A/N: This is just the first chapter. Don't know when I'll update. I have the Outline for the whole story though. This is a trial to get the hang of the web. If anybody thinks this is great for a first chapter let me know :) (I certainly need the validation). If you're a fan of The Magicians by Lev Grossman you'll find this chapter VERY VERY VERY similar to the beginning of that story. Be nice! It's my first fanfic. Won't be updating up until I'm at least done with CoS (it will be a long time)

Chapter 1: Through the Mirror

Brooklyn, NY - 2019

Alex did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.

They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: David, Lizzie, and Alex. David and Lizzie held hands. That's how things were now. The sidewalk wasn't quite wide enough, so Alex trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with David, or just alone period, but you couldn't have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.

"Okay!" Lizzie said over her shoulder. "Al. Let's talk strategy."

Lizzie seemed to have a sixth sense for when Alex was starting to feel sorry for himself. Alex' interview was in seven minutes. Lizzie and David had accompanied him for moral support.

"Nice firm handshake. Lots of eye contact. Then when he's feeling comfortable, you hit him with a chair, break his password and email Stanford."

"Just be yourself, Al," David said.

His dark, curly hair waved to the whims of the wind. Somehow it made it worse that he was always so nice to him.

"How is that different from what I said?"

Alex did the magic trick again. It was a very small trick, a basic one-handed sleight with a nickel. He did it in his coat pocket where nobody could see. He did it again, then did it backward.

"I have one guess for his password," Lizzie said. "Password."

It was kind of incredible how long this had been going on, Alex thought. They were only seventeen, but he felt like he'd known Lizzie and David forever. The school systems in Brooklyn sorted out the gifted ones and shoved them together, and as a result they'd been bumping into each other in the same speaking contests and regional Latin exams and tiny, specially convened advanced math classes since elementary school. The nerdiest of the nerds. By now, their senior year, Alex knew David and Lizzie better than he knew anybody else in the world, not excluding his parents, and they knew him. Everybody knew what everybody else was going to say before they said it. Everybody who was going to sleep with anybody else had already done it. David -pale, freckled, dreamy David, who was on the swimming team and knew even more history than he did- was never going to sleep with Alex. The fact that he was straight didn't help either.

Alex was average in height and constitution, not too tall and not too short, he was just average. His long hair was freezing in chumps. He should have stuck around to dry it after gym, especially with this interview today, but for some reason –maybe he was in a self-sabotaging mood– he hadn't. The low gray sky threatened snow. It seemed to Alex like the world was offering up a special little tableaux of misery just for him: crows perched on power lines, stepped-in dog shit, windblown trash, the corpses of innumerable wet oak leaves being desecrated in innumerable ways by innumerable vehicles and pedestrians.

"God, I'm full," David said. "I ate too much. Why do I always eat too much?"

"Because you're a greedy pig?" Lizzie said brightly. "Because you're tired of being able to see your feet? Because you're trying to make your stomach touch your penis?"

David put his hands behind his head, his fingers in his wavy chestnut hair, his camel cashmere coat wide open to the late October cold, and belched mightily. Cold never bothered him. Alex felt cold all the time, like he was trapped in his own private individual winter.

Lizzie sang, to a tune somewhere between "Good King Wenceslas" and "Bingo":

In olden times there was a boy

Young and strong and brave-o

He wore a sword and rode a horse

And his name was Dave-o…

"God!" David shrieked. "Stop!"

Lizzie had written this song five years ago for a middle-school talent show skit. She still liked to sing it; by now they all knew it by heart. David pulled his scarf in a motion that pantomimed someone being hanged, Lizzie kept singing, and when that didn't work he covered his ears and started mock-crying. "My ears! My beautiful hearing!"

"I hate to break the party," Alex said, "but I've got like two minutes."

"Oh dear, oh dear!" Lizzie twittered. "The Duchess! We shall be quite late!"

I should be happy, Alex thought. I'm young and alive and healthy. I have good friends. I have two reasonably intact parents –namely, Dad, an editor of financial textbooks, and Mom, a commercial illustrator with ambitions, thwarted, of being a painter. I am a solid member of the middle-middle class. My GPA is higher than the average.

But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Alex knew he wasn't happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn't think what else to do.

He followed David and Lizzie past bodegas, laundromats, hipster boutiques, cell-phone stores limned with neon piping, past a bar where old people were already drinking at three forty-five in the afternoon, past a brown-brick Veterans of Foreign Wars hall with plastic patio furniture on the sidewalk in front of it. All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn't be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he'd been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead.

Maybe his real life would turn up in Stanford. He did the trick with the nickel in his pocket again.

"Are you playing with your wang, Alex?" David asked teasingly.

Alex blushed.

"I am not playing with my wang."

"Nothing to be ashamed of." David clapped him on the shoulder. "Clears the mind."

The wind bit through the thin material of Alex' interview suit, but he refused to button his overcoat. He let the cold blow through it. It didn't matter, he wasn't really there anyway.

He was in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Like most people, Alex read the Harry Potter books in grade school. Unlike most people –unlike David and Lizzie– he never got over them. The books, and the extended world of the never-ending fanfiction and potterverse, were where he went when he couldn't deal with the real world, which was a lot. And it was true, there was a strong whiff of the English nursery about them, and he felt embarrassingly touched when he got to the part in the first book about Harry seeing his deceased parents in a magic mirror, showing that his heart's deepest desire was one of belonging and family.

But there was a more seductive, more dangerous truth to the Harry Potter world that Alex couldn't let go of. It was almost like the Harry Potter books were about reading itself. When Harry, just Harry –the ordinary and neglected orphan– leaves his mean relatives and goes with Hagrid into the wizarding world, it's like he's opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

The world Harry discovers hidden behind a dingy, typically british pub –and later on at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry– is a world of magical twilight and seasons, a landscape as black and white and stark as a printed page, with a whimsical castle that has ghosts, poltergeists, sentient armor suits, talking portraits and changes its structure at will. In the Wizarding world of Harry Potter the answer to all your problems is one spell away to resolution. In the Wizarding world the seasons were really magical, and the environment really was part of the story. Plants that try to eat you, intelligent creatures that could outsmart you. Rooms that appeared if you asked nicely. Friendships and family were important in that world. Things mattered in a way they didn't in this world. In the magical world you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It never left you. Or no, it came when you called. Even in the darkest of times, when Harry, Ron and Hermione found themselves in the most harrowing situations, happiness could be found if one only remembered to turn on the light.

They stood on the sidewalk in front of the house. The neighborhood was fancier here, with wide sidewalks and overhanging trees. The house was brick, the only unattached residential structure in a neighborhood of row houses and brownstones. It was locally famous for having played a role in the bloody, costly Battle of Brooklyn. It seemed to gently reproach the cars and street lights around it with memories of its gracious Old Dutch past.

If this were a Harry Potter novel –Alex thought, just for the record– the house would be the secret dwelling of an old powerful witch or wizard, full of secrets and forbidden magicks.

But this wasn't a novel, it wasn't even a fanfic.

"So," Lizzie said. "Give 'em Hades."

She wore a blue serge coat with a round collar that, added to her blonde hair tied up in a messy bun, made her look like a French schoolgirl.

"We'll wait for you in the Cafè at the end of the block," said David.

"Cheers."

They bumped fists. David dropped his gaze, embarrassed. He knew how Alex felt, and Alex knew he knew, and there was nothing more to say about it. Lizzie came to break the awkward moment, saving Alex from his own embarrassment. She kissed him on the cheek and said "Good luck, you got this." She retreated and laced her fingers with David's. "We'll be at the Cafè."

David made a mock military salute and they both turned their backs to him, making their way to the end of the street.

Alex walked slowly up the cement pathway to the front door, as he mused in his thoughts. You could envy David and Lizzie, but you couldn't hate them, because along with being beautiful and smart they were also, at heart, kind and good. More than anybody else Alex had ever met, David reminded him of Harry Potter, and Lizzie of Hermione Granger. But if David was Harry and Lizzie was Hermione, what did that make Alex? The real problem with being around David and Lizzie was that they were always the heroes. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.

Alex rang the doorbell. A soft, tiny clatter erupted somewhere in the depths of the darkened house. An old-fashioned, analog ring. He rehearsed a mental list of his extracurriculars, personal goals, etc. He was absolutely prepared for this interview in every possible way, except maybe his incompletely dried hair, but now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it. He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore. He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on.

The doorway was guarded by a depressingly ordinary suburban screen door. Orange and purple zinnias were still blooming, against all horticultural logic, in a random scatter pattern in black earth beds on either side of the doorstep. How weird, Alex thought, with no curiosity at all, that they would still be alive in late October. He withdrew his ungloved hands into the sleeves of his coat and placed the ends of the sleeves under his arms. Even though it felt cold enough to snow, somehow it began to rain.

It was still raining five minutes later. Alex knocked on the door again, then pushed lightly. It opened a crack, and a wave of warm air tumbled out. The warm, fruity smell of a stranger's house.

Who even does this in their spare time? Alex thought.

The foyer was dark and silent and muffled with Oriental rugs. Alex, still outside, rang the doorbell again for good measure. Nada. It didn't seem like there was anybody in the house.

A staircase went up. On the left was a stiff unused-looking dining room, on the right a cozy den with leather armchairs and a carved, man-sized wooden cabinet standing by itself in a corner next to the fireplace. Interesting. What seemed to be an old nautical map taller than he was took up half of one wall, with an ornately barbed wire compass rose. He massaged the walls in search of a light switch. There was a cane chair in one corner, but he barely spared it a glance.

All the blinds were drawn. The quality of the darkness was less like a house with the curtains drawn than it was like actual night, as if the sun had set or been eclipsed the moment he crossed the threshold. The only source of artificial light came from a lit candle on a commode, next to the fireplace on its other side. Part of its light reflected on an ornate mirror over the furniture piece. Alex slow-motion-walked into the den. He'd go back outside and call. In another minute. He had to at least look. The darkness was like a prickling electric cloud around him.

The cabinet was enormous, so big you could climb into it. He placed his hand on its small, dinged brass knob. It was unlocked. His fingers trembled. Le roi s'amuse. He couldn't help himself. It felt like the world was revolving around him, like his whole body had been leading to this moment.

It was a liquor cabinet. A big one, there was practically a whole bar in there. Alex reached back past the ranks of softly jingling bottles and felt the dry, scratchy plywood at the back just to make sure. Solid. No Narnia behind the spirit drinks. He closed the door, breathing hard, his face burning in the darkness. Not yet humiliated enough, he decided to move to inspect the candle and the curious-looking mirror. He would go back outside afterwards, and probably leave the entire premises. Everything pointed to a bad-taste joke. David and Lizzie were probably waiting for him at the Cafè with a TV crew, ready to yell "Gotcha!" the moment he stepped inside. He shook his head as if to get rid of the shameful thoughts, if he was to be ridiculed at least he would play his part. He moved closer to the commode. The mirror was ornate, with a bronze looking material for a framework. Strange symbols that Alex didn't recognize and mythical creatures were engraved along the frame. Very interesting. The glass seemed to be tainted black, only reflecting the more subtle lights. Like foe-glass, Alex thought. The features of his countenance were only shadows in the dark-looking mirror. A crack on the floorboards behind him startled Alex and he quickly turned. A tall man in a tailcoat suit and a long gray beard was standing just a few feet length away from him, he had the twitch of a smile in his mouth. Alex was about to apologize for the intrusion when the man suddenly pushed him with force against the mirror. The crash of broken glass didn't come though. Alex felt as if he had been pushed from a cliff, and as he fell, the darkness that had covered the surface of the mirror swallowed him.