Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (15 page)

The first time Abby pressed the third button, she just about jumped out of her skin. An electronic whirring noise started coming from the bureau opposite the bed—and then, from a hidden slot, up came a flat-panel TV the size of Kansas. It rose up as though it were riding an invisible elevator.

“Whoooooaaa,” she said out loud.

There was a super-thin, shiny new laptop on the desk, and an iPod in a mini-stereo, and a leather desk chair that had a remote control of its own; not only could it adjust in about sixty-four different ways, but it could also massage your back. That degree of overkill, Abby soon learned, was just about everywhere—like in the bathroom, which had a hot tub, a regular bathtub,
and
a shower. And the shower had,
no kidding,
eight
different sprayers, to make sure there wasn't one single inch of your body that didn't get squirted. She wanted to call over to Ben's room, so they could say “Whooooooooaaaa” together.

But even though her room had more high-tech gadgetry than the space shuttle, she was surprised to find one obvious item missing: there was no phone.

I
N ALL OF HER
TV
INTERVIEWS
,
Abby seems to remember a million details of her adventure at the super camp. But the part she remembers best is the meet-and-greet social—the party to welcome everybody to the super camp.

It was outdoors in the courtyard, the one with the huge fountain. Phil Shutter had ordered the whole place to be decorated with these eight-foot-tall torches, accompanied by good music, and outfitted with huge tables of kid-friendly food. The sun was setting, filling the whole place with a golden light, and the air was just warm enough that you could wear a short-sleeved shirt.

Abby, who had once felt so alone with her weird useless power, was amazed to find out that there were, in fact,
twenty-three kids here—teenagers, middle-schoolers, even a couple of elementary-schoolers. And every one of them had some pointless special power that they'd never asked for.

It didn't take long for Abby to find Ben, Ricky, and Eliza. They were hanging out by the fountain, munching chocolate-covered nuts that they had sneaked from a bowl on a table. And it wasn't long after that when she realized that
all
of the kids were hanging out in clusters—according to the camps they'd come from. You'd be amazed at how quickly you can bond with other kids when you spend nine hours with them in a van.

Or on a plane. Some of the other kids had come from Cadabra camps as far away as California.

“Hey there, ho there!”

Abby looked up to see that Phil Shutter had stepped into the light with a microphone.

“Could we dial that music down a bit? Thank you ever so kindly!”

He pushed his glasses up his nose. For the big party, Abby noticed, he had taken off his tie. He no longer looked like a businessman at a summer camp; now he looked like a businessman with his tie off.

“Greetings to you all,” he began, as corny as ever. Abby and Ben exchanged eye-rolling glances.

“It's good to see all of you folks together in one place. I hope you've all had a chance to settle in, get your stuff unpacked, and learn how the shower works. If you have any questions at all, please let me know, or just tell the receptionist in your pod lobby, and she'll get whatever you need.”

Kermit the Frog!
That's who Phil sounded exactly like—Kermit the Frog.

“He sounds like Kermit!” Abby whispered directly into Ben's ear. He listened for a moment, and then nodded, grinning, as he recognized the voice, too.

“Anyhoo,” Phil was going on, “tonight it's all about meeting your camp mates and your new counselors, enjoying a little delicious barbeque, and recovering from your journey. Tomorrow, the work begins. Whoops! Did I say work? I meant fun! Because around here, work
is
fun. I expect you'll really enjoy meeting our staff tomorrow. They'll work with you to help you understand your power, to make it grow, to help you use it in better ways.”

He scratched at his little mustache with the end of his pen and glanced around the courtyard.

“Okeydoke,” he said. “Now, in just a moment, we'll bring out a little grub. Grab a plastic plate and fill it up,
hombres
! And then I want to give each of you an assignment. I want you to walk right up to somebody you don't know,
somebody from a different Cadabra camp, and introduce yourself. Tell a little about yourself. Say where you're from, what grade you're in. If you're comfortable with it, do a little show-and-tell of your power. I wanna see some serious mingling. Let's get this party started!”

Unfortunately, Phil was trying to say it the way a rock star would say it, so it came out like, “Let's get this potty stotted!”

Ben nudged Abby with his elbow. “Oh, he's a cool one, that Phil,” he said, shaking his head.

She laughed. “Come on—let's pig out.”

So they filled their plastic plates with chicken, ribs, salad, mashed potatoes, corn, and brownies. At first, Abby and Ben sat on the little wall around the fountain, ate, and chatted; but after a while, they decided that Phil's suggestion was worth taking. This was a great opportunity to meet the other campers and find out their stories.

As it turned out, there were some interesting stories indeed.

A tall, black-haired girl named Doreen had been dumped at Camp Cadabra in Indiana by her parents, who were in the middle of a divorce and didn't want her hanging around the house all summer. She had zero interest in magic except for her own power, which was raising her body temperature by two degrees.

She had occasionally been able to use it to get out of going to school (“Mom, I feel sick! I think I have a fever!”), but otherwise thought it was no more useful than, say, having a freckle on her arm.

“What's your trigger?” Ben asked.

“My what?” Evidently, not every Camp Cadabra had a Ferd to explain what triggers are.

“How do you make your body temperature go up?”

“Oh. Like this.”

Doreen lifted her arms out to her sides, waving them and sticking her stomach this way and that. Abby wasn't exactly sure what she was doing, apart from looking a little like a tippy scarecrow.

But Ben caught on. “Belly dancing! You're belly dancing, right?”

Doreen nodded. “Now feel!” She grabbed Ben's hand and pulled it up to her own forehead. Ben was no doctor, but her forehead did feel a little warm.

“And that's not just from the exercise of dancing around?” Abby asked.

“Nope,” said Doreen. “That's what everybody asks. I stay hot for, like, two hours. And you can measure it with a thermometer.”

They also met a tall, gangly, weed-thin kid going into high school who called himself Weezer. (Months later,
after the whole story came out in the newspapers, they learned that Weezer's real name was Eugene.)

He had flown all the way in from the California camp because his counselors had discovered his amazing ability—to clog a salt shaker.

“Salt shakers git clogged all the time,” he explained in a slow, booming voice with a twangy Southern accent. “Usually it's because of humidity, like in the summertime when it's hot and muggy out. But I can do better'n that. I can clog it when I
want
to clog it. I can clog it even when it
ain't
cloggy weather.”

Abby nodded appreciatively. She congratulated Weezer because he seemed genuinely proud of his talent. And why not? It was something that nobody else could do. She even managed to avoid smiling when she learned about his trigger: crossing his toes. Even if it was inside his shoes, it still worked. You could even be right in the middle of shaking out salt onto your food; if Weezer crossed his toes, that was it. No more salt. You'd have to get a toothpick and poke it into the little holes to un-jam them.

Then there was Tabor, who was standing by the brownie tray when Abby and Ben went for seconds. Tabor was visiting from Hungary. He had been staying with an American host family in Florida who had a son the same age. The son, named Eric, had always been a magic nut, sitting in his
room and practicing card moves or coin tricks for hours; he had been begging his parents all winter and spring for the chance to go to magic camp. He was sure it would be the greatest thing in the world.

Tabor's life was filled with magic, too, but not in the same way. He had never even thought about magic as a form of entertainment. His family believed in all kinds of mystical things; his mother used to say they had Gypsy blood in them. Growing up, he'd heard stories of distant relatives who could read minds, or bring rain to dry fields, or miraculously cure sickness. Nobody could ever prove it, of course, and nobody had ever actually seen any of it. But from the time he was a baby, Tabor had been taught that miracles, large and small, are woven into the cloth of everyday life.

Tabor believed that if you dig deep enough, you'll find something magical, or at least unusual, in everybody. His uncle Viktor could stick out his tongue and make the sides crinkle up with wavy edges. A kid in his school could roll his eyes so far back in his head, all you could see was pure white, like a zombie. And his cousin Kristina could breathe through her ear. For real. (The doctor said there was some kind of connection between her ear canal and her nasal cavity.)

And Tabor himself was double-jointed. That's what
you call people who can bend their joints much farther than normal people. Tabor showed Abby how, using his other hand, he could bend his thumb back so far that it could touch his wrist. (Even today, Abby can't get her own thumb anywhere near her wrist. Plus, it hurts to try.)

One day, when he was about eight years old, Tabor was showing off his thumb-bending thing to a friend. All of a sudden, a piece of mail fell off his father's desk.

And that was how he discovered his power. It turns out that if you put a sheet of paper at the edge of a desk or a table so that half of it is sticking out,
almost
falling off the edge, he can make it fall. It's as though he can make gravity just the
tiniest
bit stronger on the suspended half of the sheet of paper, just enough to tip it off the table.

Tabor didn't think it was a big deal. Growing up in Hungary, he just accepted it as another one of life's freaky little unexplained oddities.

But Eric, the boy his age in the American host family, went crazy. When he saw Tabor knock the sheet of paper off the desk without touching it, he thought it was the greatest magic trick he'd ever seen.

Eric begged Tabor to teach him how to do it. Tabor explained that he didn't know how it worked, but Eric
didn't believe him. He just believed that Tabor was sticking to the old magician's rule, “Never reveal your secrets.” And that's how it came about that Eric and Tabor
both
went to the Camp Cadabra in Georgia that summer. Eric wanted to become a better entertainer; Tabor just wanted to see more of America. The twist, of course, is that Tabor, who had very little interest in magic as a form of entertainment, got chosen to come to the super camp. And Eric, his own American “brother,” the one
real
magician among them, didn't. He stayed behind at Camp Cadabra.

As the evening went on, more of the campers shared their stories. Some accepted their powers, just the way you might accept having brown hair or bony elbows. But many of them had been suffering in silence, feeling like weirdos, getting teased at school, getting no understanding from their parents, brothers, and sisters.

And yet here, under a sky full of summer stars, they were among friends. Nobody would laugh at you; if there was a smile when you were telling about your embarrassing little power, it was a smile of understanding and sympathy. Here, you could talk about your magic, your secret, your journey so far.

There was also a lot of talk about what would happen tomorrow, when super camp would finally begin for real.

Sent: June 30
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Howdy

Hey you guys,

Hey from your favorite daughter at super camp!

They just had a super-fun welcome party for all of us kids. There's about 25 of us from all over the country. They're all super-talented and really nice. They had a big cookout, and we all had a lot of fun.

The place is not much like a camp. It's beautiful, though. The room is like a hotel room! Big plasma TV, hot tub, and all that. There are three other kids here from the camp I was at, including that guy Ben, who I think you met the first day.

It's not at all what I expected. It's nothing like a camp at all. It's like, I don't know, a big
modern company headquarters. But whatever. Looks like fun.

How's everything with you guys? Does Ryan still have his frog?

I'm super-tired, so I'm going to sleep now . . . I'll e-mail some more tomorrow!

Love,
Abs