Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power (2 page)

Abby nervously pushed her long, dark brown hair back over her shoulders. She steadied this new egg with her hand. Then, as her family watched, she tugged her earlobes.

The egg began to spin by itself. It kept spinning as long as she kept tugging.

“WICKED!” shouted Ryan. “How do you blow it from so far away? No, I know. It's a magnet! Can I try? Where's the magnet? Lemme try!”

“That's great, honey,” said Mrs. Carnelia, giving Abby's shoulders an affectionate squeeze. “You sure have
me
fooled!” And she walked away to pour the milk.

Only Abby's father said nothing. And for him to say nothing was highly unusual. He had a feeling that there was more to this than just a spinning hard-boiled egg.

And, as everyone knows by now, he was absolutely right.

T
HINK ABOUT EVERY MOVIE
you've ever seen where something magical or impossible happens.
Cinderella. Peter Pan. Freaky Friday. The Shaggy Dog. Dr. Dolittle. Lilo & Stitch. Aladdin. Alvin and the Chipmunks. Aquamarine. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Indian in the Cupboard. Nanny McPhee. Sky High. Night at the Museum.
And, of course, about 67,000 superhero movies. What do they all have in common?

In every one of these movies, something happens that breaks the laws of nature. Animals talk, cars fly, people get superpowers, whatever.

And how do the characters react? They say “Wow!” their faces light up in astonishment, and they talk about it for four seconds. And then they move on with the story.

Hello! Four seconds?

In fiction, they say: “Hey, you turned that pumpkin into a carriage. Awesome. Let's get in and go to the ball!”

But if something like that really happened—if it happened to YOU, you would talk about it for more than four seconds. You would FREAK OUT. You'd be thinking, “Holy jeez!! I've just seen a violation of the laws of nature that have controlled the world for oh, I don't know, about 4.5 billion years! That's insane! Actually, maybe I'm insane because such a thing has never, ever happened before! Surely I'm mistaken! Breathe. Breathe. Take it slow. Seek professional help. Ask your doctor if psychotherapy is right for you.”

Then you'd tell everyone you knew. You wouldn't be able to shut up about it. You'd go on TV shows. You'd write a book. You'd set up a Web site!

So maybe you can understand why Abby, a real-world person, pretty much splatted onto the ceiling.

See, Abby liked her life, her family, and her friends. She even liked school pretty well. But sometimes she just felt so . . . average. Average height, average singing voice, average looks. Eventually, when the kids in her class grew up, Abby doubted very much that anyone would look back and remember her.

Yes, she was an okay artist, did fine with her grades, was
coming along on her clarinet. She had a Web page, a blog called Abbylog, which she updated twice a week, and which had an audience of six people (plus her parents, who don't really count). That was something, at least. Oh, and she could fold her eyelids inside out, which was primarily useful in grossing out Ryan to make him stop bugging her.

But she couldn't charm the teachers with a toss of blond hair like Tiffany Sykes. She hadn't been in a TV commercial like Amber Jessup. And nobody fought over her when they were picking players for teams, like they did over Stacia Dornfeld.

That didn't mean
nobody
thought she was special. Her mom thought she was, but of course moms are required to think that. Her dad always said that she was a “diamond in the rough” and that someday the world would “beat a path to her door.” But all of that future-potential stuff didn't make Abby special
now.

This, though, was different. Abby couldn't help wondering if maybe this egg thing was
really
special. Made
her
special. Well, okay, maybe not special, but at least unusual. She was pretty sure that if someone invented a sport someday where you got points for spinning farm-fresh poultry products without touching them, they'd pick her before they picked Stacia Dornfeld.

Besides,
said the little voice in Abby's head,
maybe the egg thing is only the beginning.

That little voice couldn't stop asking questions.
What does it mean? Am I a witch? Have I always had this power? Is this only the first miracle of many? Will I develop new powers later? What else can I move with my mind—I mean, with my earlobes? Are there actual schools for real wizards?

How do you set up a Web site?

Months later, Ryan and Mrs. Carnelia would both swear that Abby did, in fact, eat a plate of chef's salad that afternoon. But if you ask her today, she'll say she doesn't remember it. She just remembers counting the seconds until she could run up to her room and make some more magic.

Amber Jessup may have had her 30 seconds of fame on TV. But Abby Carnelia, the world's first
actual
person to have magic? That was huge. She'd be the first eleven-year-old to have her own TV show. No, wait—her own channel!

After lunch, she nearly threw her plates in the sink, muttered something to her mom in a hurry (it sounded like “thanksforlunchMomI'llbereadinginmyroomBye”) and flew upstairs.

Of course, reading wasn't what Abby had in mind. She closed her door, pulled out the two hard-boiled eggs she had slipped into her sweater pocket, and prepared to blow her own mind.

She set the eggs on her bedside table, sat cross-legged on her purple bedspread, and began running some tests.

Would an egg spin if she tugged on only one earlobe? No, it had to be both of them.

Would the egg spin if she closed her eyes? No, she had to be looking at it. That's how she controlled
which
egg would spin.

Could she make the egg spin in the other direction? No, always clockwise.

Could she control the speed of the spinning? No. It was always that slow, steady spinning.

Could she make anything else spin? She tried a super-ball . . . a Nerf football . . . her toothbrush . . . a hair scrunchie . . . nothing. Right after lunch, Abby had been high as a kite. Her imagination had run wild with the limitless possibilities of being the only person on earth with
real magic.
Fame! Fortune! Blogs!

But the more she experimented, the more the crushing truth began to sink in: this was it.

Only eggs. Only earlobes. Only spinning.

Only NOTHING,
said the sarcastic little voice in her head.

Finally, defeated, Abby crashed onto her pillow. She rubbed her face unhappily. What good was magic if this was all it could do? What's the point of magic if you can't control what it does, or at least make it do something
useful? Who cares if you have magic if you can't make things float and change and turn invisible, or command animals to do your bidding, or make people like Tiffany Sykes spill soda on their clothes at lunch?

Abby's magical power was—the little voice in her head wouldn't stop saying it—
stupid.
She had a stupid magical power.

The sheer randomness and pointlessness of her power drove Abby crazy. Her trick was so trivial; nobody around her even recognized it as supernatural.

Her family just thought it was a cheesy magic trick. Ryan's latest theory involved invisible threads. And when Abby asked her mother what she thought of her egg trick, the response was: “I think it's terrific, hon. Now see if you can magically clean up your room.”

Sigh.

Finally, she couldn't take it anymore; she felt that if she didn't tell
someone,
she'd explode. So at lunch on Monday, Abby grabbed her best friend, Morgan, by the elbow just as they were leaving the cafeteria line.

“Sit with me at the nut-free table,” she whispered. “It's important.”

“What for?” Morgan whispered back. “And why are we whispering?”

Abby and Morgan almost always sat together at
lunch—they'd been friends since first grade—but never at the nut-free table. Nobody sat at the table for kids with nut allergies, except kids with nut allergies. On most days, there were only two or three kids sitting there at a table designed for ten.

“Trust me,” Abby said. She grabbed her tray and led the way.

They sat down at the far end of the nut-free table. Abby pulled the hard-boiled egg out of her lunch bag.

“Okay, hold out your hand flat,” she said.

Morgan held her hand out. Abby set the egg down on Morgan's palm.

“Keep it like that. Don't move. I'm not going to touch this egg, or blow, or anything.”

She made it spin in Morgan's hand.

“Dang, dawg!” said Morgan, drawing her head backward, her green eyes wide. “That is a
rockin'
magic trick!”

Then Morgan closed her hand on the egg to make it stop spinning. She studied it closely.

“Okay, I give up. How do you do it?”

Abby looked her straight in the eye.

“It's not a trick, Morgan,” she said intensely. “It's a
power
.”

Morgan looked around the cafeteria, half to see who else might be watching, and half to get her thoughts together.

“Yo, girl,” she said quietly. “I'm sorry, but there's no
such thing as powers. I'm supposed to believe that you're making that egg spin with your mind?”

“Not my mind! With my earlobes,” Abby said. Morgan started getting up to leave, and Abby suddenly realized how silly that sounded. “I mean, I don't really know
how
I'm doing it.
It
does it.”

“Can you move stuff around? Maybe you have that ESP thing where you can move stuff around with mind control!”

Abby shook her head. “I spent all weekend trying. This is it. This is all I can do. My one and only magical power.”

Morgan sipped her diet soda thoughtfully. “Well, if that's really a magical power, it's a pretty lame one,” she said finally. “Wouldn't it be better if you could fly? Or turn invisible? Or, like, make Mrs. Thatch forget the names of the state capitals?”

Abby threw her head back in exasperation. “Yes, I
know.
Don't you think I'd rather have powers like that? But this is it. It is what it is.”

“Well, if you're telling me the truth,” Morgan said finally, “then I think you should find out more about this. Get some books from the library. Google it.”

Abby nodded; that was good advice. Surely there was somebody, somewhere, at some time in history, who had made an egg spin and written about it.

“Okay, gimme the egg,” she told Morgan.

“How come?” Morgan asked, handing it over.

“Because it's not just a trick,” Abby began. “It's—”

“I know, I know, it's a power,” Morgan interrupted, grinning.

“No,” said Abby. “It's my lunch.”

O
NE OF THE PERKS OF LIVING
in a leafy suburb like Eastport is that you can pretty much ride your bike anywhere. Most of the streets even have sidewalks, so your parents don't flip out when you say you're going to ride your bike to the library.

That's exactly what Abby planned to do after school. Her dad offered to drive her, but Morgan was going to meet her at the library, and Abby didn't want a hovering adult hanging over them.

“No, thanks,” she told him on her way out. “It's such a beautiful day, I think I'll ride my bike. You know, get some fresh air and exercise.”

Ryan had just burst into the kitchen. He stared at her as
though she'd grown antlers. “
You
want to get fresh air and exercise?”

“Leave me alone, Ryan. I'm going to the library with Morgan. Bye, Dad!” She pushed open the door to the garage.

But Ryan scampered right along after her.

“Wait, wait! Before you go—do this one!”

He waved a piece of scrap paper under her nose.

“Ryan,
please.
I gotta go, okay? Let's do your code later.”

Ryan had become obsessed with codes lately. He'd filled a hundred pieces of scrap paper with nonsensical-looking writing that, once you solved it, always turned out to be some eight-year-old's idea of a joke, like “Q: What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? A: FROSTBITE.”

“Oh,
come
on, Ab!
Pleeeeeease?
Please please please please please? Just real quick!”

Abby sighed loudly to make her point. Then she turned and grabbed the piece of paper from Ryan's hand. She read what was written there in his cramped little pencil writing:

Your time has come to leave. Fly away! Is evil going to prevail? Open the door and flee!

Abby had twenty minutes to get to the library and meet Morgan. “It's a masterpiece, Ryan. Too hard for me. I give up.” She tried to hand the paper back to him.

“No, no!” said Ryan, “Find the hidden message! Okay, I'll give you a hint. It's a first-word code. Just read the first words of the sentences.”

Abby looked at it again, reading the first words out loud. “Your . . . fly . . . is . . . open.”

Ryan clapped his hands and cackled hysterically.

“Cute. Real cute,” she told him. “Hey, when we both grow up and become spies, you'll be the first person I'll communicate with. And that's a promise.” She reached out and ruffled his hair, then turned to get her bike.

“Wait, wait! I have to teach you the second-word code!”

“When I come back, Ry. See ya!”

Little brothers,
Abby thought as she strapped on her bike helmet.
Can't live with 'em, can't sell 'em on eBay.