Page 17 of Everything She Does Is Magic (Fableview #1)

Anya

It’s bad when even the sad girl music doesn’t cut it for me.

Sometimes it’s too on the nose, and what I really need to listen to are the brightest, happiest songs I can find.

Not because I dislike this kind of music.

It’s that, when I’m really in my feelings, joy seems like the saddest emotion of all.

I have my headphones on, upbeat pop blaring loud enough to make me lose hearing as I do French extra credit to keep my mind occupied. A loud sound from outside cuts in just enough to make me pause.

It’s a car. Honking. Not once, not twice, but six times in urgent succession.

Aunt Cal’s sitting room has giant curtains that are always closed.

They’re made of a heavy red fabric that might be as old as the house itself.

I tug one back a fraction of an inch, holding my breath to avoid inhaling whatever volatile combination of dust and filth I’ve just kicked up.

There’s a black SUV parked in front of Cal’s house.

The driver honks again, and it’s a siren song to my nervous system.

All these years of hearing my family talk about threats to our magic—years of me tuning it out, thinking it’s some kind of vague thing they’ve made up to make us all feel self-important—now seems like the greatest oversight of my life.

Julia is here, and she has come to make a spectacle of the way I once failed her.

Or worse, she’s told Darcy everything, and Darcy herself is here to force answers out of me about why, when she moved so close to me, angling to have our lips meet, I invited her to a family dinner instead. The very dinner I’d already decided would never, under any circumstance, actually happen.

I’ll have to fight this attack with nothing but my French vocabulary and my heaviest glare. Lucky for me, the glare is surprisingly effective, according to multiple outside sources.

The honking continues—a long, persistent blare interrupted by occasional short beeps. I surrender to my fate, opening Cal’s front door a sliver.

Let me surrender in peace. No need to involve the entire street.

My head is no more than six inches out into the open when I hear “There she is!”

Pulling the door open all the way, I see…my mother?

Yes. My mother. Is here. Right now. Six days ahead of her already-early plan to show up.

“Goodness, you’ve gotten taller,” she says. “I hope Cal’s been measuring! It’s at least two inches!” She has her hand over her forehead to gaze up at me, standing beside the SUV—her SUV, I recognize now—as my dad ambles his way around to the trunk.

“Hello,” he says with a quick wave, greeting me more like a neighbor than a father.

I appreciate his subdued reaction, because my body refuses to move any farther even as my brain tells me to run into the woods and take refuge.

It’s one thing to lie to my parents over the phone.

Not easy, but manageable. In person, my mom’s brightness is so overwhelming that I can’t help but wither like the aster I burned on Fableview Boulevard.

I knew this moment would come, but I hoped I’d be more ready. I wanted to have a set plan for my nonwitch life.

“When we talked to you the other day and saw how beautiful the town looked, we just couldn’t help ourselves!

We went ahead and moved our flight up again,” Mom explains as Dad hauls two massive pink suitcases out of the trunk.

“One has clothes for me to wear. The other’s full of clothes I need you to fix! My little mender!”

My dad reaches into the trunk again, taking out what must be his bag—a small leather backpack that he slings across his right shoulder, likely holding the three repeats of the same dark brown sweater he has on now.

Feeling the tiniest bit of mercy for him, I walk down the stairs to help carry Mom’s giant bags inside.

He gives me a quick squeeze. “I wanted to tell you, but she insisted it be a surprise.”

“It’s definitely a surprise,” I reply.

Mom reaches for me from behind. I turn to meet her, and she holds me so tight to her chest that what remains of my breath gets lost in the fabric of her shirt—a loud, floral blouse with dangling flower earrings to match.

She starts kissing my head in comical fashion.

Aggressive smooches of joy that I find embarrassing even when our only audience is Dad, who is used to it by now.

Done with her squishing, Mom takes me by the shoulders and scans me. “I need to see you up close.”

When we look at each other eye to eye, I feel as though I can imagine all the different people we’ve been before.

One of the witches in our family has the gift of viewing past lives.

She’s told me more than once that my mother was once my child.

It’s strange to feel that now, to see in my mom’s eyes that she’s more innocent than I am.

She trusts the world in a way I do not, sees the beauty in making friends and having community.

Between us, she’s the one with hope for life. I’m the bitter cynic who knows better.

For an amazing moment, all my worries melt away, replaced by sentimental adoration.

My mom is here.

Then I remember that this is exactly what I will be giving up when I leave our coven.

My escape, my attempt at a normal life, will come at the cost of my family.

There will be no sentimental hugs after long periods of being apart.

No wet kisses on my forehead and overbearing questions about my inner life.

I will belong to no one.

Aunt Cal walks around from the back of her winding Victorian home wearing her patchwork jacket and a large straw sun hat. She’s carrying a basket of radishes she’s picked from the garden.

“Cal!” Mom yells. “You look radiant as ever!”

Aunt Cal makes no change to her expression. She puts down her basket of radishes and stands still, waiting for my mom to give her the inevitable smothering hug we all know is coming.

My mom meets the moment in the exact way we anticipated. “My baby sister,” she coos, clobbering Cal. “As beautiful as always.”

Cal finally gives in and hugs my mom back. It really is impossible to remain passive around a woman as vibrant as Mom. She’s so potent, and yet she’s surrounded by stoic types like Dad, Aunt Cal, and me. She’s the one who makes us all softer.

Cal goes stiff, and immediately my mom releases her, knowing what this means—Cal’s having a vision.

Her body stays rigid, and she gets a far-off look in her eyes, like she’s been transported to whatever it is she’s seeing.

It’s the kind of thing Darcy would never believe is real.

She’d say that Cal is just doing a bit of visual theater before suggesting things that are already likely to happen, and through that, it makes them come true.

But Cal has predicted things no one could ever know in advance.

She’s prevented car accidents that occurred with other drivers in the same intersection she named.

She’s seen pregnancies even the mothers didn’t yet know about.

Her powers may not be as tangible as mine, but they are definitelyreal.

This particular vision lasts about three seconds. Cal stands taut—eyes vacant, hands fixed into fists—as Mom, Dad, and I wait to hear what she’s seen. What a sight we must make to the neighbors. This is the kind of strange that only makes sense in a place like Fableview.

When it’s done, Cal relaxes back to her usual self.

“You aren’t being truthful,” she says, looking right at me. Her first words spoken in almost two months.

I fumble for a response. Defensive. Confused. Amused. None of it seems right.

I choose to say, “How so?” needing more than anything to know exactly what it is that she’s seen. I’m not being truthful about a lot of things. Which is the one she’s found worth mentioning? And what will happen because of it?

Does she know what my life will look like without our coven? Could she give me a hint?

With a glint in her eye, she says, “Not now,” and ushers my parents inside.

My mom and dad are unbothered by this foreboding message.

My mom has known Cal her whole life. And my dad makes it a point not to be bothered by much of anything.

Neither of them even casts a sideways glance my way.

They walk inside—Mom with an excited smile, Dad with his usual calm expression—both of them commenting on how nice the place looks since the last time they visited.

In reality, Cal’s house is a labyrinth of old books and half-melted candles piled indiscriminately in different corners, with those giant velvet curtains blocking out most of the sunlight.

It’s best in here on a rainy day, when the cloudless sky turns everything stark and Cal lights a fire for us to gather around.

Today, with the sun shining brightly through the autumn-turned leaves, my parents in town and Cal aware of my lies, the house feels suffocating.

Too full of a history I can’t live up to and a past that’s overdue to catch me.

This would be the time for me to come clean.

But I can’t do it. I’d rather suffer the consequences all at once than drag it out over the next two weeks.

Once my parents have brought their luggage to their guest room and caught up with Cal about various family topics, Mom claps her hands together and says, “So! When do we get to meet the famous Darcy?”

All day I have been working to avoid the thought of her. When Julia stopped me in Pam’s Paints, the first thing she had to say to me, after all these years, was “Of course you’d be here. Who are you going after this time?”

As if she weren’t the one who’d targeted me . Sought me out, knowing I came from a family of witches. She made me her friend. She used me.

It’s taken me years to accept that. I’ve been so caught up in the mean things she said to me, trying desperately to fix it, that I haven’t allowed myself to admit that I didn’t deserve any of it in the first place.

I made the right choice by not helping her with my powers.

But she’s here at the worst possible time.

A time when Darcy almost kissed me. It’s the kind of hopeless utopia that would swallow me whole, until one day I got regurgitated back into the real world—where Darcy Keller is a girl from Fableview who’s destined to go somewhere else, and I am a girl from somewhere else who’s destined to go nowhere.

“Darcy’s busy,” I tell my mom. Another truth. Darcy somehow teaches art classes, runs the art club, sings in the school choir, helps her parents organize the Halloween schedule, and attends every event. In a themed costume, no less. She is the definition of “busy.”

Cal, with a knowing smile, revealing more with her face than she has with her words, says, “We should go see her at the apple orchard.”

“Yes! I love the apple orchard,” my mom says.

It’s not fair. My mom loves most things.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “She has a lot on her plate. We should get food instead. I’m sure my parents are hungry.”

Maybe this is what Cal saw—me being dishonest with myself.

The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen was seconds away from kissing me, and I stopped her in the worst way possible, by inviting her to a dinner that was never supposed to happen.

A dinner that will now get moved up the moment Darcy sees my parents are here ahead of schedule.

“Embarrassing” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

“We should go to the apple orchard,” Cal repeats.

“I liked you better when you’d taken a vow of silence,” I say.