by David Pogue
“Not my mind! With my earlobes,” Abby said. Morgan started getting up to leave, and Abby suddenly realized how silly that sounded. “I mean, I don’t really know how I’m doing it. It does it.”
“Can you move stuff around? Maybe you have that ESP thing where you can move stuff around with mind control!”
Abby shook her head. “I spent all weekend trying. This is it. This is all I can do. My one and only magical power.”
Morgan sipped her diet soda thoughtfully. “Well, if that’s really a magical power, it’s a pretty lame one,” she said finally. “Wouldn’t it be better if you could fly? Or turn invisible? Or, like, make Mrs. Thatch forget the names of the state capitals?”
Abby threw her head back in exasperation. “Yes, I know. Don’t you think I’d rather have powers like that? But this is it. It is what it is.”
“Well, if you’re telling me the truth,” Morgan said finally, “then I think you should find out more about this. Get some books from the library. Google it.”
Abby nodded; that was good advice. Surely there was somebody, somewhere, at some time in history, who had made an egg spin and written about it.
“Okay, gimme the egg,” she told Morgan.
“How come?” Morgan asked, handing it over.
“Because it’s not just a trick,” Abby began. “It’s—”
“I know, I know, it’s a power,” Morgan interrupted, grinning.
“No,” said Abby. “It’s my lunch.”
CHAPTER
3
Library
ONE OF THE PERKS OF LIVING in a leafy suburb like Eastport is that you can pretty much ride your bike anywhere. Most of the streets even have sidewalks, so your parents don’t flip out when you say you’re going to ride your bike to the library.
That’s exactly what Abby planned to do after school. Her dad offered to drive her, but Morgan was going to meet her at the library, and Abby didn’t want a hovering adult hanging over them.
“No, thanks,” she told him on her way out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I think I’ll ride my bike. You know, get some fresh air and exercise.”
Ryan had just burst into the kitchen. He stared at her as though she’d grown antlers. “You want to get fresh air and exercise?”
“Leave me alone, Ryan. I’m going to the library with Morgan. Bye, Dad!” She pushed open the door to the garage.
But Ryan scampered right along after her.
“Wait, wait! Before you go—do this one!”
He waved a piece of scrap paper under her nose.
“Ryan, please. I gotta go, okay? Let’s do your code later.”
Ryan had become obsessed with codes lately. He’d filled a hundred pieces of scrap paper with nonsensical-looking writing that, once you solved it, always turned out to be some eight-year-old’s idea of a joke, like “Q: What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? A: FROSTBITE.”
“Oh, come on, Ab! Pleeeeeease? Please please please please please? Just real quick!”
Abby sighed loudly to make her point. Then she turned and grabbed the piece of paper from Ryan’s hand. She read what was written there in his cramped little pencil writing:
Your time has come to leave. Fly away! Is evil going to prevail? Open the door and flee!
Abby had twenty minutes to get to the library and meet Morgan. “It’s a masterpiece, Ryan. Too hard for me. I give up.” She tried to hand the paper back to him.
“No, no!” said Ryan, “Find the hidden message! Okay, I’ll give you a hint. It’s a first-word code. Just read the first words of the sentences.”
Abby looked at it again, reading the first words out loud. “Your . . . fly . . . is . . . open.”
Ryan clapped his hands and cackled hysterically.
“Cute. Real cute,” she told him. “Hey, when we both grow up and become spies, you’ll be the first person I’ll communicate with. And that’s a promise.” She reached out and ruffled his hair, then turned to get her bike.
“Wait, wait! I have to teach you the second-word code!”
“When I come back, Ry. See ya!”
Little brothers, Abby thought as she strapped on her bike helmet. Can’t live with ’em, can’t sell ’em on eBay.
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 wh
o 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.
CHAPTER
4
Pool
“MAGIC 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 discover
y. “Aha!” she said, pulling out a white piece of paper. “The price list.”
Abby knew that her family didn’t have a ton of money. She looked out at the sunshine sparkling on the town pool, watched some kid jumping off the diving board, and prepared herself for the bad news.
“Good heavens! How could anyone afford to go to a camp this expensive?” she imagined her mom saying.
But that’s not what her mom actually said.
“Good heavens! This is the cheapest camp I’ve ever heard of!”
Abby turned to see her mom studying the white paper.
“This camp costs less than Ryan’s camp—and his isn’t a sleep-away camp!”
“I wanna go to Abby’s camp, too!” said Ryan, sounding exactly like an eight-year-old.
“But you’re already signed up for Camp Makonoweea,” said his mom.
Mrs. Carnelia almost slipped and called it Camp Economeea, which is what she and her husband called it as a joke. (It was not a very fancy camp.)
“Ryan, you’ll have a great time at your own camp,” said Abby. “All your friends are going! Besides, I’ll call you every once in a while.”
“No, I don’t think you’ll be doing that,” said her mother, reading one of the documents. “They have a no–cell phones rule. But they do have e-mail, so you can write to us.”
Abby blinked at her. “No cell phones?”
Her mother shrugged. “I guess they want you to focus on the natural setting, the meaningful friendships, all that sort of thing.”
Ryan was suddenly a lot happier.
Abby’s parents had given her a sweet, shiny, metallic-purple cell phone as an early graduation gift, and Ryan had gone nuts with jealousy. He’d wanted one ever since. He was thrilled to see the look on Abby’s face when she learned she’d have to do without hers. It definitely took the sting out of her being allowed to go to sleep-away camp.
“No cell phones! Oh yeah! Uh-huh! Can you feel it?” he sang. He danced around Abby, poking at her with his index fingers.
