Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power by David Pogue Read Free Book Online Page B

it that good!”
    Abby was thunderstruck. “But you said—you said—I mean, I asked you how you did it, and you said youdidn’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 herparents why she wanted to leave camp after only one day?
    â€œAbby.” Someone was tapping her shoulder.
    It was Ben.
    â€œAbby. 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.
    â€œListen,” he said. “The thing you said about an egg. Is that true? Is that for real?”
    She gave a tiny nod, still looking away.
    There was a pause, and then Ben went on.
    â€œI mean, look, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve never seen a trick that I couldn’t figure out, or at least that I couldn’t think of a way to do it. But, I mean . . .” He stopped and sighed. “I mean—could you show me?”
    Abby wiped at her eye and sneaked a look at him for the first time. “What?”
    Ben studied her face seriously. “I want to see your egg thing. Would you show me?”
    When she hesitated, Ben took charge. He scanned the salad bar and quickly found what he was looking for: a basket of hard-boiled eggs. He grabbed one and pressed it into Abby’s hand.
    â€œShow me. I want to see it.”
    It took her a minute to make up her mind. But Abby realized that, at this point, she had nothing to lose. She knew she couldn’t make herself look any sillier.
    â€œHold out your hand,” she told him.
    She grabbed his hand from underneath to steady it. She put the egg on his hand. She let go.
    â€œAll right,” she said. “This is my power.”
    She tugged on her earlobes. “This is my trigger,” she said, with a hint of a smile.
    The egg began to turn on Ben’s palm.
    What Abby learned that day is that magicians and normal people react to magic tricks very differently. A big, flashy trick that blows away normal people may not excite a magician very much, because a magician can guess how it’s done.
    What really impresses a magician is a trick that
can’t
be figured out, no matter how small. And Ben knew that was what he was seeing. There was no breeze, no wires, no magnets, no little tiny trained hamsters. It was an egg that
he
had picked out of the basket, on
his
palm—and Abby was three feet away.
    It was
impossible.
    She finally took her eyes off the egg to look at Ben. His mind had been blown to smithereens. He simply couldn’t process what he was seeing.
    He didn’t say anything for a long time.
    He looked at the egg very closely,