Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (19 page)

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 clipboard 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?”

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?

A
BBY 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.”