Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (12 page)

“They thought maybe I needed an exorcism,” Ricky said solemnly. “You know, like in the movies. Where evil spirits take over your body, and a priest does a special ceremony to get 'em out.”

“So did they try that?” asked Eliza.

“Well, they were gonna. My parents took me to see this old priest guy on the Upper West Side. He lived in this little tiny apartment, like you wouldn't believe how small it was. The bathtub is in the kitchen! Anyway, this guy asked a ton of questions that had nothing to do with me, like did I have visions, did I ever hear voices, did I scream in my sleep, did I ever have blackouts where I just can't remember what happened in the last few hours, did I ever feel compelled to do something evil, all this stuff. I told him no, not any of those things. Only that I can fog up glass. He made me leave the room so he could talk to my parents, but later on, they told me what he said anyway.”

“What?” Abby asked.

“He said that an exorcism wouldn't do any good because I'm not actually possessed by any evil spirits. He didn't know how to explain my trick, but he was positive that there's nothing in the Bible about people fogging up windows.”

Eliza snorted. “Surprise, surprise,” she said.

“How did you get picked for this trip?” Abby said. Of course,
she
had gotten noticed by performing at Camper Show. But she didn't remember Ricky doing any on-stage performances where the counselors might have noticed him.

“Oh, it was kinda weird,” he replied, getting back into storytelling mode. “So this one night? In our cabin? It was after lights-out, and we were just whispering back and forth, me and this kid who's in the bed across from me? We could see a light shining through one of the windows in our cabin, and I was gonna see if I could make him freak out. I told him there was a ghost who likes to hang around our cabin, a Spanish ghost, who speaks Spanish and stuff, and I told him I could make the ghost appear. I told him to watch the light through the window really closely, and see if he could see the ghost passing in front of it. And so I started making all kinds of weird noises and sounds, like really quietly and whispery, just saying weird words and stuff? And in the middle of it, I did my Spanish counting. And the glass
fogged up, all the way across the cabin, and it looked
just
like some ghost was passing in front of the light out there.”

“Whoa,” breathed Ben, admiring the prank.

“Oh, yeah, it
rocked,”
said Ricky proudly.

“Did it scare the other kid?” Abby asked.

“Oh man, he started crying! He was totally completely scared. And he's fourteen! He gets out of bed and goes and wakes up our counselor and tells him what happened. And he's all, like, ‘Don't worry, little guy, it's just a trick, it's not real, there's no ghosts, go back to sleep.' But the next day, our counselor came over and talked to me, and I showed him how I did it? And I guess that was it. After lunch, he took me to meet this other counselor, and
he
asked me if I wanted to go to super camp. And I said, sure.”

“Who was it, Ricky? Who was the other counselor?” asked Ben.

“You know.
Him,”
he said.

He was pointing at Ferd.

T
HE CAMP CADABRA VAN WAS ROOMY AND MODERN
,
but it wasn't designed for all-day drives. The seat benches made your butt sore after a couple of hours. As a result, the kids kept shifting positions, crossing and uncrossing their legs, turning around and leaning on the seat backs, and generally avoiding holding the same position for too long.

Fortunately, Ferd made plenty of stops, too, for bathroom breaks, snacks, and lunch.

At around noon, they picked up some Tex-Mex Express, to go, and piled back into the van. As they started chomping their burritos and tacos, Ricky reminded them that not everybody had told their stories yet.

“Like Eliza,” he said, with a stringy scrap of lettuce
hanging from the corner of his mouth. “I wanna know what your power is.”

From the back seat, most of what he'd seen of Eliza was the back of her crinkly red hair; she had spent most of the ride listening to the conversation, but looking out the window, too.

“I don't know. It's private,” Eliza said without even turning around.

“Aw,
come
on!” Ricky exclaimed. “I told you about mine!”

“Yeah, really, Eliza,” Abby added. “I thought we had a pact. I thought we're a team.”

“Throw us a crumb, Eliza,” added Ben from the back seat.

Even Ferd chimed in. “Fair's fair, little lady,” he said. Abby was astonished, because Ferd had been wearing ear-buds for the whole ride. She had figured that he'd been lost in his world of classical bagpipe music.

Eliza sniffed. “What do you want to know?”

“What's your
power?
” said Ricky impatiently.

“Fine,” she said, a little standoffishly. She looked out the window and pretended to be bored. They were passing through a town. Like so many American towns, it had a main drag, a strip of shops and restaurants where, if you were really, really hungry, you could eat at Wendy's, McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC,
and
Friendly's without having to walk more than half a mile.

Finally, after a moment, Eliza said: “I can levitate.”

What?
Abby thought. She turned to look at Ben, who was equally shocked. She'd thought that all of these powers would turn out to be pointless little silly things like hers—and like Ricky's.

But levitation? Floating in the air? That would be another story. That'd be more like the magic you read about or see movies about.
Real
magic. That would be historic! People had been dreaming about flying for thousands of years. And there was someone in the van who could do it!

“Whoooooooaaaa,” breathed Ricky. “Like, for real? Like, rising in the air?”

Ben was also having trouble with the concept. It had been hard enough for him to believe in Abby's teeny-tiny power. Even Ricky's power was hard for him to swallow; his brain was scrambling to figure out what this was all about.

But levitating was a completely different level of freakiness. That wouldn't be just
bending
the laws of nature, like making an egg spin or fogging up a little piece of window; it would be
breaking
them. And it would be front-page headlines, if anyone knew.

“Does that mean you can, like, fly?” said Abby. She turned on the bench seat, folding one leg under her to face Eliza more comfortably.

“I get off the ground, okay?”

“But what's your trigger?” said Ricky, pestering her. “Tell more! Come on. I told you mine!”

Eliza just stared out the window some more. She was not, Abby had decided, a warm and fuzzy person.

“Fair's fair,” Abby said, feeling a little bit pushy but also desperately curious.

“It's not a big deal,” Eliza said, but she was starting to feel outvoted.

“Flying is a very big deal, Eliza,” Ben chimed in.

“It's not flying! I didn't say flying,” Eliza said, finally turning to face the others. “Did I say flying? I did not.”

“You said levitation. That means rising off the ground,” Ben said. “How is that not flying?”

“Because—well, because it's—”

Eliza stopped and looked down at her lap.

“Because it's what?” asked Abby, as gently as she could.

“Because I can only levitate a quarter of an inch.”

There was a moment of shocked silence, and then came dual snorts from the back seat, as the boys looked at each other with raised eyebrows and tried to stifle their laughter. Abby also felt like giggling—what was the point of being able to fly, if you could only rise the height of an Oreo?—but she didn't want Eliza to regret having opened up.

“That's very cool,” she told Eliza encouragingly. “Actually it's amazing.” A little white lie never hurt anyone.

“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.