A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic Read Online Free PDF

nickel. Well, I’m a fool to let you do it. You’ll have another dime off of me, and no mistake. I don’t suppose you want to just walk away now?” The man took off his top hat and held it over his heart, revealing a pasty, bald scalp covered with scraggly black threads of hair.
    Ralph laughed. He had never been good at anything in his life! “I think I’ll play again,” he said.
    The man placed the pea beneath the center shell and made the walnuts dance. Faster and faster, like a mad jig. But Ralph kept his eyes on the shell. He knew it. He knew it. The man stopped. Ralph pointed. The man lifted the shell. The pea was gone. “Sorry, son,” the man said. “Would you like another go?”
    â€œI don’t have any more money.”
    â€œAh, rough luck.”
    Emotion washed over Ralph as he stood, immobile, watching the man put away his shells. I know what you’re thinking: sadness, misery, disappointment. But you’re wrong. You see, Ralph had seen something. Something that changed his life. When the man lifted the shells, the pea wasn’t under any of them.
    Ralph’s world tilted on its axis. The sky tore open above him, revealing a white light.
    Never mind the nickel. Never mind.
    He had seen magic.
    Kai flipped through more pages. They were blank.
    She slammed the book shut. What the heck was that?
    What the heck?
    What the . . .
    Lavinia wrote it, she thought. She must have! But why? To be funny?
    That seemed unlikely. Lavinia didn’t seem like the kind of person for practical jokes. She seemed more like a person for practical footwear. Kai looked around the room, wondering if her mysterious great-aunt was about to jump out at her. Slowly and softly, Kai walked over tothe closet. With a deep breath, she yanked it open. But the closet was empty, except for the violin case, which lay like a dusty black shadow at the bottom.
    Someone sneaked in here and wrote a weird story while I was out, she thought. Or else I went crazy, wrote this myself, and then forgot all about it.
    Minds are pretty creative things, aren’t they? Kai’s worked very hard to try to make sense of the story and how it got there. But it was wrong on all counts.
    It’s a prank, Kai thought. A stupid prank. She shut the book and shoved it onto the closet shelf. She yanked on a sweater, commanding herself to stop thinking about the book. Don’t think about it, her mind said sternly. Think about the moth, or Doodle. Think about Lavinia.
    But she couldn’t. Her mind was consumed with that book and its story for the rest of the afternoon—right up until it was time for dinner.

CHAPTER FOUR
Leila
    B EYOND THE WINDOW, THE city of Lahore was dark. Really dark, because the power was out. To conserve energy, the local government had instituted “load shedding”: rolling blackouts during the cooler hours of the day. Inside the Awan house, though, the rooms were bright and cheerful, thanks to the generators humming in the backyard.
    Leila breathed in the heavy scent of masala, nicked with the sharp undercurrent of gobi and warm oily parathas , like a scratchy blanket. She knew most, but not all, of the dishes on her plate, and she was determined to try everything—even the green stuff. This was part of having “an authentic cultural experience,” which was a phrase that Leila had read that afternoon on her sister’s blog.
    Nadia was in Kenya, as part of a program formiddle-school girls who were gifted in science. She was studying elephants and helping to build a library for a village of very photogenic Kenyans, many of whom were pictured on Nadia’s blog, clustered around her while she played her guitar. It wasn’t easy to have a younger sister who was in your same grade, and while the blog made Leila feel closer to Nadia, it also made her want to strangle her a little. Nadia just always had to be the fascinating sister, didn’t she? It occurred