Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (8 page)

The lights were shining directly into her eyes, making it almost impossible to see all those hundreds of people watching her, waiting for her to do something impressive. She took a breath and dove in.

“I'm going to do something that's probably never been done on this stage before. It may not look like much. But the more you think about what I'm doing here, even in the days and weeks to come, the more it's going to bug you.”

Ben had written that line. It had sounded stuck-up to her, but the supportive camper crowd loved it. A couple of people whooped, and there was a smattering of applause.

“Part of what will make this demonstration so annoying is that I'm not going to be involved. I won't touch anything, choose anything, or handle anything. I'm going to rule out every possibility that anything is rigged, gimmicked, or prepared in advance.”

To make her point, she walked to the side of the stage, about fifteen feet away from the table that the stagehands had wheeled out.

She looked out across the crowd of strangers. Her mouth was dry as dust. She'd always wondered what real magicians loved about performing onstage—and now, with her knees barely holding her up, she was more mystified than ever.

“I'm going to need a couple of helpers for this little experiment,” she went on. “But it's important that it's somebody completely random. It can't be somebody I
know. So here's how we're going to choose the volunteers:
Catch!”

With that, she pulled two foam Nerf balls out of her skirt pockets and threw them out into the audience.

After a scramble, two kids wound up clutching bright-orange foam-rubber balls.

“Pretty random, right? But not random enough. I want the selection of these volunteers to have
nothing
to do with me. You two with the Nerf balls—throw them into the crowd
again!”

There was a laugh, as the crowd caught on to her little game. By having two strangers throw the balls to two
other
strangers, there was no chance that Abby would wind up choosing volunteers that she'd secretly trained beforehand.

“Okay, great! You two with the Nerf balls—please join me on stage. Oh—and nice catch.” She smiled, and there was a little bit of clapping.

To Abby, it looked like the two volunteers were moving at the speed of slugs; in the time it seemed to take them to come onto the stage, she thought, she could have run off the stage, hailed a taxi, and driven all the way home to Eastport.

Finally, they were with her, awaiting instructions.

Abby asked for their names—they were Joshua and Carly—and introduced them to the crowd.

“All right. First you, Joshua. On the table to your left,
you'll see a carton of a dozen hard-boiled eggs. We only need one of them. Your job is to prove to this audience that there is absolutely nothing tricky going on with any of these eggs. Go ahead: pick up a couple of them. Crack 'em with your fist. Peel off the shell. Throw a couple out to people in the audience. All I ask is that we wind up with one egg to use for the trick.”

As the crowd giggled, Joshua picked up three eggs, hefted them, examined them—and then began to juggle them, showing off.

This is what I get for doing the trick at a magic camp,
Abby thought.

“That's great, Joshua,” she said aloud. “You get to perform in
tomorrow's
Camper Show.”

The crowd cracked up. Abby felt the tiniest flutter of pride and excitement; that line Ben
hadn't
written.

Joshua cracked a few eggs on the edge of the table, split them, showed them, tossed a couple more into the crowd. The cameraman followed all of the action.

“Okay, Joshua,” Abby said finally. “Are you pretty satisfied that this was a dozen ordinary eggs, and that you've wound up with one of them that you, and you alone, picked out?”

“Yes I am,” said Joshua, waggling his eyebrows into the camera.

“All right. Carly, you're up next. For you, I have a little
arts-and-crafts project. Also on that table, I've brought you a dozen spools of thread, all different colors. You're going to pick one—I'm not going to pick one, or even touch one. Pick out any color you like, and break off a four-foot piece of thread.”

“Okay,” Carly said. She bent over to examine the thread and finally picked out a spool of dark blue.

“How's that thread look to you? Any trapdoors, mirrors, or secret assistants?”

Carly smiled at her and shook her head no. “It's just thread,” she said.

“Great,” Abby went on. “Can you tie one end of that thread around the middle of the ruler there? And then use the tape to fasten the other end to Joshua's egg. I'd love to help out, but I made a promise that I wouldn't get involved.”

When the volunteers had finished, they had created what looked like a first-grader's science-fair project. Each of them held one end of the ruler. The egg dangled from the thread between them.

“Can you make it stop turning?” Abby asked. Joshua reached out to steady the egg. It was motionless now, except for the faintest side-to-side swinging.

“Actually, my real question is this: Can you make it
start
turning?”

Just as Carly reached toward the egg, Abby quickly added, “without touching it, without blowing on it, and without moving the ruler?”

Carly, Joshua, and the audience chuckled as they suddenly realized how difficult that would be.

“No, we can't,” Joshua finally told her.

“But I can,” Abby said with a smile.

And she did.

She turned to look at the egg. Then, with her fingers hidden by her long hair, she tugged at her earlobes. The great thing, as Ben had pointed out in rehearsal, was that you couldn't tell that she was pulling on her ears; it looked as though she was just massaging her temples, the perfectly normal gesture of a mind reader.

But the truth is, nobody in that audience was paying much attention to Abby and her magical gesture. Every eye was on the egg, which began to spin on the end of that thread in the most ghostly way. The giant high-definition screens revealed every speck of dust on the Scotch Tape and every tiny bit of fluff on the dark-blue thread.

And there was complete silence in the Weasley Theater.

What's going on?
Abby thought, flicking her eyes away from the egg for a fraction of a second.
Don't they see it? Why don't they react?

She knew what was happening, of course: she had just
exposed herself as a freak. It was like going on TV to brag about how loudly you can burp. The entire world of Camp Cadabra would now realize that she was a complete weirdo—and they'd laugh about her for years.

But that wasn't the worst of it. After flopping in such a big way, she'd never have a chance to find out what her dumb little power was all about. She'd never find anyone else like her, or anyone who knew anything about this kind of thing.

To the audience, it looked like Abby had forgotten what was supposed to come next. She stood there, flustered, her hand starting to shake.

“Go on, Abby!”

She looked out into the blinding darkness, but she couldn't see anyone past the third row. She had, however, recognized the voice; it was Ben's. It was enough to snap her back to earth.

“Stop it, Carly,” Abby said, finally remembering how the trick was supposed to go on. “Stop it from spinning, will you?”

Carly did, using her hand. Abby made it spin again.

“No, seriously—try to make it stop,” Abby said, forcing a grin.

Carly grabbed the egg, steadied it, and let go. But it started spinning again. For the first time, Abby could hear the audience coming alive, buzzing and pointing.

“All right, you guys. Now comes phase 2. I need you to shorten that thread up, so the egg is only hanging a foot down from the ruler.”

The two volunteers turned the ruler over and over, winding the thread around it.

“Great! Good job. And now, how about lowering it into the water?”

The water was actually a fish tank—or, rather, the Nature Station's glass terrarium. Ben had carefully transferred the plants, the gravel, and the turtle out of it, washed out the terrarium, and then filled it with tap water. (“Presto, change-o,” he'd said. “Now it's an aquarium!”)

Carly and Josh stepped a couple of paces closer to the aquarium table and stood on either side. Carly steadied the egg, and then the two of them lowered it into the water.

“That's it,” Abby said. “Just rest the ruler across the top.”

There the egg sat, halfway down in the fish tank, completely inaccessible to air currents, utterly untouched by human hands. An egg in a tank.

The cameraman crouched down to focus his lens on the underwater egg.

“Now, we're all magicians here. You're all capable of figuring out how any trick is done. What I'd like you to do now is figure out how
this
is done.”

And with that, she reached up to her earlobes again and made that egg spin
in water.
It was the creepiest darned
thing most of those campers and counselors had ever seen.

This time, Abby didn't have to wonder what they were thinking. The applause was immediate—and thunderous. It continued as Abby dropped her hands to her sides, and the egg slowly swam to a stop. Abby took a step backward, beaming.

She looked out into the theater, the waves of fear finally falling away. For the first time, she was able to experience the audience's reaction, and it was
awesome.
She felt like flying. She wasn't a freak anymore—she was a magician! With Ben's help, she had turned her pointless power into an actual stage illusion—and
that,
she thought, was quite a trick.

She scanned the audience, hoping to spot Ben, but the spotlights continued to blind her.

Much later, though, she would remember something that she
did
see, something she didn't think was important at the time: a line of three counselors sitting together in the second row. They were the only ones not clapping. Instead, they were bending forward in a huddle, talking fast, looking up at the egg and pointing in her direction.

A
BBY QUICKLY DISCOVERED
a great thing about performing a hit trick at Camper Show: you become a minor celebrity. When she got back to Witches 3 that night, No-H Sara and the other girls mobbed her, hugged her, high-fived her, and pelted her with questions and congratulations.

“I thought you haven't done much magic before?”

“What'd Ferd say?”

“Will you look at my trick and tell me if you think it's any good?”

“How long did you have to practice?”

“Where'd you get those Nerf balls?”

But Abby also quickly discovered a not-so-great thing
about performing a hit trick at Camper Show: the conversation turned pretty quickly to how she did it.

“Hey, so how does the trick work?”

“Yeah, how'd you do it?”

“What's the secret?”

“Can you teach me?”

“Come on, you can tell us. We're your best friends!”

Unfortunately, she couldn't tell them. Oh, she
would
have told them the secret of the trick—if there were one to tell. But what do you say when you don't even know how it works yourself?

So Abby froze, unable to say anything at all. “Well, it's—it's kind of complicated,” she managed in a small voice.

Fortunately, Claudia the counselor caught her panic-stricken look and stepped in to help. “Come on, witchezzzz,” she said matter-of-factly, “There'll be time for that later. It's already past lights-out time. Who's first for the outdoor shower?”

And just like that, the party broke up. Little No-H Sara was the last to leave Abby's side—“You're gonna tell me how you did that, girl!” she said with an evil look—and then it was over.

In the morning, on the way to breakfast, everybody seemed to recognize Abby. Nobody had the first clue what her name was, but everybody who'd been at the show high-fived her, gave her a thumbs-up, or at least smiled as they passed. The whole feeling of Camp Cadabra had changed.

She didn't see Ben until Impromptu class that morning. As soon as he loped into the room, he broke into a huge smile and gave her a quick, clumsy hug. “You did great,” he said.

“It was your idea,” she countered.

“Yeah, but it's your power.” He seemed convinced at last.

When Ferd entered the room, once again wearing a huge Hawaiian shirt, the class began. At last, Abby could sink back into the routine of being nobody special.

But it didn't last long.

Ferd's class that day, as often happened, had more to do with presentation and style than with the step-by-steps for performing one particular trick. At the end of the class, Ferd wrapped up by saying: “And this, my people, is my final word of advice to you in your blossoming impromptu career: Know when to stop. A magician who performs just one unforgettable effect is a genius; a magician who performs just one too many is a fool. Be good, my people. Now be off.”