Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (6 page)

But deep down, the first couple of classes left Abby with a nagging worry about the sort of magic that she was learning at Camp Cadabra: It was all fake. All of it.

And then she went to Impromptu.

The class was held indoors, in a big, bright room in the
Hagrid building. It looked a little like the science classrooms she'd seen during a tour of the Eastport Middle School, with long tables topped by thick black stone. As she walked in, two counselors were setting up what looked like place settings for dinner—plates, silverware, glasses, napkins—at each seat.

As she walked in, she saw someone she knew.

“Ben!” she said happily, waving to him.

Ben brushed the floppy hair from his eyes and smiled.

“Hey,” he said. “Abby, right?”

“Right,” she said.

He adjusted his knife and fork absentmindedly. “So how's your first real day of camp going?”

“Good,” she said. “Fun stuff.” She took a breath and pointed to the chair next to him. “Can I sit here?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am, we're expecting a party of sixteen at any moment.” He grinned at her.

“Well, they'll just have to wait, won't they?” she said, flouncing down onto the seat. Her day, and her mood, were rapidly improving.

This
, Abby thought,
is the perfect opportunity to ask Ben about his magical power.
She just didn't know how to bring it up.

As it turned out, there wasn't time.

“Good morning, my people!” came a voice from the front of the room.

Abby turned to look. It was a short, pudgy guy wearing a flowered Hawaiian shirt and a greasy, blond ponytail.

“My name is Ferd. Kindly note that it's not Fred—it's Ferd. Short for Ferdinand. Please make a note of it. And for the next two weeks, I'll be teaching you amateurs about the marvels of impromptu magic.”

He was strolling slowly down the aisles between the tables, like a king surveying his peasants, but his voice was high and thin.

“Impromptu. Adjective: ‘without prior planning.' In magic, there's nothing better. You're hanging out with friends. Or waiting for the waiter. Or waiting to be picked up from school. Or you're at someone else's house, and the six-year-old says, ‘Do a trick!' What are you going to do—run home to get your suitcase full of props?”

Ferd opened his eyes wide, expectantly.

“I think not!”

Abby, highly entertained, snuck a look at Ben's face. He was fascinated, too, with a you-gotta-be-kidding-me expression.

“In such scenarios,” Ferd continued, “impromptu magic is your only way out. You pick up something that you've got on hand, be it a salt shaker, be it a dollar bill, be it a writing implement. And you commence to conjure.”

With this, Ferd stopped by one of the tables, picked up
a salt shaker, and wrapped it in a napkin. Then he picked up a pepper shaker—“the spice of life!” he declared—and sprinkled some pepper onto the napkin.

Then he crushed the napkin. The salt shaker inside was gone.

“Now,
impromptu
may mean ‘no preparation.' But what is unprepared, my people, are the
props—
not the
magician.
You, my people, must do quite a
lot
of preparation—and you're going to be doing it here, in my class, over the next two weeks. You are my Frankensteins. I am going to create you. I am going to turn you into impromptu magicians, capable of performing miracles with ordinary unprepared objects—on an audience, I assure you, that is completely unprepared for
you.”

Ferd had returned to the front of the room, where he picked up a spoon from his place setting.

“Today, we talk about presentation. In today's class, you will not learn a trick, you will not perform any tricks, you will not even discuss tricks. We will learn the art of
presentation.
Showmanship. Patter. Personal style. If you master the presentation, the trick part will come easily. As Harry Houdini didn't say, the secret is only the last five percent. All right: kindly examine your spoon.”

The campers, intrigued by Ferd and
his
memorable presentation style, picked up their spoons and held them up off the table, following his lead. 56

“For the sake of argument, my people, let us say that our objective here is to make this spoon levitate—to make it float in the air. What I want you to do is to make up a half-decent
trigger.”

He thrust out his arm, pointing around the room as though he were trying to pick out the murderer in a crowd of suspects.

“Consider, if you will, the best magic trick you've ever seen. I don't care if it was on a stage, on a table in front of you, or in a movie. Whatever it was, it had a trigger: something that the magician did to make the magic happen, something that showed how
he
was in control.”

He waggled his fingers mysteriously at the spoon.

“If you're a six-year-old,” he went on, “the trigger is saying, ‘hocus pocus.' If you're ten and not very imaginative, maybe you wave your hands. If you're a mind reader, you close your eyes and frown. If you're
Bewitched
, you wiggle your nose. If you're Harry Potter, you point your wand and say something in fake Latin. These would be your
triggers.”

He demonstrated a few triggers, waving, staring, pointing, waggling his fingers.

“The trigger is only for show,” he went on, “but it's an important part of the illusion. So I want you to take four minutes to consider the trigger. I want to see your trigger. Surprise me. Be different. Cultivate your own style. Make it fit your personality. Okay, go.”

The room burst into murmurs and giggles as the campers turned their attention to triggers. Ben held out his spoon and glared at it, eyebrows high. Abby laughed and responded with a trigger of her own: holding the spoon over her head and blowing on it. Ferd stalked the room, muttering comments like “Fine, fine” and “A bit tired, wouldn't you say?”

Eventually, Ferd moved on to the finer points of magic presentation—things like patter (what you say while you're doing the trick), misdirection (making the audience look where you want them to look), and conclusion (wrapping up the trick in a satisfying way).

Impromptu was nearly over when Abby had a startling thought. She had discovered her pointless power by accident, by tugging on her earlobes looking for an earring.
That
was the trigger—a
real
trigger.

For weeks now, she'd been wondering how long she'd had her magical power. Did she just develop it now, at age eleven? Had she had it for weeks?

Suddenly, though, she had a crazy realization.

I'll bet I've always had the power,
she thought.
But that was the first time in my life I ever did that trigger when there was an egg on the counter in front of me. If I hadn't pulled my earlobes at that moment, I might never have discovered my power at all!

Abby wasn't quite sure whether that would have been a good thing or not. 58

“Abby?”

It was Ben, looking at her with concern.

“Earth to Abby.”

She straightened up. “Sorry, what'd you say?”

“I said, do you wanna sit with me at lunch? They're serving a special today—mystery meat.”

“My favorite,” she said. “Let's go.”

This, she hoped, would be more than just a lunch with a fellow camper. It would be her first chance to compare notes with another person who had real magic.

L
IKE EVERYTHING ELSE AT CAMP CADABRA
,
the dining hall wasn't anything like what you'd expect to find at a summer camp; it was magnificent. Inside, it was like a grand Swiss castle, with a huge, soaring cathedral ceiling and gigantic windows overlooking the lake.

Oh—and I should probably mention the food.

This was not camp food. This was not Jell-O cubes, fruit cocktail, and defrosted trays of fried nuggets. This was a salad bar twenty feet long, a taco bar every other day, and a pasta station at every meal, where you could pick the kind of noodles you liked and what kind of sauce you wanted on it. At breakfast, there were two little guys who would make omelets or pancakes with
whatever stuff you wanted in them, like bacon and cheese for the omelets, chocolate chips or blueberries for the pancakes.

Where on earth did this camp get its money?
Abby couldn't help but remember what her mom had said when she'd opened the brochures: not how
expensive
this camp was going to be, but that the price seemed so
low
. Abby imagined that some famous magician, some guy who'd gotten his start at a magic camp at age eleven, had donated some of his millions to build a new one. Or something.

As Abby set her tray down next to Ben and stepped over the padded leather bench to sit down, he was chatting with a buddy from his cabin across the table. She waited for a break in the conversation, took a big gulp of her lemonade, and then dove in.

“So. Ben.”

He turned his head. “So. Abby.”

“Um. Listen, I really need to talk to you for a sec.”

He looked away, as though the tacos on his plate had gotten
really
interesting.

Oh, great,
Abby thought.
I've known the guy for, what, six minutes? He probably thinks I'm a stalker.

“Okay, I'm really sorry if this is gonna sound weird and strange. Will you promise not to be creeped out?”

“I can't really promise,” Ben said after a moment. “But I will say that it takes a
lot
to creep me out. My dad's let me watch horror movies since I was six.”

Abby smiled, only slightly less nervous. She took a breath. “Okay. Remember when you showed me your key trick yesterday in the parking lot?”

Ben nodded.

“And I asked you how you did it, and you said you didn't really know. You
said
that, right? You said it just happens when you squint one eye, or whatever.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I tell everybody that.”

“You do?” she said. “You're completely open about it? I can't believe it! Because, listen, I have a trick like that, too.”

And there it was. She was spilling it. She started talking faster. “Not a trick—a
power
. Just like yours! Except with an egg, not a key. And I don't have any idea how I do it, either! And I've been thinking that I'm some kind of freak or something. I thought I was the only one in the world with a power I can't explain. And that's the whole reason I signed up for this camp! Because I thought maybe I could learn more about it, or master it, or develop it, or something like that. But everybody's just doing
trick
tricks, like magic tricks—and that's all great and everything, but it's nothing like what you and I do! And so yesterday, when I
saw you do that, I was just so happy, SO happy, because it was like, hey, I just can't believe that there's someone else who's got anything like my—“

She got stuck there. She didn't know whether to say “power” or “problem.”

“—well, anyway, there's somebody else like me! And I'm just so happy to meet you, and I want to know everything
you
know about your power.”

Ben was no longer smiling. In fact, he looked a little uncomfortable. If you'd seen his face, you would have thought that he'd just been attacked by a crazy person.

“Yeah. Well—well, okay,” he said, frowning. “Look, Abby. I mean, I love magic. I've been doing it since I got my first magic kit in kindergarten. I've won a couple of awards. I do close-up at a restaurant every Sunday night, going table to table. But I—I'm not gonna sit here and tell you I have magic
powers.
”

Abby could almost hear the next thing he wanted to say:
I'm not totally insane, like you are.

“But your key trick!” she said. “You said you don't know how you do it, right?”

“Of
course
I know how I do it! I practiced for about three months to get it that good!”

Abby was thunderstruck. “But you said—you said—I mean, I asked you how you did it, and you said you
didn't know! You said it flipped over whenever you did that squinting thing!”

Ben shook his head. “That's just patter, Abby! Whenever anybody says, ‘How do you do it?' that's just what I say! If you tell 'em how you really do it, you destroy the trick. You ruin it for them, because everybody
wants
to believe that magic is real. But if you tell 'em even
you
don't know how it works, you keep the mystery alive. You keep it going. It makes the trick even better! It's just patter, Abby.”

Abby felt tears welling up in her eyes. She was suddenly roasting hot. How could she have been such an idiot?

She stood up and turned away, walking fast across the dining hall.
Of course he doesn't have a power, you moron!
she told herself.
It's only you, and it's always been only you, and you just made yourself look like a first-class idiot!

It wasn't until Abby reached the salad bar, stretched out across one end of the building like a chrome-and-glass battleship, that the world stopped spinning long enough for her to stop and compose herself. Now she was special, all right—a laughingstock. She was the one kid at Camp Cadabra who was loopy enough to think that she
really
was magic.

She stood there, leaning against the glass sneeze guard over the fancy lettuce bin. How would she explain to her
parents why she wanted to leave camp after only one day?

“Abby.” Someone was tapping her shoulder.

It was Ben.

“Abby. What just happened back there?”

She looked up at the dark wooden beams of the high cafeteria ceiling, trying to stop herself from crying. She said nothing.