by David Pogue
“It’s not,” Eliza retorted. “It’s totally stupid. I’ve never even told anyone.”
“You must have told someone,” Ricky pointed out. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Like Ferd?” said Abby. She couldn’t help noticing that everybody’s favorite weirdo seemed to play a central part in getting everybody on this van.
“I didn’t exactly tell him,” Eliza replied. “My counselor told him. She caught me.”
The others were all completely rapt with attention, eyes wide. Eliza sighed. She’d have to spill her guts now.
“Okay, look. It’s a totally lame power, okay? I can only levitate a tiny bit. And even then, I can’t keep my balance. It’s like if you were trying to balance on a bunch of marbles on the ground. You’d slip and slide all over the place. That’s what it’s like. It’s totally useless.”
“Why can’t you just hold on to something?” asked Ricky.
“Well, I do. I have to, or else I’ll fall right over.”
Using both hands, Eliza flicked her cloud of orange hair off her shoulders, a habit she had whenever she was a little nervous. She plucked at the folds of her enormous T-shirt to adjust it a little.
“So how did someone see you using your power?” asked Ben.
“Okay, well, one night I was trying to sneak out of my bunk in Witches 2 to get a snack from the fridge. Normally, nobody ever gets out of bed after lights out, because you can hear the footsteps. The floor, like, creaks. But it’s no big deal for me because I’m not actually touching the floor. I sort of hover just above it, as long as I’m holding on to the bunk beds for balance. I sort of scooch myself along by pushing off the posts of the beds and stuff. Like I’m on a really, really flat skateboard.”
Abby felt just a tiny bit cheated. That, she thought, almost doesn’t even count as levitation.
“It was great because I didn’t make any sound. I got all the way over to the mini-fridge without ever touching the ground. We had just made s’mores that night, and there were some leftover chocolate bars in the fridge. I stole one and grabbed a couple graham crackers, and not a soul knew it!”
She was warming up now, pleased with herself.
“So how’d you get caught?” Abby asked.
“What’s a s’more?” said Ricky.
Eliza answered Ricky first. “You know, where you roast a marshmallow on a stick and then mush it between two graham crackers with a piece of a chocolate bar, so it gets all melted and gooey. It’s awesome!”
Eliza lived in New York City, where very few people made campfires in the summer. So to her, s’mores were a huge discovery.
“How’d you get caught?” Ben asked.
“Oh,” said Eliza, losing some of her enthusiasm. “I was trying to float back to my bunk, but it was too hard to carry the food in one hand and keep myself steady with the other one. So I wound up losing my balance and falling on my butt. I tried to get up and levitate again, back to my bunk, but when I hit the floor, I woke up my counselor. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was watching me go the whole way back.”
She shrugged. “Next morning, I had a visit from Ferd at breakfast. Right, Ferd?”
But he didn’t reply. He was either lost in iPod Land again or pretending to be.
“Anyway. Here I am.” She didn’t seem too happy about it. Then again, Eliza never seemed too happy about anything.
“What’s your trigger?” said Ricky, who was much more easily fired up. “What makes it happen? What do you have to do?”
Eliza made it clear that she didn’t want to discuss her trigger. “That’s my little secret,” is all she said.
“Why, Eliza? Why don’t you want to tell us?” asked Abby.
“We’re your friends here,” added Ben. “Whatever it is, we’re not going to judge you.” He was hoping she’d forgotten the little giggle-snort he’d made when he found out her power.
Eliza looked out the window at the passing landscape, which had given way to a greener world of rolling hills.
“Doesn’t matter,” Eliza said. “It’s not something I want to talk about, okay? Let it drop.”
“Well, I know it’s not something you say, like my trigger is,” Ricky piped up. “Because then they would have heard you in the cabin that night.”
“And it’s not something you do with your hands, like my trigger,” Abby added, enjoying the game. “Because you needed your hands to hold on to the bunk beds so you wouldn’t fall over.”
“Okay, fine!” said Eliza, finally, rolling her eyes. “Okay. It’s not something I say, and it’s not something with my hands. It’s something I think.”
“Cooooool!” Ricky exclaimed. “You can do it just by thinking?”
“Yes,” Eliza said. “I think about a herd of buffalos. Satisfied?”
“Well, what’s so embarrassing about that?” asked Abby. “You acted like it was something that people would make fun of.”
“Well, it’s not just buffalos. I have to think about buffalos that . . . are all walking backward.”
“A herd of buffalos walking backward?” said Ben. “Man, that’s pretty specific.”
“Yeah,” muttered Eliza. “A herd of buffalos walking backward and wearing . . .”
“Wearing what?” said Ricky.
“Is this the embarrassing part?” asked Abby.
“Yeah.”
“Oooooh, let’s guess!” shouted Ricky. “I bet it’s, like, ballerina tutus! Is it tutus?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
“Regular clothes? Is it some kind of regular clothes?” offered Ben.
“No!”
“It’s got to be something more embarrassing than that, or she would have told us,” Abby pointed out. “Is it, like, underpants?”
“No! Not exactly,” muttered Eliza.
“A bib?” offered Ben.
“Is it a bra?” blurted Ricky, giggling hysterically.
Eliza glared at him. “No, no, no!” she said. “Nothing like that.” She stared miserably ahead at the dashboard. It was half a minute before she spoke again.
“The buffalos have to be wearing diapers. Happy now?” The three other kids, having promised not to laugh, did everything they could to contain themselves.
“Ohhhhh,” said Ricky solemnly, but the “ohhh” soon fell apart into a paroxysm of coughing that was designed to mask his giggling. Abby, trying desperately to conceal her huge grin, covered her face with her arm as she pretended to scratch her opposite ear.
Ben tried to think sad thoughts, tried to focus on the scenery, tried to hold his breath—but he couldn’t hold it. A weird sort of noise exploded out of him, sort of a cross between a laugh and a loud burp.
Eliza glared at him.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Okay, so . . .” Ricky was biting the sides of his tongue, hoping that the pain would stop him from laughing about a herd of backward-walking buffalos wearing diapers. He cleared his throat loudly several times, but his stomach was tense and quivering with the suppressed laughter.
Abby, who had managed to pull herself together, tried to change the subject, at least slightly. “That’s really amazing, Eliza. Seriously. How did you ever discover your power?”
Eliza sighed. “It was a TV show called The Ren and Stimpy Show, this really, really old cartoon from a long time ago. My parents had it on a videotape. Sometimes they’d put on these tapes for my brother and me when they wanted to get us out of their hair for a while.
“Anyway, they put this one tape in the VCR, and we watched it, and there was a part with these baby buffalos, and they were all wearing diapers. It was pretty funny, actually.”
“But they were walking backward?”
“No, no, they were walking normally,” Eliza responded. “But my brother wanted to go back and show me his favorite part again. So he was rewinding the VCR, you know, scanning backward, and that makes it play in reverse. So it looked like all these buffalos in diapers were walking backward. And sudd
enly I just—I just floated up off the couch. Just a little tiny bit. But it felt so freaky, and it was so unexpected, that I, like, screamed a little. And my brother’s like, ‘Cut it out, Lize.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t help it! Did you see that?’ And he’s like, ‘What?’ And so I realized that it happened to me, but not to him. So I didn’t want him to know. So I said, ‘That buffalo part. I love that.’ He had barely even noticed it.”
Abby was surprised that Eliza was talking so much. Until this moment, she hadn’t heard Eliza say more than a couple sentences at a time.
“Anyway, now my brother starts scanning forward, to get to the buffalo scene again. And I sank back into the couch. And he hits Play and he’s like, ‘What, this part?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah—isn’t that hilarious?’ And he goes, ‘Whatever.’ And he hits Rewind again. So now the buffalos are all walking backward again, and I’m thinking about it again, and up I go!
“So I’m a little freaked out, so I go upstairs to my room. But on the stairs, I’m thinking about what just happened. And I’m remembering that it only happened when my brother was rewinding through that one scene. And every time I thought about that scene, it would happen again! I actually levitated right there on the stairs. I mean, you know. A tiny bit. But I lost my balance. I almost fell over and cracked my head open!”
It was about the most bizarre story Abby had ever, ever heard.
“So you never told anyone?”
Eliza shook her head. “Practically nobody.” And she left it at that.
“Hey,” Ben said. “Can we—can we see? I mean, can you show us?” He shot a glance at Abby for support.
“Forget it,” snapped Eliza. “I don’t do it on command. I’m not a trained dog.”
“Aw, come on,” said Ricky. “I showed you mine!”
“And I’ll show you mine as soon as we get, you know, some eggs,” added Abby.
“That’s a No.” Eliza was firm. “It’s not gonna happen.”
But Ben had a twinkle in his eye. “So your trigger is just picturing—you know, that one particular image of that certain animal dressed—that certain way?”
“Yes! I told you.”
“And every time you think of it, you levitate?”
“Yes. What’s your point?”
“So to make you levitate, all we’d have to do is get you to think about that certain subject?”
Eliza turned to face him. “Yes, but you can’t. I’m too good. I’ve learned to think about other things.”
Ben held up a notebook, open to a page.
“Even if I showed you this?”
You couldn’t really tell whether his drawing showed buffalos, cows, hamsters, or what; Ben was a terrible artist. But it was clear that whatever they were, they had something diaper-ish wrapped around their hind legs. And he’d drawn a huge 3-D arrow pointing away from them, as though to suggest that they were walking backward.
Let’s put it this way: if you’d just been talking for twenty minutes about buffalos walking backward, and now you were trying not to think about that, seeing Ben’s drawing would definitely make you think about it again.
If you were watching closely, you could have seen Eliza’s entire body pop up. Not a lot—just enough to look as though she were a marionette whose strings had just been jerked a bit.
“Hey!” Eliza shouted, grabbing the seat in front of her for support.
“Abby! Here!” Ben tossed his notebook over the seat to her.
Abby knew right away what it was for. She smiled, grabbed the notebook, and slid it along the seat toward Eliza. And sure enough: it slid freely and easily under Eliza’s rear end.
It was the easiest science project Abby had ever done.
“It’s true, folks,” she announced. “Nothing under Eliza right now but thin air.”
It didn’t take long for Eliza to start thinking about something else besides animals in potty training. In a blink, she sank right back down onto the seat, pinning the notebook under her.
She glared around the van. “That was not cool,” she seethed. She yanked Ben’s notebook out from under her and angrily threw it at him. It hit him in the forehead.
Abby didn’t like Eliza much, but she didn’t feel good about making her upset, either.
“I’m sorry, Eliza,” she said sincerely. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
Ben rubbed his forehead and put his slightly mushed notebook back in his backpack. “Me, too. Sorry.”
“It’s kinda neat, though,” said Ricky enthusiastically. (There was almost nothing Ricky ever said that didn’t sound enthusiastic.) “You can do your power just by thinking about it.”
“And it’s a great power, too,” said Abby encouragingly. “It’s a lot more useful than spinning an egg.”
“Or fogging up glass,” added Ricky.
“Or flipping a key,” Ben pointed out.
This last point seemed to interest Eliza.
“What do you mean, flipping a key?” she said, calming down at last.
“Is that your power?” asked Ricky. “Can I see?”
Abby looked back at Ben, alarmed. She was under the impression that Ben did not, in fact, have any special power at all. In fact, she had absolutely no idea what he was doing in the van.
CHAPTER
14
Sushi
“BEN. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”
Abby had managed to keep her mouth shut for what had seemed like two years in that van. She was smart enough to recognize that Ben was up to something—and to keep her own mouth shut. But she couldn’t wait to talk to him in private.
She finally got her chance. Ferd had spotted a Sushi Shack, his favorite fast-food restaurant, just off the highway, and announced that it was definitely time for dinner. For two reasons: first, Ferd was hungry.
Second, Ricky was getting carsick.
But it wasn’t until they had slid into the plastic booths in the Sushi Shack and placed their orders that Abby finally saw her opportunity. Ben got up to visit the men’s room, so Abby excused herself and left the table at the same time.
She cornered Ben right by the goldfish tanks on his way back from the bathroom and whispered as loudly as she dared.
“Ben. What are you doing here?”
He pretended not to know what she meant. “Well, I was sort of hoping to enjoy some slabs of raw fish.”
“Come on! You know what I mean. Why are you part of this group? Ricky and Eliza and I all have these—these dumb little powers. But you . . . you told me that you don’t! You said you’re just a magician! You said you didn’t even believe that there’s . . . you know, real magic, or whatever.”
Ben leaned back against the glass of the aquarium. “What can I say? I lied.”
“You lied? What do you mean? To me?”
“No, not to you. To Ferd.”
Abby was shocked. “You mean, he thinks your key trick is an actual power?”
“Hey—it fooled you, remember?” Ben wiggled his eyebrows. “After I heard about your invitation to super camp, I kind of showed off my key trick to a kid at lunch at the same table where Ferd was eating. He took me aside afterward and asked me if I’d share how I did it. And so I said what I always said.”
“That even you don’t know how you do it.”
Ben nodded. “Yep. Once you’d told me about getting invited to the super camp, I kind of knew what to say already. I knew what Ferd was going to suggest.”
“But why? I mean, why did you want to come?”
“Are you kidding? ’Cuz it’s fun! See the world a little! Get out of camp for a little while. Hang out with you. You know, find out what happens at the camp for magician freaks.” He looked very pleased with himself.
Abby still wasn’t comfortable with the whole thing. “But what if you get caught?” she asked.
“What if I do?” He shrugged. “They’ll send me back to camp, I guess. What else can they do?”
Abby couldn’t believe that he’d do anything so risky. She
looked down at the floor.
“They’re probably gonna find out, Ben.”
Ben shrugged. “So what? It’ll be fun while it lasts. Let’s see how long we can stay on this ride. You’re not gonna tell, are you?”
She shook her head no.
“Okay, then. We’re partners with a secret, right? Come on, let’s go back to the table. My California rolls are getting cold.”
They made their way back to the table and rejoined the others. Everyone was eating sushi except Eliza, who said she was allergic.
(“To fish?” Ricky had said.
“No, to rice.” She had a hot dog instead.)
Ferd had just piled a chunk of wasabi onto his tuna roll and was preparing to slam the whole thing into his mouth when Abby and Ben returned.
“Aha, they’re back,” he said. “We were just talking about you.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ben said, sitting down. “Only nice things, I’m sure.”
“Everyone’s told their stories except you,” Eliza said accusingly. “You practically haven’t said a word since we crossed the New York state line.”
Ben smiled. “I’m a man of few words. What can I say?”
“I wanna see his power,” said Ricky. There was a single grain of white rice stuck to his cheek, which bobbed up and down whenever he spoke.
“I don’t know. It’s kind of dumb,” Ben said modestly.
“It’s not dumb,” said Abby encouragingly. “Just show ’em.”
Eliza shot her a suspicious look. “You’ve seen it?”
Abby nodded. “I met Ben the first day of camp.”
“Okay, then, let’s see your trick. You’ve already seen mine,” she added dryly.
Ben fished in his pocket for the car key he always used. He held out his flat palm. “Can everyone see okay?”
Everyone could.
He put the key flat on his hand and said the words Abby had heard before. “I’m not going to touch this key. I’m not going to blow on it. No strings attached. All it is . . . is a momentary flux of gravity.”
And he squeezed one eye shut. Ricky gave a little gasp as the key slowly, visibly lifted up on its edge and then fell over on its back.
