Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power Read Free Page A

a promise.” She reached out and ruffled his hair, then turned to get her bike.
    â€œWait, wait! I have to teach you the second-word code!”
    â€œWhen 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.

    The Eastport Public Library, ten blocks from the Carnelias’ house, is a very modern library—the pride of Eastport. You can borrow DVD movies, music CDs, computer game cartridges, gadgets like iPods or GPS things for your car—you can even check out toys. Some people claim that somewhere in the back, the Eastport Public Library even has
books.
    â€œYo, girl,” said Morgan when Abby arrived. “You ready for some hardcore Googling? Let’s do this thing.”
    Once inside the library, they each bought a bottle oficed tea (the Eastport Library had had a café since 1998) and sat down by the computers to search the Internet.
    Abby fired up Google and tried typing in phrases like “spinning egg magic.”
    That search led her to all kinds of science videos, all very interesting. “Dude! Look at this!” she whispered to Morgan.
    They watched a YouTube video that showed how you can spin a
boiled
egg on its end—you know, standing up—but a
raw
egg just falls over when you try.
    â€œI got one, too. Look at this,” Morgan whispered back. She pointed to her own screen, where Abby read an article about crushing eggs with your hand. She learned that it’s really hard to crush an egg when your hand is wrapped all the way around it; the shell distributes the force evenly, even if you squeeze really hard.
    On a Web site about science magic, they found out that you can make an entire hard-boiled egg scoot out of its shell just by blowing on it really hard—if, beforehand, you just make a pinhole in one end and a dime-sized hole at the far end.
    At one point, Morgan rapped Abby excitedly on the shoulder. “Dawg—this is it! This is your trick!”
    Abby scooted her chair over. Morgan hit Play. It was a video of somebody spinning an egg with his hand, thenstopping it briefly with his finger—and when he took his hand away, the egg started spinning again.
    Abby and Morgan looked at each other. It was
so
close!
    But that’s when the narrator popped onto the screen. It was one of those Mr. Science–type guys, with stick-out ears and a white lab coat.
    â€œMagic? Of course not!” he was saying. “Remember: there’s no such thing as magic! There’s only science. What we’re showing you now is just a cool feature of regular eggs. Once you start spinning an egg, the momentum of all that yolky stuff inside wants to keep going—even if you stop it for a second with your finger. But you don’t have to tell your friends that; I won’t mind!”
    Abby softly banged her forehead on the keyboard.
    After half an hour, Abby and Morgan gradually reached an astonishing conclusion: in the entire, massive, pulsing Internet universe, there was not one single Web page about making an egg spin by pulling your earlobes.
    â€œOkay then,” said Morgan matter-of-factly. She stood up. “We’ll try books.”
    As it turned out, most of what the library had were magic books—books full of magic
tricks.
They rounded up a few of those to check out, just to get a feel for the field.
    There were also a few books about
real
magic, with titleslike
Witches, Warlocks, and Wizardry: Magic Belief Systems Through History
and
The Human Need for Magic: A Sociological Approach.
Abby’s interest perked up; maybe these books would be more like it.
    By the time Abby said goodbye to Morgan and rode home, there were eleven books in her backpack. Most of them were hardcover books, and they were heavy. It took her longer to ride her bike back from the library than it had taken her to get there.

    After a week of disappearing