by David Pogue
A couple of the kids made polite “uh-huh” noises.
“In the next few days, we’re going to lavish love and attention on you, in a way that I’ll bet nobody’s ever done before. We want you to feel as special as I’m certain you are. And in return, all I ask is that you give our shepherds your complete cooperation. We’re all in this together, gang. Any questions?”
Yeah, a million, Abby thought. I just don’t know where to begin.
“All-righty, then,” Phil concluded. “Have a great morning.” He turned on his heel and rushed out.
“All right, let’s dig in,” announced Monty, taking charge. “Benjamin, you’ll be with Dr. Lansinger. She’ll be your shepherd. Shake hands and say hello.” Ben walked over to the lady with her hair in a bun and shook hands.
“Tabor, meet Dr. Davis—Dr. Davis, this is Tabor. Reggie, your shepherd is Dr. Wright here. And Abigail, you lucky girl, you’re going to be stuck with me. Put ’er there.”
He stuck out his bony hand. Abby shook it weakly.
“I understand you’ve got a certain affinity for eggs, am I right?”
Monty grinned his tight little grin and walked Abby over to a table at the side of the room. Her jaw dropped.
“What’s all this?” she said. Of course, she could see perfectly well what it was: a little farmer’s market of eggs. But not just white, regular, chicken eggs. Little blue robin’s eggs. Big brown eggs. Smaller tan eggs. Tiny speckled ones. Even two huge eggs—ostrich, maybe.
“Well, our first job is to find the limits of your power,” Monty began. “To find out just how far your skills can be expanded. I shall be by your side—the lucky shepherd who gets to see your special abilities blossom and grow!”
It was all Abby could do to understand what was happening; there was no time to figure out how she felt about it.
Monty sat down on one of the stools and opened a tiny laptop, no larger than a paperback book. “We have two sets of everything here: your raw eggs, in the left-hand collection, and your hard-boiled, on the right. What do you say we begin with something that we know works well—the chicken’s egg, hard-boiled?”
He reached over, plucked one out of its box, and set it on the table in front of her. And all of a sudden, he grew weirdly shy. “I, ah—I have to admit, Abigail, that I have not actually witnessed this power of yours myself. So it would be a great honor if you could, you know, ah . . . demonstrate.”
“I actually prefer Abby,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nobody calls me Abigail unless it’s my mom and she’s mad.”
“Oh-ho! Yes, yes of course. Abby it is, and Abby it shall be. Forgive me. Abby. Yes. All right, then. Shall we begin?” And he gestured toward the hard-boiled egg on the table.
Abby sighed, reached up to her earlobes, and tugged them just enough to make the egg spin a few times.
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s all it is.”
“Correction,” said Monty, tapping away on his computer. “That’s all it is so far. Now we try . . . this!”
He snatched the egg away with his hand, then grabbed a new one from the left-side pile. “And now: the uncooked chicken’s egg. Again, if you please.”
“It won’t work,” Abby said. “I’ve tried it.”
“Please—would you?” Monty gestured toward the egg.
Abby looked at the new egg and tugged her ears again. The egg did nothing.
“Fascinating,” Monty said, typing. “It appears that cooking the egg affects its density and mass in such a way as to facilitate your influence. Yes. Yes.”
He looked up. “All right then, moving on.” He put the raw egg back in its box and put a tiny speckled one on the table. “Quail’s egg.” He tapped away on his keyboard.
Abby glanced around. She could see Ben sitting across the room, showing his key-flipping trick to his “shepherd,” over and over again. By the window, Tabor was occupied the same way. His shepherd, a man with a wide face and bumpy skin, would balance a piece of paper or a card on the edge of the table, and Tabor would try to make it fall to the floor. And Reggie from Oklahoma was busily trying to make apple juice run uphill.
Monty cleared his throat. “Quail’s egg. Shall we begin?”
Abby nodded and tried to make it spin. She couldn’t.
She couldn’t make the robin’s egg spin, either. Or the finch egg. Or the sparrow egg. And definitely not the ostrich egg.
And that’s how the morning went. Monty was always polite, always respectful, but Abby first grew bored and then impatient. Monty and the other shepherds seemed to be a lot more interested in the kids’ dumb little powers than the kids were themselves.
At lunch, the kids spoke quietly as they chomped.
“I swear,” Eliza was saying. “I’m like, ‘Dudes! I can’t levitate any higher than a quarter of an inch, okay?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s okay! Let’s try tying you down with string! Let’s try making you hold some heavy books! Let’s try it if you start by standing on your head!’ They think I’m, like, a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”
“I know,” Abby responded, stabbing a bite of salad. “I had to tug my ears so many times, I feel like they’re going to fall off my head.”
Ben was more than grouchy; his mind hadn’t stopped racing all morning.
“What I want to know is, what is this place, really? I mean, come on. You guys have seen our rooms—they’re not cabins. And those shepherds aren’t camp counselors, either. They’re little science teachers. And all this stuff about—‘Flip more than one key at once, Ben!’ ”
He shook his head and stared down at his cheeseburger. “I don’t know what this place is, but I can tell you that it’s not a summer camp. And I swear, I’m going to find out what’s—”
“BEN!” shouted Abby, interrupting him. “You’re about to drip ketchup on your shirt.”
She reached out toward him with her napkin. In fact, there wasn’t any ketchup; she had noticed that Ferd was approaching the table with an overflowing tray of food. She thought Ben would probably prefer not to be overheard.
Ben caught on quickly. “Thanks, Abby,” he said, looking at her with a half smile.
“Aloha, all,” said Ferd. “So how was the first day of school?”
The kids smiled, but nobody said anything. They just kept right on eating.
Ferd sat down. “All right, my people. You’ve worked hard all morning, but your camp overlords have proposed something a little more enjoyable for the afternoon.”
“You mean, like, shoveling dirt?” Eliza shot back.
Abby had to admit that Eliza was extremely good at sarcasm.
“The upstanding directors of this establishment have arranged for a little quality time in the big field behind the cafeteria—flying remote-control helicopters,” he said. “Dogfights aren’t out of the question.”
“Remote-control helicopters?” It was Ricky (of course). He was so happy, he was about to splurt right out of his skin. “Can I try? Can I try?”
Abby smiled despite herself. She didn’t care so much about flying the helicopters. But watching Ricky do it would be entertainment enough.
“Honey! E-mail from Abby!”
Mrs. Carnelia was sitting with her laptop on the living room couch, catching up on work. Abby’s dad was just coming upstairs from the basement, wiping his hands on a rag. “Really? Great! Will you read it to me while I make some coffee?”
“Okay,” she responded. “It goes like this.”
And she read him the whole thing:
Received: July 1
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. There are three other kids here from the camp I was at, including that guy Ben, who I think you met the first day.
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 after my first day tomorrow!
Love,
Abs
“Short and sweet,” Mr. Carnelia said, coming over to sit next to his wife. “This place is in Pennsylvania, right?”
“So I’m told.”
“Do we know where? What city?”
Mrs. Carnelia frowned. “Well, Abby didn’t mention it. It might be in the paperwork somewhere.”
She walked over to the bureau by the front door, where a FedEx envelope of Cadabra materials had arrived the day before. She pulled out its contents, plucked out the shiny booklet titled “Camp Cadabra Advanced-Placement Summer Program,” and stuffed the rest back into the envelope.
“Well, if the address is on this brochure, I can’t find it,” she said, sitting down again.
“It’s not a big deal, munchkin,” said Mr. Carnelia. “I was just wondering what sort of place it is. I mean, what does a camp look like when there are only twenty-five kids?”
And that’s all they said about it that night. But Mrs. Carnelia was not completely comfortable.
Before she went to bed, she shot an e-mail message back to Abby.
Sent: July 1
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Howdy
Dear Abby,
How wonderful to hear from you! Your dad and I are both so proud of you. We know you’re going to have a wonderful experience, and we can’t wait to hear more about the place.
For example: What is your room like? Do you have any roommates?
Are you getting enough sleep? Enough food? What does the place look like? Is it in a city, a suburb, or the countryside? What are your activities? Remember to use sunscreen if you’re outside all day!
Ryan just started Adventure Camp at the Y . . . it’s just mornings, from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m., but he’s loving it.
Ryan no longer has the toad. I made him return it to the wilderness. The poor thing was not eating any of the bugs we caught for him (the toad, not Ryan).
Write back, and give us more details!
Love,
Mom
P.S. Where in Pennsylvania is the super camp?
CHAPTER
18
Spygirl
THE SECOND DAY OF SUPER CAMP began just like the first: Abby spent her morning in the Telekinesis lab with Monty and the other kids with pointless powers.
This time, Monty tried to see if she could make an egg spin by tugging on only one ear instead of two. By tugging with her eyes closed. By looking at the egg in a mirror. By crossing her arms and tugging opposite ears.
The answer, every time, was no. But to Abby’s growing annoyance, Monty never gave up.
Accept it, Monty, she thought. There’s nothing more to this. What you see is what you get. And the sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll quit wasting your time. And mine.
After about a half an hour, she asked if she could go to the bathroom. “Of course,” Monty replied. “But you’ll need a security card to get in. I’ll walk you over there.”
Abby thanked him, and the two of them walked down the long hallway to the restrooms. Monty swiped his card across the black box by the women’s room door, and the lock popped open.
As Abby pushed her way in, Monty leaned against the wall. “I’ll wait here for you,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” Abby responded. “I know the way back.”
A few minutes later, Abby began her walk back to the Telekinesis room. But she wasn’t in any particular rush.
She decided to treat herself to a little sightseeing. There was a tall, thin window in each door of the hallway. It might be interesting, she thought, to see what the other campers were up to.
There were three kids in the Metamorphosis lab. From her position in the hallway, Abby couldn’t tell exactly what was going on. But she did see a huge, football-player kid at the nearest table.
Or, rather, on the nearest table. He was on his hands and knees, as though he were playing horsey. She caught a glimpse of bright yellow coming from his fist; it was a dandelion. But as he bobbed his head up and down, Abby gasped to see that the yellow dandelion was slowly turning into a different kind of dandelion—the puffy, delicate kind made of those little gray whiskery things that fly away when you blow on them.
“Neat trick,” she said quietly to herself.
Across the hall was the Teleportation room. She peeked in. Nobody was in there at all.
She looked into Invisibility, too. Nobody there, either. At least not that I can see, Abby thought with a wry smile.
In the Body Morph room, she spotted Doreen, the girl who could raise her body temperature by two degrees. Doreen’s “shepherd” was right in the middle of sticking a digital thermometer into Doreen’s ear.
What a bummer, Abby thought, to have a power that nobody even knows you have unless they stick a thermometer into you.
But right across from Doreen, Abby could see a funny-looking kid she hadn’t seen before. He was playing a harmonica, looking miserable, and resting his elbows on a table that was absolutely covered with crumpled-up, used Kleenexes. A shepherd wearing a light green shirt kept pulling new tissues out of a box and handing them to the kid, who would blow his nose into them and then throw them on the table. Over and over again.
I don’t even want to know, thought Abby. She moved on.
She spotted Ricky in Weather Phenomena—good old Ricky. There he was, standing in front of two shepherds, each one holding up a mirror about six feet away. She couldn’t hear anything through the door, but she knew that if she could, she’d hear Ricky doing his counting by twos in Spanish. She could even guess what they were testing at the moment—whether he could fog up two mirrors at once. Ricky was clearly doing his best. Abby smiled in sympathy.
There was one other camper in the room with him: a very tall, very pretty teenage girl whose arms were covered in mud almost up to her shoulders. Abby couldn’t really figure out what was going on, but it had something to do with stuffed animals.
She peeked into the ESP window. This should be good, she thought. She already knew that ESP stood for Extra-Sensory Perception—mind reading.
There were three campers in this room. Two of them, with their shepherds, were just sitting and watching the third one—a very young kid, maybe even a fourth-grader, standing up on a stool and saying something out loud.
The shepherd was looking embarrassed and red in the face. Abby hoped that the camper had just read the shepherd’s mind and discovered something very, very private.
On the third night, after dinner, Abby decided not to go to the movie that the camp offered each night. She was tired, especially after the game of laser tag that all the campers had played that afternoon.
So she hung out in her room and checked her e-mail. Something from home!
Received: July 3
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Howdy
Dear Abby,
How wonderful to hear from you! Your dad and I are both so proud of you. We know you’re going to have a wonderful experience.
Ryan just started Adventure Camp at the Y . . . it’s just mornings, from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m., but he’s loving it.
Ryan no longer has the toad. I made him return it to the wilderness. The poor thing was not eating any of the bugs we caught for him (the toad, not Ryan).
Love,
Mom
Abby read the note a second time, her lips pursed into a frown. Her mom’s e-mails were usually a lot chattier. And no “P.S.?” Her mom always ended her e-mails with a “P.S.” or two (or three).
She must have been especially busy that day, Abby thoug
ht. So she clicked the Reply button and wrote back:
Sent: July 3
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Update from your daughter
Dear Mom and Dad and Ryan,
Hi guys—thanks for the e-mail! I miss youuuuuuuuuuu!
Everything’s OK here, but it’s a very strange place. We spend every morning in these sort of science labs, with people named Dr. This and Dr. That poking us and asking questions and running a million experiments.
My friend Ben says it’s nothing like the magic camps he’s ever been to. They don’t actually teach you any new magic. There are no performances or anything. You would think they might even have a professional magician come by every now and then! But they don’t even do that.
Every morning we’re in those science classrooms, and then in the afternoon, we do something fun. It’s usually something high-tech, like flying remote-control helicopters or playing laser tag or shooting off model rockets.
The food’s really good.
Whassup with you guys? When does Dad have to fly off somewhere again?
Love,
Abs
On the fourth day of super camp, Abby Carnelia finally began to guess what kind of trouble she was in.
That morning, two things shattered any illusions she still had that she was at any kind of normal summer camp.
The first thing happened just after five in the morning, when she was still deep asleep. She was in the middle of a perfectly pleasant dream, something about winning a clarinet contest with a clarinet that could play itself, when the place went nuts. It started with a deafening alarm: “NAAAAK! NAAAAK! NAAAAK!” Abby jumped out of bed and poked her head into the hallway, where bright lights were flashing. She could see other kids peeking out, too, covering their ears, looking around, freaked out and confused.
