Don't Expect Magic (10 page)

This is so unfair! All my new boot designs are in there. I need that sketchbook.
“Mais …”

Now her lips go as thin as her voice.
“Bien.”
She opens the notebook and viciously rips a couple of blank pages out, and the kids around me flinch. There’s a spark of glee in her eyes. It’s probably exactly how she looks when she’s tearing the limbs off stray kittens and boiling puppies for stew.

Madame K, sketchbook assassin, hands me the ripped pages, the tiny bits of paper where the spiral held them hanging by microscopic threads. She’s probably disappointed there’s no dripping blood. She tells me,
en français
, of course, to use the pages to write a five-hundred-word essay on the benefits of learning French, and to complete all of the questions in Chapters
Six à Neuf
, even though we’re only up to Chapter
Cinq
.

I’d rather use my pen to magically give her a beard to go with the unibrow. That’s got to be her
real
wish, right? To be even more terrifying and repulsive? I’d try it, but I don’t want to do anything that has even a one percent chance of making her happy.

After class, I decide to test Principal Lee’s open-door policy. The door
is
open and he invites me in, but when I tell him what happened, he doesn’t see my side at all.

“I’ll tell you what I’d do, Delaney. I’d throw myself one hundred and fifteen percent into that assignment, be the top best A-one French student in the class from now on, and then
maybe
Mrs. Kessler will let you have the notebook back at the end of the semester. An apology wouldn’t do any damage either. I always say, you can catch more flies with agave syrup than balsamic vinegar.” He chuckles at his culinary non-humor.

I was trying to
help
her
, I want to tell him, but of course I can’t, because then I’d have to explain how, and why. The visit is an absolute complete top best A-one waste of time, other than learning that Principal Lee is not my pal after all.

Now I
really
need to know if the whole f.g. thing is true. It’s not just curiosity anymore. If the power is there, I have to find it so I can get my sketchbook back. It doesn’t matter that it’s
my
wish. Later I can figure out how to trick somebody into wishing it for me. That’ll be easy. The hard part is finding an opportunity to truly test myself.

World history is a write-off. I’ve got a chair now, but all the tables are full, so instead of cramming me in somewhere, Ms. Lammers sticks the new girl way in the back of the room, at a paint-covered folding table that looks like it was borrowed from some third-grade art class. The table’s kind of cool, though, and anyway, who wants to be wedged in with a bunch of hostile strangers?

I’m so far back, I’m practically in South America, so I decide to check my messages. Posh has sent me links to the telekinesis article she told me about, plus a clip from the documentary. Being Posh, she’s also texted me a marathon Posh-ipedia compilation of all the online info she could find. There’s a report on a mind-reading experiment that was done at Berkeley in 1975, and a
Modern Psychology
article about the power of wishful thinking (which I really don’t think is the same thing as granting wishes), and who knows what else, because I’m only halfway through reading about fairy sightings in the Scottish Highlands when Ms. Lammers appears next to me. What is with the teachers at this school sneaking up on people? And taking their stuff? Ms. Lammers holds out her hand, and I know she wants me to give her the phone. I don’t even bother to
play dumb or protest or claim an emergency. I just give it to her and mentally add it to the list of the things I need to get back.

I cheer up when I get to trig, because I know this is going to be the class where I make it happen. It’s math. It’s where things are proven to be true or false with no in between. Where things add up. If Hank = f.g., then Delaney + f.g. gene + determination = f.g. While Mr. Nisonson goes on about the Law of Sines, I
really
look this time, peering around the room, squinting hard at the faces, trying to read people’s minds, figure out what they want. Somebody must want
something
. Even if it’s just a snack. After all, it’s almost lunchtime.

My eyes land on one of the guys who was sitting with Flynn at lunch. He’s wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt and he’s got the shaggy boy bangs—the angled mop that covers their eyes so they have to constantly shake their heads to see and you’re always waiting for them to jerk it too far or too fast, causing them to sever a neck muscle. He’s trying to use the edge of a piece of paper to draw a straight line for the scalene triangle Mr. Nisonson wrote on the board, but Shaggy keeps having to erase and start over because the paper moves or bends, causing his pencil to slip. He either forgot his ruler, or lost it, or never had one at all because he decided his school supply allowance was better spent on metal band decals for his notebook.

I point my pen his way. I concentrate. I think,
Ruler, ruler, ruler
.

Nothing happens. Maybe I need to visualize it. I close my eyes and picture a ruler and then picture it in Shaggy Boy’s hand. I open my eyes and point the pen and try again, try to really feel the f.g. energy flowing through me.

Still no ruler.

I squeeze the pen, so tightly it’s on the verge of snapping. I focus. Hard. I tense up, putting everything I have into it. I’m not even breathing anymore.

“Are you feeling all right, Delaney?” Every solitary head in the room turns as Mr. Nisonson says this. I’m no longer visualizing the ruler. I’m visualizing myself—what I look like clenching the pen and clenching my teeth with a constipated grimace as if those aren’t the only things I’m clenching.

Then I visualize the entire class erupting in hooting, deafening, comedy-festival-crowd-sized laughter. It doesn’t happen, but I can feel
that
energy for sure—energy that comes from a room full of people trying hard
not
to burst into hysterics.

“I’m fine,” I say, and make it sound like there’s nothing wrong at all, when really, everything is wrong.

I’m done. Problem solved. Delaney Collins ≠ f.g.

I try to cheer myself up as I head for lunch. Okay, so I’m not destined to flit around granting wishes with a magic pen. Weight off! No need to spend my life helping people. What a tedious, thankless loser life
that
would be. Hank’s life, basically.

Yet it also means I have nothing to look forward to now but the same miserable day-in, day-out real life. Boring. Depressing. Normal.

Maybe “normal” isn’t the right word. Not here at Happy High. The food in the lunchroom, for instance. No heat-lamped doughy pizza, no crusted-over casseroles for this crowd. It’s all creepily beautiful and Technicolor. The mac and cheese is smooth and silky and the color of sunshine. The pizzas are like paintings in a modern art museum, with flecks of sun-dried tomatoes, designer mushrooms and olives that are probably flown in every morning direct from Greece. Even the nachos look like sculpture, each plate topped with a perfectly rounded ice cream scoop of guacamole.

Today’s special is lemon pepper rotelle with artichoke hearts and fire-roasted tomatoes. I slide the plate onto my tray, because it’s not like the other options are any less weird. Cadie and Mia, ahead of me in line, each pick one of the designer salads. Cadie’s has weird fruits on it I’ve never seen before in my life, and Mia’s actually has flowers sprinkled on top.

“Make sure you get the apple pie!” Cadie says, looking my way. I glance around, but she’s definitely talking to me. “Chesley Kang’s mother owns this pastry shop in Gardenia Village and she brings in like a case of them once a month. They go super fast.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Oh! Lana Francis got the last piece. Darn.” Cadie
smiles at me apologetically and I don’t bother to tell her I’m really not that broken up because if it doesn’t have chocolate in it, forget it.

Cadie waits for me as I pay and then walks with me out the sliding glass doors. Mia’s ahead, casting unhappy looks over her shoulder as Cadie and I somehow end up together at the cheerleaders’ tables. My resistance must be low from the strain of the day, and I find myself sitting down in the very chair I avoided yesterday, right at the crack where the two round tables have been pushed together.

Cadie sits at the top of the figure eight, with Mia. Her table is obviously the first string. The hair of the girls there is just a pinch glossier, their skin smoother, their shoulders broader than the girls at the table on the other side of me, who strain to be included in the star table’s conversation about whether silver lip gloss is a do or don’t. Eventually, B-Team settles down into their own chat, dissecting one girl’s date with some boy named Jonas or Jonah, or maybe Josh. It’s hard to tell, since they all talk at once in the same squealy, excited voice.

I’m stuck in the vortex between two whirling, intelligence-free conversations, but at least I’m ignored by both sides and left alone. With nothing to do but think, I make a mental list of everything I’ve lost today: charcoal pencil, sketchbook, cell phone, dignity, self-esteem, hope. It’s like a tragic poem. I swear I have enough material in my life to be a modern Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

This reminds me that in a weak moment near the end
of Brit lit yesterday, I lent my charcoal pencil to the girl in front of me, whose pen had run out, and I forgot to get it back in my rush to leave. The brain-blitzing events of last night completely buried the memory of it until now. But it wasn’t only poetry that sparked the realization. It was also the cheerleader sitting next to me, at table two: the girlfriend of Jonah/Jonas/Josh. She’s the one who borrowed it.

“Hey, do you have my pencil?” I ask her, interrupting an argument over whether J-guy asking her to buy the popcorn for the movie was a bad sign. She looks at me like not only do I smell (which I do
not
), not only am I an unforgivably offensive presence at the table (which I already
know
), but it is also stratospherically beyond outrageous that I should ask her to return something that she deigned to lower herself to borrow in the first place, and I should consider it a gift to her and be grateful she had the generosity to accept it.

Too bad she’s mistaken me for one of those members of the lower castes that can be intimidated by queenly scorn. I don’t say anything. I don’t change expression. I just wait. She finally lets out a huff and her fellow date dissectors roll their eyes in support. She digs though her leather book bag—probably made from sacred Indian cows—and retrieves my pencil.

“Thank you,” I say sweetly. I can feel her loathing through the pencil as she hands it to me—and this flips another switch in my head, causing bits and pieces of
today to come back to me. Stuff I hadn’t paid attention to but that had slipped into my brain anyway. Energy creates a reaction. Compounds break apart and reassemble into something new. Complementary angles add up.

I can’t keep the thoughts straight. They’re jumbled together and firing off in different directions. Then more memories come, mixing in with the others. I wonder if this is how Posh’s brain is all the time. No wonder she can never relax and be quiet. She’s got to get the ideas
out
.

So do I, but my way. I take out the blank pages Madame K ripped from my sketchbook and write “apple + butter + sugar + flour = apple pie.” I sketch a slice of pie and draw an arrow from the words to the image. Okay, now what? It’s still not fitting together.

I take a break from thinking to draw in a scoop of ice cream next to the pie—and then it hits me. There was no ice cream, and now there is. It started in my mind and now it’s on the page, thanks to the pencil. Some people might call that magic. But it’s really just the result of a combination of elements: charcoal dust and paper. Plus thought. My thought. The “activation energy.”

It can’t be that easy. Can it? Wouldn’t anybody be able to do it?

But I’m not anybody.

I point the pencil toward Cadie’s plate. The ingredients come together in my mind, as if I’m going to draw the pie, and I send the idea down my arm to the pencil, and then
to the plate. I’m calm and confident. Cadie is going to get the slice of apple pie she wished for.… Not even an apple seed.

Lunch ends. Cadie stands and picks up her empty, apple pie–free plate, signaling her minions. They rise and follow her back into the school, leaving me at the crack between the two tables, alone with my failure.

“Uch!”

“Nasty!”

“What is it?”

Behind me a mini-crowd has formed near one of the tables. Someone’s on the ground, but I can only see the bottoms of his sneakers.

“He’s been alienated,” a Goth chick says, pointing. I step closer and can see it’s Shaggy from trig. A steaming mass of something bubbles up from the middle of Marilyn Manson’s face on his T-shirt.

“It came out of nowhere,” Shaggy says, his tone half horror, half awe. “Then, like,
wham
—it hit me.” He scowls. “I just got this shirt on eBay! It’s a classic! Twenty-eight bucks! This giant bird turd or whatever it is better not stain.”