Page 24 of Everything She Does Is Magic

“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 seatto show her, and she beams at herself in open adoration. “I’m abutterfly!” 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. Withoil, 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’svery cute.