The Illusionist Read Online Free Page A

They’d see I was a man.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œI know, because of the way I feel,” he said.
    â€œWhat’s your real name then?”
    â€œDean.”
    â€œI mean your real name?”
    â€œThey baptized me Lily. Lily Dean.” He looked up. “When I was born I had these—these little deformities. They were confused. I just changed it around. Cool, huh?” He grinned. “It worked for my ID and everything.”
    â€œWhat about your parents?”
    â€œYou couldn’t tell about it when I was a kid. I just looked like a girl, so they just thought I was. It started happening later. Then the truth came out.”
    Dean told me he came from this little hamlet way upstate. His father was a purchasing agent for the county, his mother the town clerk. His father didn’t want to know the truth about it, Dean said. But he thought his mother suspected from the start.
    Dean also had a brother, Raymond, two years older, whom heworshiped. Right from the beginning, Dean said, he wanted to do everything Raymond did, to tag along with all his friends. But his brother hated him. Raymond and his friends would tie Dean up and then beat him with sticks, anything to get rid of him. The mother would try to protect Dean. But no matter how much Raymond tormented him, Dean said, all he ever wanted was for Raymond to love him.
    And when Dean got hurt, he’d try desperately not to cry, because only girls cry. He would wear only boys’ clothes, refused to play with dolls. If his mother brought him a doll, he’d just leave it in the package to die. One time, when he went to his grandma’s house in Syracuse, he came home and his mother had redecorated his room. She’d painted the walls pink, hung pink curtains, ordered a canopy bed from a catalog, and put down a pink rug—as if to make Dean more a girl. But when Dean saw what his mother had done, he threw a fit and refused to sleep in his room until she’d changed it all back again.
    At first Dean didn’t really understand what he was, but he just knew somehow, though he couldn’t give it a name. He was a stranger in his own body. And as he got older, as he reached adolescence, he understood more clearly that he was a boy. His voice grew deeper, he started lifting weights. About that time, he became interested in magic, started ordering stuff from catalogs, magic tricks and books on the subject. Doing magic tricks was a way of getting other kids not to beat up on him, something to make them like him. He was good at the magic tricks, real fast, and soon the other kids began to tolerate him.
    He started selling a little dope here and there. He had this connection up near the border. Pretty soon his mom lost all control over him, and he was hitchhiking all over the place anyway. He brought this stuff down and kids loved it. Strangely enough, he really didn’t smoke that much himself. He used it kind of like bait, and to buy affection. And sometimes he used it as an aphrodisiac. The other kids still thought he was a weirdo, but they stopped beating up on him.
    â€œSo—I’m fifteen,” he continued, “and this girl calls the house. It’s a wrong number—but she thinks I’m a guy. We start talking, and we make a date to go RollerBlading, and the whole time she thinks I’m a boy.
    â€œI start shaving to make my beard grow in, so it’ll be all bristly, and my mom sees this, but my dad’s pretending nothing’s happening. I tell my parents I want them to call me Dean. But it’s like my dad just doesn’t hear it. My mom starts trying to obey me, but she can’t make herself do it. I can feel my mom watching me now, her eyes all full of sorrow. And meanwhile, my brother Raymond is dropping out of school, and he’s hanging out and getting drunk and doesn’t come home at night.
    â€œOne day, I’m in the bathroom shaving myself, and I look at