Oksa Pollock: The Last Hope by Anne Plichota and Cendrine Wolf

felt ashamed. She hadn’t treated her friend very well today. Feeling a bit embarrassed, she waited for him to go on.
    “You okay?” he asked, without looking at her, fiddling with a piece of grass.
    “No, not really,” she admitted, “my feelings are all over the place.”
    “There’s nothing strange about that,” declared Gus. “We’ve had a lot of changes in a short period of time, everything is new: the country, the house, the school—it’s just a reaction.”
    “It’s not that, Gus…”
    A few minutes went by in uneasy silence.
    “Fine,” Gus said finally, glancing sidelong at his friend. “It seems like I’m going to have to worm it out of you if I want to get to the bottom of this.”
    Oksa felt as if she couldn’t escape from her own thoughts. Her secret was beginning to take up a lot of space and she was dying to tell him. So why was she hesitating?
    “Gus!” she said, feeling on edge. “I am your friend, aren’t I? And whatever happens, I’ll always be your friend, won’t I?”
    “Er, yes, of course!”
    “You swear it?”
    “I swear it.”
    Oksa took a deep breath, feeling excited by what she was about to do.
    “See that pine cone over there, near the bench?”
    “Yes,” replied Gus, intrigued.
    “Watch closely.”
    The pine cone rose from the ground, hesitantly at first, then more steadily, and then flung itself some thirty feet away, where a squirrel pounced on it. Gus cried out in amazement, looking back and forth between the pine cone and Oksa. But the demonstration had only just begun. The pine cone rose vertically into the air, as if lifted by an invisible hand. The squirrel was jumping up and down to catch it and Oksa couldn’t resist driving the poor creature to distraction by making the fruit it craved shoot from the ground into the lowest branches of a tall tree. Then she decided to focus on a huge pile of dead leaves—a rising whirlwind immediately sent the leaves flying, provoking the outraged shouts of the park gardeners.
    “Don’t tell me you just did that?” exclaimed Gus in a choked voice.
    “Why? Did you think I didn’t? Look!”
    This time she targeted Gus’s bag, which began floating almost two feet above the ground. Gus sprang to his feet, snatched his bag out of the air and looked around uneasily before muttering:
    “How are you doing this?”
    “I don’t know, Gus.”
    “Fine,” he said sceptically, “you want me to believe that you’ve somehow succeeded in defying the laws of gravity and you have no idea how you’re doing it, is that it?”
    “I just will it to happen, that’s all.”
    “You know, I’d like to be able to do this kind of thing too. But there’s no point me just willing it, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be enough. You’ll have to be a little more convincing than that!”
    “Like this?” said Oksa, rising above the ground like a Hindu yogi.
    Gus watched her in astonishment and grabbed her hand, pulling her sharply down to the ground.
    “Are you mad? What if someone sees you?”
    Oksa’s face clouded.
    “I’d rather they didn’t.”
    “But how has this happened?”
    “I haven’t the slightest idea, Gus.”
    It was such a relief to be able to talk to someone and she began telling him everything that had happened over the past six days. The experiments in her room. The trick she’d played on McGraw. The duel with Mortimer-the-Neanderthal. Gus listened attentively until the end without interrupting. When she’d finished, he leant back against the tree trunk and whistled through his teeth:
    “That’s totally amazing! I’d never have believed this sort of thing could happen
in real life
!”
    He looked at her again and this time he met her eyes, which were shining with elation.
    “But you must be very careful, you understand? You could get yourself into serious trouble. Do you feel as if you’re not
exactly
the same as everyone else?”
    Oksa nodded vigorously.
    “You know what they did with people like you