturb” sign

hung on the knob, and I had a ridiculous image of a housekeeping person dusting his fake mustaches.

His room was nicer than mine, with an enchanted painting and more space and even a bigger bed. A peek at the bathroom said

that was also extra classy, but I wasn’t going to explore.

Instead, I stood in front of an overstuffed chair and crossed my arms. “Do you need to tell your friends? Where you went?”

“I’m pretty sure they’ll figure it out,” Gil mumbled. He’d shoved his hands in his pockets and stood near the wall just past

the door, shoulders hunched like he was waiting for me to yell or get violent.

Was I going to yell? Probably not. I sorted through the snake basket of my feelings. Anger was there, yes, but mostly I was . . . sad? Disappointed? Hurt? I’d be lying to myself, though, if I ignored that I was also at least a tiny bit relieved.

Gil was Leandro. In some ways, it made things so much easier; in others, extremely harder. No pun intended.

Okay, smol pun.

“I was going to tell you earlier,” Gil said. “It’s why I was looking for you. To tell you. But you were with Amy, and then

I didn’t want to interrupt all the stuff you were saying, and then Mary dragged me off...”

And I’d told him it could wait. “Right. Okay.” My brain shuffled a whole deck of questions and started pulling random cards.

“Did you get my email?”

“This morning. I, um, already knew your name, by the way. My friend who recommended your store told me about you. All good

things,” he said quickly.

Considering I’d stalked him online, I couldn’t really get mad about that, I guess. I mean, I could, but it would make me a

hypocrite. “So you knew it was me the whole time here? Since the first day?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know at the park, but I knew as soon as I read your bio, before we started filming.”

Puzzle pieces started clicking together. “You didn’t say anything because nobody knows you’re Leandro, except your friends?”

“Only the friends who work on the videos with me. The ones you saw today. And my agent. And my grandpa Fred.”

Only four people? Seriously? “Not even your parents?”

He looked away and said softly, “Especially not my parents.”

That sounded like a bruise I wasn’t going to poke. “How did you even start being Leandro Presto? It seemed like you went viral out of nowhere and then you were all over the place.”

“That’s pretty much what happened.” Gil’s shoulders relaxed and he took his hands out of his pockets. “It’s kind of a long

story. I should, um . . .” He gestured at the beer stain on his pants.

“Yeah, no, for sure.”

He pulled folded jeans out of the dresser and took them to the bathroom. “Do you want a drink?” he asked through the door.

“My minibar stuff is free, or I can get you something from the vending machine?”

“Wow, celebrities living it up, huh? I don’t even have a minibar, just a fridge.”

“I mean, I’m not like everyone else here, but I do get some perks.” He came back out, crossed the room and opened a door that

looked like a regular cabinet. “Options are bottled water, soda, beer, tiny rum, tiny vodka, tiny whiskey, and tiny wine—red

or white.”

Was it too early for a tiny Cuba libre? Probably. “Caffeine me.”

He passed me a soda—regular-sized, thankfully—and opened a beer for himself. We both sat down, me in the comfy seat, him in

a wheelie desk chair.

“So. Leandro Presto.” Gil took a swig of his beer and sighed. “Flashback to a few years ago. I started my Doctor Witch blog when I was getting my PhD. Some of the other people in my cohort, and my professors, thought it was a neat idea and

spread it around. So did my roommates, Sam and Ed—my friends who work on Mage You Look with 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 thought it 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 academic

publications 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 tried

to shoot my shot. Either they ended up promoting internally, or they went with someone who had already been teaching somewhere

else. 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 whole

bunch 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, which

was important to me. Still is.” He took a drink. “Anyway. It was hard, harder than just teaching. I’d never had complaints

from 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 turn

stuff in late or whatever. The usual shit. But I like to get interactive, call on people and answer questions and stuff. Talking

to 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 spell

demonstration because I was trying so hard to make jokes. Turned my skin pink, like neon highlighter pink. Sam and Ed totally

lost it laughing. I told my grandpa Fred about it, and he reminded me that one of the ways we taught magic through the Alan

Kazam volunteer work was by pretending to do things wrong and letting the kids correct us. I think I mentioned before how

they 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 Presto

is, you know, a magic word. Eventually we thought, maybe we could do the thing on purpose and post the videos online? See

if 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. Then

people 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 about Mage You Look ? Or did you... were you not interested in me, like that? When we were just emailing each other?” My face burned getting

those words out, but I had to know.