“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**k do you want?”