He tries issuing commands by thinking and staring.

He stares with all his might at the boy sitting on the bench in front of him. He looks hard at him, and commands: I order you to turn around. Turn around.

He says it with his eyes and thoughts, not his voice.

Or he stares at the teacher.

I want to go to the blackboard. I demand you to call me up. I want to give the answer!

Or at his father.

I want fifty groshys for the movies. I demand it. Please. I want to go to the movies!

One time it works, lots of times it doesn’t.

That’s no surprise. Spells are tricky, and he’s only just starting.

Kaytek waits patiently.

Until finally . . . he does it.

His first spell was like this.

The teacher wants to give a bad mark. Not to Kaytek, or even to his good friend, but to some other boy.

Kaytek thinks very hard: Make his pen go missing.

And at once the teacher asks: “Where’s my pen? It was here a moment ago.”

The boys and the teacher look for it.

“It’s not here. Who took it?”

“Not I . . . And not I.”

Meanwhile the bell rings. The teacher leaves, and there’s his pen, lying on the table, as if it had never been lost.

His second spell was like this.

The teacher is writing on the blackboard, and Kaytek thinks: Make the chalk turn into soap.

The teacher tries to go on writing – but he can’t. He examines the chalk. He’s riled, muttering something to himself.

“What’s up?” the students wonder. “What is it? What do you need, sir?”

At once the teacher gives the chalk a hard squeeze and goes on writing. But he’s making an awful face.

And it was the same in geography.

The teacher was standing in front of the map, explaining something. It was a boring lesson.

And Kaytek just thought briefly and quickly: Make the map turn upside down.

The teacher blinked. He frowned. He rubbed his eyes. The boys didn’t even notice, because a moment later the map was the right way up again.

Afterward, when Kaytek counted how many of his spells had worked, he didn’t even know whether or not to count them as real spells.

Because what had happened?

He could have imagined it.

He could have fallen asleep for a while out of boredom and just dreamed it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between dreams and reality.

What about the pen that vanished? That often happens. Something gets lost, you search and search, but it’s definitely not there. Then you look again, and there it is. It’s enough to make you wonder. It’s enough to make you lose your temper.

Kaytek wanted to be sure it wasn’t just a coincidence, or a dream, or a mistake, and that it really was a spell and not something else.

So he only counted the things that couldn’t possibly have happened without a magic spell.

So in the class there was a klutz. He was so clumsy that they teased him and made fun of him.

He was worst of all in gym. And the thing he did worst was jumping over a rope.

They say: “What are you afraid of? If you trip on the rope, it won’t kill you.”

Kaytek feels sorry for him. What do they want from him? He’s a good, quiet kid.

So he gives a command the magic way.

And it works.