读者文摘:魔术改变了我的生活(3)（在线收听）

She marched toward me and demanded to know what was going on.

她朝我走了过来，问我发生了什么事。

The coin vanished for her too.

她也看到硬币不见了。

"Do it again,"she said, and I did.

“再来一次，”她说，我又做了一遍。

I'm sure my hands were shaking, but when I looked up, everything had changed.

我确信我的手在颤抖，但当我抬起头时，一切都变了。

I will remember the look on her face—the look of wide-eyed, openmouthed wonder—forever.

我永远都不会忘记她脸上的表情——睁大眼睛、惊叹不已。

Two certainties.

确定的事情有两件。

First, this was clearly the greatest thing in the world.

首先，这显然是世界上最伟大的事。

I kept seeing my teacher's face—the stern, authoritarian facade melting into shock, fear, elation, and joy, all at once.

我一直看着老师严厉、专制的外表瞬间转变成震惊、恐惧、欢欣和喜悦。

The kids' too.

像孩子一样。

My classmates had been transformed for a moment from a vaguely indifferent, vaguely hostile pack of scavengers and carnivores into real people.

我的同学们曾一度从一群淡漠、充满敌意的食腐动物变成了活生生的人。

If you could make people feel like this, why wouldn't you do it all the time? Why didn't everyone do this?

如果你能让人们有这种感觉，为什么不一直这样做呢？为什么每个人不这样做呢?

For anyone—but especially for a nine-year-old boy at a new school—this transformation is almost indistinguishable from real magic.

对任何人，尤其对一所新学校的9岁男孩来说，这种转变几乎与真正的魔法无异，

The second certainty was harder to reconcile.

第二个更难调和。

The more I thought about it, the stranger it became, and even now it intrigues me as much as it did that day on the playground.

我越想它，越觉得它陌生，即使是现在，我的兴趣依然不减，心情和那天操场上一样。

Here it is: All of it—the chaos, the shouting, the wideeyed wonder—came from a coin trick.

所有混乱、叫喊、睁大眼睛的惊愕表情都来自于硬币戏法。

I knew that it was just a trick and I was just a kid.

我知道这只是个恶作剧，我只是个孩子。

But the reactions of the students and the teacher were so much greater than the sum of these modest parts that I didn't know how to explain them.

但是学生和老师的反应远远超过了事物本身，我不知道如何解释。