THE EVIL TEENAGER WIZARD

SAMPLE YA FANTASY:

"The wizard targeted borderline teenagers. Duke knew it. He knew it from having escaped once before. At the end of the show, the wizard would do something to the kids’ hormone levels that would take over their personality. Duke narrowed his eyes at the thought. In exchange, he would give them a magic gift, a gift that gave him the right to mess up their minds and churn their brains into an emotional mush.

Never! Duke gritted his teeth. You’ll never get to me!

The kids in his sixth grade classroom had no clue. They didn’t stand a chance. They thought the man in front of them only did magic tricks. Duke wanted to rip his fake white beard, his googly eyes glasses, and his creepy two inches nails. He looked ridiculous. What did he think they were, three? The six tweenagers didn’t mind the costume that appeared pulled off from a wreck at the bottom of the sea. The old world was full of useless disguises. They smiled and clapped at the right places, striking two round shells together, like the courteous Oceaniopians they were.

Duke remembered the wizard by his real name: the Evil Teenager Wizard. The wizard almost got him the year before and inflected him with a mild case of randomly pocking facial hair. Duke spotted a bristly turf every morning and cut it with a pair of scissors, but nothing else to get upset about. Duke was almost immune.

“Hocus Pocus,” said the wizard.

Things had been appearing out of thin air from the wizard’s ears, nose, and mouth for half an hour now and he also had crossed his hand through his hat a few times. Duke’s suspicions confirmed when a strange odor of green grass and sweat floated around the old man as he came closer. The wizard was out of this world. He didn’t even live under water like most people.

Duke plugged two knuckles up his nose to block the stink. Nobody mowed grass anymore, not since tsunamis had flooded most of the earth. Duke had a patch of grass growing in his mom’s lab. She was in a coma because of this patch of grass. He had to escape this year again. He wasn’t ready for cutting the emotional lifeline that stitched him to his mom’s dwindling life.

He needed to escape, and fast, and be next to her when she would wake up.

“Watch me and be amazed,” the wizard said in a mysterious voice that sounded as creepy as Duke’s little sister when she plugged fake vampire teeth in her mouth and screeched.

Instead of letting the evil wizard take hold of his attention, Duke looked up through the pod’s integral glass window. He watched the waves coming and going with bubbly fingers above their heads. His six other classmates focused on the magic tricks, completely absorbed like rag dolls sitting on poufs around the stage. Only Cassiopeia, a girl with ocean blue hippy clothes watched him from the corner of her eye. Duke smiled weakly in her direction and she opened her lips to uncover a range of pearly teeth."