Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power

by David Pogue

  Abby shrugged. “Then you’d never have discovered your power.” She yanked another pair of pages from the clipboard. “Here. Do it again! One more time—please?”

  Ben did as he was told, this time with a growing smile. Once again, he sang—and once again, the pages darkened in his hand.

  The door opened, and they could see the unmistakable shape of Monty’s rear end backing through it. He was tugging the front end of a cart; Dr. Lansinger was pushing from the other side. Another piece of scientific equipment sat on top.

  As quickly as she could, Abby grabbed the pages, squared them up, and put them back onto the clipboard. Ben hopped off the table edge, his mind still in a daze. Abby grabbed his shoulder and leaned forward.

  “Don’t tell,” she whispered. He looked back at her and nodded before walking back to his table.

  Abby spent the rest of the morning tolerating Monty’s experiments, but her mind was somewhere else. Not only had Ben never had any real powers before, but it had taken him a long time to believe that anyone else had them.

  And yet, when all the circumstances were just right, he’d found his magic. He’d found the power he’d always had, locked away inside, waiting for the one moment when all the conditions for his trigger were lined up exactly.

  That’s what happened to Eliza. And Ricky. And Tabor. And Doreen.

  And me.

  Until the day they discovered their powers, how were they any different from normal kids?

  We weren’t. All it took was a freak of chance, when we stumbled upon our powers.

  Ben’s discovery was turning Abby’s brain inside out. The question she couldn’t shake was: Are we the only ones with powers?

  Or is there something waiting to be discovered inside every kid on earth?

  CHAPTER

  20

  Truck

  ABBY HADN’T EVEN RECOVERED from the first shock of the day when she got another one. And it started with round-headed Ricky.

  “Does anybody know what we’re doing after lunch?” he asked between taco bites. The afternoons were always his favorite. The afternoons were everyone’s favorite. Not only was there always something fun to do, but there was no testing or examining at all.

  “No clue,” said Ben.

  “Maybe we can go to the farm,” Ricky responded. “I really wanna go see it.”

  Eliza made a face. “What farm? There’s no farm.”

  “There is, too,” said Ricky. “I saw one of the trucks go by.”

  “What trucks?” asked Abby. Her room had a view of the inner courtyard, but Ricky’s window faced the side of the central building. A driveway ran past it.

  “One of their trucks. It said ‘Good Farma for Those We Love.’ ” He wiped some salsa off of his tray with a napkin.

  “You mean ‘good farmers?’ ” asked Abby.

  “Probably it just said, ‘good farms,’ ” said Ben.

  “I’ll bet it was ‘good farming,’ ” offered Eliza.

  “No!” said Ricky, getting cranky. “It said ‘Good Farma.’ I’m very observant. I notice these things. I’m a good speller.” He sipped from the straw in his chocolate milk. “And the farmers are not,” he said after a moment.

  Abby didn’t get it. “Are not what?”

  “Are not good spellers,” said Ricky. “They had two spelling mistakes on the same truck.”

  “What were they?” Ben wanted to know.

  “Well, ‘Good Farma,’ for one thing. They spelled Farma with a P-H, like in phantom.”

  “That’s not a spelling mistake, you dingbat,” said Eliza. She adjusted a fold of her huge tie-dyed T-Shirt. “That’s just how you spell pharma. As in, ‘pharmaceutical.’ As in, ‘medicines and drugs.’ My dad used to be a lawyer for a pharma company. That’s how I know.” She turned and gave Ricky a mock pat on the shoulder. “Hate to break it to you, Ricky, boy, but there’s no farm around here. You saw a drug-company truck.” 211

  Abby smiled. Good old Ricky. “What was the other spelling mistake, Ricky?” she asked.

  Ricky was feeling a little hurt by Eliza’s comment. He wasn’t especially enthusiastic about sharing the second misspelling he’d seen, just in case he was wrong about that one, too.

  “Well, maybe it wasn’t,” was all he said. He picked up another carrot stick.

  “C’mon, you can tell us,” said Abby. “We’re not gonna laugh at you. Are we, Eliza?”

  Eliza rolled her eyes at Abby, but said nothing.

  “Tell us, Ricky,” Ben prodded.

  Ricky looked out the window, then back at the other kids. “Oh, all right. The big letters on the truck said ‘Calabra’ instead of ‘Cadabra.’ ” He glared at Eliza. “Did your dad work for that company, too?”

  “No,” she replied. “But that’s not a typo, either. There is a company called Calabra. Don’t you guys’s parents give you Armadrol when you get sick?”

  “Mine do,” said Ricky.

  “Yep. Calabra makes it. They have ads on TV all the time.” Eliza shrugged. “So it’s not much of a coincidence that a Calabra truck has an ad on it that talks about ‘Good Pharma.’ ”

  Ben made eye contact with Abby. “But it’s a little weird that a truck that says Calabra is driving around a camp called Cadabra, isn’t it? I mean, that’s quite a coincidence.”

  Eliza shrugged and swallowed a bite of ravioli. “Depends on whether you’re freaked out by coincidences all the time.”

  “Are you saying there’s no farm, for sure?” Ricky looked genuinely disappointed.

  “There’s no farm,” said Abby gently.

  But it sure would be nice if there were, she thought.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Abby asked Ben as they walked out of the cafeteria.

  “I certainly hope not,” he said with a grin. “I don’t want any part of what’s going on in your twisted mind.”

  “Come on, Ben,” she pleaded. “What Ricky said. What’s a drug truck doing driving around this camp?”

  “I don’t know—bringing supplies to the infirmary? They’re big into taking blood samples and having doctors fussing over us. If you hadn’t noticed.”

  She shook her head. “Ben, there’s something creepy going on here. I know it. And I know how to find out what it is.”

  They were passing through the central lobby that connected their rooms. She and Ben both gave a little wave to Candi, who was sitting at her desk as usual, typing away on her computer. They waited by the hallway, as they did every day, until Ferd could come and take them outside to the afternoon activity.

  Ben lowered his voice until he was almost whispering. “Okay, what?”

  “We need to look on Candi’s computer.”

  Ben laughed. “Since when did you turn into Abby the Spy? Come on. There’s no way.”

  “Why not?”

  Ferd chose that moment to burst through the double doors. Eliza and Ricky were already with him.

  “Okay, kidlets. Let’s motivate. We’ve got a major Ultimate Frisbee war brewing out on the back lawn.”

  Abby and Ben followed the group outside. But as they walked out onto the grass, they hung back far enough that they could continue their conversation in private.

  “Why can’t we see what’s on Candi’s PC?” Abby asked, more urgently now. It seemed like such a natural way to find out what made Camp Cadabra tick.

  “Well, for one thing, there’s probably a password about six feet long,” he said. “This isn’t like Mission: Impossible, where you can just guess what the password is.”

  “Can’t we try, though? Please? Just try?”

  “Try how? You’d have to get her away from there.”

  “So we’ll try after she leaves at night! Come on, Ben, you’re good at all that techie stuff.”

  “But I’m not a hacker.” Ben, for the first time since Abby had known him, was dragging his feet. “Look, Abby. I’m already not supposed to be here. It just doesn’t seem right. I don’t want to get caught; I’d be in s
o much trouble.”

  Abby hung her head in discouragement. Her deep brown hair fell over her face.

  “Look, Abby. We’re only going to be here for a few more days, and then the whole thing will be behind us.”

  She gave him a tight little smile. “Okay,” she said.

  But it wasn’t.

  The movie that night was Dr. Doolittle IV: Llama’s Revenge. Abby joined the other kids, but only reluctantly; her mind was elsewhere. She sat in the back row, and after ten minutes, she decided that the popcorn was actually more interesting than the movie.

  Fortunately, things got more interesting very fast.

  “Abby.”

  It was Ben, standing behind her chair and whispering in her ear. He was out of breath.

  “What?”

  “I gotta talk to you. Come outside for a sec.”

  She stepped up on the seat’s armrest and climbed over the back of the chair. The two of them walked out the back of the movie theater—actually a small auditorium that was normally used for speeches—and into the vestibule.

  “Come ’ere,” Ben said. “Sit here for a second.” He gestured to a half-wall by the big picture windows.

  She sat. “What? What is it?”

  “Okay. Well, remember how you said I should snoop around on Candi’s computer?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I couldn’t do that. I watched her this afternoon when she was on the phone; the screen saver comes on after five minutes, and you need a password to get back in. But it gave me an idea.”

  Abby’s eyes were wide. She leaned forward. “What? Tell me!”

  Ben waggled his eyebrows, enjoying every minute of this.

  “Okay. So we see Candi every day, when we go in and out of our rooms, right? But hardly anyone ever talks to her. So I decided to chat her up a little. Turns out she’s really nice. She’s twenty-five, she grew up about ten miles from here, she has a boyfriend, she’s been working here for eight months.”

  Abby kept waiting for the punch line. “You dragged me out of the movie to tell me about Candi’s love life?”

  “No, no. I’m just telling you what happened. Okay, so after a minute, she asks if I’m having a good time here, and I tell her, sure. Except I tell her that I’m a little insecure about my trick. I tell her, all the other kids have much cooler powers than me. And she’s like, ‘Oh, no, I doubt that very much!’ And she asks to see it! She asks if she can see my power!”

  He looked at Abby, waiting for her reaction. But she didn’t have one. Not yet.

  “Don’t you get it? She asked to see my trick! This is perfect! So I said, ‘Sure. I do it with a key, like a house key or a car key. Do you have one? And so she says, ‘Yeah—here’s the one for the desk drawers, but I need it right back!’ ”

  Now Abby got it. She giggled with excitement. “No way! She gave you her desk key?”

  “Yeah. And you know what? It’s one of those copper ones with a jagged edge, just like my house key! So I did a palm switch!”

  “A what?”

  Ben hadn’t meant to confuse her with magicians’ mumbo jumbo. “A palm switch! I did my trick for her, and she thought it was really great—but then I gave her back the wrong one!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wound up with . . . Oh, hey wait! You’ve got something in your ear?”

  He reached past the side of her head and pretended to pull something out of her ear. It was the oldest, dumbest trick in the book—but she gasped when she saw what was in his fingers.

  “You got her desk key!”

  “It may not be as good as hacking into her computer, but it may be fun to see where it leads anyway. You game?”

  Abby was excited now, fired up by the thrill of the hunt.

  “Of course I am! Let’s go!”

  They scurried out to the central atrium where Candi’s desk sat empty in the dim light. They hunched down behind it, right next to its locked fake pinewood doors.

  Ben handed her the key. “You’re the mastermind; you do it.”

  Abby slipped the key into the lock and turned it. The desk door swung open easily. And inside was—a bunch of papers and folders.

  Well, what did you expect? said the little voice in her head. A stash of weapons?

  Abby grabbed a handful of pages, knelt on the ground, and started reading them out loud.

  “Cadabra Movie Schedule. Vegetarian Cafeteria Menu. Shepherd Contact List. Emergency Evacuation Protocols. Employee Pension Plan Information . . .”

  She looked up at Ben, confused. “What is all this?”

  “I don’t know. Just a bunch of general stuff for Candi or whoever works here, I guess.”

  Abby kept flipping through the pages, her excitement quickly turning to boredom. “Vacation Policy. Annual Federal Holidays. Philadelphia Metropolitan Bus Schedule.”

  She sighed and stacked up the pages, ready to put them back in the desk. “Forget it,” she said. “There’s nothing juicy in here.”

  But Ben put his hand on her wrist. “Wait a sec. Go back. Right where you stopped. What was that?”

  She flipped past all the same pages again until she found what he wanted. “This? Camper Research Schedule?” She pulled it out of the stack.

  “Yeah. That’s gotta be about us, right?”

  Abby started reading it out loud.

  “6/30. Evening welcome barbecue. 6–9 p.m., courtyard. No research. 7/1. Morning introductions, meet shepherds, begin exploration of talents.”

  She looked up. “It is about us. It’s just our schedule.”

  “Yeah, but—” He was reading intently over her shoulder. “What’s that? Look what it says down there!”

  She scanned down the page. “7/8. Primary medical staff arrives. Begin Level 2 research: hypnotherapy, medication, MRI/CAT scans. 7/10. Minor exploratory surgery on selected subjects. Harvest tissue samples.”

  She read it again to herself, not quite understanding. But even if her brain wasn’t grasping it all, her gut was telling her plenty. A cold, dark shadow passed through her.

  “What is all this?” she asked, barely daring to breathe.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s what they have planned for us next, Abby.”

  He met her gaze. Abby saw uncertainty and fear on Ben’s face for the very first time, and it made her even more afraid. She felt as though her stomach had just dropped right down out of her body.

  When she was capable of taking another breath, she finally spoke. “What are they going to do to us, exactly?”

  Ben took the page from her. He looked down at it, partly to read it again and partly because he didn’t want her to see what he was feeling.

  “Well, you know. Hypnotherapy? That’s hypnosis. They’re gonna hypnotize us. A CAT scan is where they stick you into this huge tube that can, like, take pictures of your brain and your guts and stuff. Medication means giving us pills or shots.”

  “But why do they have to do all that?”

  “And you know what surgery is,” he finished up.

  Abby’s eyes flashed with anger. Doctor stuff, blood, taking pills—all that stuff had always made her queasy even when it was supposed to make her healthy. But there was nothing wrong with her now—and the thought of being unconscious and even operated on for no reason at all was so upsetting, her hands started to shake.

  She grabbed his forearm. “They’re not gonna make me do that stuff!”

  Ben nodded. “I’m sure any of the kids here would agree with you. The thing is, they weren’t going to tell us any of this. They’re just planning to do it. So we wouldn’t have a choice!”

  “Well, they’re not gonna do that to me! I swear to God. I’ll run away.”

  He sighed. “Well, actually, what I want to do first is have a little chat with our buddy Phil Shutter. I think he owes us some explanation. You want to come with me?”

  She stood up and handed the folder back to him. “Want to? A whole army couldn’t keep me away.”

  “G
reat. We’ll hunt him down right after breakfast tomorrow.”

  When Abby got back to her room, she turned on the gleaming laptop on the desk. She fired up her e-mail program and wrote:

  Sent: July 6

  From: acarnelia11@gmail.com

  To: eastportmama@optonline.net

  Subject: URGENT!!!!!!

  Dear Mom and Dad and Ryan,

  I don’t think you know what this place is. They are treating us like science projects! On Monday, they’re gonna do stuff like hypnotizing us, giving us shots, and sticking us in scanning tubes. And even surgery!! Did you have any idea that this stuff was going to go on?

  I want to come HOME!

  Can you at least call here and make them let me talk to you? I really, really don’t want to be here anymore. I’m going to talk to the guy who runs it tomorrow. I’m going to tell him I’m homesick and need to leave.

  I’m really scared, you guys. I never expected any of this.

  Please, please write back.

  Love you!

  Abs

  She read over it one more time and then clicked Send.

  She went to bed, but it was hours before she finally fell into a shallow, fitful sleep.

  CHAPTER

  21

  Phil

  EASTPORT, CONNECTICUT, was in the middle of a gigantic summer rainstorm the next morning—“the storm of the century,” the guy on the news channel kept saying.

  Then again, he had also said that about the last storm, and the one before that.

  Mrs. Carnelia made breakfast for her husband and Ryan, and then sat down at her desk to check her e-mail. After a moment of reading, she stood up, frowning. “Jack?” she called. “Jack, come in here a sec. I think you should see this!”

  Mr. Carnelia poked his head into the study. “What is it, hon?”

  She pointed to the screen. “Take a look at this note from Abby.”

  Received: July 7

  From: acarnelia11@gmail.com

  To: eastportmama@optonline.net

  Subject: Hello!

  Dear Mom and Dad and Ryan,

  this.

  Please, please write back.

  Love you!

  Abs