Page 12 of Everything She Does Is Magic (Fableview #1)

Darcy

What’s happening right now?

Somehow, this has turned into a conversation about who is dating who.

No one is dating anyone.

“Everything is fine ,” I say. There’s a child standing twenty feet away. I spring up to approach her and her guardian. “Would you like your face painted? It’s free!”

It’s actually ten dollars, but I need a task more than I need the money, so this one will be on the house.

Anya told me she gets shy around pretty girls, and now I’m shy around her. It’s not like me to be shy. It’s also not like me to miss someone’s interest in me. It’s also not like me to rebel against my parents this much.

Or maybe all of it is like me. Maybe it’s just been easier to ignore it because my entire life, I’ve been taught to fear change. That there’s no use in tweaking what’s already working. But the truth is, everything changes anyway. It’s harder to stop it from happening than it is to embrace it.

The random child does not want a free face painting, so I text Grace and ask her if Maddie’s here. Grace responds within seconds, confirming her whole family is in attendance.

Send Maddie over to our booth, I write. I’ll paint her face for free. And you should come too. I need help. I’ll explain later.

Coming.

Grace is outside the booth by the time I’ve slowly walked myself back. The swell of gratitude I feel for her is so overwhelming, I have to give her a hug.

“Thank you for always showing up for me,” I say.

“Wow, it’s that bad?” she asks, giving my back hard, confusedpats.

“It’ll all be fine,” I say.

“Cryptic.”

If Anya, Kyle, and Piper have held a conversation in my absence, that’s not for me to know. No one’s moved from the position I left them in, that’s for sure.

“I understand now,” Grace says to me upon entering the tent. She gives Piper a hug. “Did you just get back?”

“This morning,” Piper tells her. “We have a lot to catch up on.” She gives a meaningful look at Anya, who diverts her gaze by arranging my face painting supplies.

She’s started putting the brushes in order from thinnest to thickest. It’s a really sweet gesture. Something I’d planned to do myself but hadn’t gotten around to yet. It’s very cute.

She’s very cute.

My internal panic button goes off, repeating Oh my god with increased urgency.

Anya does have a brooding mysteriousness.

But there is also this thoughtfulness about her.

The measured actions, like arranging my brushes the way I would.

Her eyes have this half-open thing about them where she’s always looking a little skeptical or sleepy.

And she’s got a downturned mouth. I used to think it was because she was always a little sad.

But she’s not. She’s just selective with her trust. Her joy.

When something rare infects her with it, it’s like watching the string lights turn on for the first night of October, sparkling and wonderful.

The rest of Grace’s family arrives. Maddie sees Anya and gives her a big squeeze. Anya is bewildered at first, unprepared for the affection.

But then it happens. The string light effect. She glows from top to bottom, hugging Maddie back.

“Are you getting your face painted?” Anya asks.

“I don’t think so,” Maddie says.

“Yes, she is,” Mrs.Manalo interjects. She looks to Maddie. “That’s why we came over here.”

“But I don’t want to anymore,” Maddie protests, tears already welling.

“We can do whatever you want,” I say, squatting down so I can get on Maddie’s level. My parents have always encouraged me to do this with young kids. So they see me as an equal. “But it’s also okay if you don’t want to.”

Maddie shifts from foot to foot.

“She told me this morning she wanted to be a butterfly,” Mrs.Manalo offers up. She has a bag slung over her shoulder and a tired look on her face. “I don’t know what changed.”

“No, I didn’t!” Maddie protests. The tears start spilling over. “I don’t like butterflies.”

“I told you, you don’t have to like only scary things,” Grace says. “You can like butterflies too. Like me. I love reptiles and glitter. It’s a family tradition at this point. And Darcy’s really good at painting. She can make you into whatever kind of butterfly you want.”

She’s as good at convincing Maddie to do things as she is at convincing me. It must be her perfect big-sister voice—confident but also gentle. You trust what she’s saying, which makes you want to trust yourself.

“Even a scary one,” I add, even though I’m not sure what that would look like.

“I don’t like butterflies!” Maddie insists. With this doubling down, her face has gone from red to purple. The tears turn into choking sobs as she repeats her insistence that she never, not once, mentioned wanting to be a butterfly.

Kyle flees the scene, mumbling something about needing a turkey leg. Piper slinks off too, as is her way, never really holding to one person or place for very long.

“She definitely did,” Claire says. She always finds a way to escalate the trouble. “It’s fine if you changed your mind, but you for sure said it.”

“We can paint you into anything you want, Maddie,” I remind her.

This situation has certainly taken the attention away from Anya and me, but I’m not sure that it’s any less stressful.

“Sometimes I get embarrassed when I’m the only one doing something,” Anya says. Her voice is so quiet that it takes a second for all of us to realize she’s talking to the group. “But I’d feel a lot better about getting my face painted if you did it too.”

Maddie looks up from the ground. Her eyes, wrung red and watery, widen.

“I was thinking about being a butterfly too,” Anya continues.

“Do you think that’s a good idea? I’m not sure I can pull it off.

I only wear black. I’m kind of scared other people will think I look really silly with a butterfly on my face.

They probably think I should have spiders there.

Maybe we could be butterflies together? That would really help me. ”

Maddie doesn’t even hesitate when she says, “Okay.” Her tears stop completely, and she plops into the open chair, her tiny legs swinging as she waits for me to begin.

The rest of the Manalo family is stunned into silence.

“I’m great at butterflies,” I tell Maddie, dampening my pastel watercolors. “What color should we make yours?”

“Pink,” she says emphatically.

I turn to Anya and my breath hitches. Suddenly I can’t remember how to be calm around her. There’s this tingling, uncapturable feeling inside me. I’m a butterfly too.

“Do you want me to make yours dark?” I ask.

“No way,” she says, more to Maddie than to me. “I want pinktoo.”

“Two pink butterflies, coming right up,” I say.

I paint Maddie’s face first, doing light pink wings over her eyes and cheeks and a dark pink butterfly body up her nose, with dark pink accents all around.

She blows hot breath in my face, snot still crusted around the edge of her nose.

But she’s calm, her long lashes pressed into the tops of her cheeks because she’s keeping her eyes closed for the entire process.

When I’m done, I pull out the mirror from under my seat to show her, and she beams at herself in open adoration. “I’m a butterfly !” she says, delighted. She jumps out of the chair as quickly as she jumped in it. “Let’s go get our pumpkins!” she tells her mom and sisters.

“Don’t you want to see your friend’s face get painted?” Mrs. Manalo asks.

Maddie looks back at Anya. “You can show me when you’re done,” she says with finality, skipping off toward the pumpkin patch.

Mrs.Manalo tries to slip me a twenty, but I refuse. “I insist,” she says, a naked urgency in her eyes. “That was magic.”

“It was,” I say, looking again at Anya.

“Thanks for that,” Grace says once her mom and sisters are out of earshot.

“No problem,” Anya tells her.

“I’d stick around, but you’ve put my mom in a good mood, and I want to use that to my advantage by convincing her to buy me something fun.”

When Anya and I are alone, I plunge forward with my painting task with way too much aggression, nearly poking Anya’s eye out with hot pink paint.

“Sorry,” I say, my hands shaking.

“That was my bad,” she tells me. “I’ll do a better job of holding still.”

She leans forward. Having just spent twenty minutes with a four-year-old mouth breathing on me, it’s a much different experience with Anya’s face so close to mine.

I can see the flecks of rich honey in her brown eyes.

Her lips have vertical lines creasing in the middle that I have this overwhelming urge to paint.

Not with my face painting watercolors. Onto a canvas.

With oil, maybe. Such a difficult medium. So time-consuming. So complex.

My portraiture has never been very good, but these are lips I’d need to practice at anyway, getting the bow just right.

And those downturned ends. It would be hard not to make them look like a frown.

I’d need to find a way to communicate that her mind is moving faster than her mouth can, and she’s holding back a thousand interesting thoughts that I want to climb inside her head and learn.

I swipe dark pink down the bridge of her nose, memorizing the way the brush flicks along the curve.

“Thanks for painting my face,” she says.

“Your plan all along.”

“That’s why I joined the Fableview Fall Planning Committee. To be turned into a pink butterfly.”

“I knew it.”

“About earlier—” she says.

“Don’t worry about it,” I interrupt, swirling water through the lighter pink, then beginning the wings, drawing the rough outline across her right temple and down to her cheekbones. My heart races, galloping in circles like it’s caged, desperate to be set free. “I think you’re pretty too.”

There. I said it back.

It’s not a big deal.

Right?

Except now my hand has decided to shake even harder than before, and Anya’s portrait of stillness has cracked too. There’s a ghost of a smile on her face, twitching against my brush.

It’s very cute.

She’s very cute.

Whatever.

I’m a professional.