The Magic Misfits. Neil Patrick Harris

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      Carter learned how to do magic tricks from his uncle. And they were just that: tricks. There was no magic involved. How could there be? Everyone knows there is no such thing as magic – or so Carter believed.

      At a very early age, Carter stopped trusting in wonderful, happy, fantastic things. It wasn’t his fault. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.

      You see, Carter was born to two lovely people. His mom had a smile that shone like the sun on a perfect day at the beach. And his dad could pull coins out of ears and make a deck of playing cards vanish into thin air. They all lived in a tiny red cottage with white trim on a wooded and winding road outside a small northern city. One afternoon when Carter was only a few years old, both of his parents failed to come home.

      They also failed to come home the next day. Or the day after that. When the babysitter called the police, Carter hoped it was only one of his father’s tricks. But after another day passed with no word, Carter had to face the cold hard truth: his parents were not coming back. It was their final vanishing act.

      Young Carter was taken in by a distant relative named Sylvester “Sly” Beaton. For the sake of convenience, we will call him Carter’s uncle.

      Uncle Sly was a wiry little man who always dressed in a brown tweed suit with frayed seams and patches that covered moth-eaten holes. He wore his long, greasy hair tied back in a messy ponytail, and the whiskers of his patchy beard barely covered his pointy chin. Uncle Sly told people he got his nickname because he was like a fox, but Carter always thought that his uncle looked more like a weasel, which made sense because Uncle Sly often acted like a weasel too.

      The man was not thrilled to have to look after Carter. And Carter was not thrilled to live with this weasel. But that’s what the circumstances were, and so Carter made the best of them.

      Like Carter’s father, Uncle Sly knew magic tricks. He could hold a tissue up to Carter’s nose and make him sneeze a waterfall of coins into a glass. Then, one by one, Uncle Sly would make the coins disappear again. This blew Carter’s mind – well, his mind and his nose.

      Carter begged his uncle to show him how to do magic. Eventually, Uncle Sly saw that there might be a benefit in having an assistant, and so he taught Carter everything he knew. It turned out Carter was a natural-born magician.

      Soon enough, Carter was doing all of Uncle Sly’s tricks – only better. Carter had a special talent. His fingers were long and his tendons were taut, which gave him fast hands and expert card-shuffling skills. He could make coins vanish and reappear across the room. He could materialise playing cards out of thin air. He even revised Uncle Sly’s sneeze trick, using ice cubes instead of coins (which was rather impressive, given the size of the average human nostril).

      Now, Uncle Sly wasn’t the type of man to celebrate his young nephew’s ability to change up his oldest and best illusion, but he was smart enough to notice an opportunity when it was sneezing ice cubes right in front of him. So on Carter’s birthday, instead of throwing him a party, Uncle Sly decided to test him. He sent the boy up to a random couple on the street to perform his very first show.

      As Carter approached, he nervously slicked his blond mop of hair to the side, pinched his pale cheeks, and opened his blue eyes wide. The couple seemed happy to stop for him. First, Carter presented a deck of cards and asked the woman to choose one and keep it hidden between her two hands, making sure not to show him.