2 Sleight of Hand

Chapter 2 Sleight of Hand sleight of hand (n) a trick performed with the hands, requiring quickness and skill, such as making a coin appear or disappear; also called legerdemain or prestidigitation Evan heard Jessie clomp downstairs to answer the door. If it was Peggy, he would just stay in his room. It wasn't that he didn't like Peggy; it's just that he felt as if he was getting a little old to have a babysitter. In three months he was going to be eleven. That was old enough to be a babysitter. In fact, sometimes Mrs. Nevya, who lived on their street, paid Evan to play with her two little boys while she did housework and made important phone calls. She knew Evan could be counted on to keep the boys safe.

Evan flipped to the section of the book that explained how to do sleight-of-hand tricks. There were seven basic techniques for sleight of hand, and Evan wanted to master them all: the palm, the ditch, the steal, the load, the simulation, the misdirection, and the switch. Today he was working on the palm. It was a technique that fooled the audience into thinking that your hand was empty when really you were holding something. There were two ways to palm something: the finger palm and the classic palm. Evan examined the pictures carefully. He could do the finger palm, no problem, but it was the classic palm that gave a better show. With

the classic palm, you had to squeeze the muscles in your hand in just the right way—so that your palm held the coin or ball or whatever you were hiding— while making your hand look completely relaxed. It was hard. Evan spit on his hands, then rubbed them together. He pulled out the quarter from his pocket and held it in his left palm. He waved his hand in a flourish. The quarter fell out and onto the floor. He picked it up and tried again. He didn't mind practicing. You had to practice if you wanted to be good. Evan had always loved watching magic acts, but until his grandmother gave him a magic kit for Christmas, he had never thought about performing magic himself. As soon as he learned a few tricks— and discovered that he was pretty good, a natural— he'd been hooked. Every time he mastered one skill, he couldn't wait to jump to the next. Each skill was harder than the last, and pretty soon he was performing tricks that left Jessie and his mom asking, "How'd you do that?

And magic was a lot like basketball. In basketball you had to move fast, you had to think fast, you had to drill over and over so that your muscles knew what to do before your brain even gave a command. And you had to know how to fake, to misdirect your opponent so that you could perform magic on the court. In Evan's mind, basketball and magic were almost the same thing. There was a feeling he got when he sank a shot, the way the ball left his fingertips, sailed through the air, then fell through the basket with barely a whisper. It made him feel as if everything was in its proper place, everything in the whole world was right where it belonged. Performing a magic trick—perfectly—made him feel the same way. Evan heard the doorbell ring a second time and then the loud screech of the front door opening. Jessie shouted something, but Evan couldn't hear what. A minute later, his mom knocked on his door and came in. "That must be Peggy," said Mrs. Treski. "I don't

know what she's doing here so early. Maybe she thought there was going to be traffic on the drive. Can you help me close my suitcase?" "Sure," said Evan, putting the quarter back in his pocket and following his mom. "Wow," he said when he walked into her bedroom. "I didn't hear the bomb go off!" The drawers of her dresser were hanging open, and clothes were draped all over the bed, the chair, and even on the floor. There was a pile of books and magazines on her night table that looked as if it was ready to topple over, and at the foot of the bed was a small mountain of shoes. "I had trouble deciding what to take. And I still can't close my suitcase." There was something in her voice that made Evan nervous. That made him put on his grown-up voice. "Relax, Mom. It's not like you're going to the moon." "Try to zip while I squeeze," she said, pushing down on the scratched purple suitcase. "It feels like I

am. It feels like I'm going all the way to the moon." One of Mrs. Treski's clients had asked her to attend an important conference in California so that she could write the promotional materials for a new product they were introducing. Evan didn't even know what the product was. Some kind of software. Mrs. Treski had lots of clients, and Evan couldn't keep them all straight. But this client was very big and very important. At first she'd said no, explaining that she couldn't possibly leave her children for three whole days. "Family comes first," she had said to Evan and Jessie, which was pretty much her number one motto in life. But the client had offered to pay her big money to do the job. And there were some serious repairs that needed to be made to their old house. So after a lot of thinking, she had finally agreed to go. It was Evan who convinced his mom that she should stay an extra two days and have a little vacation. See the sites. Meet up with her old college