Free Magic Nation Thing by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Page B

to do and say if she met with a certain amount of suspicion, as well as how she might handle it if Paige got mad at her. What she hadn’t prepared for at all was what she’d have to do and say if Paige believed every word of it and was totally thrilled to death.
    Abby started, as she had decided would be necessary, by saying, “Well, according to my mom, we’re descended from some ancient ancestors who were kind of like supernatural, and she thinks both of us inherited some things from them.”
    She got about that far before the last bell rang and Paige reluctantly turned loose of her backpack strap and let her head for her first-period class. The next time Paige caught up with her was during the lunch hour, when she once again appeared and dragged Abby away to an unoccupied table. That time Abby got into the whole thing about being able to hold someone else’s possession in her hands to produce a kind of vision about the owner.
    She could feel her cheeks getting red, and she found she couldn’t look Paige in the eye as she went on. “I did it a lot when I was a little kid, and when I told the day care lady about it she said it was my imagination, only I thought she said it was my Magic Nation and for a long time I thought it was something that happened to everybody. That is, I did until my mom started telling me about us being descended from these weird ancestors.”
    Up until then Paige hadn’t said anything, so Abby went on, still looking down at her hands. She told about how she had found the little Moorehead girl’s locket on her mother’s desk, and how it had made her have a kind of vision about Miranda and her father at Disneyland.
    Paige, who had been amazingly quiet the whole time, finally broke in to say “Wow!” Abby looked up quickly, wondering, Wow what? Wow, what a liar, maybe?
    Several seconds passed before Paige went on in a tense whisper, “That is so insane !”
    Forgetting for a moment what insane meant when Paige said it, Abby said, “I know. I think so too. So please don’t tell anybody. Promise you won’t. Please?” It was then that she realized, mostly from the expression on Paige’s face, that what Paige was saying was that she really believed what Abby had told her. Not only believed it, but was absolutely, insanely crazy about the whole idea.
    “I knew it,” Paige said. “That is, I should have known it. I should have seen that there was something totally supernatural about you.”
    “About me?” Abby winced. “Like what?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Like the way you pick up things about what people are thinking and feeling. Like the way you knew about Sky’s being caught in the refrigerator by Ludmilla. And the way you can do things without half trying.”
    Abby shook her head. “No, I can’t. What kinds of things?”
    “Oh, you know,” Paige said. “Like the way you could ice-skate the first time you tried. And ski too. Like Ms. David said, that just wasn’t natural.”
    Abby tried to interrupt to remind Paige that what Ms. David had said was that Abby was a natural, which meant something quite different, but Paige never stopped talking long enough for Abby to say anything.
    That was about where things stood when the school day was over, except that, when Abby begged her to, Paige did promise she wouldn’t tell anyone else. But by the time they were on the bus heading for Pacific Heights, Paige’s enthusiasm had expanded to include some plans for the future. Plans about how she and Abby were going to form their own detective agency and start solving all kinds of mysteries by using Abby’s psychic abilities. “We can call it the P. and A. Agency, for Paige and Abby,” she said, “and people will hire us to solve all kinds of crimes and mysteries.”
    Paige’s plan seemed to be for this “agency” to get under way immediately, even after Abby brought up a few difficulties they might run into. Difficulties such as being too young to get a detective’s license, as