Neil Patrick Harris - The Magic Misfits 2

The chair where Mr Vernon had been seated was empty!

The room erupted in gasps of surprise until one of the assistants turned to the audience and removed his mask. As soon as the pure white curls sprang out from beneath, Leila knew that they’d all been had. The magician did escape – and in the most unexpected way. The crowd cheered as if someone had just announced that all of them were being adopted that day.

The man with the curly white hair stepped to the edge of the stage, grinned, then took a bow. Leila was so floored she nearly slid down the stairs. Instead she stood and clapped longer than anyone else.

When the applause ended, Leila pushed her way through the crowd, elbowing the tall girl and her gruff goons aside, to approach the man. “How did you do that, Mr Vernon?”

His eyes lit up when he saw her face. He paused as if lost in a trance, then answered quietly, “I’ll bet you know exactly why I cannot tell you.”

Leila thought hard. “A magician never reveals his secrets?”

The man chortled. He tapped her forehead lightly. “A bit psychic, are you?”

“Not that I know of,” said Leila, rubbing at the spot where he’d touched her. She felt the other orphans pushing in from behind her. She fought to block them out of her mind. “Were you really in danger?”

“Oh, but I am always in danger,” he said with a wink.

Leila laughed. “I want to learn how to escape like you did.”

“I see.” He squinted. “Well, it takes years of practise. Is that something you’d be prepared to do?”

“Oh yes! I’d practise every minute of every day to be like you!”

“Well, enthusiasm is rarely a bad thing,” he said, considering. “What is your name, dear?”

“Leila,” she answered quietly.

“ Leila ,” he echoed. “How pretty! And how long have you lived here with Mother Margaret?”

“All my life.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I’d like to come and see you again, Leila. Would that be all right?”

Leila’s face flushed. “It’d be more than all right !” she exclaimed. “Maybe you can teach me a trick or two?”

“Maybe…” He grinned again, the corners of his eyes crinkling with amusement. With both hands, he pinched his fingers together. As he moved his hands apart, Leila noticed that he held a soft white rope between them. He dropped one end and lowered the rope slowly into her outstretched palm. “For you. See what you can do with this. Might I suggest learning different types of knots? They can be helpful in many situations.”

Leila’s face flushed a deeper pink. She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and say thank you, but she didn’t want to make him think she was a weirdo.

At that moment, the other orphans crowded forwards, asking for Mr Vernon’s autograph and edging Leila away. She didn’t mind. He was going to come back and see her again. He’d teach her a trick. Maybe.

She’d be ready. She’d have some new knots to show him in response.

Later, in the bedroom she shared with five other orphans, Leila pulled a tin box out from a hiding place behind a brick in the wall beside her bed. She opened the lid, revealing a few loose, glittering keys.

One key was very special to her. You see, when someone placed Leila on the doorstep of Mother Margaret’s Home as an infant, they’d wrapped her in a blanket and left a string looped around her neck, with a key tied to it like a pendant. Of course, Leila didn’t remember any of that; she knew the story only because Mother Margaret had shared it with her. It was this first key that’d made Leila start looking for spare ones, or ones that appeared to be lost. She hoped that someday she’d have an interesting collection of all shapes and sizes.

Staring down at her keys, Leila thought about the magic show and how Mr Vernon had managed to break out of those impossible chains. For the first time, she felt like she’d unlocked something inside herself: a wish to escape. Really escape.

When the man with the white curly hair returned later that week with his husband, offering to adopt her, her wish came true – like magic.

One night, years later, in the apartment over Vernon’s Magic Shop, Leila Vernon stretched out atop her big bed, unable to sleep. Thoughts of dark cupboards kept popping into her head whenever she closed her eyes. A thin patchwork quilt covered Leila’s wiry frame, barely protecting her from the brisk air that crept through the open window of her bedroom.

The window looked out over Main Street and the green park that extended far out in both directions. The orange glow of streetlights shifted on the walls and ceiling as the shadows of leafy branches danced to a quiet music composed by the crickets and peeping tree frogs that called out to each other from the nestled hills surrounding the town of Mineral Wells.

Before bedtime, Leila’s two fathers had tucked the blanket around Leila’s body and kissed her good night, wishing her pleasant dreams. But Leila knew that no wish could protect her from memories of her old life. The dead of night was when they usually came to visit. Sometimes the memories were uninvited guests who stayed long after receiving cues that it was time to go. Sometimes they tried to sneak in, like cloddish cat burglars who had no clue how to finagle a locked door. And sometimes the memories seeped like sulfur smoke through cracks in the walls, threatening to choke and smother Leila, stinging her big brown eyes.

When the other memories became too much to handle, Leila would recall her adoption by the Vernons. She held on to the hand of that memory, as if it could lead her to safety. Sometimes it worked. But sometimes the darkness in those locked cupboards was too difficult to see through.

Especially after everything that had happened with B. B. Bosso and his circus of thieves several weeks before…

Leila blinked at the ceiling, feeling both blessed and cursed – happy to have this home and this family, but annoyed that the past kept knocking to be let in. This won’t do , she thought. She whipped away the quilt, then scurried to her bookshelf, where she’d placed her secret tin box.

The box rattled noisily. She drew it to her chest to quiet it. Next door was the room of her newfound cousin, Carter. She didn’t want the clamour to wake him.

Leila lifted the lid and stared at her key collection, which had grown substantially in the years since she’d moved to Mineral Wells. But her first key, the one tied to the string, the one that had been with her on the night Mother Margaret found her on the orphanage doorstep, sat on the very top. Leila lifted the string and let the key swing back and forth like a mesmerist’s pendulum.

She thought about Bosso and Carter and the other Misfits. She knew that Carter must also suffer from memories of his former life. She wondered if he ever thought of his missing parents, as she sometimes wondered why her own had deserted her on a dark, cold night. Other times, she was happy to not think of them at all. She pressed her hand against the cold key, as if to make an impression against her skin, one that she might use to forge a copy. Her body warmed the key, and the key warmed her body and calmed her mind.

From somewhere beyond her bedroom door, the sound of a commotion stirred: a chair suddenly shifting, a pile of books toppling from a shelf, things crashing to the floor. Next came a sharp and fearful yelp.