by David Pogue
“Anyhoo,” Phil was going on, “tonight it’s all about meeting your camp mates and your new counselors, enjoying a little delicious barbeque, and recovering from your journey. Tomorrow, the work begins. Whoops! Did I say work? I meant fun! Because around here, work is fun. I expect you’ll really enjoy meeting our staff tomorrow. They’ll work with you to help you understand your power, to make it grow, to help you use it in better ways.”
He scratched at his little mustache with the end of his pen and glanced around the courtyard.
“Okeydoke,” he said. “Now, in just a moment, we’ll bring out a little grub. Grab a plastic plate and fill it up, hombres! And then I want to give each of you an assignment. I want you to walk right up to somebody you don’t know, somebody from a different Cadabra camp, and introduce yourself. Tell a little about yourself. Say where you’re from, what grade you’re in. If you’re comfortable with it, do a little show-and-tell of your power. I wanna see some serious mingling. Let’s get this party started!”
Unfortunately, Phil was trying to say it the way a rock star would say it, so it came out like, “Let’s get this potty stotted!”
Ben nudged Abby with his elbow. “Oh, he’s a cool one, that Phil,” he said, shaking his head.
She laughed. “Come on—let’s pig out.”
So they filled their plastic plates with chicken, ribs, salad, mashed potatoes, corn, and brownies. At first, Abby and Ben sat on the little wall around the fountain, ate, and chatted; but after a while, they decided that Phil’s suggestion was worth taking. This was a great opportunity to meet the other campers and find out their stories.
As it turned out, there were some interesting stories indeed.
A tall, black-haired girl named Doreen had been dumped at Camp Cadabra in Indiana by her parents, who were in the middle of a divorce and didn’t want her hanging around the house all summer. She had zero interest in magic except for her own power, which was raising her body temperature by two degrees.
She had occasionally been able to use it to get out of going to school (“Mom, I feel sick! I think I have a fever!”), but otherwise thought it was no more useful than, say, having a freckle on her arm.
“What’s your trigger?” Ben asked.
“My what?” Evidently, not every Camp Cadabra had a Ferd to explain what triggers are.
“How do you make your body temperature go up?”
“Oh. Like this.”
Doreen lifted her arms out to her sides, waving them and sticking her stomach this way and that. Abby wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing, apart from looking a little like a tippy scarecrow.
But Ben caught on. “Belly dancing! You’re belly dancing, right?”
Doreen nodded. “Now feel!” She grabbed Ben’s hand and pulled it up to her own forehead. Ben was no doctor, but her forehead did feel a little warm.
“And that’s not just from the exercise of dancing around?” Abby asked.
“Nope,” said Doreen. “That’s what everybody asks. I stay hot for, like, two hours. And you can measure it with a thermometer.”
They also met a tall, gangly, weed-thin kid going into high school who called himself Weezer. (Months later, after the whole story came out in the newspapers, they learned that Weezer’s real name was Eugene.)
He had flown all the way in from the California camp because his counselors had discovered his amazing ability—to clog a salt shaker.
“Salt shakers git clogged all the time,” he explained in a slow, booming voice with a twangy Southern accent. “Usually it’s because of humidity, like in the summertime when it’s hot and muggy out. But I can do better’n that. I can clog it when I want to clog it. I can clog it even when it ain’t cloggy weather.”
Abby nodded appreciatively. She congratulated Weezer because he seemed genuinely proud of his talent. And why not? It was something that nobody else could do. She even managed to avoid smiling when she learned about his trigger: crossing his toes. Even if it was inside his shoes, it still worked. You could even be right in the middle of shaking out salt onto your food; if Weezer crossed his toes, that was it. No more salt. You’d have to get a toothpick and poke it into the little holes to un-jam them.
Then there was Tabor, who was standing by the brownie tray when Abby and Ben went for seconds. Tabor was visiting from Hungary. He had been staying with an American host family in Florida who had a son the same age. The son, named Eric, had always been a magic nut, sitting in his room and practicing card moves or coin tricks for hours; he had been begging his parents all winter and spring for the chance to go to magic camp. He was sure it would be the greatest thing in the world.
Tabor’s life was filled with magic, too, but not in the same way. He had never even thought about magic as a form of entertainment. His family believed in all kinds of mystical things; his mother used to say they had Gypsy blood in them. Growing up, he’d heard stories of distant relatives who could read minds, or bring rain to dry fields, or miraculously cure sickness. Nobody could ever prove it, of course, and nobody had ever actually seen any of it. But from the time he was a baby, Tabor had been taught that miracles, large and small, are woven into the cloth of everyday life.
Tabor believed that if you dig deep enough, you’ll find something magical, or at least unusual, in everybody. His uncle Viktor could stick out his tongue and make the sides crinkle up with wavy edges. A kid in his school could roll his eyes so far back in his head, all you could see was pure white, like a zombie. And his cousin Kristina could breathe through her ear. For real. (The doctor said there was some kind of connection between her ear canal and her nasal cavity.)
And Tabor himself was double-jointed. That’s what you call people who can bend their joints much farther than normal people. Tabor showed Abby how, using his other hand, he could bend his thumb back so far that it could touch his wrist. (Even today, Abby can’t get her own thumb anywhere near her wrist. Plus, it hurts to try.)
One day, when he was about eight years old, Tabor was showing off his thumb-bending thing to a friend. All of a sudden, a piece of mail fell off his father’s desk.
And that was how he discovered his power. It turns out that if you put a sheet of paper at the edge of a desk or a table so that half of it is sticking out, almost falling off the edge, he can make it fall. It’s as though he can make gravity just the tiniest bit stronger on the suspended half of the sheet of paper, just enough to tip it off the table.
Tabor didn’t think it was a big deal. Growing up in Hungary, he just accepted it as another one of life’s freaky little unexplained oddities.
But Eric, the boy his age in the American host family, went crazy. When he saw Tabor knock the sheet of paper off the desk without touching it, he thought it was the greatest magic trick he’d ever seen.
Eric begged Tabor to teach him how to do it. Tabor explained that he didn’t know how it worked, but Eric didn’t believe him. He just believed that Tabor was sticking to the old magician’s rule, “Never reveal your secrets.” And that’s how it came about that Eric and Tabor both went to the Camp Cadabra in Georgia that summer. Eric wanted to become a better entertainer; Tabor just wanted to see more of America. The twist, of course, is that Tabor, who had very little interest in magic as a form of entertainment, got chosen to come to the super camp. And Eric, his own American “brother,” the one real magician among them, didn’t. He stayed behind at Camp Cadabra.
As the evening went on, more of the campers shared their stories. Some accepted their powers, just the way you might accept having brown hair or bony elbows. But many of them had been suffering in silence, feeling like weirdos, getting teased at school, getting no understanding from their parents, brothers, and sisters.
And yet here, under a sky full of summer stars, they were among friends. Nobody would laugh at you; if there was a smile when you were telling about your embarrassing little power, it was a smile of understanding and sympathy. Here, you could talk about your magic, your secret, your journey so far
.
There was also a lot of talk about what would happen tomorrow, when super camp would finally begin for real.
Sent: June 30
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Howdy
Hey you guys,
Hey from your favorite daughter at super camp!
They just had a super-fun welcome party for all of us kids. There’s about 25 of us from all over the country. They’re all super-talented and really nice. They had a big cookout, and we all had a lot of fun.
The place is not much like a camp. It’s beautiful, though. The room is like a hotel room! Big plasma TV, hot tub, and all that. There are three other kids here from the camp I was at, including that guy Ben, who I think you met the first day.
It’s not at all what I expected. It’s nothing like a camp at all. It’s like, I don’t know, a big modern company headquarters. But whatever. Looks like fun.
How’s everything with you guys? Does Ryan still have his frog?
I’m super-tired, so I’m going to sleep now . . . I’ll e-mail some more tomorrow!
Love,
Abs
CHAPTER
17
Lab
ABBY DIDN’T SLEEP WELL her first night at super camp.
She never slept well in new places. Her pillow at home was super-hyper-ultra-mushy, so whenever she had to use a pillow that was sort of hard and tall, she couldn’t get comfortable. That night, though, things were even worse because it seemed as though she had nonstop nightmares.
In the worst and last one, she dreamed that she was running around outside, under a big sky, on a huge field, with a herd of wild horses. They were all romping, playing, happy to just be alive and free, and happy that Abby was among them.
But then Abby looked up at that glorious blue sky, and she noticed something odd: a reflection that shouldn’t have been there. It was as though she were looking out through an infinite piece of curved glass. And sure enough, when she looked around, she realized that there was a gigantic glass dome, a huge transparent bubble that was slowly sinking down around the entire field.
She tried to scream, to tell all the horses that they would be trapped, but they couldn’t understand her (they were horses, after all). So she ran around them, trying to shoo them away, as the glass dome sank lower and lower. It also started getting smaller and smaller, trapping them all inside.
Now she started yelling out to whoever was controlling the dome. “I’m not a horse! I’m not a horse! I’m a person! Let me go! Let me go!”
But there was no answer . . . and when she looked down at herself, she realized that it wasn’t even true. She was a horse, too.
That’s when she woke up, breathing hard and feeling desperate and sad.
She pressed her palms into her eyes and rubbed them. “Just a dream, just a dream, just a dream,” she said to herself. She checked the clock; breakfast was only half an hour away, so it was time to get up and get the ball rolling.
The dining hall at this camp, she discovered, wasn’t a dining hall—not even a super-fancy, ultra-cushy one like at Camp Cadabra. Instead, it was a straight-ahead cafeteria, just like the one at school except with better food and no fourth graders’ artwork on the walls. It was a pretty big one, bigger than her school cafeteria, but almost everyone there was an adult. The kids all sat at a group of tables at one end of the room, where Ferd and four other helpers took charge.
“We commence at nine, so finish up,” he said. Abby was sitting with Ricky and Eliza, who were both yawning; they’d stayed up even later than she had at the welcome party. Ricky was hyper, chattering nonstop. Eliza, wearing another T-shirt the size of Louisiana, ate silently.
Ben didn’t show up at all.
After breakfast, everybody handed their trays through an opening in the wall to a dishwashing crew on the other side.
“Okay, let’s go, my people,” Ferd said. “New Hampshire campers, I’ll take you to your first activity.”
Funny, Abby thought. I don’t remember signing up for activities.
Ferd led Abby, Ricky, and Eliza out of the cafeteria and through two long hallways; at the end of the second one, they found Ben waiting with Candi, the pod assistant.
“Looks like you’ve got yourself a troublemaker,” she said with a smile. “I found this guy stumbling out of his room about ten minutes ago.”
“I overslept,” Ben said sheepishly.
“Thank you, Candi,” replied Ferd. “Ben, would you care for a Pop-Tart or something?”
“I already got him a bagel,” said Candi.
“I’m good,” Ben confirmed.
“All right then—onward to Magic Central!”
Ferd swiped his security card across the little black box by a big set of heavy double doors. They swung open, Ferd plowed ahead, and the four kids scampered to keep up.
They were marching down a long, wide, white hallway. There were doors on both sides—doors with windows so you could see inside. Other kids, led by other camp workers, were flooding into the hallway and going into different doors. It felt like the first day of a new school.
As she marched along, Abby noticed that there was a small sign next to each door that identified what was going on inside—and they blew her mind.
METAMORPHOSIS. ESP. RESTORATION. TELEPORTATION. PREDICTION. DISAPPEARANCE. INVISIBILITY. BODY MORPH.
What is this place? Abby thought to herself. Have they really found kids who can do all this stuff?
Ferd stopped suddenly, and Abby almost crashed into Ricky.
“Eliza, m’dear, this is you,” Ferd said. “I’ll be back to pick you up at lunchtime.”
The door looked just like all the others, except that it said LEVITATION. Well, naturally, thought Abby.
“See you, dudes,” said Eliza with a shrug. She went inside.
Ferd moved forward about twenty feet to stop at the very next door. “Ricky, this would be you.”
Ricky read the sign on the door out loud. “WEATHER PHENOMENA?” he said.
Ferd shrugged. “Well, we couldn’t figure out how fogging up a window really fit into Levitation or Invisibility. Okay, young man, in you go. I’ll see you at noon.”
Ricky stayed right where he was in the hallway. He looked around with an unhappy face. “But can’t I stay with my friends?”
“You’ll see them at lunch,” Ferd reassured him. “Go on inside. They won’t bite. Trust me—fun and pleasure await.” He pulled the door open for Ricky, who looked inside, looked back at Abby and Ben, and then muttered, “Well, okay, I’ll see you guys.” He turned and went inside.
Ferd let the door close gently, then turned to Ben and Abby. “And you youngsters are right over here.”
He marched them to the end of the hallway and stopped in front of a door labeled TELEKINESIS.
“What’s that?” asked Abby. “Tele-kine-sis? It sounds like a disease.”
“No, it’s cool,” Ben reassured her. “It’s called telekin-ee-sis. Moving things with your mind.”
“And that’s pretty much your specialty, no?” said Ferd. He opened the door for them. “This is you. Have a blast.”
Abby stood in the doorway, peering into the room. It looked like a science fair, a kitchen, a magic shop, and somebody’s basement playroom, all in one.
She could see broad tables surrounded by stools. Blackboards and whiteboards on the walls. Video cameras in all four corners of the ceiling. Sinks and cabinets everywhere. Cardboard boxes and plastic milk crates full of stuff. Tripods holding cameras, tubes, and stuff she couldn’t even identify.
“You must be Abigail and Benjamin,” said a little bald guy in a white button-down shirt. As he trundled up to them, Abby could see that he was actually shorter than Ben. “Now the question is, which one of you is Abigail, and which is Benjamin?”
He looked from Abby’s face to Ben’s, the light reflecting off his glasses.
“That’s a joke, folks. A little humo
r to lighten up the moment. No harm done. I’m Monty. I run this lab. Come on in and meet everyone.”
Lab?
Abby shot a glance at Ben. He was wearing an expression that said, “Is he for real?”
Monty the oddball was leading them to the center of the room, where two other kids were waiting with three other counselors, or teachers, or zookeepers, or whatever they were.
“The troops have arrived,” Monty told his adult pals.
He introduced Abby and Ben to the others. Abby was happy to see that one of the other two kids in her group was Tabor, the kid from Hungary who could make a piece of paper fall off the edge of a table. Of course he’s in Telekinesis, she thought. He can’t really move stuff with his mind—he moves stuff by bending his thumb—but close enough.
The other kid was Reggie, a scrawny kid from Oklahoma who said he could make apple juice flow uphill.
“Really? That’s so cool!” Ben said when he heard.
“It’s actually not that cool,” Reggie replied with a shrug. “It only goes up a tiny bit, and only if the angle isn’t very big. Like if you tip up a cafeteria tray by putting a gummy bear under one end. Much steeper than that, and I can’t get it to do anything.”
At that moment, the door opened and a familiar blond head popped in. It was Phil Shutter, clutching, as always, a clipboard. He opened his mouth, and Kermit the Frog’s voice came out.
“Okeydoke, folks! Sorry if I’m tardy; I’ve got a lot of rooms to visit,” he began, approaching the group in the middle of the room. 174
“I just wanted to drop in and, you know, help you kick off the day’s activities. And I hope you don’t mind if I get just a tad bit serious for a moment.” He took off his glasses, breathed on each lens to fog it up, and then wiped them with a white handkerchief.
“As you know, very few campers were selected to join us at this facility. Yes, it’s an honor for you to be chosen, and you should be proud; but the greater honor is ours. Because the shepherds in this room—you might call them counselors, but we call them shepherds—have devoted their lives to exploring the boundaries of magic and science. I don’t believe there’s anyone else in the country who’s better qualified to help you find out more about your abilities. What makes them tick, how to make them grow, how to help them become more powerful. And that’s something we’d all like, right?”
