Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (25 page)

“I
'
M CHAD FRESNO
,
and
this . . .
is
Been There, Done That!
”

The studio audience cheered wildly for as long as the little man with the headset ran around waving the APPLAUSE sign back and forth.

Chad Fresno, Abby noticed, was what her dad called a “three-lumper.” His hair looked like three carefully frozen, shiny lumps of plastic: one on top, one on each side of his head. He sat down in the swiveling leather chair across from Abby on the mini-stage.

“Every week, we introduce you to someone who's lived an experience that the rest of us encounter only in our dreams—or our nightmares,” he said to the TV camera. “And today, we bring you a young lady we've plucked right
out of the headlines.” Abby smiled, but her stomach had turned to nervous Jell-O.

The chance to appear on national TV had seemed like it would be really cool—and it
had
been cool, especially when a limousine had arrived to pick up the Carnelias and take them to New York City for the show.

The bright TV lights made it hard to see any faces in the audience, but Abby knew that her family was out there. So was her best friend, Morgan, who had insisted on coming along in case Abby needed a bodyguard. Even No-H Sara had made the trip to the city to see Abby's big TV moment.

“It's been in all the papers, it's been all over the Internet: last week, police raided the Pennsylvania headquarters of Calabra Pharmaceuticals,” Chad was saying to the camera. “Inside, they found twenty-one children being held virtually prisoner, far from home and facing medical experimentation against their will. Calabra, we now know, had built a chain of five summer camps as a sort of hunting ground for kids with special abilities.”

On the TV monitors, Abby could see video being played back. It showed a bunch of police cars driving down the long, sloping driveway of Calabra's valley headquarters, lights flashing. There was a shot of Phil being escorted out of the building by two officers, and even a glimpse of what
Abby thought she recognized as Ferd's ponytail bouncing along in the group behind.

“Today on
Been There, Done That
, we welcome a very special guest: the young lady who first uncovered the scheme and helped bring Calabra Pharmaceuticals to justice. Please help me welcome seventh grader Abby Carnelia!”

There was cheering and applause. Abby shoved her hair behind her ears nervously.

Chad turned at last to face her. She noticed for the first time that he was wearing makeup. “Abby, tell us: how has your life changed since you got home from Calabra?”

“Well, it's been a little crazy,” Abby said. Her voice came out strangely at first, but her confidence grew as she spoke. “There are still news people camped out across the street from our house. They take pictures when we leave the house, and they shout my name and stuff. I've had to do a lot of interviews. And once when I went to the pool, some of my friends from school wanted my autograph. That was cool.”

The audience chuckled.

“They're calling you a hero, Abby. Did you ever think you'd be called a hero?”

Abby looked down for a moment, shaking her head.

“I'm not sure I deserve that,” she said. “Because there were four of us. We kind of figured out what was going on together, and broke out of there together.”

Chad nodded knowingly. “Have you been in touch with your friends from Calabra?”

Abby shook her head no. “It's been too crazy.”

“Well, Abby, we
have
been in touch with them. And I think it's time to introduce them to the whole world. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Ben, Ricky, and Eliza!”

Abby's jaw dropped in surprise. She'd had no idea that this TV show would be a reunion. But sure enough, here came Ricky, his very round head bobbing as he stepped onto the stage; Eliza, wearing a T-shirt dress that was much too big for her; and finally, Ben, loping amiably into the lights.

Abby ran forward to greet them. There was a massive group hug in the middle of the set, and so much excited babbling that Chad had to break them up.

“We do have a TV show to do here, guys,” he kidded them.

Ben, Ricky, and Eliza sat down in the chairs next to Abby's. She was beaming, delighted to see them again.

“All right then,” Chad said finally. He rotated his chair to face his four guests. “I want to hear the whole story. Who wants to start?”

The best part of the TV show wasn't the actual interview; in fact, Abby found that nerve-racking. No, the best part came afterward, when the four middle-school musketeers got to gab and catch up and remember their adventure. The four families spent two days romping through New York and having fun.

Mr. and Mrs. Carnelia couldn't help noticing that Abby was especially happy to see Ben again. So they invited Ben and his parents to come spend a few days in Connecticut at the end of the summer. It wasn't like Ben was, you know, Abby's
boyfriend
or anything. But they'd been through so much together, and had become so close, that Abby knew they'd be friends forever.

It was the biggest science news in years: the discovery of a rare, very special breed of children who can bend the laws of nature—in tiny, pointless ways.

Actually, everybody
thought
these were rare, very special children. But Abby Carnelia wasn't quite finished.

You see, ever since she saw Ben discover a power of his own, she hadn't been able to stop thinking:
What's the difference between Ben, before he discovered his power, and every other kid in the world? Nothing at all.

Every kid who's ever had a power started out as someone who
didn't
have a power. And the only way people discover their magic is by accident—by stumbling onto whatever the freaky trigger might be. The conditions have to be exactly right, or it won't happen.

There has to be, you know, a hard-boiled egg sitting on the counter when you tug on your earlobes.

Abby realized that there might be a
lot
of kids who have powers—but who just haven't discovered them yet. They may be everywhere.

In fact—and this is the part that blew Abby's mind—they could be
everyone.

For all she knew, every single person in the world might have a little magic inside, some freaky little ability. Including every one of her friends, and even strangers.

And even you.

The question was, how could she help people find their magic?

Find Your Magic started as an after-school club. Every Tuesday afternoon, kids would come in and experiment. They'd bring in all kinds of props and objects: balls, crayons, coins, shoes, liquids, papers, toys, aluminum foil, Silly Putty, buttons, Cheetos, rulers, cardboard, rubber bands, M&Ms . . . all kinds of stuff.

And then they'd try to find their triggers. They'd try everything they could think of: flapping, singing, dancing, waving, breathing, blinking, jumping, thinking, scratching,
tugging, wiggling, burping, clapping, slapping, chomping, pressing, gulping, flicking, singing, bending, eating, snapping—always hoping to find something that had an unexpected effect.

One day, in the spring, near the end of seventh grade, someone did. A kid found his power. It was a boy from Abby's history class. He managed to make everyone else in the room hear a high, very faint violin note—or
think
they heard one—when he put a quarter between his toes.

There was no violin, of course, and no actual sound; you couldn't record it. But everyone in the room would swear that there was a sound. Abby had helped her first student find his power.

It caused such a sensation that the first Abby Carnelia's Find-Your-Magic Center opened six months later, in a shopping mall about two miles from Abby's house. At this point, almost everyone knew who Abby Carnelia was, so kids begged their parents to sign up for time at the center.

Now anyone could play with all those feathers, Slinkies, socks, marbles, lipstick tubes, cloth scraps, grapes, Popsicle sticks, Lego bricks, toothpicks, marshmallows, paper clips, clocks, twist-ties, hats, spoons, and hard-boiled eggs, trying every trigger that Abby and her workers suggested, in hopes of finding their magic. Eventually, somebody always did, and the word spread.

For a while, even adults sometimes stopped in to try. But they never seemed to find their magic; Abby eventually came to believe that if you don't find your magic while you're still a kid, it goes away.

Even so, in no time at all, there were Find-Your-Magic Centers all over the country. Nowadays, even kids who are too young to remember how it all began say, “ 'Bye mom! I'm going to Abby's!” And they ride their bikes over to a center after school.

Now, I won't lie to you; most kids never do find out what their power is. After all, the chances are very small that you'll find the right trigger under the right circumstances.

But nobody seems to mind. People have fun trying to find their powers. And most of all, it's a great feeling just to know that you're special—even if you never do find out exactly why.