“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.”