Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (7 page)

“Listen,” he said. “The thing you said about an egg. Is that true? Is that for real?”

She gave a tiny nod, still looking away.

There was a pause, and then Ben went on.

“I mean, look, I'll be honest with you. I've never seen a trick that I couldn't figure out, or at least that I couldn't think of a way to do it. But, I mean . . .” He stopped and sighed. “I mean—could you show me?”

Abby wiped at her eye and sneaked a look at him for the first time. “What?”

Ben studied her face seriously. “I want to see your egg thing. Would you show me?”

When she hesitated, Ben took charge. He scanned the salad bar and quickly found what he was looking for: a basket of hard-boiled eggs. He grabbed one and pressed it into Abby's hand.

“Show me. I want to see it.”

It took her a minute to make up her mind. But Abby realized that, at this point, she had nothing to lose. She knew she couldn't make herself look any sillier.

“Hold out your hand,” she told him.

She grabbed his hand from underneath to steady it. She put the egg on his hand. She let go.

“All right,” she said. “This is my power.”

She tugged on her earlobes. “This is my trigger,” she said, with a hint of a smile.

The egg began to turn on Ben's palm.

What Abby learned that day is that magicians and normal people react to magic tricks very differently. A big, flashy trick that blows away normal people may not excite a magician very much, because a magician can guess how it's done.

What really impresses a magician is a trick that
can't
be figured out, no matter how small. And Ben knew that was what he was seeing. There was no breeze, no wires, no magnets, no little tiny trained hamsters. It was an egg that
he
had picked out of the basket, on
his
palm—and Abby was three feet away.

It was
impossible.

She finally took her eyes off the egg to look at Ben. His mind had been blown to smithereens. He simply couldn't process what he was seeing.

He didn't say anything for a long time.

He looked at the egg very closely, holding it right up to his eye. Then he looked at Abby, his eyes intense under his floppy bangs. “Abby,” he said. “Either I've just seen the greatest magic trick ever invented . . .” He swallowed. “Or you really are a witch.”

I
F YOU ASKED HER NOW
,
Abby could still tell you every single detail of that first day of magic camp. Her emotions were on a roller coaster all day. And in those moments by the salad bar, she went from feeling like the loneliest person on earth to knowing that she had a close friend she could trust.

She remembers playing soccer in the afternoon. All that running around, full out, was just what she needed. By the end of the game, she was exhausted and exhilarated. And hungry. After a quick rinse in the outdoor shower at Witches 3, she headed with her cabin mates over to the dining hall for dinner.

She didn't wind up sitting with them, however. While
she was standing at the pasta bar, ladling pesto sauce onto her angel hair noodles, Ben came directly over to her. He didn't waste any time telling her what was on his mind.

“I know what you have to do, Abby.”

She put the ladle back in the saucepot and glanced at him. “Oh, hello to you, too, Ben. I'm fine—thanks for asking.”

Either he didn't get it, or he didn't hear it.

“I've been thinking all afternoon. I know what you have to do. You have to do your egg trick at Camper Show.”

Camper Show was the highlight of each day at Camp Cadabra. After dinner each night, everybody piled into the brand-new, high-tech, outdoor theater, and Camp Cadabra turned into a breathtaking magic festival. First, at 7:00 p.m., the campers watched what they called Magic Show—a performance by a professional magician who'd been flown in for the evening from Las Vegas or New York or wherever.

Then, at 7:30, there was Camper Show; that's when a few fellow campers got the chance to try out the tricks they'd been working on in front of a live audience.

Abby picked up her tray and turned toward her table. “Camper Show? Thank you. I'm flattered. But seriously—are you crazy?”

“Come on, Abby! Why not?”

“They'll laugh me off the stage, Ben! It's not a good trick. It's not
even
a trick. It's small, it's short, it's boring, it doesn't go anywhere, and it's pointless. It's
lame!”

Three hundred kids all laughing at her—now
that
would be the perfect wrap-up to her wobbly Camp Cadabra experience.

Ben nodded, slurping his milkshake. “Okay, fine. So we'll goose it up.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Goose it up?”

“I'll admit, it's a little small for a stage show. So we'll make it play bigger.”

“Like how? How do you make it big enough to see from the back of the room? Use a dinosaur egg?”

He grinned. “Why? Can you spin those too?”

“I don't know,” Abby said. “Go get me one from the salad bar, and I'll give it a shot.”

Ben pretended that he was about to get up from the bench to go get one. But then he stopped short and sat down again. “Seriously, Abby. I think you should perform it. You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.”

“Like what?”

“Well, at the very least, you'll meet a lot of people. You'll get fantastic experience in appearing before a big crowd. And if your trick really is . . . you know, more than just a trick . . .”

He trailed off for a moment. His face told Abby all she needed to know: that he was still having trouble getting used to the fact that she had an actual power, that he wasn't sure he should believe it.
That's okay,
she thought.
I'm still not sure I should believe it myself.

“You mean, if I'm not making this up about my power,” she prodded him.

He looked down, but he nodded. “Right. If it's for real—if it's for real, then at least you'll be showing the entire camp at once. And if anybody here knows anything about it—you know, about sort of—unexplainable powers—then you'll hear about it.”

Abby considered this point as she twirled the pasta on her fork. If her little stunt could impress the other magicians as much as it had impressed Ben, then maybe it wouldn't be so bad. And it would be a great opportunity for the camp's counselors to see it—real magicians. Maybe one of them might know, at last, something about unexplained phenomena.

She closed her eyes for a brief moment, and then shook her head. “It's just too small, Ben,” she said finally.

“Well, if that's what you're worried about, don't. Plenty of kids are planning to do close-up tricks in Camper Show—little tiny tricks with dice, or cards, or coins. That's why they have a cameraman!”

“They what?”

“There's a guy with a video camera, and the trick is projected on big screens on either side of the stage,” he said. “Everybody can see it. You don't have to worry.”

“But it's just not any good as a trick. After all these people get up there with mind-reading and card routines and sawing people in half, I can't just get up there, spin an egg, and walk off.”

“I know,” Ben replied. “But I've been working on this part, and I think I know how to make it work. Look, Camper Show isn't some birthday party or some talent show. You're not performing for normal people; you're performing to an audience of magicians. Magicians have a different amazement threshold. We've got to play up the impossibility of it. Your trick isn't especially dazzling, but it does violate the laws of physics, and we have to make sure the kids know that.”

“Okay, how?” she asked.

His leg was bouncing up and down, something it seemed to do by itself when Ben's mind was racing. “We're gonna need a dozen spools of thread. A couple of Nerf balls. And a ruler, and a terrarium from the Nature Station.”

She had no idea what he was talking about. So she said, “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“And a dozen hard-boiled eggs.”

She still didn't get it. “Why a dozen? Why do we need all that stuff?”

“I'll explain on the way. Finish up; we've got a scavenger hunt ahead of us.”

The fourth night of Camp Cadabra's first two-seek session was cool and breezy, a welcome break from the heat of the first few days. The audience of campers and counselors wore sweaters and sweatshirts for that night's Camper Show.

There was no audition process for each evening's show. You signed up at lunch with a little description of your act. Truth is, the camp didn't really need auditions to ensure the quality of the show. The terror of looking like a bumbling idiot in front of three hundred fellow magicians was enough pressure to scare away the really lame acts. Usually, Camper Show included very good tricks presented by very talented campers.

Abby was quite sure that she would be the exception.

After dinner that night, it took No-H Sara ten minutes to persuade Abby to leave the Witches 3 cabin.

“Come
on,
girl!” Sara said, pounding the open doorway in frustration. “If we don't go right now, we're not gonna get good seats!”

Abby had been working with Ben on a presentation of the egg trick for two days, feverishly trying to come up with something that wouldn't seem too pathetic. She'd learned her patter, rehearsed the setup. She could practically do it in her sleep. And yet—

“I feel like I'm gonna throw up,” Abby moaned, flopping back onto her bed. No-H Sara walked back into the cabin and kneeled down next to Abby.

“Abby, come on,” she implored. “You said yourself you've got it down cold! It's going to be fine! We're all gonna be screaming for you. And besides, everyone's here to learn and get better, right? Everyone roots for everyone. What are you worried about?”

“Auuuugh!” Abby covered her face with her hands. What was she worried about?
Everything.
Nobody except Ben knew that, in fact, Abby had never done a single trick in front of an audience. The egg thing was all she could do. And the thought of three hundred kids seeing right through her was almost more than she could bear.

And that's if the trick worked. And if they could see it. And if they didn't think it was lame. And if she didn't freeze, faint, or puke—or all three at once.

Sara stepped forward and used the only remaining persuasion tactic she could think of: she started tickling Abby under the armpits.

“Okay—okay stop!” Abby cried out, shivering and giggling. She squirmed off of the bed, stood up, and backed away. “Okay, fine. I'm going. But if I pass out, you're calling 911.”

“It's a deal,” said Sara. “Now let's get going.”

When they arrived at the Weasley Theater, Abby checked the bulletin board in the lobby. That's where the show committee posted, each night, the lineup of performers for that evening. Her name appeared as the fifth performer out of nine. That suited her fine; she didn't want to be either the first or the last magician in the show. That would be much more pressure than she could bear.

Abby took her seat in the front row of soft, reclining chairs, along with the other campers who'd be performing. As the lights went down, she caught a glimpse of Ben a few rows back. He gave her a double thumbs-up, but Abby wondered if he was as confident in her as he said he was.

The show opened with a ninth-grade camper performing his version of the Zombie. It's a standard stage illusion where, as music plays, a shiny silver sphere appears to float with a mind of its own, balancing delicately on the edge of a silk scarf before ducking behind the magician's back. The campers, who all knew how hard the Zombie is to perform properly, went wild.

Next came a card-manipulation trick involving two-handed fans of cards; alas, it went terribly wrong that night. The magician, a thirteen-year-old from Pennsylvania, was sweating too much in the stage lights and wound up dropping cards all over the stage.

That's going to be me right there,
Abby told herself.

A tiny nine-year-old girl was up next, performing to music. It was an unusual routine, involving white-to-rainbow color changes, first of silk scarves, then paper flowers, then finally confetti. The crowd loved it.

While the fourth act went on—a mind-reading trick—Abby walked over to the stairs at the side of the stage, where a teenaged stage hand clipped a wireless microphone to Abby's blouse. “You're gonna do great,” he said helpfully. “Knock 'em dead.”

And then it was time.

Abby walked up the four stairs to the stage and somehow made it to the center.

“Hi guys,” she said, her voice a little shaky. She wasn't used to hearing her voice amplified a hundred times, booming across the outdoor theater, under the stars.