Levitating Las Vegas

Levitating Las Vegas - By Jennifer Echols


1



SEVEN YEARS AGO

Holly Starr wished she weren’t the daughter of a Las Vegas magician. She wished her dad hadn’t changed his name from Stuckenschneider to Starr when he broke into the business. She wished he hadn’t drafted her last autumn to assist him in his headlining casino act. He’d said he wanted her to learn the biz so she could take over as the magician someday. The prospect excited her. But in the meantime, she had to play showgirl, which was not exciting at all. It was mortifying. He made her wear a tacky 1970s-style spangled bikini that matched her mom’s. She was fourteen years old, for God’s sake. Some of her friends still didn’t dare wear a bikini to the pool. Granted, other friends told her (at least to her face) that they’d kill to be on a casino stage six nights a week like her, in the heat of the spotlight and the fever of the adult playground a few miles from their high school. But the more common attitude, especially among the older, cooler kids, children of doctors and lawyers and artists, was disdain for all things Vegas—including Holly, whom they looked down on as a freak with no future, like those double-jointed girls from Bulgaria who hung around the bathroom in the science wing and smoked cigarettes and stuck nails into their noses. She wished she were plain old Holly Stuckenschneider, ninth grader, perhaps a majorette in the marching band, definitely Elijah Brown’s girlfriend. But she wasn’t. She was Holly Starr, magician’s assistant. Her scantily clad likeness was blown up ten times larger than life on a billboard advertising her dad’s act over Interstate 15.

And now she could levitate. It was a bad end to a bad day in her bad life, she thought, as she used her mind to lift her parents’ mod leather couch and matching chairs and rearrange them to her liking as if they were plastic furnishings in a Barbie Townhouse, all from her vantage point floating in the air next to the living room chandelier.



To think, this had started as the best day of her life. First period at school, Elijah Brown had asked her to the ninth-grade prom. All school year she’d looked forward to the bell every morning because Elijah would stumble into the classroom half a second late. His clothes were as consistent as a uniform: faded jeans and a rock band T-shirt. His too-long sandy brown waves were mussed and generally mashed on one side like he hadn’t bothered to detangle them after rolling out of bed. Maneuvering down the row, he would look the guy in the first desk up and down as if he’d never seen him before, and give the same look to the second guy, constantly blinking as if he couldn’t quite wake up. Then he would look at her and his sleepy green eyes would widen, and he’d smile. “Hey, Holly,” he’d say, sending a rush through her as he slid into the desk behind her.

Her friends agreed he was hot, but Holly felt a special connection with him. Elijah’s mom was a blackjack dealer at the same casino where Holly’s dad put on his nightly act. Elijah worked there himself after school, learning the carpentry trade. Holly imagined he understood the casino experience as she did—not as a vice to be pined for, or a sin to be avoided, but a job. He was the only boy in school who greeted her like he was a friend, not a lecher, and never made her feel like a freak for wearing a spangled bikini to work.

And if she’d ever had a chance with him, it was now. The ninth-grade prom coming up in April gave vulnerable fourteen-year-old boys that extra push they needed to ask girls out—even quiet boys, even dreamy boys with green eyes. Finally came the day when Elijah shuffled into the classroom on the bell, gazed at the guy in the first desk, squinted at the guy in the second desk, looked at her, and smiled. This time, instead of saying, “Hey, Holly,” he asked, “Hey, Holly?” He wanted her to go to the prom with him, and he wanted her cell phone number.

In the break between second and third periods, she told her friends she had a prom date with Elijah Brown. They squealed and demanded to know what she would wear. Major dilemma! How could she dress for the prom and avoid looking like she was headed for work? She would need the only prom gown ever made with no sequins.

At lunch she cheered up, because Elijah texted her.

Making sure I input ur # right? Im in algebra. Have a good lunch. Tip: mac & cheese / strange consistency / plz avoid.

Holly’s mom didn’t give her lunch money. She made Holly bring yogurt and a banana from home. Warily Holly eyed the mac and cheese on someone else’s plate, then texted Elijah back.

# is right! Thx for checking. Stick w me: I am going to be a magician someday & I will teach u to change mac & cheese into Fritos.

Every day after lunch she looked forward to waving at Elijah as their paths crossed in the hall. She usually stressed out about the encounter and checked her makeup in her compact, letting her friends think she was vain in general, not for a specific guy. Today the bell rang to end lunch before she was ready. She probably had granola in her teeth. She hugged her friends good-bye and stepped alone into the cacophony of the hallway—

—and there he was, already walking toward her and grinning. His friend walking beside him was still talking. The friend hadn’t figured out yet that Elijah’s attention and his eyes were on her. Now the friend realized he’d lost Elijah and started pulling at him, teasing him.

Without looking at his friend, Elijah extended his arm—the sleeve of his T-shirt fell away to show Holly the toned biceps he’d developed working out for the high school lacrosse team—and shoved his friend into the crowd, where he was swept away by the current of students headed to fifth period. Elijah leaned against a locker in front of her.

“Hey, Holly,” he said. “I didn’t know you wanted to be a magician.”

She smiled so wide that the corners of her mouth ached, as if she were onstage. But for once, her smile wasn’t fake. Heart racing, she backed against the locker, too, and asked, “Do you like magic?”

He pursed his lips, suppressing a smile, and said coyly, “I’ve never seen any magic.”

“You’ve never come to my show?” she exclaimed, feigning outrage. She was a little hurt that he’d worked at the casino at least as long as she had, yet he’d never sought out her performance, such as it was. The next second she realized she did not want him to see this unfashionable holdover that should have been canceled about the same time the Stardust casino was demolished, and she should not have called it her show. She hadn’t meant to claim ownership of her parents’ old-school charade.

“I’ve wanted to,” he said, “but the guys at work won’t let me.” His half smile told her he was teasing her just a little, but he seemed so focused on her and so earnest that she knew he was telling her the truth. “We’re allowed in shows when a prop needs fixing. Yours is the only show at the casino that’s never broken.”

“Ha! Irony. It’s broken, all right, but we make and repair everything ourselves because my dad doesn’t want to give away any of his trade secrets.” She wiggled her fingers spookily on trade secrets because her dad talked about them like they were the Headless Horseman. “But if you want to see some magic . . .”

“I do,” he said quickly. He kept smiling at her, but a blush crept across his cheeks, as if he really liked her but was afraid of looking too eager because then she wouldn’t like him as much—exactly what she was thinking about him.

She inched closer, feeling her own face grow hot. “The other shows around town send my parents complimentary tickets. Sometimes I take my girlfriends with me to the matinee on Saturday, but if you’re not working—”

“Yes!”

“You’re working?” Holly asked, determined to stay cool through her disappointment.

“No! Yes.” He closed his eyes and swallowed. When he looked at her again, his bravado was back. “Yes, I would love to go with you on Saturday. Are you doing research for your future act?”

“Yeah, well . . .” She glanced sidelong at him. He was still listening. “I start talking about this and I feel like the youngster at the family cheese business who’s going to implement all these newfangled, more efficient manufacturing practices and ultimately ruin the family’s tradition of handcrafted cheese. But I swear, my parents are doing essentially the same act they’ve been performing for a decade and a half. Audiences keep paying to see it because nobody can figure out how my dad levitates. He gets written up in the guidebooks as one of the ten biggest mysteries of Las Vegas.”

“Really!”

“Yes,” Holly said proudly. “He is number four. But at some point, my parents have got to update their act, make it more hip and stylish. Otherwise the crowd will start skipping magic altogether in favor of Cirque du Soleil. But my parents won’t listen to me. When I have my own act, I can do what I want, and it will be so cool!”

He narrowed his eyes at her, as if squinting would help him see her more clearly.

“Does that make sense?” she asked, losing her confidence.

“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s like cheese.” He grinned.

As the bell rang to tell them they were late for class, they said a quick good-bye and dashed in opposite directions. Scooting down the hall to math, she marveled that the entire population of the school had cleared out and settled into their desks without her noticing because she’d been so absorbed in Elijah’s gaze. He seemed too easy, standing so close over her, looking so hot, saying such perfect things. She was in heaven. More of his texts floated her through school, through the ballet class her mom insisted she attend to improve her poise onstage, and through her homework, reading the last act of Romeo and Juliet.

It was Monday, her family’s one night off from the casino. Her parents had plans for dinner at an expensive restaurant where it was nearly impossible to get reservations, then cocktails at a high-end club that Holly’s friends would have killed to sneak into. But the Starrs were down-to-earth. Her mom had sighed when she came in from tending the desert garden around their mansion to get ready for the outing. Her dad had been pissed when he realized he would miss the Lakers game. They dressed up in public and occasionally made appearances like this because looking like they were made of money was good for the magic business.

Before they left, her mom made Holly’s dinner (salad with edamame for protein, whole wheat toast, no butter—“We showgirls have to watch our figures, you know”) and sat down with her to make sure she ate it.

“How was school?” her mom asked conversationally as she frowned at her manicure, touching red polish to nicks in her long nails.

Holly swallowed a bite. What she wouldn’t give for a hamburger for dinner, just once! But even edamame tasted okay on the best day of her life. “Elijah Brown asked me to the ninth-grade prom.” She tried to say this casually. She didn’t want to let on how much she liked him, lest she earn herself a lecture on Safe Sex while trying to down her rabbit food. “Maybe you know his mom? She’s a dealer at the casino. He’s so cute and really nice, Mom. Could you pleeeease take me shopping for a prom dress next Saturday morning? And I invited him to go with me to the show that sent us tickets for the matinee, if that’s okay.”

Holly’s mom was younger than Holly’s friends’ moms. The downside was that Holly’s friends wanted to know whether her mom had been an Unwed Pregnant Teen. Holly thought this was likely, considering how often she got the Safe Sex lecture. But she didn’t know for sure. Her parents refused to talk about that or where they came from or anything concerning their family’s origins. They fostered the notion that they were magical gypsies who’d materialized out of thin air—and they were, as far as Holly knew. On the other hand, the upside of having a young mother was that she was still very pretty, if you could see past her thick showgirl makeup.

Now, for the first time, Holly’s mom looked old. As Holly watched, her mom’s face fell into wrinkles Holly had never noticed. Then her mom shouted, “Peter!”

“What?” Holly’s dad walked in, his muscled chest bare.

Without taking her eyes off Holly, her mom said carefully, “Elijah Brown asked Holly to the ninth-grade prom, and she invited him on her own date.”

Holly’s dad’s hands balled into fists. “You’re not going,” he boomed.

Holly was shocked. She’d half expected the Safe Sex lecture. She definitely had not expected this decree, as if she’d done something wrong. She’d never gone on a real date before, but she had to go sometime. “Yes, I am,” she insisted.

“No, you’re not,” her parents said simultaneously. Her dad added, “Not with Elijah Brown, you’re not.”

“What’s the matter with Elijah Brown?” Holly had never heard a single bad thing about him.

Her parents looked at each other.

“Just what you said.” Holly’s mom twisted her largest diamond ring around on her finger. “His mother is a dealer at the casino. We can’t have you fraternizing with the son of a dealer. We have a certain image to uphold.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Holly said. “The diamonds, and the date at the fancy restaurant, and your matching fur coats in March—all that is for the cameras, for the public. It’s not real. Elijah is real.”

Her parents looked at each other again.

“You are our child,” her dad bellowed, “and you will do what we say. End of discussion.” He whirled around, long hair flying, and stomped back into the master suite.

“This is ridiculous.” Holly dropped her fork into the plate of edamame with a clank. “Elijah Brown is a nice guy”—and funny, and quiet, and smoldering—“and I invited him on a date, and I already told him yes to the prom. There’s no way I’m going back to school tomorrow and telling him no.”

“That’s ex-act-ly what you’re going to do.” Her mom tapped her long red fingernail on the table for emphasis. “Or I will call his mother and tell her myself.” She stood abruptly and swept into the master suite after Holly’s dad.

Holly stared through the open doorway framed with grand molding. Her mom would call Elijah’s mom, as if she and Elijah had gotten in a slap-fight on the elementary school playground. She didn’t understand her parents’ reaction. Their elitist attitude was fake. Her dad played pickup basketball games with the security guards in the employee gym at the casino. Her mom went to lunch with ladies from the public relations department. None of Holly’s friends’ families were rich or famous, and her friends spent the night with Holly all the time. Holly didn’t spend the night with them, but that was because her parents were overprotective and worried about stalkers, not snobby.

Overprotectiveness was the only explanation for the way her parents were acting now. They wouldn’t admit it, but they were afraid for her to go on a date. They didn’t want her to grow up.

There had to be a way out of this. Maybe she could cancel the matinee but still go to the prom with Elijah secretly? She didn’t see how. Her parents would be on the lookout. And who knew whether he liked her enough to play along? He’d asked her to the prom. He hadn’t pledged his undying love.

The doorbell chimed. Holly’s dad emerged from the master bedroom, dressed in a suit this time.

“That’s the chauffeur from the casino,” he said, stopping at the kitchen table and crouching until he was at Holly’s eye level. “I’m sorry, kiddo. We’re not saying you can’t go to the prom at all. If it were some kid besides Elijah Brown—”

“Any kid besides Elijah Brown?” Holly didn’t buy that her parents wanted to keep her away from Elijah because his mother was a dealer. There had to be something else.

“Not any kid. We’ll take it on a case-by-case basis.” Her dad wasn’t meeting her gaze anymore. Before he rose and headed for the door, his eyes had already shifted toward his escape.

Then Holly’s mom clopped in on four-inch stilettos and a cloud of perfume. “In bed by ten, sweetie.” She stopped and kissed the top of Holly’s head as if she hadn’t just ended Holly’s social life.

Holly didn’t respond. She stared straight ahead at the darkened doorway into her parents’ bedroom until she heard the front door close and the limo pull away.

And then the plate of salad and edamame lifted off the kitchen table in front of her, zipped across the room, and smashed against the front door. She jumped at the noise. Shards of china tinkled onto the floor.

She flushed hot, and her body sparkled with pleasure—a lot like the way she’d felt when Elijah stood so close to her and looked down at her in the hallway after lunch, but ten times more intense. The feeling was delicious and shocking. Yet she wasn’t surprised that she could fling her dinner plate across the room with her mind. Somewhere deep down, in a dark place she hadn’t acknowledged, she’d always known that she could do magic.

But she knew she should be surprised, so she eased up from her chair and crossed the room to examine the plate-shaped mark on the door. Vinaigrette oozed down between bits of lettuce pasted flat.

Prom date out, telekinesis in. Not a fair trade at all.

She didn’t clean up the mess. She knew she’d get in trouble if she left it until her parents came home, but that was just tough. She flounced into the living room, stretched out on the chaise, and tested her magical power. First she pressed the button on the TV remote without physically touching it. She was pleased to find her power had this much precision. She clicked through the shopping networks to a music channel. Now her levitation had a kick-ass sound track.

After a few moments of knocking magazines around on the side table, she turned to bigger objects. The more she used her power, the more the sparkling sensation raced through her body. She lifted the armchair five feet in the air, moved it across the room, and set it back down. She lifted the coffee table all the way to the ceiling and accidentally scraped the plaster. Hastily she lowered the table and set it down. She lifted the chaise she was sitting on and propelled it around the room, tilting it on its course, like a car in an animatronics-filled fantasy ride at Disneyland. She set it down in a new location and adjusted it a little so she could still see the music videos on TV.

Next she turned her attention to the sofa. Here she had a problem. She managed to make it hover a few inches off the floor, but this gave her a headache. Lifting heavy things hurt, just as if she were lifting them with her body rather than her mind. She preferred a happy medium between the addictive sparkles through her limbs and the pain in her head. She set the sofa down.

She lifted herself into the air, careful not to lift too high and hit her head on the ceiling. The chandelier was dusty, she noticed. This was the best feeling yet—producing the strongest sparkles—and she had only a lingering headache from her battle with the sofa. She moved all the furnishings exactly where she wanted them, then imagined opening the medicine cabinet in the hall bathroom and taking out the painkillers. When she saw the plastic bottle bobbing toward her down the hall, she opened a kitchen cabinet, removed a glass, and filled it with chilled water from the refrigerator. The glass had just arrived in front of her, and she was concentrating hard to defeat the child safety cap on the bottle without giving in and using her fingers, when the front door opened, scraping broken bits of plate along the marble floor.

“Sweetie,” her mom called, “we’re home for just a second. I forgot my pur—”

The painkiller bottle and the glass of water hit the floor. Pills and bits of glass splashed all the way to her mom’s sequined stilettos.

Holly and her mom stared at each other. She pictured how her mom must see her, floating in the air, no strings attached. She became painfully aware of the rock music blaring from the TV. It made her power seem underhanded, like her mom had caught her smoking pot.

“Peter,” her mom called sharply behind her. “It’s happened. I’ll get the shot.” Watching Holly, she stepped right through the mess of pills and broken glass and plate on her way to the kitchen.

Shot? Holly didn’t like shots, especially shots with sinister connotations of lying in wait for her. She picked up her mom with her mind and hung her in midair.

“Holly, Holly, careful, careful,” her mom protested. Out of the corner of her eye, Holly saw her mom careening against the kitchen light fixture. But Holly could only devote so much attention to her mom. She turned to focus on her dad coming through the doorway.

She didn’t get the chance. Her dad grabbed her neck. But he never touched her. He stayed in the doorway. Holly could tell from his intense gaze on her and the sudden pain in her throat, and her own experience of the last fifteen minutes, that he was squeezing her neck with his mind.

The world went red.

She lashed out at him with her magical power, a blind punch, to make him let her go.

The pressure on her neck released and she gasped at the same time she hit the marble floor hard on her hip. Before she could take another full breath, her mom sat on her and jabbed something into her arm. The shot. Holly knocked her mom off, flung the shot away, and tried to levitate out of harm’s way. But the excited sparkles drained out of her like her drool pooling on the cold stone floor.

“Peter!” Holly’s mom yelled. “Call Mr. Diamond!”

Holly wondered why her mom wanted to drag the owner of the casino into this. This dream was the strangest one she’d ever had. That was her last thought before she blacked out.



“Holly, sweetie,” her mom whispered. Her mom’s fingernails hissed through Holly’s hair, stroking, comforting. Holly opened her eyes.

She lay in her bed. Her mom leaned over her. Her dad and a balding man in a white coat—not Mr. Diamond, but a doctor she’d never met—stood at the foot of the bed, chatting quietly in concerned tones.

Looking past them, Holly tried to lift her copy of Romeo and Juliet off her desk. Nothing. Then her pencil cup, her pink stapler, her tennis tournament trophy from eighth grade. No movement, no tingle. Nothing.

“Do you remember what happened?” Holly’s mom asked.

“You gave me a shot!” Holly cried. “Dad tried to choke me!”

“No,” all three adults said sadly, as if they’d been afraid of this.

“We held you down while the doctor gave you a shot of medicine to stop your hallucinations,” her mom said gently. “We couldn’t control you. We didn’t want you to hurt yourself or one of us. You punched your father in the eye.”

Sure enough, Holly’s dad’s left eye was shaded, developing into a shiner. Holly shrank against the headboard.

“Holly, I’m Dr. Gray.” The physician approached the bed. “You have a condition called mental adolescent dysfunction,” he said in the tone of the narrator of antiquated films about menstruation that Holly’s PE teacher had shown in middle school. “It’s a psychiatric disorder that presents in puberty. The bad news is that this is a serious condition. In the past, people have been institutionalized their whole lives with the disease. But the good news,” he went on quickly as Holly started to hyperventilate, “is that it’s easily controlled with medicine. We gave you the initial dose in the shot.” He pulled a prescription bottle from his pocket and shook it. Pills rattled inside. “Take one of these every night before bed. Don’t ever take more, don’t ever miss a dose, and you should be fine.” He set the bottle on her bedside table.

“That’s not what happened,” Holly murmured.

“What do you mean?” Holly’s mom asked, playing along, like this was all one of Holly’s childhood tea parties when Holly was little.

“You and dad left for dinner,” Holly said. “While you were gone, I felt like I—”

The adults watched her.

She skipped that part. “You came back to get your purse. You yelled to Dad that you were getting the shot, like you had something ready and expected all this to happen. You told him to call Mr. Diamond.”

“Mr. Diamond!” Her dad laughed.

Holly pointed at her dad. “And you tried to choke me!”

Her dad flinched as if Holly had hit him. Again. She realized how serious this accusation was and how hurtful, but he had tried to choke her. Hadn’t he?

“Holly.” Dr. Gray pulled Holly’s desk chair close to her bed and sat down. “Your parents tell me you had a disagreement tonight. That’s how the disease manifests itself. Your parents made a decision to protect you, but you’re angry with them for having power over you. Your father is allowing you to work as his assistant so you can learn the magic trade, but you’re jealous and impatient. You want to be the magician.”

Holly squirmed. This might be true. But she would never dream of hurting her father to take over his act. No.

“These are common emotions, Holly,” Dr. Gray said. “All teenagers feel this way about their parents sometimes. The only difference between other teenagers and you is that you, unfortunately, have a mental disorder that pushes your delusions of grandeur into the danger zone. When you were in that state, you probably thought you could fly or something.” He raised his eyebrows in question.

His description of what she’d experienced was too accurate to be wrong. She eyed him guiltily.

He didn’t seem to blame her, though. He patted her arm—ouch, on the sore spot where someone had given her the shot—and handed her a glossy pamphlet. “This will tell you more about the disease. Just take your medicine, Holly, and I think you’ll be fine. If you’re not, we’ll move to the next step.” Her parents followed him out of the room. Holly heard them walking him to the front door with good-byes and thanks for the emergency house call.

Tuning them out, Holly examined the pamphlet. On the front, a stick person held its head in its hands while teardrops sprang from its face. Another stick person put its arm around the first, lending comfort in 2-D.

WHAT IS MENTAL ADOLESCENT DYSFUNCTION?

Mental adolescent dysfunction (MAD) is a lifelong mental illness that strikes during puberty (≈ 14 years). The first episode is brought on by strong emotion. Thereafter, sufferers are plagued with delusions that they have magical powers. They may believe that they can:

• Move objects with their minds

• Read minds

• Control the minds of others

Most troubling, patients with MAD may become violent. Therefore, it is imperative that patients control their symptoms with medication at all times.

Holly’s own tears plopped onto the pamphlet and ran down the slick paper. Earlier her parents had forbidden her to date Elijah, and she’d thought that was the end of the world. Now she faced a lifetime of mental illness, a job bagging groceries, a room in a halfway house with the other crazies, or—God forbid—living with her parents forever.

She felt a little better when she opened the pamphlet. Inside were rainbows and butterflies. Both stick people stood upright and triumphant. They had taken their medicine.

Holly’s mom swept in and sat in the chair. She took the pamphlet from Holly and set it aside. She held Holly’s hand in both her cold hands and gazed at her, looking even older than she had earlier that evening. “Sweetie, the doctor says everything’s going to be okay. Nobody has any reason to be afraid of you as long as you take your medicine. But you know how cruel teenagers can be.” She squeezed Holly’s hand. “Don’t tell anyone what happened tonight. Don’t let anyone know you have MAD.”

“Don’t worry,” Holly said. She pictured herself announcing to her school, Guess what? I’m not just a fourteen-year-old showgirl anymore. I’m a violent fourteen-year-old showgirl with a mental disorder! No way would anybody ever hear about MAD from her. She might be crazy, but she wasn’t that crazy.

“The kids at school could make fun of you,” her mom understated. “If this health problem goes on your permanent record, you could have trouble getting into college or finding a job. It could be bad publicity for your father’s act. People hold such prejudice against the mentally ill.”

Holly’s eyes flitted to her dad, who glowered at her from the doorway. The red bruise under his eye had turned purple.

“Don’t even tell your best friends.” Her mom produced Holly’s cell phone, which she must have taken from Holly’s purse while Holly was unconscious. “Especially not Elijah Brown.”

Holly grabbed for the phone.

Her mom snatched it out of Holly’s reach. “You sent texts to that boy all day at school when you were supposed to be paying attention in class. You had countless messages from him today—”

Fourteen, Holly thought.

“—and another seven in the last hour,” her mother finished. “Seven!”

“What did they say?” Holly wailed.

“I erased them.” Her mom eyed her sternly. “Break up with him, or I will call his mother and break you up myself. Text him right now and tell him you can’t go with him to the matinee or the prom.” She handed Holly the phone.

Holly took it with a frustrated sigh. She didn’t want to break her date with such a cool guy, on a text. But honestly, she thought it might be for the best, now that she’d been diagnosed. Thank God she’d freaked out here at home. What if that had happened on a date, and she’d given Elijah a shiner?

Besides, breaking the date with him on a text was definitely better than her mom calling his mom, which might get around school. She didn’t need anything else added to her Ninth-Grade Freak tally.

She thought for a moment, then composed a message her mom would deem appropriate. But she made it sound stilted and un-text-message-y. She hoped Elijah would figure out that she’d been forced into it. She didn’t want him to hate her. Cringing, she handed the phone over.

I’m sorry to cancel our dates to the prom and magic show. My parents and I concluded it’s not the right decision for me at this time.

Her mom read the screen, gave Holly a satisfied nod, and pushed send. She tossed the phone backward to Holly’s dad, who fumbled with it and dropped it. There was no real magic in this family.

Her mom rubbed Holly’s arm and stood up. “Get some sleep, sweetie. We’ve all had a hard night, but you need to go to school tomorrow so no one suspects anything’s wrong.” As she passed Holly’s dad leaning in the doorway, she put her hand on his chest. Then her high heels clicked across the marble floor of the living room, fainter and fainter.

Holly’s dad stepped forward to Holly’s bedside. “I’m sorry, kiddo.”

Holly swallowed. “I’m sorry for hitting you. I thought you were trying to kill me, seriously.”

“Don’t worry about that now,” he said hoarsely, on the verge of tears. “Just take your medicine.” He bent down and touched his forehead to Holly’s. This close, his black eye filled her field of vision. He rocked his forehead back and forth against hers. Then he kissed her on the tip of the nose, backed away, and turned off the light as he left the room, closing the door behind him.

Holly nestled down into her soft bed. She lay on her sore arm. She rolled over to the other side. Now she lay on her sore hip. In her faulty memory, she’d landed on her hip when she fell from midair. She wondered what had really happened.

She jerked upright in bed and switched on her lamp. During her hallucination, she’d punched her dad with her telekinetic power. In reality she must have punched him with her fist. He had a shiner. She would have a corresponding mark on her knuckles.

She gazed down at her hand, skin smooth, nails unbroken. She wiggled her fingers. They weren’t even sore.

She stared at her closed door. What if her parents had made up her disease? What if she really did have magical power?

She tried to open the door with her mind. Nothing happened. No delicious sparkly feeling at all.

Shaking her head, she turned off the lamp and snuggled down into bed again. The clock on her bedside table said that only an hour and a half had passed since Holly had sat at the kitchen table in front of that doomed plate of edamame. But her mom was right. Holly was bone tired, as she should be. She’d had a physical fight with her parents. She’d attacked and hurt her own dad. Her parents hadn’t made up her disease and then let Dr. Gray in on the secret. Only a crazy person would come up with a conspiracy theory like that.

Besides, her parents wouldn’t do that to her.



Elijah retrieved his backpack from his locker in the casino’s employee break room. He thumbed through the messages on his phone as he headed down the employee corridor toward the bus stop. But the message from Holly stopped him cold. Poker dealers and cocktail waitresses and someone dressed up as a giant banana flowed around him as he dropped his backpack on the industrial linoleum and read the message over and over, trying to make sense of it.

To think, this had started as the best day of his life. He’d had the balls to snag the seat behind Holly in English way back on the first day of ninth grade, but there his courage had failed him. The longer he stared at the back of her head and examined how each strand of her rich brown hair caught the fluorescent lights of the classroom, the surer he became she was way too good for him. She lived in a mansion with her famous parents, who were the toast of the casino. Elijah lived in an apartment with his mom, who’d gotten him an unpaid apprenticeship at the casino after school so he wouldn’t get in trouble like his dad. It had taken him almost the entire school year to work up his courage again and ask Holly out, and she’d said yes. He’d bragged about her to the older guys on the lacrosse team, who’d turned on him and tried to hit him in the crotch with the ball for the rest of practice.

And now this. He’d been afraid of this when she abruptly stopped their long and funny text conversation a few hours ago. The casino didn’t allow cell phones during work. On his break halfway through his shift, he’d hurried back to his locker to check his messages. Nothing from her. He’d sent seven more hilarious one-liners into the abyss, because he was an optimist. And an idiot.

A giraffe elbowed him in the back, trying to get around him. Shoved off balance, Elijah nearly dropped his phone. The giraffe kept walking on four stilts as if nothing had happened. And that’s exactly how Elijah felt, staring at Holly’s message. He was the kind of guy to whom a beautiful girl could say yes and then no without a clear explanation. The kind of guy nobody noticed in a corridor full of musclemen and giraffes. A boy with no father. He looked up at the wide hall ahead of him, which was painted a dull white and ended in a vanishing point. This was his life.

His boss snapped him out of these thoughts. He was looking for Elijah because Mr. Diamond wanted to see him.

Elijah turned around and spotted his sawdusty boss a few steps behind him. “Why would the owner of the casino want to see me?” Everyone in the casino knew what Mr. Diamond looked like because his portrait was displayed in the entrances and the elevators and the bathrooms, but few employees had been granted an audience.

Elijah’s boss stopped in surprise. “How’d you know?”

“Know what?” Elijah asked.

“That Mr. Diamond wanted to see you.”

“You just told me,” Elijah said.

“No, I didn’t.” His boss jerked his thumb backward over his shoulder. “I got the call in the break room. I came to find you.” The faster he got rid of this kid and went home, the sooner he’d get inside his wife.

“TMI!” Elijah exclaimed. The guys on the job said filthy things under their breath about the buxom tourists strutting through the casino, but not about real people.

“What?” His boss frowned.

“Your wife,” Elijah explained.

His boss’s lips parted. His stomach dropped to the floor. There had to be a logical explanation. The kid was only screwing with him somehow—disappointing, because this one didn’t have a single tattoo or piercing and always came to work on time.

Elijah stared right back at his boss. A pleasant tingle spread throughout his body, which was offset by the horror that he could read his boss’s mind. Suddenly he was sweating in the cool corridor. “How do I get to Mr. Diamond?” he asked quickly.

His boss pointed one finger straight up. He thought, Top floor.

“Thanks. See you tomorrow.” Elijah slung his backpack over his shoulder, pocketed his phone, and hurried down the hall, away from those strange feelings and toward the elevator. Maybe he should find his mom behind a blackjack table on the casino floor and tell her he was coming down with something. But then he’d be acting like a baby. She couldn’t do anything for him that he couldn’t do for himself. Buy some cold medicine. And if Mr. Diamond wanted to see him, he’d better go.

He tripped over his own feet as the periodic table popped into his head.

He looked around. A showgirl in full costume sat cross-legged against the wall, an unladylike position considering how little she was wearing, with her feather crown balanced on her head and her UNLV chemistry book open on the floor in front of her. The showgirls’ standard line to tourists who tried to pick them up was that they held this job only to save money for medical school. The irony was that in her case, it was true.

She looked up at Elijah, blinked her false lashes at him just to give the teenage kid a thrill, and looked back down at her book. The group-six transition metals were chromium (Cr), molybdenum (Mo), tungsten (W), and seaborgium (Sg). Molybdenum. Molybdenum. She never could remember how to spell molybdenum.

Elijah passed his hand over his sweating brow as he walked on and the showgirl’s thoughts faded from his head. Clearly he was ill, but the elevator wasn’t far away. He could see it, and when he entered it, he could rest for forty stories.

The closer he got, the less sure he became that he could make it. A dealer passed him, fuming silently about a gambler who’d sat at his table for two hours and pretended not to know the rules. The customer was always right, his ass! A janitor pushed a wide broom in front of her, pining for her four-month-old baby and hoping he might be awake this time when she got off work. Each thought increased the tingling through Elijah’s body. He’d never felt this good in his life. It was so good he could hardly stand it.

One of the elevators opened. Twenty people poured out and headed straight for him. He flattened himself against the cinder-block wall as best he could with his backpack on. He closed his eyes and held his breath, waiting for them to pass. A cashier was going to divorce his wife if she wasn’t home when he got there tonight. A tourist had gotten lost and taken the wrong elevator, but as long as she was down here, she might as well explore until security kicked her out. A dealer recognized Elijah. Wasn’t that Jasmine Brown’s kid? Lord, he’d grown a foot since the last time she’d seen him. He looked sweaty and pale, on the verge of fainting. She reached out to him.

Elijah saw all this in his head, even though his eyes were closed. He saw the way he looked to this friend of his mom’s. It couldn’t be real. If she actually touched him, he was going to freak out completely.

He felt a hand touch his forearm.

He yelped and jumped.

“Hon, are you okay?” The lady leaned close to Elijah, gazing into his eyes with concern.

Elijah’s body tingled so delightfully that it almost hurt. Reading people’s minds was tearing him apart. “I’m fine,” he breathed. “Thank you, but I’m fine.” The crowd had passed. The elevator doors stood open, waiting. He tore away from the lady, dove inside before the doors shut, and pressed the button for the fortieth floor.

His stomach left him as the elevator sped upward, but his mind cleared, and the tingles subsided. Taking a deep breath, he noticed his ghostly reflection in the clear plastic sheet protecting the portrait of white-haired, dignified Mr. Diamond. Elijah wiped more sweat from his brow, yanked his wavy hair into place as best he could, and hoped he would pass for healthy, at least until his interview with the owner of the casino was over.

He knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. If he was being kicked out of his apprenticeship, his boss would tell him, not Mr. Diamond. Maybe Elijah had done such a great job that Mr. Diamond was promoting him. Elijah had very carefully refurbished the elaborate gold paneling in the Peacock Room. But he was fourteen. He couldn’t officially work even part-time until his fifteenth birthday in the summer.

The doors slid open before he was ready. Tentatively he stepped onto plush carpet and looked around. There were only three doorways in this short hall, and Elijah knew one of them led to the penthouse. Mr. Diamond’s door must be the one with two men in dark suits stationed outside. The guard with a beard daydreamed about his trip to the beach next month. The red-haired guard noticed Elijah. Tall kid, fourteen years old, light brown wavy hair, green eyes. Yep, that was him. The orders were to scare him to soften him up. The guard planned to open the office door for Elijah and shove him inside.

Realizing this, Elijah stopped five paces away.

The red-haired guard glared at him and moved his jacket aside with one hand to expose the gun on his hip, though he had no intention of using it on an unthreatening kid. He barked at Elijah, “What the f*ck do you want?”

“You know I’m Elijah Brown,” Elijah burst out. “Open the door for me. Don’t you dare shove me. I’m having a really bad day, and so help me God, I will kick your ass.”

The red-haired guard froze. The kid was one of those, and Mr. Diamond hadn’t warned him!

The bearded guard was unimpressed. Elijah might be a mind reader, but he didn’t know how to control his power yet. The guard hoped Elijah did try something, and then he would show Elijah how to kick somebody’s ass. He pushed open the door and shoved Elijah twice as hard as the red-haired guard had planned. Elijah reeled across the carpet, his backpack throwing him off balance. The door slammed shut behind him.

He stopped himself in the center of the room, in front of a single chair. Beyond that was the biggest desk he’d ever seen. Mr. Diamond himself sat behind it. Floor-to-ceiling windows displayed a killer view of the Strip at night. Other casinos glowed every color. The red and white lights of traffic crawled by a million miles below.

Beside Mr. Diamond’s desk, waiting for Elijah with his arms folded, was Holly Starr’s dad. Elijah hadn’t recognized him at first without his magic cape. He wore a normal business suit, had a black eye, and scowled at Elijah.

Uh-oh.

“Sit down,” Mr. Starr spat. He tried to make this sound authoritative, but he was distracted. Elijah looked exactly like his father had looked at that age. It was uncanny that two people could look that much alike, father and son or not.

Hearing this in his head, Elijah forgot to follow the instructions. He placed his hand lightly on the back of the chair and watched Mr. Starr.

Mr. Starr pointed at him. “This is exactly the attitude that’s gotten you in hot water. And you’re not taking Holly with you.” After his experience earlier that night, Mr. Starr now thought Holly might be more dangerous than Elijah. But that didn’t matter right now. His mission was to scare this kid. “Stay away from my daughter.”

“Bullshit,” Elijah said as calmly as he could. His voice broke, but he pushed ahead, heady with power and high on the tingling sensation in his limbs. “You’re scared of me and of Holly. You’re trying to hide something from both of us, and I won’t let you.” To make good on this threat, Elijah turned to Mr. Diamond for help.

But Mr. Diamond was the only person Elijah had encountered in the last few minutes whose mind he couldn’t read at all. Elijah would have suspected the old man was a cardboard cutout, another reproduction like his portrait from the elevator, if it weren’t for Mr. Diamond’s middle finger tapping the opulent desk.

Mr. Diamond stopped tapping and cleared his throat. “Peter, it’s happening for Elijah right now. He can hear everything you think.”

Mr. Starr looked at Elijah in surprise, then at Mr. Diamond. “Do you have a shot?”

“Not here,” Mr. Diamond answered in a kindly, rumbling voice. “You’ll have to take him down.”

Mr. Starr grabbed Elijah by the throat. He hadn’t moved a step toward Elijah. He hadn’t uncrossed his arms. But with his mind, he took Elijah by the throat and squeezed.

Elijah fought back. He knew now that he was powerful. If Mr. Starr was scared of him, surely Elijah could crush people’s carotid arteries with his mind, too. He focused all his energy on Mr. Starr’s throat, just as Mr. Starr focused all his energy on Elijah’s. But Elijah only tingled mightily from the effort, his mind bursting with Mr. Starr’s violence, as the room faded to black.



He woke not fifty feet from where he’d started—in the basement of the casino, at the employee health center, with his mom and a physician named Dr. Gray in chairs on either side of his bed. His memory of what had happened was so ridiculous that he immediately doubted it. His mom confirmed that much of it had been a delusion. Mr. Diamond really had called Elijah up to his office because Mr. Starr had complained about a lowly apprentice carpenter asking Holly out. Mr. Starr had not attacked Elijah with his telekinetic powers, duh. Elijah had wigged out and punched Mr. Starr. Funny how Elijah’s malfunctioning mind had turned that around to make him think Mr. Starr already had a black eye when Elijah stepped into the room. If he’d held out hope that Holly’s parents would reverse their decision and let him date their daughter someday, that was pretty much over.

His mom and Dr. Gray listened to his story of what he’d imagined Mr. Starr had done to him. When he finished, his mom and the doctor stared at him for a few moments. He wished he knew what they were thinking, but all of that was gone.

Finally his mom smiled. “Well, no wonder you’ve got an A in English. That makes a great story!” She looked at Dr. Gray. “His advanced English class is reading Romeo and Juliet right now.”

“Ohhhh.” Dr. Gray nodded. “We see this a lot. All teenage boys want to save the girl and take on the world. The only difference between other boys and you, Elijah, is that you, unfortunately, have a hereditary mental disorder that pushes your delusions of grandeur into the danger zone and makes you think you can read minds.” He chuckled.

It wasn’t funny. Tamping down his panic, Elijah turned to his mom. “Hereditary? Did Dad have it?”

His mom took a deep breath and held it.

“Dad didn’t die in a drunk driving accident like you told me, did he?” Elijah asked. “He had this disease and he did something horrible.” His mom had always been vague about the details of his dad’s untimely death. Now Elijah knew why. It had been a lie, for good reason. The truth was worse.

His mom let out her breath slowly. “He wasn’t on medication. You’re in much better shape.”

Dr. Gray patted Elijah’s arm and handed him a glossy pamphlet. “This will tell you more about the disease. Just take your medicine, Elijah”—he picked up the prescription bottle on a nearby table and rattled the pills inside—“and I think you’ll be fine. If you’re not, we’ll move to the next step.” He rose, and Elijah’s mom followed him to the doorway of the examining room, where they talked softly together.

Elijah opened the pamphlet, which was decorated ironically with butterflies, rainbows, and stick people hugging each other. Somebody down at the crazy people’s print shop had a sense of humor.

LIVING WITH MENTAL ADOLESCENT DYSFUNCTION

The news that a patient has mental adolescent dysfunction (MAD) can be devastating, both for the family, who had expected a normal, healthy life for their child, and for the patient amid an already turbulent adolescent period. Patients and their families should take comfort in the knowledge that a diagnosis of MAD no longer mandates a lifetime in a mental institution. A new drug makes normal life possible in many cases. Mentafixol suppresses the symptoms of the disease and enables most patients to enjoy an average lifespan. In fact, all known assaults by patients with MAD were committed when the patient was off medication.1

1 JA Gray, “Mental Adolescent Dysfunction: Long-Term Prognosis,” Journal of Mental Illness.

Elijah frowned at the pamphlet and ran his thumb over a rainbow. He’d been on a wild ride, a strange mix of fact and fiction, he realized now. If only the whole thing were his imagination. Especially the part where Mr. Diamond and Mr. Starr ganged up on him to keep him away from Holly.

Elijah’s mom returned alone and sat at his bedside again. “I’m so sorry, honey.” She picked up his fist and kissed it.

He looked down at his hand in hers. Shouldn’t his knuckles be bruised from punching Mr. Starr in the eye? Maybe the adrenaline from the disease had given him superhuman strength and resilience, like an addict on crack.

Then he looked up at his mom, still young and pretty, with long black hair and dangling turquoise earrings that showed pride in their Native American heritage. Yet for some reason, she was terrified they’d have to live on the reservation—she called it the “Res”—and he sensed one of those lectures coming on.

“You’ve got to be careful now,” she said. “People are prejudiced against the mentally ill. Don’t tell anybody about your disease.”

“I won’t,” Elijah promised. If he did, he would never hear the end of it from the lacrosse team. Worse, what would Holly think? He was almost glad she’d broken their dates. She deserved better than a mental patient. What if he’d gone out with her and hurt her?

“And for God’s sake, stay away from that girl,” his mom said. “Don’t even talk to her. Mr. Starr and Mr. Diamond were understanding of your condition and promised to keep it quiet. But that’s it for you and me, Elijah. Mr. Diamond says if you have another episode, I might have to withdraw you from Holly’s school, or I could get fired altogether, and then I wouldn’t be able to take care of you. You might end up at the Res. You don’t know what the Res is like, Elijah. Promise me you won’t pull any more Romeo and Juliet shit on me. There are plenty of pretty girls you can ask out. Let this one go.”

The next morning, Elijah had trouble getting out of bed, but his mom shook his shoulder incessantly and hissed at him that he had to go to school so no one would suspect anything was wrong. He walked into first-period English on the bell, as usual. Holly was the brightest point in his day, as always, her shining brown curls cascading over her shoulders, her dark brown eyes wide. But she cast them down at her desk the instant she saw him.

He crossed to the opposite side of the room and sat down, all the while reaching over the rows for her thoughts. He tried to read her mind, jonesing for the tingles that had spread through him when he’d read minds the night before. He wanted that feeling from her. But she kept her head down, poring over their Shakespeare textbook, with hardly a sideways glance at the guy she’d just dumped.

He opened his own book. His life wasn’t over, he assured himself. He would keep his grades up, pull his weight on the lacrosse team, make the most of high school despite his illness, and try his best not to worry his mom. Only one thing had changed irreparably since yesterday: there was nothing left between him and Holly but regret.