Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power Read online

  by David Pogue

  Roaring Brook Press New York

  Text copyright © 2010 by David Pogue

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2010 by Antonio Caparo

  Published by Roaring Brook Press

  Roaring Brook Press is a division of

  Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

  www.roaringbrookpress.com

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pogue, David, 1963–

  Abby Carnelia’s one and only magical power / David Pogue. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After eleven-year-old Abby discovers that she has a completely useless magical power, she finds herself at a magic camp where her hope of finding others like herself is realized, but when a select group is taken to a different camp, a sinister plot comes to light.

  ISBN: 978-1-59643-384-7

  [1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Camps—Fiction. 3. Ability—Fiction. 4. Family life—Connecticut—Fiction. 5. Connecticut—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P75163Abb 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009046619

  Roaring Brook Press books are available for special promotions and premiums.

  For details contact: Director of Special Markets, Holtzbrinck Publishers.

  First Edition May 2010

  Printed in March 2010 in the United States of America by

  RR Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  For Kelly, Tia, and Jeffrey,

  who make me believe in magic every single day.

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1. Egg

  CHAPTER 2. Magic

  CHAPTER 3. Library

  CHAPTER 4. Pool

  CHAPTER 5. Ben

  CHAPTER 6. Camp

  CHAPTER 7. Class

  CHAPTER 8. Lunch

  CHAPTER 9. Show

  CHAPTER 10. Ferd

  CHAPTER 11. Van

  CHAPTER 12. Ricky

  CHAPTER 13. Eliza

  CHAPTER 14. Sushi

  CHAPTER 15. Orientation

  CHAPTER 16. Social

  CHAPTER 17. Lab

  CHAPTER 18. Spygirl

  CHAPTER 19. Darkening

  CHAPTER 20. Truck

  CHAPTER 21. Phil

  CHAPTER 22. Escape

  CHAPTER 23. Gates

  CHAPTER 24. Hitchhikers

  CHAPTER 25. Afterward

  CHAPTER

  1

  Egg

  YOU’VE PROBABLY SEEN THE ADS for Abby Carnelia’s Find-Your-Magic Centers on TV. Or maybe you’ve seen a Find-Your-Magic Center at the shopping mall, tucked in between the Gap and the drugstore. But Abby Carnelia herself didn’t discover her own magical power until she was eleven years old.

  This is how it happened.

  One Saturday in April, Abby and her little brother, Ryan, were in the kitchen, helping their mom make a chef’s salad for lunch. Mrs. Carnelia’s version of the chef’s salad was basically a big tossed salad with sliced-up ham, turkey, bacon, eggs, and sometimes leftovers from the fridge that really had no business being in a salad.

  Ryan was setting the table. Abby was slicing up the hard-boiled eggs. Mrs. Carnelia walked by with a piece of meatloaf that was about to become salad topping.

  “Did you lose an earring, honey?” she asked. “Or are you just going for a lopsided look?”

  Abby looked up from the eggs. “What?”

  “You’re missing an earring.”

  Abby’s hands automatically went up to her earlobes. Sure enough, she could feel the left aquamarine earring still in place. But on the right side, there was nothing but a naked, rubbery, pierced earlobe.

  On any other day, she might have run upstairs to look for the other earring, or felt around on the floor, or tried to remember putting them on.

  And on any other day, she might have heard any of the three things that people in that kitchen said next. First came Ryan’s wisecrack: “It probably fell in the salad. Chew slowly, people.” (Ryan was eight. Wisecracks were his specialty.)

  Then came her mother’s question: “Are you sure you put it on today, honey?”

  Then her dad boomed into the kitchen, big and bald. “And good morrow to you, my beetlings!”

  (He always said stuff like that. And no, I don’t know what “beetlings” means, either. It’s just what he had always called his kids for as long as Abby could remember.)

  But this was not any normal day, and Abby didn’t hear anything. She was too busy looking at the egg. Staring at it, actually, with just about the weirdest expression you’ve ever seen on a sixth grader’s face.

  It was a hard-boiled egg. Just a plain white chicken’s egg, like every egg you’ve ever seen. There was only one thing unusual about it: this egg was spinning. Slowly, sitting there on the counter, turning around and around.

  Now, in itself, a spinning egg isn’t especially freaky. In the history of the world, there have probably been thousands of spinning eggs. There are egg-spinning science experiments, egg-spinning games, and probably world records for spinning eggs. What made this particular spinning egg so unusual was that nothing had touched it. Nothing had come anywhere near it. There are very few world records for eggs that start spinning all by themselves, for no reason.

  Abby, frowning hard at that egg, reached out to stop it with her hand. There. Now it was sitting still, just like an egg is supposed to.

  But then a little voice in her head seemed to say: Try it again! So for the second time, Abby Carnelia reached up and tugged at her earlobes, just like she had the first time she checked for the missing earring.

  And there it was: the egg started spinning again. By itself.

  She was speechless. Even the little voice in her head was speechless.

  She stopped the egg again. She tugged her earlobes again. It started spinning again. Always slowly, always the same direction, and always perfectly evenly, without any of the wobble you’d get if you spun an egg with your hand.

  Now, Abby loved science. She had spent two years in Brownies, knew how to make a few recipes (which is science, after all), and had been the only girl in fifth grade not to be grossed out when they dissected a frog in science class.

  She knew all the basic laws of science, like “What goes up must come down” and “Nature abhors a vacuum.” But she had never heard the one that goes, “Eggs spin when you pull on your ears.”

  Abby’s mom repeated her question. “Abby? Are you sure you put on both earrings this morning?”

  It was Ryan, though, who first realized that something was going on. He trotted over to see what Abby was looking at. And he saw the egg start spinning by itself.

  “WHOA, DUDE!” he said.

  Abby came back to earth, noticed him there, and stopped the egg. She picked it up and tapped it on the bowl to crack its shell, ready to peel it, as though nothing had happened.

  “What, Ry?” said their mom.

  “Abby just did the coolest trick. Do it again!”

  But Abby was confused and just a little bit freaked out. A thousand thoughts were crowding her brain, and her stomach was doing the jitterbug.

  So she pretended that nothing was going on. She finished peeling the egg and began to slice it. “I was just fooling around,” she managed. “Forget it.”

  Of course, you can’t tell an excited eight-year-old boy to forget anything.

  “No, c’mon! Do it again!”

  Ryan grabbed another hard-boiled egg hims
elf and tried to make it spin the way Abby had. He waved his hands around it. He blew on it. He made ghost noises with his mouth.

  “What did you do, blow on it? I bet you blew on it. Show Mom. Mom! Come here! Look at Abby’s egg trick! Hey, Dad! Want to see something cool? Abby did a trick!”

  Abby rolled her eyes. “It’s nothing, all right? It’s just a stupid egg.”

  But her parents had now joined her at the counter.

  “No egg is stupid,” proclaimed her dad. “Bring forth the trick with all due speed!”

  “I’d love to see it, hon,” added her mother.

  “Doooooo IT! Dooooo IT! Dooooo IT!” chanted Ryan.

  Abby, flustered, didn’t know what to do. She had already sliced up the first egg; it was salad bits at this point. She had no idea if a different egg would work.

  Ryan grabbed another one from the bowl, set it on the counter, and flicked at it with his pointer finger. “Do the thing, Abby!”

  The little voice in her head said: Oh, go ahead. Just do the thing.

  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.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Magic

  THINK 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. H
er 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?”