Page 15 of Everything She Does Is Magic (Fableview #1)

“Would you mind giving me some space?” I ask. “I’m not…um…connected to my muse.”

Darcy searches my face for a clue that I’m kidding. The tension that coils around my throat doesn’t show in my expression. This is what sitting behind her in French has taught me to do.

“No problem. I’ll be up front if you need anything.

” She’s given me a seat behind the counter.

If she faces forward in her chair, I’ll be out of her eyeline.

But she doesn’t face forward. She looks back in near-constant intervals.

I start counting them out, and it averages every twenty-eight seconds.

It stretches to thirty-five.

Then to over a minute.

My ceramic cat has about three intentional strokes of black paint across its belly and seven random blotches of paint from me losing my focus. “You’re still distracting me,” I tell her.

“Sorry, sorry!” she says, throwing her hands up in playful surrender. “I would never want to interrupt your muse.”

“It’s fickle. Delicate.”

“Of course.” She makes a big show of getting out her phone, tilting her head down to start scrolling through it.

I wait a respectful minute, making sure she’s truly lost in the land of apps, before I stand up.

It’s risky with my back turned to her, but I commit to it, moving in my slow, silent way.

I’ve gotten very good at not pulling focus, slipping between the cracks of other people’s lives, like a blur only remembered if caught on the edge of a photo.

It’s easier than taking up their attention, because once I have it, all they ever seem to care about is what I can do with my powers.

Mere feet from achieving my goal, something stops me in my tracks.

It’s not a mirage or a figment of my nightmares.

It’s Julia , sitting in Pam’s Paints, painting purple stripes onto the socks of a witch figurine.

She hasn’t looked up from her work in progress, her curly red hair so large and full that it’s falling into her face.

I open and close the supply closet door, keeping the handle twisted until the door shuts silently behind me.

It’s a cramped space, filled to capacity with things.

Half-finished paintings resting against shelves of unpainted ceramics.

A long table pushed up against the side, covered in scrap materials. My heart is beating so hard it hurts.

Julia is here.

She’s become so significant in my memories that the reality of her is hard to process.

Even when I thought I saw her at the pumpkin patch, her presence felt more like a manifestation of my anxieties than an actual possibility.

I’ve spent years poring over all the things she said to me.

I haven’t spent any of our time apart considering what I’d say to her .

In the far corner of the supply closet, there is a wooden table covered in splatters of paint.

Atop it, all three of the ceramics that were broken last week lie in organized pieces with a bottle of super glue beside them. The gnome has been partially reassembled. He is fragmented and sad, missing half of his left eye, all of his nose, and a triangle of one cheek.

Seeing this, knowing what these little pieces mean to Darcy, helps me regain my focus. Julia might be inside Pam’s Paints, but she’s not in this closet. She can’t reach me here. Not yet.

Usually I need to think of something related to my task, like the colors of the paints used or the way the ceramics feel in my hand, glossy and smooth. For this, I find Darcy’s face is enough.

I inhale, focusing on the sweet flattery in her expression when we talked about this gnome the first night I came here, then exhale, keeping my hands cupped over the broken gnome.

The magic inside me builds, a pressure I can feel into the roof of my mouth, like a yawn I’ve swallowed. I imagine the gnome as he once was, picture each broken piece finding its match, and the tension inside my body begins to spill into my hands, reassembling the gnome.

There’s a sense of completion when I succeed. It’s the same satisfaction I get when I answer the last question on a test, and I know the work is done.

Opening my eyes, the little gnome greets me, looking the same as he did when we first met.

I scrape up the pieces of the broken mug next, making it into a pile.

It’s best to have my materials close together so the magic doesn’t have to stretch too far to find what I need.

I learned that the hard way while training with my cousin Graham.

We were working on the distance of my magic, exploring how far my mending could go to repair something.

We’d already figured out I could gather materials that weren’t in immediate view.

That day we wanted to see if I could repair things for which I had no supply, like patching a gap in his roof without having extra shingles.

Graham stood behind me as I squatted down, my hands atop the missing shingle. I focused my breathing. Imagined the ceiling below free of a drip. Envisioned the piece of roof folding over itself to be fixed.

Next thing I knew, Graham was doubled over. I’d conjured a shingle out of thin air, and it had hit him in the head on its way to me. He was inches from falling off the roof altogether.

“That was awesome ,” he’d said, blood trickling down his forehead. “Your power is amazing.”

This ceramic mug has most of its pieces, but some are so fine, they are nearly powder. I make the mountain of fragments as contained as possible, and my hand catches on a particularly sharp piece, slicing the skin between my thumb and forefinger.

“Shit,” I say, louder than I mean to, startling backward as I put the cut to my mouth to nurse it. There is a wall of ceramics behind me, waiting to be glazed. My abrupt movement makes them wobble in dramatic fashion—loud, sharp clanks that anyone in the shop can hear.

The door handle turns.