by David Pogue
Ferd waddled into view, wearing a tiger-striped bathrobe that wasn’t quite tied securely enough. Some black-shirted helpers raced down the hallway.
“IS IT A FIRE DRILL?” Abby yelled to Ferd.
He nodded. “OR A SYSTEM TEST. NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.”
A minute later, the sounds and lights turned off. The place was quiet once more, although Abby could hear some chatter from sleepy campers down the hallway.
Ferd held up his hands and shouted as he walked through the building. “Apologies, my people,” he said. “They do these system tests now and again. Forgive the ungodly hour of the night. Now, back to bed with you!”
Abby wished that Ben were there so she could at least exchange do-you-believe-this-guy? looks with him. But the door to his room remained closed.
The second disturbing event came later, during the morning session. One by one, each kid was pulled out of class and taken into a little medical office for a checkup by the camp doctor. It was the full deal: they took Abby’s temperature, looked in her ears and her nose, tapped her knee with a reflex hammer, wrapped one of those blood-pressure sleeves around her arm, weighed her and measured her.
And then they got ready to take a blood sample.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had that done to you, but you probably wouldn’t enjoy it. It’s like getting a shot. Except instead of squirting some medicine into you, the needle pulls some blood out of you. If you’re brave enough to watch, you actually see your blood going into the clear part of the syringe.
Abby hated shots, just hated them. She always had. Once, when she was five, her mom buckled Abby into the car to take her for a checkup—and then made the mistake of mentioning that she would have to get a shot. Abby jumped out of the car, ran out of the garage, scrambled inside the house, and hid herself in the closet in the attic. She didn’t come out all day, no matter how much her parents called her name, no matter how hungry she got. They didn’t find her until nearly dinnertime, when Abby finally came out. And that was only because she had to go to the bathroom so badly she was about to explode.
Abby could not understand why the camp doctor needed some of her blood, anyway. Sure, she got weighed and measured once in a while at school, but this was ridiculous.
“It’s just to keep you healthy,” the doctor kept saying. “Every camper gets a free checkup. It’s all part of the program.”
“But why do I need a shot?” Abby insisted.
“Listen, not everything at summer camp is supposed to feel good,” the doctor said as he worked. “What about those early-morning Polar Bear dives into the freezing-cold lake? What about running the half-marathon around the mountain? What about when you have to carry your canoe a mile across land to get to the next place in the river? Sometimes, you just gotta do what’s good for you.”
Abby looked at the doctor with a scrunched-up face. “We didn’t do any of that at summer camp!”
“Well,” the doctor replied, coming toward her with the needle, “that’s how it was in my day. You kids today don’t know how easy you have it.”
Abby skipped the movie that night, too. She was starting to miss home and wanted to see if her mom had written back.
Yes!
Received: July 4
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Update from your daughter
Dear Abby,
Thank you so much for the e-mail! Those afternoon activities sound like a lot of fun. I can tell you, we didn’t have remote-control helicopters when I was in summer camp a hundred years ago!
What do you do in the mornings? Is that when they teach the magic classes?
Are you having a chance to perform at all? Do they bring in magicians to do shows, like they did in New Hampshire?
Dad’s at home for another few days, then he has to fly off. He took Ryan to a Yankees game today in New York, which is a big deal for both of them. Personally, I’d rather stay home and watch the grass grow.
Love,
Mom
P.S.—Hope you’re getting plenty of sleep and meeting some great people!
P.P.S.—Old Mrs. Teplitz across the street had puppies! (I mean her dog did.)
Abby smiled and leaned back in the chair.
But after a moment, a little voice in her head suggested that she read the message again. This time, she wasn’t smiling. Something was really weird about her mom’s note.
“What do you do in the mornings?” “Do they bring in magicians?”
Didn’t you read my last e-mail? Abby thought. I already told you that stuff!
Abby was growing annoyed. Her mother must have stopped reading Abby’s e-mail after about one sentence. Abby was a slow typist, so her mom should appreciate every single sentence—and not get distracted after ten seconds of reading!
At that moment, there was a knock on Abby’s door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s . . . um, it’s Monty.” But it was Ben’s voice. Abby grinned as she stood up.
“What do you want, Monty?” she asked, walking toward the door.
“I want to see if you can spin an egg by tugging on my ears.”
She laughed and opened the door. “Why, Benjamin. What a surprise,” she said.
“Hello, Abby Cadabra,” he said as he came in.
“I thought you went to the movie.”
“Nah,” Ben replied. “It’s Titanic II: The Voyage Home. I’ve seen it, like, six times.”
“I know. Me, too. I practically understand the plot by now.”
Ben flopped down into a big leather swiveling chair by the window. He had brought along a foam-rubber football. And now, as he swiveled the easy chair back and forth, he was absentmindedly tossing the football straight up into the air and catching it.
“So how are you enjoying super camp?” he asked.
Abby stopped and looked at him. Then she looked around. Without a sound, she walked over to the bed and pressed the button on the wall that made the TV screen rise up out of the dresser.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked, bewildered.
“Let’s watch some TV! Can you grab the remote by your foot?” She turned on the TV and flicked through the channels until she found a concert video.
It was the Badd Boyz, singing their hit song, “U R 2 Good 4 Me”:
Ooh baby, can’t U C
That U R 2 good 4 me,
Ooo, honey I want yo touch,
But girl, U R way 2 much . . .
Abby turned it up loud.
“Auuuggh!” Ben shouted, trying to make his voice heard over the music. “Okay, first, I can’t stand that song. And second, if I wanted to watch TV, I would have stayed in my own room!”
She put a finger to her lips, in a Shhhh! motion. Then she dragged the desk chair across the rug until it was right next to Ben’s easy chair and sat down.
“I just want to make sure they can’t hear us,” she said.
“Who?”
“You know, in case they’ve got little microphones hidden around, and they’re listening to us.”
Ben studied her with curiosity. “Do you really think?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t trust these people. They took blood from us today! This isn’t a super camp—it’s a super lab. And we’re their guinea pigs.” She looked away. “I know. You think I’m completely paranoid.”
“Actually, I don’t,” he said. “I thought I was the only one.”
Abby looked at him sharply.
“Why? Did you find out something?”
“Well, let me just ask you this: What’s the deal with all the security?”
Abby shrugged. “They said it’s to keep us safe from outsiders.”
“Nope,” Ben replied. “It’s to keep us in.”
Okay, that’s a little creepy, thought Abby.
“Why do you think that?” she asked.
“You’ll see,” he said, glancing around. He brushed his floppy hair off his fore
head, the way he always did. But this time, she could see that his eyes were especially intense.
“You know how I never show up at breakfast?” he said. “They think I’m a slacker, or maybe just a little unpredictable. But it’s great because they leave me alone so I can do a little exploring.”
“What kind of exploring?”
“Well, like this morning, I woke up super-early, for some reason, so I decided to see how hard it would be to get outside. Not inward, into the courtyard, but the other way. Out of this place. So I went past the reception desk where Candi sits. I don’t have one of those security cards, but I didn’t need one; someone had left the first set of doors open. So I just walked right through them, down the hall toward the doors to the main building, when all of a sudden—”
“What?” Abby asked, spellbound.
“It was like: ‘BAAAAMP! BAAAAMP!’ These alarms went off!”
Abby lit up. “Oh, yeah! We heard that! Like in the middle of the night! That was you?”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “That was me. And they have these metal gates that come down from the ceiling, just like in the movies. Both ends of the hallway. It scared the heck out of me.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I was trapped in there! I couldn’t get out either end of the hallway. I was in there for, like, five minutes before three of those helper guys could open the gates again and let me back in.”
“Well, what made the alarm go off? Did someone push a button or something?”
“I don’t think so,” Ben replied. “It went off right when I started walking down the hall. Didn’t Phil say something about motion detectors or pressure sensors in the floor? Just stepping into that hallway makes the alarms go off.”
Abby frowned. “But didn’t we come in that way on the first day? There wasn’t any alarm then.”
“I know,” Ben said. “They probably turn themselves off during the day. They must be on a timer.”
“So what did you say when they caught you?”
Ben grinned. “I pretended to wake up. Like I’d been sleepwalking.”
“Are you kidding me?” Abby had always known that Ben was a daredevil, but she couldn’t believe his guts this time. “Did they believe it?”
He nodded. “I think so. Since the day we got here, I’ve sort of been letting them think that I’m a little loopy.”
“Oh, like you’re really not?”
She grinned at him. But inside, her feelings were anything but cheerful.
CHAPTER
19
Darkening
IF YOU REALLY WANT to be totally accurate about it, the day that really changed the direction of Abby’s life wasn’t the day she discovered her power.
It was the day Ben sang to her in the Telekinesis lab.
Ben had now been an impostor at the super camp for six days. His key-flipping trick was so good, it had everyone convinced that it was a real supernatural power (although a pretty pointless one). Ben kept telling Abby that he was sure he was going to be discovered at any moment—but so far, nobody had suspected.
The sixth day in the lab was no more interesting to Abby than the other days had been. Monty had brought in some scientific machines to see if he could figure out what kind of force she was actually applying to that egg. “To see the unseen!” he said, holding one finger up in the air. “This is our challenge today!”
It took him most of an hour to figure out how to set up the thermography camera, which was supposed to be able to make what Monty called “heat movies.” It was like a huge, ridiculously clumsy camcorder, except that it didn’t measure light; it measured heat.
On the screen, Abby could see cool areas in black or blue, medium areas in green, and then warmer areas—like her face and hands—in shades of orange and yellow. She moved around, dancing in front of the lens, watching her weird, rainbowy shape on the screen. When she exhaled hard, she saw a spray of hot orange shoot out of her mouth, as though she were a girl dragon.
When Monty aimed the camera at the egg on the counter, though, it was just green—and stayed that way, even while it was spinning.
Monty looked unhappy. After a few more tries, he sighed deeply, and then he began taking the machine apart again.
“All right, you kids stay right here,” he said glumly. “I’m going to go get the magnetic resonance camera. Dr. Lansinger?”
Dr. Lansinger, Ben’s shepherd, had been spending the week trying to explore the bounds of Ben’s key trick. But she hadn’t made any progress with him, either. He couldn’t seem to make anything flip but the key. He couldn’t make the key flip anywhere but on his hand. And he couldn’t make it do anything but flip once.
Because the magnetic resonance camera was heavy, Monty asked her to help him wheel it into the Telekinesis lab. While both shepherds were out of the room, Ben ambled over to Abby’s table.
“Yo, Abby Cadabra,” he said, hoisting himself up to sit on the table’s edge.
“Hey,” said Abby. She was feeling a little bored—and a little down.
“You were making some awfully cool rainbow movies there. I saw you breathe out that orange and yellow air. That never happens to me, except sometimes after I eat Mexican food.”
She smiled despite herself.
He glanced toward the door and then looked back at Abby. “Hey. Is something the matter?”
Abby didn’t respond for a moment.
“Come on,” he prodded. “You can tell me.”
She sighed. “It’s just—I don’t know. This place is wearing me down. It’s not what I had in mind when I signed up for summer camp.”
“That’s because it’s not a summer camp,” he said. “There’s more to this. I’m sure of it.”
He picked up Monty’s clipboard and looked down at it.
“Man, oh man,” he said. “Check this out.” He pulled a sheet of paper out from under the spring clip. “Look at this—the dude’s taking notes on us, like a scientific study. You were right when you said we’re guinea pigs.”
“Shhhh!” Abby said, with a nervous glance at the other two shepherds in the room. “They’ll hear you.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Ben replied. “I can just turn up the music!”
And that’s when he started to sing. Pretty badly, actually.
“Ooh baby, can’t U C, that U R 2 good 4 me! Ooh, honey, I want your touch—but girl, U R way 2 much!”
Abby screamed. It was more of a yelp, actually. Still, it was so loud, everybody in the room stopped what they were doing and stared.
They saw her standing next to Ben, her hands stuffed into her mouth as though to silence her own reaction.
“What’s the matter?” Ben said. “What happened?”
Dr. Wright, one of the other shepherds in the room, hurried over. “What’s the trouble, Abby?”
She thought fast. “Nothing—nothing,” she said. “I—I bit my tongue. I always do that when I’m talking too fast. I’m really sorry.”
“Should we have the nurse take a look?” Dr. Wright said, genuinely concerned.
Abby shook her head. “No, no, it’s just fine. It’s already fine. Thank you so much.”
“All right. Well, you let us know if you want someone to look at it.” Dr. Wright smiled and returned to his own table.
Ben waited until he was out of earshot. “What was that about?” he whispered urgently.
“Look.”
She pointed at the page in his hand, the one covered with Monty’s notes.
“What? It’s just his notes,” Ben said.
“But it was white before. The paper was white. Really white. I saw it. I saw it change! It changed right in your hand.”
Ben held the page up. It wasn’t white, exactly. It was just a hair darker, a very faint gray, as though it had moved from sunshine into shadow.
“It looks the same to me.”
“Here, then,” she said. She was suddenly filled with energy and a sense of purpose. She grabbed the cli
pboard from Ben’s hands and pulled off another sheet of paper.
“Here. Hold this and do it again,” she told Ben.
“Do what?”
“What you did before! Sing that song!”
He stared at her. “Are you kidding me? I was just goofing around! I was just—”
“Sing it!”
Ben could see that he wasn’t going to win this one. So he started singing that annoying Badd Boyz song again, the one he couldn’t stand, the one that had been running through his head since the night before.
He didn’t have much energy this time, and he wasn’t very loud, and his attention was on the sheet of paper. But he sang.
“Ooh baby, can’t U C . . . that U R 2 good 4 me! Ooh, honey, I want your touch—”
He stopped singing—and breathing. Because he saw it, too. The piece of paper in his hand had just gotten a shade darker. Right in front of him. Unmistakably. In a blink.
His jaw dropped as he met Abby’s gaze. She was nodding, her face glowing with happiness.
“Ben! You have a power!”
“Wait, what?”
She grabbed his sleeve. “Don’t you get it? You do have a power after all! You’ve just never known it. Because you’ve never found the trigger! It has something to do with that song, or something—I don’t know. But it’s real. You’re not just a fake magician after all!”
Ben was still trying to process all of this.
“That’s—a power?” he said. “Making a piece of paper turn light gray? But you can barely see it!” He was holding the light gray page against another piece of paper on the clipboard so that he could see them side by side.
“Yes, but don’t you see? All our powers are stupid! They’re all sort of ridiculous. But it doesn’t matter. You’re still changing the laws of nature. You’re still doing something that nobody else in the world can do.”
And that, she thought to herself, makes you special. Absolutely, incredibly special.
Ben shook his head, as though he was trying to shake himself awake. “But come on. What could that stupid pop song have to do with anything? Why would it be that one song? What if I’d never heard it? What if it had to be a pop song in another country? What if it were never written?”
