“A good magician never reveals his secrets.”

Those were the very last words that my grandfather ever said to me. As far back in my life as I can remember I had a fanboy level of fascination for all of the magic tricks that he would perform to entertain me. Whenever my family went to visit, or when he would come to our home to stay for a holiday or weekend, he’d sit down with me and go through his lineup. He’d amaze me with a coin pulled out from behind my ear, or a bouquet of flowers exploding from his sleeve, or even having me draw from a deck of cards and throwing them out the window, to reveal my card under his hat.

Each time he did one of his tricks I’d always beg him to teach me how he did it, but of course he always refused on the grounds that a proper magician should never disclose the methods of their trade or else the magic would be gone for good.

You might assume that a talented magician such as him would have made a career of it, but he actually worked the majority of his life in an assembly plant from the time he was old enough to hold a welding torch. He worked until his back could no longer physically support the heavy lifting that his job demanded of him and retired. Stage magic was only ever a hobby for him, something that he learned as a young man to impress women at the bars (which is how he met my grandmother), and then later used to become a hero in the eyes of his favorite (and only) grandchild.

To a little boy who didn’t know any better, he was obviously the singular greatest magician to ever grace the Earth. Without question it was obvious that every other magician must have learned their craft from him. He was the original, the master of the art, the Magician Supreme Grandpa.

To this day, and I never learned why, both of my parents held an almost religiously fervent hatred for any sort of magic trickery. They would not tolerate it within their home, and even went so far as to threaten Grandpa with banning him from ever visiting again if they caught him showing me a trick again. I unsuccessfully tried for years to beg them to see things my way, but that only resulted in me getting grounded time and time again. I eventually gave up.

All was not a lost cause however, as on my tenth birthday Grandpa pulled me aside to give his gift in secret. Huddled in his garden shed, he bestowed to me the greatest gift I had ever received. The “Beginner’s Guide To Basic Magic”. He had me kneel and swear a sacred oath of secrecy, made me promise that I’d never let Mom or Dad know about the book. There and then the two of us formed the “Secret Magic Society”, our mission being my education in the mystic arts of cleverly shuffling cards and rope tricks.

I would finally learn magic right under the watchful noses of the dreadful tyrant parents.

I must have read the entirety of the book at least ten times in the first month that I had it. Within a year I could have recited it verbatim from cover to cover by memory alone. None of it was complex, it was a beginner’s guide for children aged eight to twelve after all, but it was my most prized possession. If I was to hone my talents further I would need more material, but I couldn’t just go to my parents and ask them to buy me more books and supplies. And of course they refused to give me any sort of allowance.

Grandpa almost assuredly would’ve bought me more if I just asked him, but I could not risk having my parents discover that he was my supplier. As such I had no choice but to start working at the age of eleven as a paperboy so that I could earn some money. I did any chores that my neighbors couldn’t be bothered with. If someone needed their yard mowed, gutters cleaned, dogs walked, or trash sorted, they knew who to go to. You’d be surprised how much money people are willing to pay if it means they don’t have to do something.

Every cent that I earned was saved in a shoebox under my bed, and as soon as I had enough I would rush right to the nearest magic store and buy another book or prop. With my parent’s work schedules, it was easy enough to sneak away after school, and to hide everything before they got home. I began my career by holding private magic shows in my bedroom for my action figures, then for my friends once I felt confident in my abilities.

At the age of thirteen I felt proficient enough to enter into my school’s yearly talent show. With my grand performance of finding the super intendent’s card from a pile of eight decks I won third place. Fortunately, neither of my parents were able to attend, and no recording of the event ever made it to their attention. So far as I ever found out, they never even knew I had competed at all. Grandpa and Grandma made it though, they cheered me on from the front row seats and took me to dinner afterward.

Almost every night I dreamt about becoming a professional stage magician. In my dreams I would travel from city to city performing center stages for hundreds or thousands of people to watch. In my fantasies I’d even get my own show. Grandpa remained my biggest supporter in all of this, and he would sit and watch every new trick that I wanted to show him no matter how busy he might have been. Often I would video call him in the middle of the night, and he’d wake up to see what I’d come up with. Grandma didn’t have his patience, and was perpetually busy with housework, but she’d still give a warm word of encouragement here and there which was more than enough.

My dreams were brought to an end just before my fourteenth birthday.

Grandpa tried to remain physically active even when his arthritis kept him from performing sleight of hand tricks anymore. Every evening he would go for a walk to the nearby pier, watch the boats go back and forth, then walk home. It was on his way home from one of those walks when it happened. A drunk driver went off the road and hit him on the sidewalk. From what the cops found on CCTV footage after the fact, the guy didn’t even get out to see if he was okay, he just sped off.

Grandpa was left there for half an hour before a passerby happened to find him and called an ambulance. I got the news while I was sitting in math class. Mom and Dad showed up to take me to the hospital where he was barely clinging to life. It is impossible for me to forget the moment that he asked everybody else to leave the room so we could talk alone. Once he was sure they were gone, he motioned for me to come close so he could say something.

“Come here boy, Secret Magician Society business.”

When I leaned in to listen, he weakly raised his hand behind my ear and pulled out a gold coin. That was the very first trick I had ever learned, but I had to continue the tradition.

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“Tell me how you did it Grandpa.”

He smiled at me, spoke his last words, then he closed his eyes and was gone.

Mom and Dad came in with the nurses when he flatlined, and they had to drag me from the room while they tried to resuscitate.

The funeral was two days later.

The week after he passed was when my mother announced that she was pregnant and informed me that I was going to have a younger sibling. The apartment that we lived in at the time had only two bedrooms, my own and my parents’, so Mom and Dad started making plans and saving money to buy a proper house in the near future. Until the move, it was decided by them that the baby’s crib would be going in my room (I was not consulted).

I was at school when they went in and started rearranging my things to clear space for the baby. There was no warning of this, no time given to hide my treasures somewhere else. When I got off the bus that day I found them in the parking lot with a metal trash can that was full to the brim with my magic supplies. They had waited for me to get home, and forced me to watch as Dad doused everything in lighter fluid and Mom tossed in a match. At the very top of the pile was the guide that Grandpa had given me.

All of the days and weeks that I had spent toiling away to earn money went up in a cloud of black smoke. Everything that I had earned for myself was reduced to ash and melted plastic. Of course they both tried to tell me that it was better this way, that they were only doing what they knew was best for my future. That was the very day that I stopped speaking to them beyond what was absolutely necessary.

My little sister was born four months before my fifteenth birthday. That very same day was when my hometown experienced the worst blizzard that had been seen in twenty years. Mom took it as a sort of divine sign, and chose the name Yuki. Dad agreed with her. No, we were not Japanese, and neither of them had even been to Japan. I suggested the name Eira instead, because of my grandmother’s Welsh ancestry, but I was ignored.

Over half of my room had been converted for the baby, and most of my things had either been put into storage, burned, or sold off in yardsales to make sure there was enough room for her. The moment that they got to take her home, everything went from miserable to downright torturous. She would cry, all night long, whenever I was in the same room as her. If I left the room, she would stop immediately. A smart person might think to move the crib into my parents’ room, but no, they made me start sleeping on the couch.

After a few more weeks it just stopped being my room at all, it belonged solely to Yuki. Nobody believed me when I brought it up, but I swear that she locked eyes with me and grinned as my parents carried out the last of my things, like she knew exactly what she was doing to me.

She started speaking early at the age of two, which just so happened to coincide with the time that my parents stopped listening to anything I had to say. To them I might as well have been a homeless guy on the curb ranting about the lizards in the trees. They hung on every babbled word that spilled from her mouth like it was holy scripture.

When she started walking, and her hands developed enough to pick things up, I began finding what was left of my things broken on the floor. Some items disappeared, never to be seen again. When I brought this up to the adults they just admonished me for not taking better care of my things. They stopped buying me anything at all since they declared it would just be a waste of money if I was going to break or lose anything they bought.

By the time that Yuki had turned three, all I had left to my name was some clothes and a small collection of books which I kept on the highest shelves in the apartment. I still found them full of crayon scribblings, missing pages, and filled with glue.

It took four years of me living on the couch before my parents finally decided it was time to actually buy the new house. They cited the fact that Yuki needed more room to grow. When we moved in I had the smallest room in the house, but at least it was mine. I had a real bed again. I was so taken back by the sudden amount of extra space that I honestly didn’t know what to do with all of it. Just three months after the move, I graduated high school.

Mom and Dad felt just charitable enough to let me continue living there when I started college later that year, but it was on the condition that I would be getting a part-time job to pay them rent. In addition, I had to pursue a degree in something they deemed worthwhile like law or medicine. I ended up going with chemistry, which they accepted.

After classes ended every day I would head home to drop off my things and change clothes, then I would head to the local construction company for work. I actually ended up loving the job, I would’ve even considered dropping out of college and going full-time if it didn’t mean my parents kicking me out. Being outdoors, working with my hands, building things that would last for generations, all of it just meshed well with me.

Every dollar that wasn’t spent on rent and constantly replacing my mysteriously ruined clothes was put into a savings account. Most of that went to my secret hobby. You see, every Friday night after work I would go into the city proper and stay out until morning. My parents got it in their heads that I had some secret girlfriend that I was keeping secret from them, and went on at length about how they wouldn’t support me if I got anyone pregnant. I let them keep believing that, because the truth would have had me kicked out to live on the streets.

Every Friday night I was going out to see live magic shows, taking notes and learning by watching the pros firsthand. Despite their best efforts to break me of my ambition, my passion for magic hadn’t been stamped out completely. My schooling in chemistry would be perfect for mixing stage explosives and creating other effects. Working construction gave me the knowledge I needed to set up elaborate stages to support disappearing acts and optical illusions.

I was just waiting to graduate college before I was planning to move into my own place and finally begin my career in magic. Unfortunately, Yuki had other plans for me.

I was never able to gather enough evidence to satisfy my parents, and my teachers just didn’t believe me, but my homework started disappearing from my backpack, or deleting itself from my laptop. Sometimes the stuff that didn’t vanish would be sabotaged, numbers changed around or erased, formulas altered to produce disastrous results in the labs. Despite my best efforts, my grades plummeted and I was forced to drop out.

My parents were livid with me, they spent days screaming at me about taking responsibility for failing in my education and ruining my own future. They ignored my pleas that I was set up and threatened to kick me out. Then they propped up Yuki as a shining example of what a good child should be (her own grades in school were perfect). They stopped just short of giving me the boot, instead deciding that my rent would now be doubled, and I was going to pay them back every penny of the loan they had taken out to pay for college.

I would have started working full time at the construction company, that would’ve had the load paid off in less than two years, but then I got a fateful call from my supervisor. Dozens of emails, sent from my account, had gone out to every level of management. The contents ranged from accusing them of taking bribes, cheating on their spouses, threats of blackmail. You name it. I was immediately let go, and it went out to every potential employer in the area that my name was poison.

In less than a week I had been kicked out of college and had lost a job that I had genuinely loved. I managed to get another job after far too much ass-kissing and taking out a lot of favors. It paid less than half of what the construction job did, and I could just barely afford to pay my parents. All I could do was sit and wait for a chance to break free from them.

Everything finally changed four months after my twenty-second birthday.