"It used to be really hard but it got better with practice," she says. "I can do lots of stuff at once. I can move anything I can see, and sometimes stuff I can't see if I know right where it is. I never do it by accident or anything, only when I mean to. And I can't really tell if I can feel where it is or not, because I have to know where it is and where I want it to go before I can move it at all."

Bell tilts her head. "I have to look at things to pick them up, too, at least if I don't want to just knock them onto the floor. But I can feel that I'm feeling them and not just knowing where they are, 'cause they have textures and temperatures and heavinesses and stuff."

"It's a different thing from picking stuff up with your hands," she says, shrugging.

"Well, yeah. Yours is magic. How fast can you make stuff go? We could borrow stuff from the bar to float, and a timer, and go outside and you can zoom it around!"

"I haven't done that! Let's do that."

Bell races to the bar, politely solicits an array of balls of various sizes and a stopwatch, and then frowns at the results, as she has no good way to carry six balls in her arms. "I think you might have to carry most of it," she says, picking up the stopwatch.

The six balls float up into the air and commence following Bell around like a trail of ducklings, largest to smallest.

Bell giggles and dashes out towards the door to the outside, looking over her shoulder and only barely not running into the doorframe or tripping onto her face.

"This is awesome," crows Bell. "Okay, so..." She picks up a stick and plants it in the ground, then runs to a distant point still visible from the original. Then she picks a spot between the two to stand so she can see each stick. "I'll time you, and you can start with the small stuff and move it as fast as you can from the first stick to the second stick! And then try the bigger stuff and we'll see if that's slower. Or it could be faster!"

"Five seconds!" reports Bell.

Next ball: zoom!

"Five seconds," Bell repeats. "Maybe it doesn't matter how big the thing is, maybe you could move a whole whale from here to there in five seconds!"

"Four seconds! That's even faster! Maybe this is more like rolling stuff down a hill than like picking it up. Can you move stuff that's alive? Can you move me? Can you move you?"

"I wouldn't know how to move me," she says. "It'd be like the Lorax picking himself up by the seat of his pants and flying away. But I can move people all I want! I made a bunch of kids in my class fly!"

"What's a Lorax?" Bell asks.

"He's from a kids' book! He's fuzzy and yellow and he speaks for the trees and at the end of the book he picks himself up by the seat of his pants and flies away and nobody ever sees him again."

"So he's not real," Bell clarifies.

"I'm pretty sure he isn't."

"Okay." Bell picks up another stick and scratches 5, 5, 4 in the dirt to record the results so far.

"Four," Bell calls, as she adds the numeral to the list.