Free Zapped by Sherwood Smith

 
    I remember a mobile hanging over my crib. It was a cardboard carousel of flying horses, with little animals—teddy bears, bunnies, cats—riding on their backs. One of my parents would set the mobile in motion, then they’d shut me in and leave me alone. But that was okay because the mobile would stay in motion until I was asleep.
    Babies don’t wonder why a thing doesn’t need batteries. To them, the world is filled with magic. It isn’t until you get older that the adults begin to dispel the magical things, one by one, for your own good. It’s their duty, they say, to prepare you for reality.
    Sometimes their reality turns out not to be yours. That’s what happened to me.
    Things were just always there . If I was drawing, I didn’t have to look up to grab my scissors or eraser or another pen. I reached, and picked it up.
    Who knows if I ever would have noticed, if it hadn’t been for my getting sick halfway through summer, just after we moved to San Diego. I woke up one morning and couldn’t swallow past the spikes in my throat. Mom Gwen took one look, deployed the thermometer, then banished me to bed.
    The next three or four days aren’t worth talking about. Dad set up the TV in my room—a big concession in our family—but I was so sick that opening my eyes gave me a headache.
    By the end of the week the fever was gone, I’d watched all my favorite DVDs a million times, and I got restless. Getting up still made me light-headed, but I wanted to look through my sketchbook and mess with a drawing or two. The sketchbook was on my nightstand, where I’d left it the night before I got sick, but my pencils still lay on my desk.
    I sat up in bed. The headache pounded. I flopped back, sighing as I stretched my hand toward my desk a mile away … and my fingers closed around the smooth shape of a drawing pencil.
    I brought it up to my face. A perfectly ordinary pencil. Huh?
    I flung the pencil to the end of my bed. It sat on the duvet beside the hump of my foot. When I wiggled my toes, the pencil began sliding off the bed. Again I reached without thinking, and there it was, in my fingers again.
    My heart started thumping. Was the pencil, like, alive? I laid it on my stomach, stretched out my hand nearby, and waited. Nothing happened. I made grabbing motions with my fingers, and again nothing happened. I poked the pencil, which began to roll off. This time I was aware of the little zap in my arm muscle—the twitch just before you move—a tiny light flared blue-white and the pencil smacked into my palm.
    So I tried to reach without actually reaching for the other pencils on my desk. One by one they flashed into my fingers like they were on an invisible yoyo string.
    Half an hour later my head was buzzing strangely, but on my bed lay a bunch of little stuff: an eraser, rubber bands, paper clips, and more pencils. I even tried to move my sketchbook, but that one made my head go whish-whoom like some kind of drum, and the sketchbook sat where it was.
    Maybe this was just a flu dream. I grabbed my phone to search on flu+”side effects.” I got more than I wanted to know about influenza (written in a jumble of scary medicalese) but nowhere did it say anything about zapping stuff with your mind.
    I thought about yelling for one of my parents, but hesitated. Both my moms are cool, and so is my dad, but they are all practical people. They really like Normal. I figured out by the time I was five that having three parents wasn’t Normal to some people, and as I got older, I found that it was important to my parents that we all be Normal to outsiders.
    This stuff with the pencils was definitely not Normal.
    Who else was there to ask? My younger brothers would be thrilled, but no way would they keep it to themselves. They’d be running all over shouting “Abracadabra,” or whatever secret power words they’d learned from cartoons or video