Page 28 of Everything She Does Is Magic

This gets a laugh out of her that she doesn’t explain, not even when I pry her with my most specific, unflinching, explain-yourself stare.

“Perfect,” she says, her sharp green eyes sparkling in delight. “Are cats your favorite?”

“I’m actually allergic. But they say you love what you can’t have.”

This is supposed to be my attempt at joking right back. The statement has a friction I don’t expect. After admitting that I think she’s pretty and her telling me the same thing back,electricity has begun humming in the gaps of every word we exchange.

Darcy handles it with her usual grace, waltzing over to a wall of animals and finding me a ceramic kitten. She gets me set up at my own station, explaining the process of getting the paints and all the layers that are required to make the ceramic look good after it’s put in the kiln.

“I’ll just be painting it black,” I say.

She plops down a whole bottle of black paint she’d already grabbed for me. “I figured. Just keep it at your table. It’s easier that way.”

Once I begin to work on my kitten, she mills around for longer than I anticipate. Hovering, really. Pam’s Paints isn’t wide, but it’s long. There are a lot of alcoves and clutter, as well as treasures available for purchase, including any number of Fableview-themed ornaments and magnets. Plenty of things for her to adjust. And other people to attend to. But she stays here with me.

In any other circumstance, I would want her around. Smelling her bodywash, coming up with any clever remark I could think of just to see that smile on her face, to know I’m the one who made her laugh.

Right now I need her far away.

“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’sgiven me a seat behind the counter. If she faces forward in her chair, I’ll be out of her eyeline. But shedoesn’tface 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’sJulia, 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 crampedspace, filled to capacity withthings.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 whatI’dsay toher.

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, andthe tension inside my body begins to spill into my hands, reassembling the gnome.