Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (3 page)

The Eastport Public Library, ten blocks from the Carnelias' house, is a very modern library—the pride of Eastport. You can borrow DVD movies, music CDs, computer game cartridges, gadgets like iPods or GPS things for your car—you can even check out toys. Some people claim that somewhere in the back, the Eastport Public Library even has
books.

“Yo, girl,” said Morgan when Abby arrived. “You ready for some hardcore Googling? Let's do this thing.”

Once inside the library, they each bought a bottle of
iced tea (the Eastport Library had had a café since 1998) and sat down by the computers to search the Internet.

Abby fired up Google and tried typing in phrases like “spinning egg magic.”

That search led her to all kinds of science videos, all very interesting. “Dude! Look at this!” she whispered to Morgan.

They watched a YouTube video that showed how you can spin a
boiled
egg on its end—you know, standing up—but a
raw
egg just falls over when you try.

“I got one, too. Look at this,” Morgan whispered back. She pointed to her own screen, where Abby read an article about crushing eggs with your hand. She learned that it's really hard to crush an egg when your hand is wrapped all the way around it; the shell distributes the force evenly, even if you squeeze really hard.

On a Web site about science magic, they found out that you can make an entire hard-boiled egg scoot out of its shell just by blowing on it really hard—if, beforehand, you just make a pinhole in one end and a dime-sized hole at the far end.

At one point, Morgan rapped Abby excitedly on the shoulder. “Dawg—this is it! This is your trick!”

Abby scooted her chair over. Morgan hit Play. It was a video of somebody spinning an egg with his hand, then
stopping it briefly with his finger—and when he took his hand away, the egg started spinning again.

Abby and Morgan looked at each other. It was
so
close!

But that's when the narrator popped onto the screen. It was one of those Mr. Science–type guys, with stick-out ears and a white lab coat.

“Magic? Of course not!” he was saying. “Remember: there's no such thing as magic! There's only science. What we're showing you now is just a cool feature of regular eggs. Once you start spinning an egg, the momentum of all that yolky stuff inside wants to keep going—even if you stop it for a second with your finger. But you don't have to tell your friends that; I won't mind!”

Abby softly banged her forehead on the keyboard.

After half an hour, Abby and Morgan gradually reached an astonishing conclusion: in the entire, massive, pulsing Internet universe, there was not one single Web page about making an egg spin by pulling your earlobes.

“Okay then,” said Morgan matter-of-factly. She stood up. “We'll try books.”

As it turned out, most of what the library had were magic books—books full of magic
tricks.
They rounded up a few of those to check out, just to get a feel for the field.

There were also a few books about
real
magic, with titles
like
Witches, Warlocks, and Wizardry: Magic Belief Systems Through History
and
The Human Need for Magic: A Sociological Approach.
Abby's interest perked up; maybe these books would be more like it.

By the time Abby said goodbye to Morgan and rode home, there were eleven books in her backpack. Most of them were hardcover books, and they were heavy. It took her longer to ride her bike back from the library than it had taken her to get there.

After a week of disappearing into her library books, Abby reached what she thought were two important conclusions about magic.

First, people have always wished that magic were real. The first civilizations worshiping the sun and the stars . . . the Greeks with their mythology of magical gods . . . people these days who pay to see magicians who they
know
are faking it—everybody wants to believe that magic is possible.

Second, people usually find out eventually that there
is
no real magic.

Oh, there are close calls. There are all kinds of things that people
want
to believe in. There are freaky coincidences, rumors, and ancient tales of mysticism from centuries ago.
There are religious miracles that nobody's ever seen firsthand.

But when it comes to magic that you can see yourself, repeat reliably, prove scientifically, there's never been much of anything.

Until I came along,
Abby thought with mixed emotions.

One night, she was sitting on her bed, flipping through the last chapters of
Sorcery and Society: The Need to Believe,
when a voice boomed from her doorway.

“Pardon the intrusion, my little Abbitha. Do I disturb?”

She looked up to see her father's grinning face.

“No, no, come on in,” she said.

It was hard to resist Mr. Carnelia. He had a gentle soul, he had little nicknames for everyone, and he made the best spaghetti sauce ever.

Or at least he did when he was around. In those days, he worked as an airline pilot. And airline pilots have some of the wackiest work schedules in the world: they're away from home for twenty days in a row, flying around the country, and then they're home for two weeks straight. Abby liked the dad-at-home weeks a lot more than the dad-not-there weeks.

“Doing some homework, are we?” he said as he sat down on her stuffed-animal trunk.

“Yeah,” Abby lied. “Just some school stuff.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Homework about witch doctors and Houdini?”

He nudged a book on the floor with his foot. It was called
The Focus on Hocus Pocus.
On the cover, there were pictures of magicians through the ages.

“What kind of school do we send you to, anyway?”

Abby sighed and flopped back on her pillows. “Okay, it's not really school homework,” she said.

Mr. Carnelia bent over, picked up the book, and walked over to sit on the foot of her bed.

“Now listen, little one,” he said kindly. “You don't get to be as old as I am without learning how to tell when something is on your favorite daughter's mind.”

He tapped her ankle gently twice with his meaty fist. “You rush off from dinner every night, you haven't written anything on your blog in two weeks, and we've almost forgotten what Morgan looks like. Something is up with you, beetling.”

Abby scrunched farther down into her pillows.

“I'm going to stick my neck out here,” he went on, “and make a guess. I believe that all of this has something to do with what happened the other day to your hard-boiled egg. Am I close?”

Abby just turned over onto her stomach, face in the pillows.

“I'll take that as a yes,” he said. “Well, in that case, I'll let you in on a little secret: I don't believe in magic myself. But I do believe in Abigail the Magnificent. And I would like to become your patron.”

“What's that?” Abby allowed one eye to peek out from the pillow folds.

“In the golden age, my dear, there were great musicians and artistes, and then there were the patrons—the rich and the royals, who gave money to those performers and creators to support their artistic endeavors.”

Abby flopped back over to look at him, listening carefully.

“What you may not realize, little McAbbister, is that I was once quite a magician myself. I pulled enough quarters out of ears to fill the Grand Canyon. I did amateur birthday party shows for every kid who ever turned six in Bernard, Oregon. And it's quite apparent that you, my dear, have been bitten by the magic bug.”

Half of Abby wanted to reply,
Well, kind of.
And the other half wanted to say,
Well, not really. I don't want to perform—I just want to know what's going on with me!

She couldn't decide whether or not to discuss her powers with her dad. He was the most understanding adult she'd ever met, but he was still an adult.

In the end, she didn't have to say anything. He reached
into his back pocket and carefully unfolded something he'd torn out of the newspaper.

“So I wanted to show you this,” he said. “I saw it and I thought of you right away.”

She took the clipping from him and examined it. It was an ad. It said:

“
Magic camp?
” said Abby.

“It's only a thought,” smiled her dad. “But if I may say so, it's a brilliant thought. Magic camp changed my whole life.”

“You went to magic camp?”

“Indeed,” he replied. “When I was thirteen. It was my first sleep-away camp, and it was unforgettable. Professional magicians would come to perform at night, and we'd work on our tricks all day. I made friends that I'm still in touch with to this very day.”

“But I don't know any magic tricks,” Abby blurted before she could stop herself.

Mr. Carnelia eyed her carefully.

“Abster. I have seen you do positively alarming things to a Grade A chicken's egg. I have seen you cover your bedroom carpeting with enough magic books to fill a library. You can't tell me that you don't know any magic.”

The thing was, some of those books really
had
gotten Abby sort of interested in the whole hobby. And there was something in the newspaper ad that had really gotten her attention: that bit about “unexplained phenomena.” If ever there was an unexplained phenomenon, earlobe egg spinning was it.

“Isn't it going to be all boys?” Abby asked.

“Well, if it
is
mostly boys, you're getting to the age where that might actually be considered a bonus.” He got up from the bed. “But I'll tell you what. I'll try to find out more about this place, and you give it some thought for this summer. What say ye?”

He offered his hand. Abby grinned and stuck out her foot for him to shake.

“Deal,” she said.

She didn't know it at the time, but magic camp was going to be a very big deal indeed.

“M
AGIC CAMP
?”
RYAN SHOUTED.
“She gets to go to magic camp? Don't tell me it's sleep-away camp!”

Abby smiled at him sweetly. “It's sleep-away camp.”

“Mom!” said Ryan, annoyed.

“Abby's eleven, honey,” his mother replied. “When you're eleven, you can go to sleep-away camp, too.”

They were sitting at a white metal table beside the town pool, drying off. Camp Cadabra's brochure had come in the mail—if you could call it a brochure. It was more like a glossy magazine, sixty-four pages long. It had page after page of gorgeous photos, showing kids laughing in the sunshine, sailing on a rippling blue lake, and practicing magic tricks with brightly colored silk scarves in a sunlit outdoor theater. 29

Mrs. Carnelia shook her head. “Besides, honey, nothing's for sure yet. I'm not sure we could send Abby to this camp even if we wanted to. It looks like a camp for millionaires. And we are definitely not millionaires.”

“Well, how much is it?” Abby asked. “Maybe I could just go for the two-week session.”

Two months ago, magic camp would have been the last thing on Abby's wish list. There were plenty of other camps that would have come first in her mind: music camp, art camp, maybe lying-on-the-beach-with-milkshakes-reading camp. Magic camp never would have occurred to her.

But that was before she discovered that she was a freak.

That was before she'd changed, in her own mind, from Abby the Average to Abby the Truly Weird. And at this point, after exhausting all hope of finding out more about her weirdness online and in books, this camp thing was looking like her best hope at getting some professional advice. The more she'd thought about it, and listened to her dad's great funny stories from his magic-camp days, and looked at those pictures in the brochure—the more she wanted to go.

As she rooted around in the white mailing envelope that had brought the Camp Cadabra brochure, Mrs. Carnelia made a discovery. “Aha!” she said, pulling out a white piece of paper. “The price list.”