by David Pogue
“Well, I’ve been doing magic shows since I was in seventh grade. I do birthday parties sometimes. I’m learning balloon twisting, too. The little kids really like that.”
Abby and Ben exchanged a look. Ricky was avoiding the subject.
“Do you have . . . you know, one special trick?” Abby asked.
“I’m not supposed to talk about it. My mom says it only gets me in trouble.”
“Hey, I know,” said Ben. “Abby, why don’t you tell these guys about your power, and then everybody else can go next?”
Abby wasn’t especially thrilled about going first; she had grown so used to keeping her freakiness a secret that it was almost second nature to hide it. Still, she’d had a little practice—she’d told Morgan, and Ben, and Ferd, and the world hadn’t ended.
So she looked out the window a moment, took a breath, and then told the whole story. From the beginning. Salad. Ryan. The library. Her dad. Summer camp. Camper Show.
The other kids were completely absorbed, twisted in their seat belts to listen. Even Ben was rapt; he hadn’t heard her whole story in such detail.
“. . . and so Ferd said that he wanted me to meet other kids with real powers,” Abby concluded. “And I think he means you guys!”
Eliza was staring at her. “That’s it? That’s all you can do . . . spin an egg?”
“Well, yeah.” She met Eliza’s gaze. “I didn’t pick this power, you know. It is what it is.”
“My turn!” The others turned to look at Ricky. Now that Abby had gone first, Ricky was a lot more confident.
“Tell! Tell!” said Eliza.
“Well, okay, what I didn’t really tell you is that I have a power, too. I actually had it before I ever got into magic. I mean, you know—magic tricks.”
Abby nodded, encouraging him.
“Okay. So this one time? I was in Spanish class?”
Ricky had a way of making his voice go up at the end of sentences, so it sounded like he was asking questions when he actually wasn’t.
“And I was with my friend Tad. We were supposed to be paired up together, the whole class, like, buddied up. We were supposed to practice counting in Spanish, to learn how to say the numbers. Tad lives two houses down from me on my street, so we’ve been friends for, like, ever. We always buddy up when we’re supposed to pick a practice buddy. Except this one time? Like in sixth grade? I got so mad at him. He borrowed my bike, and like, totally crashed it. He said he didn’t. He said he never did. But I could tell, because the little thing you push to ring the bell wouldn’t move anymore, and also the back brakes, you had to squeeze really, really hard to make ’em work?”
“Go on,” said Ben, hoping to nudge Ricky back to the magic part of the story.
“Okay. So anyway, we’re practicing counting to a hundred. And the teacher, Mr. Lebowitz, he said to practice for five minutes, and then he stepped out of the room. He does that sometimes. We don’t know what he does when he does that. Some kids think he just has to go to the bathroom a lot. But there’s this one kid? Thornton? He thinks Mr. Lebowitz has a secret girlfriend in the school, like another teacher. And that every time he sneaks out of Spanish, he goes and meets her in the teacher’s lounge and kisses her!”
Ricky cracked himself up, his face like a grinning grapefruit.
“So what happened in Spanish that day?” Abby prodded.
“Well, anyway, Mr. Lebowitz was out of the room, and so everybody started to get a little silly. Tad starts saying the numbers like a robot. ‘Uno . . . dos . . . tres . . . cuatro . . .’ ”
Ricky was imitating his friend, speaking in a dull, electronic, monotone voice.
“And so then I started counting like a big fat opera singer.” And Ricky demonstrated, singing high and warbled. “ ‘Unooooooo! Doooo-ooos! Treee-eee-eeees!’ It was so funny!”
The other kids laughed politely, but Abby kept wondering if there was going to be an end to this story.
“And then Tad, he started counting by twos, like dos, cuatro, seis, ocho. You know, like two, four, six, eight. Only he was doing it like Darth Vader, with all these, like breathing sounds in between. He is such a Star Wars freak. You can’t believe his room! He’s got every single action figure, in like three different sizes. He has this life-size R2-D2 that really works! He can make it move with a remote control. You press this one button, and it makes all the little R2-D2 noises. You know what Tad’s birthday party is? It’s a Star Wars birthday party every year. Every single year since he was four!”
“Impressive,” said Eliza, entirely unimpressed.
“What about the magic, Ricky?” prodded Ben.
“Okay, right. So after he did the Darth Vader sounds, I started saying the numbers backward. Not like spelled backward or counting backward, I mean talking like this.”
And when he said “talking like this,” Ricky did that creepy thing that boys sometimes do where they breathe in while they’re talking. They actually speak while they’re inhaling. It made his voice sound sort of watery, old, and raspy. But anyway, creepy.
“And Thornton? He was sitting right by the window, and I look over, and he’s drawing on the window. You know how you can fog up the glass on a window? Like if you lean right up to it and breathe on it? There was a fogged-up place on the window, and he was writing his initials in it.”
Ricky stopped, and looked around for effect.
“See?”
Abby didn’t. “What do you mean?”
“He didn’t fog up the window! He was writing in the fogged-up place with his finger, but he didn’t breathe on it. He didn’t fog up the window!”
Ben couldn’t help thinking that Ricky had somehow left out a piece of the story; he didn’t get it at all.
“Well, someone must have fogged it up, right?” he said.
“I know! That’s what I’m telling you!” said Ricky, getting frustrated. “I did it! I fogged that window. By counting in Spanish by twos breathing in!”
Abby looked at Ben with a face that said, Is this kid for real?
Eliza was looking at him with one cocked eyebrow. “So let me get this straight. Your power is that you can fog up a window? By counting in Spanish with that weird voice?”
Ricky nodded. “By twos. I have to count by twos.”
Eliza rolled her eyes and turned to face the front of the van, as though to say, I’m done with this conversation.
“How did you know?” asked Abby. “How did you know it was you?”
“Because,” Ricky said. “I was watching Thornton writing with his finger, and I did it again. I started over at dos. And I saw another foggy place fog up on the window right next to the first one. And the thing is, I wasn’t even close to the window! I was sitting with Tad, like across the whole room from it. And so I did it again, and a couple more times. I was totally freaking out? So I told Tad to watch the window, too? And he did, and I did the trick, and told him how I was making the window fog up, but he didn’t believe me. He told me that Thornton was just breathing on the window, since he was sitting next to it. So I was mad. So you know what I did?”
Abby shook her head no.
“I fogged up his glasses! It was almost by accident. I just looked right at them, and counted again by twos—dos! cuatro! seis!—and they fogged right up, like the bathroom mirror. It was so great! And he’s like, ‘HEY!’ And he had to take them off to wipe them on his shirt. And he’s like, ‘Don’t breathe on my glasses. That’s disgusting,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, sorry.’ But then he puts them back on again and I pushed my chair wayyyy back so I was really far from him. And I’m like, ‘I’ll just sit over here so I won’t accidentally breathe on your glasses, okay?’ And he’s like, ‘That’s better!’ So then he goes, ‘Okay, my turn. Who am I being?’ And he was gonna start counting again in another funny voice. Except I interrupted him and said, ‘No, it’s still my turn. I didn’t get to a hundred.’ And so I looked right at his glasses and did it again! He was so mad! It was so funny!”
Ricky was stomping h
is feet on the floor of the van with excitement.
There was a pause, and then Eliza spoke. “So do it.”
“What?” said Ricky.
“Let’s see it. Fog up my window.” Eliza tapped the van window beside her.
Abby thought that Eliza was being rude, but Ricky was perfectly cheerful about it. “Okay, sure,” he said.
There wasn’t much to it. Using that weird inhaling-voice thing, he said, “Dos, cuatro, seis, ocho, diez.” It sounded a little like a seal barking.
A round patch of Eliza’s window, about the size of a cookie, fogged up as though someone had breathed on it. Ricky was a few feet away, way too far for him to have done it with his breath.
Eliza cocked an eyebrow. “Not bad,” she said. She couldn’t resist; she put her finger up to the window and drew a fancy script E in the foggy patch, which was already starting to fade away, from the outside in.
“Does it work when you don’t use that weird voice?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“What about counting not by twos? What if you just count one, two, three in Spanish?”
“Nope,” Ricky said again. “It only works this way.”
Abby would have found his trigger hilarious—if hers weren’t equally peculiar. Mostly, she was delighted to discover that his power was just as useless and unimportant as her own. She imagined that he’d gone through many of the same experiences and feelings.
“It’s amazing, Ricky,” she told him, turning from the foggy patch to look back at Ricky. “What does your family think?”
Ricky turned his head to look out at the passing scenery, which was hilly and green. “My sisters all think it’s just a magic trick. But my parents were really upset. They thought there was something wrong with me. They took me to a psychiatrist.”
“And what did he say?”
“She. She asked a bunch of questions, but couldn’t figure out what my little fogged-glass thing had to do with my personality or whatever. I think she was a little scared. Anyway, she said I should see a doctor. So we went and saw a doctor, and he did about a million tests and finally said there was nothing wrong with me. My parents kept telling him that they had to do something, so he said if they were still worried, they should take me to see a priest.”
“A priest?” Ben chimed in. “They thought it was something religious?”
“They thought maybe I needed an exorcism,” Ricky said solemnly. “You know, like in the movies. Where evil spirits take over your body, and a priest does a special ceremony to get ’em out.”
“So did they try that?” asked Eliza.
“Well, they were gonna. My parents took me to see this old priest guy on the Upper West Side. He lived in this little tiny apartment, like you wouldn’t believe how small it was. The bathtub is in the kitchen! Anyway, this guy asked a ton of questions that had nothing to do with me, like did I have visions, did I ever hear voices, did I scream in my sleep, did I ever have blackouts where I just can’t remember what happened in the last few hours, did I ever feel compelled to do something evil, all this stuff. I told him no, not any of those things. Only that I can fog up glass. He made me leave the room so he could talk to my parents, but later on, they told me what he said anyway.”
“What?” Abby asked.
“He said that an exorcism wouldn’t do any good because I’m not actually possessed by any evil spirits. He didn’t know how to explain my trick, but he was positive that there’s nothing in the Bible about people fogging up windows.”
Eliza snorted. “Surprise, surprise,” she said.
“How did you get picked for this trip?” Abby said. Of course, she had gotten noticed by performing at Camper Show. But she didn’t remember Ricky doing any on-stage performances where the counselors might have noticed him.
“Oh, it was kinda weird,” he replied, getting back into storytelling mode. “So this one night? In our cabin? It was after lights-out, and we were just whispering back and forth, me and this kid who’s in the bed across from me? We could see a light shining through one of the windows in our cabin, and I was gonna see if I could make him freak out. I told him there was a ghost who likes to hang around our cabin, a Spanish ghost, who speaks Spanish and stuff, and I told him I could make the ghost appear. I told him to watch the light through the window really closely, and see if he could see the ghost passing in front of it. And so I started making all kinds of weird noises and sounds, like really quietly and whispery, just saying weird words and stuff? And in the middle of it, I did my Spanish counting. And the glass fogged up, all the way across the cabin, and it looked just like some ghost was passing in front of the light out there.”
“Whoa,” breathed Ben, admiring the prank.
“Oh, yeah, it rocked,” said Ricky proudly.
“Did it scare the other kid?” Abby asked.
“Oh man, he started crying! He was totally completely scared. And he’s fourteen! He gets out of bed and goes and wakes up our counselor and tells him what happened. And he’s all, like, ‘Don’t worry, little guy, it’s just a trick, it’s not real, there’s no ghosts, go back to sleep.’ But the next day, our counselor came over and talked to me, and I showed him how I did it? And I guess that was it. After lunch, he took me to meet this other counselor, and he asked me if I wanted to go to super camp. And I said, sure.”
“Who was it, Ricky? Who was the other counselor?” asked Ben.
“You know. Him,” he said.
He was pointing at Ferd.
CHAPTER
13
Eliza
THE CAMP CADABRA VAN WAS ROOMY AND MODERN, but it wasn’t designed for all-day drives. The seat benches made your butt sore after a couple of hours. As a result, the kids kept shifting positions, crossing and uncrossing their legs, turning around and leaning on the seat backs, and generally avoiding holding the same position for too long.
Fortunately, Ferd made plenty of stops, too, for bathroom breaks, snacks, and lunch.
At around noon, they picked up some Tex-Mex Express, to go, and piled back into the van. As they started chomping their burritos and tacos, Ricky reminded them that not everybody had told their stories yet.
“Like Eliza,” he said, with a stringy scrap of lettuce hanging from the corner of his mouth. “I wanna know what your power is.”
From the back seat, most of what he’d seen of Eliza was the back of her crinkly red hair; she had spent most of the ride listening to the conversation, but looking out the window, too.
“I don’t know. It’s private,” Eliza said without even turning around.
“Aw, come on!” Ricky exclaimed. “I told you about mine!”
“Yeah, really, Eliza,” Abby added. “I thought we had a pact. I thought we’re a team.”
“Throw us a crumb, Eliza,” added Ben from the back seat.
Even Ferd chimed in. “Fair’s fair, little lady,” he said. Abby was astonished, because Ferd had been wearing ear-buds for the whole ride. She had figured that he’d been lost in his world of classical bagpipe music.
Eliza sniffed. “What do you want to know?”
“What’s your power?” said Ricky impatiently.
“Fine,” she said, a little standoffishly. She looked out the window and pretended to be bored. They were passing through a town. Like so many American towns, it had a main drag, a strip of shops and restaurants where, if you were really, really hungry, you could eat at Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, KFC, and Friendly’s without having to walk more than half a mile.
Finally, after a moment, Eliza said: “I can levitate.”
What? Abby thought. She turned to look at Ben, who was equally shocked. She’d thought that all of these powers would turn out to be pointless little silly things like hers—and like Ricky’s.
But levitation? Floating in the air? That would be another story. That’d be more like the magic you read about or see movies about. Real magic. That would be historic! People had been dreaming about flying for thousands of years.
And there was someone in the van who could do it!
“Whoooooooaaaa,” breathed Ricky. “Like, for real? Like, rising in the air?”
Ben was also having trouble with the concept. It had been hard enough for him to believe in Abby’s teeny-tiny power. Even Ricky’s power was hard for him to swallow; his brain was scrambling to figure out what this was all about.
But levitating was a completely different level of freakiness. That wouldn’t be just bending the laws of nature, like making an egg spin or fogging up a little piece of window; it would be breaking them. And it would be front-page headlines, if anyone knew.
“Does that mean you can, like, fly?” said Abby. She turned on the bench seat, folding one leg under her to face Eliza more comfortably.
“I get off the ground, okay?”
“But what’s your trigger?” said Ricky, pestering her. “Tell more! Come on. I told you mine!”
Eliza just stared out the window some more. She was not, Abby had decided, a warm and fuzzy person.
“Fair’s fair,” Abby said, feeling a little bit pushy but also desperately curious.
“It’s not a big deal,” Eliza said, but she was starting to feel outvoted.
“Flying is a very big deal, Eliza,” Ben chimed in.
“It’s not flying! I didn’t say flying,” Eliza said, finally turning to face the others. “Did I say flying? I did not.”
“You said levitation. That means rising off the ground,” Ben said. “How is that not flying?”
“Because—well, because it’s—”
Eliza stopped and looked down at her lap.
“Because it’s what?” asked Abby, as gently as she could.
“Because I can only levitate a quarter of an inch.”
There was a moment of shocked silence, and then came dual snorts from the back seat, as the boys looked at each other with raised eyebrows and tried to stifle their laughter. Abby also felt like giggling—what was the point of being able to fly, if you could only rise the height of an Oreo?—but she didn’t want Eliza to regret having opened up.
“That’s very cool,” she told Eliza encouragingly. “Actually it’s amazing.” A little white lie never hurt anyone.
