Page 27 of Everything She Does Is Magic (Fableview #1)

Anya

Right as my mind is about to drift off, finally surrendering me to the sweet mercy of sleep after the previous night’s terrible, restless thrashing—me unable to stop replaying the horrible conversation with Darcy—there are two loud thuds and one distinct cry of frustration.

“Shit!”

I startle out of bed. There’s an intruder in my room. I need to learn martial arts or something. Glares won’t cut it in hand-to-hand combat.

But a fight won’t be necessary. At least I hope not.

Grace Manalo is currently splayed across my floor. She’s wearing all black, down to two smudges underneath each eye, with a bandana tied around her forehead, holding back her braids.

“Did you just break in through my window?” I ask her.

She blows an exasperated puff of air toward her face, moving a stray wisp of hair out of her eyes. “I don’t know your number, and you have your DMs turned off on everything. How else do you expect people to get in contact with you?”

“Knocking on the front door would’ve done it.”

“I tried that. Your aunt told me you were in mourning and not to disturb you. Which I would’ve taken as a no, except I met your mom, who told me you’d actually love some company. Neither of them could decide who was more right, so I was stuck there for a while.”

“But you’re dressed like a burglar. Or a linebacker.”

“Haven’t you learned the value of a costume in this town?” she asks. “I’m cultivating a sense of intentional whimsy, Doyle. Life’s a performance. It’s time you start tap-dancing on the stage a little bit.”

“Is breaking into my house a performance or an actual crime?”

“I’m not loving your tone,” Grace warns.

“Besides, your mom gave me a ladder. She told me you always leave this window open and that it’s just big enough for me to fit through.

Which reminds me!” Grace walks back to the window, sticking her head out.

“Thanks, Rhonda! I got in just as easily as you said I would! Appreciate you!” She blows my mom a kiss.

This whole thing is absurd. But it’s also oddly moving. “No one has ever climbed a ladder to reach me,” I say.

“Yeah, well, I’m an exceptional person,” Grace responds. “It’s not really news if you’ve been paying attention.”

And she’s right. It isn’t news. I can imagine a hundred scenarios where Grace would climb a ladder for Darcy, or probably even for the famous Parker Holt. I just never would have imagined a scenario where she’d do it for me.

“Enough about my fantastic qualities,” Grace says. “We need to talk about how you’re a witch.”

She gives me that same look I’ve seen so many times before, like she’s always known this.

And it seems as though she has. Like how Cal isn’t hiding whenever she tries to be silent and removed.

But all these years of trying to hide has made me rusty at accepting this truth as something capable of being shared.

Grace runs her finger across my clothes rack. “The all-black thing is kind of obvious, isn’t it? I guess I can appreciate commitment to a theme, though.”

“Maybe I’m cultivating a sense of intentional whimsy,” I say.

She moves to my dresser, smirking as she examines my crystals and knickknacks, tokens I’ve collected from my years spread out across different towns and different members of my family.

“I’ve known all along,” she says.

Those words thrust me back through time, an echo of my past that I’ve never been able to escape. At once, I’m not seventeen. I’m twelve, living with my Uncle Edward and Aunt Paula. Grace isn’t Grace. She’s Julia Daniels. The girl I thought would be my protector.

“I know you’re a witch,” Julia had told me. “I’ve known all along.”

The memory has real determination. In all my years of attempting to dismiss it, it’s only ever gotten stronger.

And now here is Grace, echoing Julia’s words, and I have to fight the urge to plug my ears and curl up into a ball, knowing Julia herself is poking around somewhere, still believing her own version of events.

“You can save my grandpa,” Julia had said. Her eyes went hard as she clenched her jaw, folding her arms across her chest.

“I really don’t know how,” I said. I was desperate for her to believe me. To make her understand. And even if I did, all I’d ever heard from my mentors was that Doyle witches don’t mess with the natural order of human life.

“Of course you do,” she pressed. “You’re a mender . I already know. I heard you talking about it. So do something.”

She said “mender” like an insult. Like a curse.

“I can close a paper cut sometimes, but I’m not even very good at it. I can’t cure your grandpa’s cancer,” I told her.

“You really are a witch,” she said then, her angry determination softening for a single moment.

She’d told me she already knew. She’d lied, and I’d walked into her trap of confirmation by accident.

“You’re not even gonna do the right thing?

You’re not gonna help the one person who’s bothered to put up with you here? ”

“I’m really sorry,” I said, tears brimming against my will. “I wish I could. But I don’t even think it’s allowed. No. I’m sure it isn’t. My mom already told me that. I can’t mess with fate likethat.”

“Whatever.” Julia stomped across the room to pick up her coat. “If you can’t do that for me, I don’t even know why we’re friends.”

Her grandpa died a few weeks later. I tried to be the bigger person and express my condolences.

And she blamed me. Told me that if I’d just been a good person, I could have helped her.

But I was selfish. I didn’t think about other people at all.

Only about myself. I lied about my powers. About what I could do. I used her.

Those were the last words she’d willingly said to my face.

The rest of my time there was filled with insults muttered under her breath as I walked past her and judgmental laughs from everyone in my grade whenever the teachers made me speak in public.

Until I couldn’t take it anymore and called my mom, begging her to let me leave.

“Darcy already knows,” I say now to Grace, squeezing my eyes shut to stop myself from having to see this again. To live this kind of moment twice. “But I messed everything up anyway. So don’t worry, you don’t have to embarrass me any more than I already have been.”

My own breathing, rapid and tight, is the only audible thing in the room. Grace is waiting, forcing me to open my eyes, to look at her and take this on the chin.

When I do, she flops onto the edge of my bed. “I really had you wrong. Like, I already knew that, but now I get it. You’re not brooding in a boring, obvious way. You’re, like, really wounded.”

I shrug.

“I relate,” she continues. “People don’t see me as wounded either. But I’m actually really sensitive. I’m just good at doing it with a smile, you know?”

It’s not unusual to find myself wordless. It’s most of my life. What’s stranger is my need to say something. To want to talk to Grace.

“You’ve never struck me as someone who doesn’t have feelings,” I tell her.

“Of course not. Everyone just sees me as dramatic, though. Like my emotions are oversized for the sake of spectacle. My soul is actually a lot more like your gothic, cobwebbed aesthetic than anyone would ever expect.”

I bet another person would laugh at this.

Grace’s delivery is so big, so dramatic , as she would say, that it’s easy to see her as unserious.

But her whole life is an exercise in taking things more seriously than anyone else ever has.

She’s shown up to my house dressed as a burglar without a hint of irony.

And her thing with reptiles. She regularly wears clothing covered in images of snakes or lizards or crocodiles.

“Even though my own heart has been unjustly stomped on more than once, I’m a romantic,” she tells me. “Which is why, when they gave me one good apology speech, I took them back.”

“Parker Holt,” I say, the only thing I know for sure in this whole mess.

“The one and only. Anyway, Parker and me is not what matters right now. Although it is very interesting. It’s for another time. I know about what happened with you and Darcy, obviously.”

It is obvious, I guess, that Darcy would tell her best friend. If I had a friend to tell, I’d have done the same thing. And honestly, I can’t imagine a better audience than Grace.

“Normally I’d just coach her through the breakup, because it does build character,” Grace continues. “Even her little stint with Kyle Holtzenberg gave her some necessary shading. But I want to help you.”

“You’re here to help… me ?”

She makes a waving gesture. “Have I not made that clear? I misjudged you, and I’m owning that. You’re a good person, and you’re good for Darcy. So I want to help you win her back.”

I want to argue that I haven’t lost Darcy. But I know I have. I’ve blown up her life like a dynamite stick, and she hasn’t texted me back since the dinner. She didn’t look at me today in school either, and not in our usual we don’t know really each other way.

She avoided me.

“She’s pretty mad at you,” Grace goes on, confirming what I’ve already felt. “You really should’ve told her about the whole protector thing.”

“I wanted to. It just took so long to get her to believe I am an actual witch that I forgot all about the protector thing.”

“I know. I tried to tell her you were a witch too,” she says.

“Before you came along, she never really embraced magic as reality. That’s something you can’t exactly convince someone of unless you can do it yourself, and unfortunately, I don’t have powers like you do.

But things just go over Darcy’s head sometimes anyway.

She didn’t realize how long she’d liked you either. ”

My cheeks burn. This is precious information, rarefied intel, and I know it. I feel like I’m not supposed to want to hear more, but I can’t help myself. “How long has she liked me, exactly?”

“You made a wrong move,” Grace says, ever the diplomatic best friend. “But we can definitely fix it.”

“How?”

“The haunted carnival.” She plucks the schedule from my mirror, inspecting it. “I see here you already know about it. I’d tell you it’s a big deal, but everything is a big deal this month. So it’s just another big deal.”

“I’m beginning to learn that,” I tell her.

“I’ve been opposed to this whole change-the-town campaign.

Recent circumstances have swayed me.” She plops down on my bed again.

“Darcy’s always wanted to make the carnival spookier.

Everything we do in Fableview is so tame, and every time we go to the carnival, she says there should be at least one place where it gets scary.

I know my little sister Maddie would love that too.

She’s desperate for some real horror in this town.

Who better to create some scares than a real-life witch, right?

And if that makes a certain reformed skeptic swoon, well…

isn’t that what us hard-hearted romantics do? ”

“I mostly, um…fix broken things,” I tell her, feeling unworthy of this speech, and this situation, and even the title of a romantic.

“Then let’s fix your broken heart, girl. C’mon. You can’t wallow any more than you already have. Please. It’s not a good look.” She makes her way to the window again. “Are you in ornot?”

“You haven’t said what we’re going to do.”

She smiles. Sly. Knowing. “Don’t worry about that part. I’ve already got our costumes picked out. All I need is confirmation that you’ll participate.”

“I’m in,” I say with a shaky breath.

“Right answer.”

She leaves my room the same way she came in, through the ladder at my window, with my mom holding it steady for her so she can get safely to the ground.