Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (11 page)

It was Ben.

“B
EN
!”
ABBY YELPED,
a smile growing. “What—what are you doing here?”

He squeezed past her and swung into the seat behind her.

“Same as you,” he grinned. “Going for a super-long van ride.”

Abby was completely confused.

“Buckle up, my people,” said Ferd at the wheel. “That's the full load.
Vámanos!
”

The van pulled forward with a crunch of gravel. After a moment, it was bumping along the piney road out of camp.

Abby stole a look back at Ben over her shoulder. He grinned back at her through his stringy bangs and, when
he was sure nobody else was looking, quickly signaled her by putting his finger to his lips in a
Shhhh!
motion.

“As long as there's no conversation back there,” Ferd said after a minute, “then I intend to fill the silence with a bit of musical entertainment.” With one hand, he reached out on the seat next to him, feeling for his CD case. “I have the complete works of Beethoven played on bagpipes.”

There was an instant reaction.

“Hi, I'm Ricky!” “I'm Ben.” “You're Abby, right?” “I call her Abby Cadabra.” “I'm Eliza.” “Nice to meet you.”

Ferd shook his head in mock disappointment. “You don't like classical? You young people today have no taste at all.”

“So, I mean . . .” Abby began. “Do you guys all have—”

She looked from face to face, hoping that somebody,
anybody,
would start explaining what was going on here. But she didn't want to dive right in and start talking about how she had a true magical power. That hadn't worked out so great the last time she told someone.

“Special talents?” It was Ricky, finishing her sentence.

She turned. “Yeah!” she said. “Do you?”

“Kinda,” he said. He looked around at the others, nervously.

“Tell us!” said Eliza.

Ricky looked down at his lap, too embarrassed to speak.

“Don't be shy, dude,” Ben chimed gently.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Ferd suddenly. “You should know that you'll be spending the next week together—as a unit, as it were. You have been selected for your mutual abilities. So it would be my suggestion that you cherish your similarity. Nobody will make fun of you here, my people. You're among friends.”

“So,” said Eliza. “Will you tell us about yourself, Ricky?”

He looked up. “What do you want to know?”

“At least tell us all the boring stuff. How old you are, brothers and sisters, all that junk,” Abby said.

“I'm twelve. I have three older sisters. I live in New York City. I have a rat.”

“A rat?” said Eliza.

“Yeah. A pet,” said Ricky. “What's wrong with that?”

“It's just gross,” said Eliza.

“How's it any grosser than a mouse?” asked Ricky, annoyed. “It's just a big mouse.”

Ben, who was still new to the concept that there might be people with actual supernatural powers, was leaning forward and listening hard.

“Tell us about your magic, Ricky,” he said.

“Well, I've been doing magic shows since I was in
seventh grade. I do birthday parties sometimes. I'm learning balloon twisting, too. The little kids really like that.”

Abby and Ben exchanged a look. Ricky was avoiding the subject.

“Do you have . . . you know, one
special
trick?” Abby asked.

“I'm not supposed to talk about it. My mom says it only gets me in trouble.”

“Hey, I know,” said Ben. “Abby, why don't you tell these guys about your power, and then everybody else can go next?”

Abby wasn't especially thrilled about going first; she had grown so used to keeping her freakiness a secret that it was almost second nature to hide it. Still, she'd had a
little
practice—she'd told Morgan, and Ben, and Ferd, and the world hadn't ended.

So she looked out the window a moment, took a breath, and then told the whole story. From the beginning. Salad. Ryan. The library. Her dad. Summer camp. Camper Show.

The other kids were completely absorbed, twisted in their seat belts to listen. Even Ben was rapt; he hadn't heard her whole story in such detail.

“. . . and so Ferd said that he wanted me to meet other
kids with real powers,” Abby concluded. “And I think he means you guys!”

Eliza was staring at her. “That's it? That's all you can do . . . spin an egg?”

“Well, yeah.” She met Eliza's gaze. “I didn't pick this power, you know. It is what it is.”

“My turn!” The others turned to look at Ricky. Now that Abby had gone first, Ricky was a lot more confident.

“Tell! Tell!” said Eliza.

“Well, okay, what I didn't really tell you is that I have a power, too. I actually had it before I ever got into magic. I mean, you know—magic
tricks.”

Abby nodded, encouraging him.

“Okay. So this one time? I was in Spanish class?”

Ricky had a way of making his voice go up at the end of sentences, so it sounded like he was asking questions when he actually wasn't.

“And I was with my friend Tad. We were supposed to be paired up together, the whole class, like, buddied up. We were supposed to practice counting in Spanish, to learn how to say the numbers. Tad lives two houses down from me on my street, so we've been friends for, like, ever. We always buddy up when we're supposed to pick a practice buddy. Except this one time? Like in sixth grade? I got
so
mad at him. He borrowed my bike, and like, totally crashed
it. He said he didn't. He said he never did. But I could tell, because the little thing you push to ring the bell wouldn't move anymore, and also the back brakes, you had to squeeze really, really hard to make 'em work?”

“Go on,” said Ben, hoping to nudge Ricky back to the magic part of the story.

“Okay. So anyway, we're practicing counting to a hundred. And the teacher, Mr. Lebowitz, he said to practice for five minutes, and then he stepped out of the room. He does that sometimes. We don't know what he does when he does that. Some kids think he just has to go to the bathroom a lot. But there's this one kid? Thornton? He thinks Mr. Lebowitz has a secret girlfriend in the school, like another teacher. And that every time he sneaks out of Spanish, he goes and meets her in the teacher's lounge and
kisses
her!”

Ricky cracked himself up, his face like a grinning grapefruit.

“So what happened in Spanish that day?” Abby prodded.

“Well, anyway, Mr. Lebowitz was out of the room, and so everybody started to get a little silly. Tad starts saying the numbers like a robot. ‘
Uno . . . dos . . . tres . . . cuatro . . .'
”

Ricky was imitating his friend, speaking in a dull, electronic, monotone voice.

“And so then I started counting like a big fat opera singer.” And Ricky demonstrated, singing high and warbled.
“ ‘Unooooooo! Doooo-ooos! Treee-eee-eeees!' It was so funny!”

The other kids laughed politely, but Abby kept wondering if there was going to be an end to this story.

“And then Tad, he started counting by twos, like
dos, cuatro, seis, ocho
. You know, like two, four, six, eight. Only he was doing it like Darth Vader, with all these, like breathing sounds in between. He is
such
a
Star Wars
freak. You can't believe his room! He's got every single action figure, in like three different sizes. He has this life-size R2-D2 that really works! He can make it move with a remote control. You press this one button, and it makes all the little R2-D2 noises. You know what Tad's birthday party is? It's a
Star Wars
birthday party
every year.
Every single year since he was four!”

“Impressive,” said Eliza, entirely unimpressed.

“What about the magic, Ricky?” prodded Ben.

“Okay, right. So after he did the Darth Vader sounds, I started saying the numbers backward. Not like spelled backward or counting backward, I mean
talking like this.
”

And when he said “talking like this,” Ricky did that creepy thing that boys sometimes do where they
breathe in
while they're talking. They actually speak while they're inhaling. It made his voice sound sort of watery, old, and raspy. But anyway, creepy.

“And Thornton? He was sitting right by the window, and I look over, and he's drawing on the window. You know how you can fog up the glass on a window? Like if you lean right up to it and breathe on it? There was a fogged-up place on the window, and he was writing his initials in it.”

Ricky stopped, and looked around for effect.

“See?”

Abby didn't. “What do you mean?”

“He didn't fog up the window! He was writing in the fogged-up place with his finger, but he didn't breathe on it. He didn't fog up the window!”

Ben couldn't help thinking that Ricky had somehow left out a piece of the story; he didn't get it at all.

“Well,
someone
must have fogged it up, right?” he said.

“I know! That's what I'm telling you!” said Ricky, getting frustrated. “
I
did it! I fogged that window. By counting in Spanish by twos breathing in!”

Abby looked at Ben with a face that said,
Is this kid for real?

Eliza was looking at him with one cocked eyebrow. “So let me get this straight. Your power is that you can fog up a window? By counting in Spanish with that weird voice?”

Ricky nodded. “By twos. I have to count by twos.”

Eliza rolled her eyes and turned to face the front of the van, as though to say,
I'm done with this conversation.

“How did you know?” asked Abby. “How did you know it was you?”

“Because,” Ricky said. “I was watching Thornton writing with his finger, and I did it again. I started over at
dos
. And I saw another foggy place fog up on the window right next to the first one. And the thing is, I wasn't even close to the window! I was sitting with Tad, like across the whole room from it. And so I did it again, and a couple more times. I was totally freaking out? So I told Tad to watch the window, too? And he did, and I did the trick, and told him how I was making the window fog up, but he didn't believe me. He told me that Thornton was just breathing on the window, since he was sitting next to it. So I was mad. So you know what I did?”

Abby shook her head no.

“I fogged up his glasses! It was almost by accident. I just looked right at them, and counted again by twos—
dos! cuatro! seis!
—and they fogged right up, like the bathroom mirror. It was so great! And he's like, ‘HEY!' And he had to take them off to wipe them on his shirt. And he's like, ‘Don't breathe on my glasses. That's disgusting,' and I'm like, ‘Okay, sorry.' But then he puts them back on again and I pushed my chair wayyyy back so I was really
far from him. And I'm like, ‘I'll just sit over here so I won't accidentally breathe on your glasses, okay?' And he's like, ‘That's better!' So then he goes, ‘Okay, my turn. Who am I being?' And he was gonna start counting again in another funny voice. Except I interrupted him and said, ‘No, it's still my turn. I didn't get to a hundred.' And so I looked right at his glasses and did it again! He was so mad! It was so funny!”

Ricky was stomping his feet on the floor of the van with excitement.

There was a pause, and then Eliza spoke. “So do it.”

“What?” said Ricky.

“Let's see it. Fog up my window.” Eliza tapped the van window beside her.

Abby thought that Eliza was being rude, but Ricky was perfectly cheerful about it. “Okay, sure,” he said.

There wasn't much to it. Using that weird inhaling-voice thing, he said,
“Dos, cuatro, seis, ocho, diez.”
It sounded a little like a seal barking.

A round patch of Eliza's window, about the size of a cookie, fogged up as though someone had breathed on it. Ricky was a few feet away, way too far for him to have done it with his breath.

Eliza cocked an eyebrow. “Not bad,” she said. She couldn't resist; she put her finger up to the window and
drew a fancy script
E
in the foggy patch, which was already starting to fade away, from the outside in.

“Does it work when you don't use that weird voice?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“What about counting
not
by twos? What if you just count one, two, three in Spanish?”

“Nope,” Ricky said again. “It only works this way.”

Abby would have found his trigger hilarious—if hers weren't equally peculiar. Mostly, she was delighted to discover that his power was just as useless and unimportant as her own. She imagined that he'd gone through many of the same experiences and feelings.

“It's amazing, Ricky,” she told him, turning from the foggy patch to look back at Ricky. “What does your family think?”

Ricky turned his head to look out at the passing scenery, which was hilly and green. “My sisters all think it's just a magic trick. But my parents were really upset. They thought there was something wrong with me. They took me to a psychiatrist.”

“And what did he say?”

“She. She asked a bunch of questions, but couldn't figure out what my little fogged-glass thing had to do with my personality or whatever. I think she was a little scared.
Anyway, she said I should see a doctor. So we went and saw a doctor, and he did about a million tests and finally said there was nothing wrong with me. My parents kept telling him that they had to do something, so he said if they were still worried, they should take me to see a priest.”

“A priest?” Ben chimed in. “They thought it was something religious?”