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They’re gonna open the doors fordinner in like six seconds, and I don’t want to have to sit at the losers’ table!” She turned and trotted ahead.
    Maybe that’s where I belong,
thought Abby miserably.
At the losers’ table.
    She picked up the pace and followed her new friend out of the woods.

CHAPTER
7
Class
    â€œC ’ MON, ABBY ! TRY IT AGAIN . You’ll get it.”
    No-H Sara and Abby sat side by side at the long, pine tables in the Snape building, practicing what they’d learned the first day in Coin Manipulation class.
    â€œI don’t know, Sara. It looks so easy when
you
do it, but I . . .” She picked up her quarter and tried the Thumb Palm again—and messed it up again.
    She looked around at the fifteen other kids in the class. The Snape building wasn’t really a building; it was actually more of an open-air pavilion. It had a roof and a floor, but no walls, so it kept some of that breezy, summer camp atmosphere.
    The counselor in charge, who identified himself asChaz, was a complete and total magic nerd. He knew the name and history of every coin move, said he owned over 200 magic DVDs, and insisted that his dad had once met David Copperfield’s lawyer. He was also blindingly good at coin tricks; it was pretty clear to Abby how Chaz had spent his free time growing up.
    Abby, however, was having trouble with the coin stuff.
    â€œIs it all sleight of hand?” she asked Sara as her quarter clanked to the table yet again. “I’m gonna have to spend the rest of my summer in front of the camcorder practicing!”
    (Abby had learned that all decent magicians nowadays do their practicing in front of a camcorder. “Nobody practices in front of a mirror anymore,” No-H Sara had said matter-of-factly. “If you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, you can’t be looking at your hands or your trick. So you can’t use misdirection with your eyes. Get it?”)
    The only thing that made Coin Manipulation bearable was hanging out with Sara.
    â€œListen, tell you what,” she was saying. “Forget the Thumb Palm—you’re never gonna need that anyway. I know some really easy ones that look a lot better anyway. Check this out.”
    She showed Abby how to flip a coin, catch it in midair, and figure out whether it was heads or tails before she even looked at it. “Right before you slap it down, you feelit with your thumb, see?” she said. “Really fast. The back of the quarter is all rough; the front, the heads side, has a big smooth president on it. So you can tell which way it’s facing.”
    Abby felt a flood of gratitude for Sara’s kindness. Overall, though, she was getting discouraged. This whole operation seemed to be all about
tricks.
A trick was not real magic. It was something that was supposed to
look
like magic, but actually stayed 100 percent within the laws of physics.
    Chaz said he knew a great way to make a coin disappear, for example, but what he really meant was he knew a great way to hide it so the audience
thought
it had disappeared. In Abby’s next class, Cards, the counselor said she’d show the kids how to make a card rise from the deck, but actually she showed them how to push the card up in a way the audience couldn’t see.
    Abby wasn’t having a terrible time. She was making friends, and she was inspired to see how seriously all the other kids were taking this hobby. She even picked out a couple of favorite tricks and decided she’d work on them until they looked smooth and polished.
    But deep down, the first couple of classes left Abby with a nagging worry about the sort of magic that she was learning at Camp Cadabra: It was all fake. All of it.
    And then she went to Impromptu.
    The class was held indoors, in a big, bright room in theHagrid building. It looked a little like the science classrooms she’d seen during a tour of the Eastport