← It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton
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My experience as a teenager was pretty far away from the mean. The kids I knew got up every morning and went to school. I got up every morning and drove myself to work where I pretended to be a space genius from the future. I was rarely around kids my own age when I was on the set and I was expected to behave like I had the experience and maturity and of the adults I worked with being very charitable to myself. I did not always have access to that maturity and I spent a lot of my twenties and even part of my thirties feeling profoundly ashamed and regretful about it. I eventually came to understand and accepted that I didn't have that maturity because it had not yet developed in my squishy young brain. And the thing is, I tried so hard to be someone who was mature. I spent so much time trying to be someone I wasn't, someone I just didn't yet have the parts to become. I lost myself. I lost myself all the time when I was older and I raised two boys and I did my best to parent them when they were teenagers themselves. Well, I learned that my experience, as weird and unique to me as it felt, was a lot more common than I knew. My beautiful, sweet, loving little boys both woke up one day and chose violence. For a couple of years. There were these pod people who looked just like my kids living in our home and they, they had thoughts about everything. Put another way, being a teenager can be rough and I feel like adults just forget that our bodies are under Assault from out of control hormone production. We are dead convinced that we are the first and last human who has ever felt this way and we just wanna scream and tear our hair out, but first we gotta run over there and hump that guy's leg. What I'm saying is I remember what it was like to feel trapped in skin that didn't fit right? Because I vowed to never forget and to never treat future kids with the dismissal and invalidation I experienced in my home. Well, this week I'm going to take you to meet a whole bunch of teenagers who are going through it. They are trying to figure out who they are, what their values are, where they fit into the machinery of the clockwork that turns the universe. You know, normal teenage stuff. We're also going to meet a demon who lives inside one of them. But I will keep you safe when we do, because I know from experience that the skin of a teenage boy is not alive. The Skin of a Teenage Boy Is Not Alive by Sanaa Ahmad Parveen isn't there when Benny falls off the roof, but everyone knows the story. Benny and his dumb demon cult. It happens at one of their houses. A place built like a modern day cathedral, the kind of hovel that has a saltwater pool with a vanishing edge and a wine cellar with someone's entire life savings down there. And red glazed tiles cutting swoops into the Los Pueblos skyline. Six day old moon, a wide goblin grin from above, the hot strobe of synth pop booming everywhere, the hazy electrostatic currents of teenage bodies thrilling with vodka and happiness hormones. Those pretty girls and pretty boys, everyone whose beautiful teeth could be pasted in a magazine. Come on, says Benny to the beautiful kids, the dumb demon cult kids. I want to get possessed. They go up to the rooftop terrace and yes, of course there's a rooftop terrace and obviously it has a tidy flower garden and a glittering breathy view of the ocean. The student council secretary discreetly pukes into the rhododendrons when she thinks nobody's watching. It's January, five months until graduation. Benny says, let's go, let's go. Time for the ceremony. What happens next? The cult kids won't say. Won't or can't. And something happens, that much is certain. A secret ritual, a ceremony in darkness, Whatever. Something happens on the rooftop terrace with the beautiful demon cult girls and boys, the true believers. The music clicks off. Now it is shivery and quiet, only California crickets lisping into the dark. The night closes upon them. An enigmatic fist and when it opens its fingers again, Benny is possessed. He tries to speak but it doesn't quite work. His eyes are wet, black, crawling with unrecognizable stars. They know it is Benny and not Benny, the way anyone knows that something is wrong. There is a face underneath his face and it is very, very old. The face swivels on its neck to look at them. Say something, one of the cult kids whispers, practically palpitating with fear and excitement. Benny, who is not Benny, hisses. What a waste. What a fucking waste. The face shuts. He turns and climbs over the railing and walks off the roof. Just walks off the edge. Bam. There's a thump below and a silence. The music clicks on again like magic, like something else. 70 decibels, the bass line whacking them right in the cranium. One of the lacrosse girls screams, a defensive midfielder. But no one can hear it over the heavy artillery of the music. All they can see is is the wide open whites of her eyes, the black hole of her mouth, those gorgeous teeth right out of a magazine. Benny will live, although it will take months for the demon to evaporate from his skin. Maybe years. No one's looking closely, least of all him. They will graduate. At the ceremony. They will release tiny nervous hummingbirds, rainbow throated, tremulous with anxiety, trapped and suddenly free. The comparison will be apartment after graduation, Parveen will leave the dust of Los Pueblos in her cracked rearview mirror, fingernail frogs whirling past her into the sagebrush palm trees, doing the Macarena to the afternoon breeze. See you later, alligator. The Demon Cult kids will grow up because that's what most kids do. The kids will get jobs. They will invest in retirement funds. There will be other cult kids after them. There are always others. 30 years will pass. The demon will return as he always does. The high school. It's always the high school for him. Always. The skin of a fucking teenager wearing the clammy eagerness of a burst pustule. He will want to escape the body, but there's no escaping a juvenile body. He will try to snap the wrists of the teenager. He will try to punch open a window with its skull. He will try to combust its body with the incendiary force of his rage alone. He will howl, yanking on the cords of this body's throat. He will howl until his mouth is full of blood, but it won't change a thing. Parveen has known Aisha from the very beginning. 3000 B.C. first day of grade school. Paste in jars. Kids up Chucking on the monkey bars. The only two brown girls in class. They make a studious point to ignore each other for the first few years. They become friends anyway. Like every good friendship, they follow the beats of falling in love. Breathless sleepovers with the soundtrack of the night unraveling all around them. They hold hands when they watch horror movies. They wage fights through passive aggressive melees and nursed silences. They invent their own language. Hello is a three note whistle, used sparingly. A tug on the ear. That's goodbye. The middle finger. A classic. You're being kind of a gonad. It also means, of course, fuck you. It's pretty corny, yes, but they are kids on their way to being teenagers. Certain that they are headed for somewhere better. They try alcohol together for the first time. A clandestine bottle of Smirnoff Ice in Parveen's basement. Peach Bellini flavored. And when they stand up, the basement sways with them like it's waltzing. Like they are all waltzing together into something marvelous. They are forever opposites. Parveen becomes sort of famous for her healthy dose of suspicion. In eighth grade English, the teacher discovers her recording license plate numbers in her textbook. Every dodgy car that passes by Aisha. She is a wide open book. Who hurt you? Aisha says sometimes laughing, and Parveen always says, why didn't anyone hurt you? Parveen is convinced that if a stranger were to give Aisha candy, she'd swallow the razor blades whole and thank them for the kindness of severing open her intestines. When Benny falls off the roof in senior year, the cult kids start hanging around Aisha. They might be in a demon cult, but they're also a little obvious. They sit behind her in advanced calculus like eerie, stunning vultures. They ask about her kid brother, achieving that perfect crook of concern in their eyebrows. When they do, they compliment her hair. And to be fair, Aisha has great hair. They say, want to come for lunch with us? Want to come to our place? They do not ask Parveen, and this does not exactly come as a surprise to anyone involved. They're going to eat you, Parveen, stage whispers to Aisha. Not everything has to be life or death. Aisha stage whispers back. The girls are up against the grilled barricade at the school's annual Darwin Day parade. It's February, four months until graduation. Thirty students twirl past them, preening and bowing elaborately, decked in full body finch costumes. Galapagos finches, Darwin's own. Each a copy of the other except for one meticulously rendered detail. The beak, the wing, the claw, the eye. The marching band comes next. It is all so lovely, and it is so unbelievably stupid. They're going to sacrifice your lungs to a third rate snake God, parveen says. They just throw some weird parties, that's all. You think everyone is evil. In the parade, a majorette whips her baton too high and careens straight into the drama department float, shearing the oil painted diorama of Darwin's voyage to South America. The Pacific Ocean wilts onto the road, wreaking geographic catastrophe. Aisha says, you know, you could just come with me. If you think it's so interesting, you can write about it for the paper. I don't think it's interesting. I just think you're going to die and I'm going to get the high school Pulitzer for your obituary, and only one of us is going to be right. It's a good thing you're not petty, aisha says. But oh, she says it with such a smile. One of my favorite podcasts is called this Might Get Weird with Grace Helbrigg and Mamrie Hart. I discovered that we share a sponsor, and I gotta tell you, I'm so excited because I'm such a fan of theirs that I just feel like this means that I get to sit at their table. I walk up to them and I go, yo, what's up Rocket Money? Am I right? Let me tell you about Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions. It monitors your spending and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. How many of you are like me in a club you really don't wanna be in? And that is a club that grants membership to those who sign up for a free trial, only to discover one year later that they've been paying every month for a thing that they do not use. Rocket Money will identify those things for you, help you cancel your subscriptions and save money. Rocket Money has saved users over two and a half billion dollars, including over $880 million subscriptions alone. Their 10 million members save up to $740 a year when they use all of the app's premium features. Yo, I think we have a societal subscription problem, everyone. $880 million. Anyway, you can cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com Storytime today. That's RocketMoney.com Storytime. Let's all say it together, everybody. RocketMoney.com Storytime that sounded great. Harveen will think of Aisha and the demon cult kids and Benny when she is 25, on a date with the boy who almost becomes her husband. They will buy an apartment together. They will adopt a war veteran of a tabby, a prickly, nervy, battle scarred wreck. And when she finally gets the tabby to relax in the seat of her lap seven weeks in, it feels like she's won Olympic gold. In her adult life, there will always be victory in these small, furiously won intimacies. She will wonder why she didn't prize these when she was younger, and she will realize the obvious. She wouldn't have recognized intimacy if it was a 15 pound tabby clenched on the couch beside her on a Richter scale. The resulting earthquake could devastate a small pastoral country. He will keep the cat. She will keep the apartment for some time. Living there alone will feel like a cohabitation with the elderly phantom of their happiness, a creaking, cranky, manacled creature that rattles in the middle of the night, enduring lengthy silences. She will hold a seance. She will sell the apartment. See you later, alligator. Seems it is that easy to say goodbye to an entire life trapped and suddenly free, an anxious, rainbow throated hummingbird. But first, a date. She is 25. He is ruefully handsome. When she was younger, he could have fertilized her eggs just by looking at her. They slurp ramen and make furtive expeditions in touch me against me, a collision of hand here and elbow there. For now it is all wildly chaste, he says. Any good horror stories from high school? Harveen says. Isn't that the whole horror story? High school? Put it in a book. You'll sell a hundred copies. All the same, her gut will lurch like it used to. Aisha and the demon cult kids, those ecstatic houses filled with light, rich kids, citadels, jewels in the Los Pueblos nights, and her clumsy octopus at a ritzy dinner party, the eternal weirdo. Come on, aisha would say to her, so trusting. You don't have to be so scared of everything. And she's right, of course. And she's wrong, of course. A flashbulb of memory. It is a shock to learn that it is all still there, waiting to leap out of the bushes. It is there and gone just as fast, like a swift mugging. When she closes her eyes, she will still see the afterimage, a crescendo of electric blue, brightest Blue already receding out of focus. The demon has plans. Better believe it. He always has plans. He wants to scorch the earth and begin again. He wants to obliterate this entire stupid species. He wants to pop every human like a blister. He wants to slurp their enthusiasm until they wilt in shame and failure. He wants to pour out of their eye holes until they disintegrate. Standard demon shit, basically. The kids always find him in the one room schoolhouse. Days they summon him with one two clapping games and bowdlerized nursery rhymes. Later, young men in dowdy school jackets carve him into the pine frames of their slates. During the 60s they call him Rogo, like a fountain drink. Teenagers. Little demons all on their own. It's so easy for them. He is angry and desperate and horny and sad and trapped. So are they, a square peg in a squarish hole, so to speak. There are other demons, of course. The kids find them too. But he is the one who always comes back. He is the one who can't get away. On the night of the wrestling tournament, Junior boys all star. Except they lose the demon cult. Kids go for cheeseburgers before they initiate Aisha. It's March, three months to graduate. The air is damp with steaming cow and runny cheese and Heinz and livid crispy fries. Elbows churn and jaws grind, an orgy of teenage hunger. Outside, the wet smear of a bloody sunset. Tractor trailers belch down the road. Inside, the fluorescents hum like high priests. It's kind of apocalyptic and strange. Harveen is invited, a courtesy to Aisha, more than a real invitation. They do not talk to her, but through her. Parveen is too stubborn to start conversations, so she scowls in silence and pretends to take indecipherable notes in sloppy cursive, an article she will never how to vanish into air by sheer concentration. How to unzip her face and crawl right out. It will be startling years later, for Parveen to realize that she remembers this moment with lurid surround sound, including subwoofer clarity. This little shitty moment. Aisha is knee deep in conversation with Clinton Chin, the handsome debate club president. Harveen will remember that this is the moment. She is truly on her own, clutching a soggy, falling apart vegetable burger that she only bought because everyone else was going for cheeseburgers and she was being prickly. She will remember how it feels to be in her skin and to want to be anywhere else, anywhere but this body, sweaty and unfamiliar. But of course there's no escaping a juvenile body. She steps outside. Fresh air. Diesel fuel. Benny is sitting on the curb, head flung to the heavens like he's watching the universe wheel past them. On his best day, Benny has never been the kind of guy anyone would mistake for cerebral. He is lovely, though, basically a model, woeful guppy, fish eyes and a gorgeous, almost floral mouth. But Benny is far from his best days. Now it is obvious even to Parveen, who does not know him, who has spoken maybe 60, 70 words to him over four entire years of high school, that Benny is not Benny. He is a body wavering. A boy, yes, but something else too. In a voice that is not entirely Benny's, he says without looking at her, you put mold on a rock and you know what grows out of it? Humans. Sticky little humans. Harveen says. Um, I can leave you alone if you want. That's what you are. Sticky little human. But it's fine. You hate them too, so that's good. That's not true, Parveen says. I don't hate everyone or anyone. Maybe I'm not even sure I know what hate really feels like. Just wait until you're older. You'll see. You know centipedes. You know how big they can get. Almost the size of a baby. Just imagine all those squirmy fucking legs. And you know what? Humans are still worse. But you're a human, so what does that make you? It's okay, says the demon. It's a temporary situation. From here they go to Ansley North's house, Aisha's initiation. A coin toss decides who will perform the ceremony, one of the running backs and the student council secretary. The cassocks tent their bodies in strange triangles, like they are a six year old drawing of teenage priests. Ansley north fixes drinks of sparkling wine and lemonade. The drinks make things swivel, unsettling but not unpleasant. Aisha is spinning her glass in her hands again and again, slopping wine and lemonade on herself. Parveen takes the glass from her hands and puts it on the table. Right before the ceremony, Aisha says to her, is this the worst idea I've ever had? Absolutely, parveen says. But it's what I want. I know. Parveen leans forward and kisses her forehead. She is aware even now that it matters what she does, how she acts. She will not throw a tantrum. She will not beg. She will be herself. And that is the worst thing she can be. She says, you should do it. It's what you want. Aisha smiles, a perfect Aisha smile. Okay, she says. I'll see you on the other side, I guess. They dab Aisha's face in paints. The priests move their hands and murmur in stumbling Latin. Aisha swims in and out, tipping like she's about to pass out. Her eyelashes flutter. It's hypnosis, someone whispers to Parveen. It's fine. Aisha straightens her back. Her eyes go clear, but she is not quite there anymore. Aisha and not Aisha. Someone new, masked in finger paints, looking Halloweeny and ethereal. My beautiful friend, Harveen thinks with a pang. There is nothing she can do other than what she has already done. Aisha is already going. She is already gone. You're in control of what you do next, aren't you? Says one of the priests. She nods. Complete control, she says. Say these words and she does her Latin just as bad as theirs. Raise your hand and she does. Cut it open, they say. They pass her a knife. She makes a shallow slice. Give your blood just like this. You're with us. Don't forget. And she does. And she is. Later in life, Benny will lose himself like a ring of house keys or an old friend. He will misplace the person he used to be when he was younger, the dopey, beautiful boy starlit with the spectacular certainty that the world has a miraculous order, the boy who said to the other kids, the dumb demon cult kids, I want to get possessed. It will get cloudy after a time. The thing he will never be able to remember, the worry that frets him from the moment he graduates high school, is that he does not know. He will never remember if he was ever really that boy, that rapturous boy full of light, or if this too was an illusion, if it was really just him, this glum sucker, if he was really the demon all along. In April there's a school dance. The theme is teenage blood sport. Senior boys wear hockey masks like serial killers, or gladiator costumes from the theater department, or doofy wrestling belts over their formal slacks. There's a girl in the bathroom doing realistic bloody makeup with melted Jolly Ranchers and fruit punch. Harveen gets a garland of wounds, starting from the base of her neck and winding around her arms like grisly gaping corsages. People stare and it gives her a powerful head rush, like she's actually bleeding out, like she's leaving the earth's atmosphere and everything is starting to slide marvelously sideways. Harriet Holliday, one of the goth girls, is selling squibs full of fake blood near the punch table. I'll give you a discount, she says to Parveen. Her nails are grooved deep with red food coloring. Parveen takes three. It's two months to graduation. She bites into a squib. Her mouth fills with blood. The cult kids come in together, apparitions of Roman soldiers with hammered metal breastplates and centurions, helmets, wild crimson plumes like the rumpled combs of roosters. They are, yes, hypnotizing. They don't look like teenagers, but the teen actors who play them, 30 years old in the full bloom of adulthood. Aisha is there. And Benny. Aisha waves at Parveen, but between them there is an entire gymnasium full of sweaty, bloody teenagers, practically moshing to the slow dance tunes. It doesn't matter tonight Harveen is made of gore and brimstone. She can bleed, but she won't ever die. She has decided she is no longer a teenager either, but a traveler from another dimension just stopping by. She too moshes to the slow dance tunes. She too sways to the songs with bass lines like jackhammers. She moves into slow collision with Benny. Hi, she says. Hi, he says. Are you Benny or the other guy? He shrugs. I want to talk to the other guy, she says. They dance, not close enough to touch, though not for lack of trying. You're in high school, not married, snaps the physics teacher as she skulks past, close enough that his body heat feels like a supernova trying to make its way to her. Close enough that she thinks she sees something crawl out of his eye and into his hair. Hair. But no, that can't be right. He's just Benny. Well, Benny and the other guy. You said being human was temporary, she says to the demon. For me, sure. So what's the secret? How do you stop being a human? He grins and it feels like the crappiest grin in the world. He says, I'm going to escape this body and then I'm going to burn this fucking world to the ground. She will see the demon everywhere in the years to come. She will see him hiding in the faces of shitty college boys who try to follow her to the bathroom. She will see him slit eyed and giddy in gorgeous girls screaming at each other on a city bus. She will see him in the people she dates, a photo strip of dunces, each with his sharptooth smile. She will see him in her dreams. She will see him writhing and sweating and fuming at parties and bars and on sailboats and in limousines and at weddings and at funerals. And always she will be struck how she feels at the sight of horrible, lonely, familiar, the most familiar thing in the universe. Like seeing a long lost friend. She will think, I know you. I know you. Sometimes he will look up at her and grin through the face of a stranger, and it will make her skin crawl. It will make her want to evacuate her body and probably the earth. Yes, he might as well be saying, of course I know you too. Harveen shows up on Aisha's doorstep one night with two sleeves of microwave popcorn and a horror movie. The road is indistinct in the jaws of fog. Palm trees smudge into uncertain ostriches. She does not know if Aisha is home or if she will answer the door, or if she will care. It's May, one month until graduation. Parveen has been packing and unpacking a suitcase on weekends. She is so close to getting free it feels like jet fuel in her veins. Just one more month. Aisha answers the door. She smiles when she sees Parveen and the popcorn in the movie. It's like any other night from before. They hold hands at the scariest parts. They watch the movie late into the night. When the credits sputter on, Parveen says, again, again. And so they watch it again from the start. We're going to be fine, you know, aisha says at the end of the night. You and me, some things don't change. That's the point. Harveen reaches out and tugs Aisha's ear, their old goodbye. If she knew how, she would try to go back. If she were a better person, she would tell Aisha, it's too late for that. If she understood, like maybe she will later, she would see that Aisha already knows. They are already going. They are already gone. At the reunion, Harveen will see Aisha again. For the first time in 15 years, one decade plus one half decade. They have followed each other with casual indifference on the Internet, through milestones and minutiae, but still it will be a shock to see how the flesh has grown along Aisha's jaw, the way her wrists have thickened, the deeply creeping caverns of her eyes. She is lovelier than ever. My beautiful friend, Parveen thinks with a pang. When she was younger, much younger, she used to fantasize about this moment, the reunion. But it is nothing like she imagined. Of course it is not. They do not start to spontaneously cry when they see each other. They do not go out for a hilarious melancholy night of drinks at a crappy dive bar. They do not say all of the things they have been storing up for 15 years. They do not pick up where they left off. They do not promise to start again. They smile at each other. They exchange a few memories. Do you remember that time when you left the sleepover in the middle of the night? Do you remember when we saw that raccoon on the side of the road and you cried? Do you remember? Do you remember? It's all in the past, right there with Spanish influenza and dot matrix printers, far away enough that it can't make its way back to them. The demon makes a break for it on the last day of classes. It's a beautiful day, one long, impossible soap bubble. The seniors throw a party in the woods behind the high school. Harveen goes, and the cult kids and the underdwellers who seem to have hibernated for four straight years. Everyone goes. They build a bonfire, a clenched fist of flame. Day melts into night. Grimacing pines lean over their shoulder. The stars shift into focus. This day Harveen knows she will get in her car the day after graduation and get the hell out of Dodge. California is over. If she was a Galapagos finch, she'd be the one that turned into a seagull and moved to New York. She plunges her hand into a cooler bristling with ice chips and illicit drinks. The bonfire snaps and spits. The wicked blade of the moon glitters. The cult kids find their own elbow of the woods. It figures. Harveen slips in to find Aisha, she tells herself, but really it is to find Benny, to see what his lovely floral mouth will do. She is getting tipsy. She is feeling free. You can't be here, says Clinton Chen, the handsome debate club president. It's okay, benny says. Or the demon. You want to join? She sways. What are you doing? Getting me out, the demon says. Come on, you know you want to see what happens. No, she should say. What a terrible idea. She should say. Yeah, she says. I want to see what happens. They join hands, Harvey with the dumb demon cult kids and Benny and Aisha. The demon starts to hum and the cult kids join in, and after a time so does Parveen. It is a weird creepy drone, a shitty teenage opera, all of their voices together in a hum, and Parveen feels it. She does. She feels the ghoulie subterranean thing, whatever it is, light them one by one, like they are all part of an impossible candelabra. And it is spooky and it is magic. She sees it in their faces, the cult kids, as each of them is stung by it it and goes into a blazing trance. But the thing, whatever it is, gets to her and it stops and she can almost feel it shaking its head, like, nope, sorry, not you. And it swings past her onto the next person. In their trances, the cult kids are. Dazzling light pours out of their eyes and their ears and their mouths. Benny is distorting, like something is coming out of him, is trying to. They're all in it. Everyone except her. She is the anomaly, the weirdo, the octopus at the dinner party. And she wants it. She wants it so badly. She has never known how wide this ocean of want could be. But it does not want her back. It does not choose her. It passes her right by. Does it work? Does the demon escape? Of course it doesn't work. There is no escape. Not for the demon, not for Parveen, not for any of them. It doesn't ever work that way. The thing is, Aisha will remember high school quite fondly. She will grow up. She will leave California. She will return. She will not get married, no, but she will raise two stupidly smart kids. She will watch them skip from 6 to 17 like she's fast forwarded through a movie, like she's spoiling the ending for herself just to make sure it turns out okay. She will help them get dressed for prom. She will turn the tassel on their graduation caps and cry a little, knowing that they are fleeing the coop, off to college. Already everything seeps with a Kodachrome nostalgia. She will feel a butt of relief spring from her chest, just a tiny one, that they have made it to the other side. High school is over, thank God. She will move on. This demon will always come back, as he always does. After him, there will be others. There are always others. They will try to escape these teenage bodies. Yes. They will try to turn into smoke and drift out of the ears. They will try to turn into birds and fly away. They will try to crack the bodies wide open. See you later, alligator. In a while, crocodile. This demon is here, always straining, imprisoned in brittle spidery limbs, in useless, still mutating child bodies. He bides his time. He is an abracadabra of fury, itching to get out, crawling with the desire to be gone. Waiting, just waiting to be incanted into something more. Sanaa Ahmad lives in Toronto, where she fails to improve her Arabic and tries not to kill all the houseplants. Her short fiction also appears in strange Horizons and Augur magazine, and is forthcoming from Lightspeed and Uncanny Magazine. A Clarion 2018 alum, she has received the generous support of the Octavia Butler Scholarship, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Council. You can find her sort of@sanaa-ahmad.com I think a lot of you know this because I think a lot of you have been here from the beginning, but hopefully you're a new listener. Hi. Welcome. Glad you're here. And you may not know this yet. This podcast exists for two reasons. The first reason is I was a huge fan of LeVar Burton's podcast, LeVar Burton Reads, and I missed it so much when LeVar stopped. So I called him and I said, I'm thinking that, like, maybe I can pick up your podcast where it stopped, because, like, somebody needs to do it, and if nobody else is gonna do it, I'll do it. So it still exists, and I can, you know, I can have the stories. Is that stepping on your toes? And levar was like, that's not stepping on my toes. And I was like, maybe it's standing on your shoulders a little bit. And he was, I love you, ww. I was like, I love you too, lb. And then we high fived and everyone clapped, but he was like, yeah, I totally support you, and I would love to help you do it. And he's been a great champion and a great. Just a wonderful mentor through all of it. You know, one of the things levar did for me was, like, kind of helped me lean into what a reader I am with Reading Rainbow and his commitment to literacy that has had me, as a lifelong passionate reader of everything I can get my hands on, including stories that my friends have written. And about a year before the first episode of our test season dropped, my friend sent me a story he had written. And he said, guess what? I got this published. First time he'd ever been published. And I was like, dude, I'm so happy for you. Congratulations. And I really liked his story. And I thought, oh, man, you know what I'll do is I'll just, like, fire up Audacity and grab my garbage little microphone here, and I'm gonna just narrate it and give it to him as, like, a G gift, right? I started to do that, and it was as if a person leapt out of my body and went, will, will, will. Dude, stop. What if you did a podcast, Your idea to, like, do levar's podcast? What if your podcast was really focused on authors who might be really respected and beloved in the genre fiction world, but in the sort of mainstream normie mogul world, they may not have been discovered by people who will absolutely love them. Okay, tell me more. I said to my imaginary self and I continued. People come up to you all the time and say, I will listen to anything you narrate. Like, I, I get that and it's awesome. And on days when I feel bad about myself, I just dip into that glass of joy a little bit and take a sip. So if that is true, I thought I could narrate stories from authors that are about to break right? And maybe I could help. And that has been the mission statement of It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton. From the very beginning, my goal has been to elevate the voices of authors. And today I am so unbelievably excited to be elevating Sanaa Amman. Because this week, by wonderful coincidence, her very first short story collection has been published by Macmillan. And I'm going to tell you about it so that if you have enjoyed her story that I just shared with you, you can go find her work and support her directly herself. The book is called the Age of Calamities. It is described as a genre defying, mind bending collection of absurdist, funny and speculative short stories. In this bold debut collection, Sana Ahmad pushes the boundaries of history and its figures, sending the reader on a thrilling ride in let's Play Dead. Henry VIII wants Anne Boleyn gone, but there's a tiny she keeps coming back to life, no matter what he does. Choose youe Own Apocalypse hurls readers back to 1945 where they assume the role of a technician for the Manhattan Project, confronted with labyrinthine paths and harrowing outcomes. And Inside the House of the Historian invites us to a dinner party turned murder mystery full of figures like Nefertiti, Queen Victoria, John Adams and Marilyn Monroe. Are you on board yet? I'm on board. I am so freaking excited for that book to be out. I'm so excited to share it with you and I would just love it so much if we can invent something called the IT Storytime Effect that follows in the tradition of the tabletop effect. I just wanted to say thank you to Sanaa also for working with my team. And I wanna thank my team for working so hard to make this all come together. Usually it takes a week or longer from the time I reach out to an author to the time we're able to actually sit down and record. It's been a day and a half. Everybody worked really, really hard and really really fast because the second I found out that she had a collection coming out, I really wanted this to drop this week so that we could promote it. So hey, thank you so much for listening and thank you for sticking around all the way to the end and listening to all of that. Wherever you are, whoever you are, I hope you're having the very best possible day. And until next time, take care of yourselves and take care of each other. The Skin of a Teenage Boy Is Not Alive by Sanaa Ahmad was Originally published in August 2019, issue 83 of Nightmare magazine. You can find it@ Nightmare-magazine.com hey, do you want to hear the credits? Here come the credits. The credits begin now. It Storytime was produced in 2026 by Traveller Enterprises Incorporated, who holds the copyright. Our producer is Harris Lane. Our story producer and director is Gabrielle Dicure. Our Content Editor is Michael Thomas. Real quick, if you enjoy the stories that Michael selects for its story time with Wil Wheaton, you will almost certainly enjoy the stories and essays he selects for Uncanny Magazine, which he also edits. I highly encourage you to check him out@uncannymagazine.com Our podcast is edited, mixed and mastered by Alex Barton of Phase Shift av. Very special thanks to Wes Stevens, Christopher Black and Amy Bur. Recorded at Skyboat Media. If you would like an ad free experience as well as reflections on each story by me, you can go to patreon.com storytime subscriptionstart at 5 bucks a month. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time. Sam.