Levitating Las Vegas

SEVEN YEARS AGO

Holly Starr wished she weren’t the daughter of a Las Vegas magician. She wished her dad hadn’t changed his name from Stuckenschneider to Starr when he broke into the business. She wished he hadn’t drafted her last autumn to assist him in his headlining casino act. He’d said he wanted her to learn the biz so she could take over as the magician someday. The prospect excited her. But in the meantime, she had to play showgirl, which was not exciting at all. It was mortifying. He made her wear a tacky 1970s-style spangled bikini that matched her mom’s. She was fourteen years old, for God’s sake. Some of her friends still didn’t dare wear a bikini to the pool. Granted, other friends told her (at least to her face) that they’d kill to be on a casino stage six nights a week like her, in the heat of the spotlight and the fever of the adult playground a few miles from their high school. But the more common attitude, especially among the older, cooler kids, children of doctors and lawyers and artists, was disdain for all things Vegas—including Holly, whom they looked down on as a freak with no future, like those double-jointed girls from Bulgaria who hung around the bathroom in the science wing and smoked cigarettes and stuck nails into their noses. She wished she were plain old Holly Stuckenschneider, ninth grader, perhaps a majorette in the marching band, definitely Elijah Brown’s girlfriend. But she wasn’t. She was Holly Starr, magician’s assistant. Her scantily clad likeness was blown up ten times larger than life on a billboard advertising her dad’s act over Interstate 15.

And now she could levitate. It was a bad end to a bad day in her bad life, she thought, as she used her mind to lift her parents’ mod leather couch and matching chairs and rearrange them to her liking as if they were plastic furnishings in a Barbie Townhouse, all from her vantage point floating in the air next to the living room chandelier.