Page 22 of Everything She Does Is Magic (Fableview #1)

Darcy

When I lean in for a goodbye kiss, Anya puts up a hand.

“Hold on,” she says. “I need to tell you something about tomorrow’s dinner. I’ve been avoiding it all night, and I can’t let you show up without knowing. I already know you’ll say you don’t believe me, but I promise you, it’s true.”

“What is it? You’re not…” I try on a laugh that doesn’t fit, falling off me like oversized clothing, pooling at my feet, and leaving me exposed in my confusion. “You’re not a… witch .”

It comes out like a curse word. A sin. It’s not any of those things. Because it’s not real.

Except for the fact that she fixed Maddie’s wings.

And she fixed my gnome.

And she dresses like…

Well, she dresses like a witch.

Sitting in her aunt’s car in the dim of the alley, just a singlestreetlamp illuminating us both, Anya searches my face for areaction.

“You’re an actual witch?” This time it’s a question. My last chance at understanding the world as it’s been.

Anya reaches up to grab one of the dried flowers her aunt keeps inside her car. She picks a rose that’s dark red and so dehydrated that it looks ready to crumble to pieces at her touch. The gesture seems out of place. Is she about to hand it to me as some sort of strange joke?

Instead she does something even stranger. She releases the stem of the flower and holds just the petals. When she closes her eyes, she really closes them, like she’s gone into a deep sleep.

Her breaths get so drawn out that I start to count them—six seconds in and six seconds out. I’m so transfixed by her face, calm and serene, that I almost miss what’s happening in her hands.

The rose has begun to bloom again. What was once dull and crinkled is now teeming with life as something like dust whirls around the air. Anya remains still, like she’s cast in amber.

My brain struggles to make sense of it all, thinking of the parlor tricks I’ve learned through my years at Pam’s Paints.

Perhaps in the time I was looking at her face, she was able to swap out the flower?

Maybe the rose is made that way, and there’s a button she’s pressed where she’s transformed it?

Or…

Maybe, just maybe…

“You’re an actual witch,” I say.

This time I believe myself.

This time it’s real.

Anya opens her eyes. She moves her hands down to hold the stem again, displaying the rose. It looks new as ever—a rich, deep red that I can tell even from here would feel like velvet on my skin.

Anya tucks it back into its place along the seam of the sunroof.

“This is from my parents’ wedding. Aunt Cal thinks it’s good luck to have it, because my mom grew it.

Mom has a gift for gardening, so it’s way more resilient than your usual rose.

I have a bouquet of them in my room too.

They’ve always been my practice flower. They’ve died and been revived more times than I can count.

Because I’m a mender. I can bring things back to life. ”

“Your mom is a witch too?” I ask.

Anya looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to keep unraveling this.

“Aunt Cal,” I whisper. Of course Aunt Cal is also a witch. There’s never been a woman more like a witch in all of Fableview. But up until now I didn’t believe that witches had actual, tangible powers.

“Everyone on my maternal side has the gift,” Anya tells me. “I don’t have my dad’s last name. My dad doesn’t even have my dad’s last name anymore, actually. I was born to be a member of the Doyle coven. I’m sorry I lied the last time you asked me.”

“To be fair, you told me the truth a few times before that,” I say. “Would be kind of hard for me to be upset about it. I just…I can’t believe it’s real.”

The joy that’s started to flood my system reminds me of what I used to feel late at night on Christmas Eve, looking out my bedroom window, trying to catch Santa on my balcony.

Fableview’s magic is real.

I can’t help the tear that falls down my cheek.

“Oh no. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Anya says.

“You haven’t,” I tell her, smiling through my crying. “I promise. I just have seventeen years’ worth of Fableview stories to work through now.”

Anya kisses my cheek. “Take your time with it. If we have to cancel the dinner, I understand.”

“We’re definitely not canceling,” I say. “I’m not passing up my chance to eat with a family of witches.”

Witches .

Real, actual witches.

By the time I make it back to my room, I still have that same warm sensation. I used to get it on Halloween too, I realize. Before it became too much of my responsibility. This pure contentment and wonder has finally come home to me.

Grace picks up on the second ring. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I tell her, hearing the smile in my voice.

“ Stop ,” she whispers. She knows, because of course she knows. We could have this entire conversation without me even telling her what happened. And as much as I love that about us, I have so much I want to say. Explain. Understand. And Grace is the only one in the world I trust with it.

“So…yeah. Anya and me,” I start as confirmation.

“I’m dying ,” Grace replies.

It’s been so long since we’ve called each other with the kind of news we need to whisper about.

It makes me nostalgic for our middle school days, when we’d gossip about who looked at us a certain way, obsessing over a lingering stare, a brush of a hand.

So much of the last year has been about my future.

Part of me has liked that change in status.

It’s all been so adult, so focused on who I will become, that it hasn’t given me much room to just be .

For this I’m right here—just a seventeen-year-old girl on the phone with her best friend, half tucked under her covers after having snuck out of the house to meet her crush.

“I could tell something happened after she won her semifinal,” Grace says. “She was so determined for the finals. Like she’d been reborn.”

“We kissed,” I confirm.

“ I knew it ,” she says, full of satisfaction. “Oh, this is so good.”

“It isn’t…random of me? Or unexpected?”

Grace quiets, all her frenetic enthusiasm distilled into one slow breath. “Why would I ever care?” she asks, genuinely. “You already know that I’ll date anyone. I would never think it’s weird that you’re with a girl.”

I do know this. It’s never been an actual worry of mine. But we’ve never discussed it before either. There’s something comforting about getting her confirmation anyway. What I really needed to know is that some changes don’t require any pushback. Some growth is good exactly as it is.

“I sort of didn’t, like, fully realize before her,” I say. “That I could like girls. I’ve always thought they were cute. But I’ve never had any girl who actually lived in Fableview who I wanted to do anything with.”

“Of course not,” Grace replies with her pitch-perfect understanding. “We’ve been stuck with the same dating pool our entire lives. No one’s gotten surprisingly hot around here since Parker Holt.”

Everything always comes back to Parker Holt for Grace.

It’s kind of beautiful, the way she can always find a way to connect anything in her life to them.

It’s something I haven’t fully understood before now.

Because I’ve never seen a reason to connect things to Kyle Holtzenberg, other than my wish to leave this town altogether.

Now I get it. I understand how Grace can filter everyone else’s experiences through her connection to Parker. Even here on the phone, I keep running my hand over my leg, remembering the stars Anya traced there. I feel so full of all this newness, desperate to dissect it.

Grace lets me. With excitement I replay everything for her, all the way back to that first exchange outside the art shop when Anya crashed our paint night.

We pick apart these memories, climb inside them like they’re cocoons, living in the past until it butterflies us to the present, to the bright and vivid now of an hour ago, me and Anya atop her aunt’s Volkswagen.

“Do you think you’ll go to the Fall Ball together?” Grace asks.

It’s the first real question about the future instead of the past, and it startles me. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

“Please,” Grace says in a get-real way.

“Okay, obviously I’ve thought about the Fall Ball, but I haven’t thought about going with Anya,” I say. “That would be…”

I imagine it, the same way I once saw my future with Kyle Holtzenberg when he lifted me up last year.

I try to see Anya and me together under the purple lights.

Would she want to dance with me? Would she like it?

The fact that I can’t quite picture it is exciting.

It’s a future I don’t know, another unknown I might want to chase.

“Maybe I’ll ask her,” I say, feeling the fizzy thrill of possibility take root. “I’m going to a dinner with her family tomorrow.”

“Good. You can find out if they’re actually witches,” Grace says. “It would explain Maddie’s wings. And the ceramics.”

In all my shock at Anya’s reveal, I forgot to ask if I could tell Grace the truth too. Until then, I’ll play my usual part.

“I’ll definitely find out if they’re witches for you,” I say. “Once we finish dessert, I’ll grab a broomstick and ask if they have any interest in joining me on the roof.”

“Perfect,” Grace says. “Then you guys can fly to the Trinity knot in the woods and sprinkle another year of good fortune over Fableview a little earlier than usual. We’re close enough to Halloween that I’m sure it’ll still be effective.”

“Won’t we need our basset hound to guide us to the correct spot?” I ask.

“The basset hound will be there spiritually,” Grace says. “Because the basset hound may or may not be going on a date with Parker Holt tomorrow…”

We’re off to the races again, Grace explaining to me how Parker apologized to her at the apple orchard. How they’re really different this time. She’s giddy, excited.

For the first time, I don’t feel like talking Grace out of it, warning her of the future hurts. The inevitable pain. It’s nice to live in the right now.

We talk until our voices are hoarse. And then we keep talking, long pauses for each of us when we accidentally fall asleep. Finally, at some ungodly hour, Grace is openly snoring, and I end the call.

I look at the picture of Anya and me atop her aunt’s Volkswagen. Who can we become to each other? I wonder, zooming in on different parts of the image as if it might have the answer. But it doesn’t. It just is, perfect and fleeting and totally foreign.

Finally , I think with a little smile. I can paint her. My witch.