Page 35 of Everything She Does Is Magic

Yet here they are right now, with my mom pointing at them, practically beckoning them forward.

16

Anya

My mom and the Kellers have spotted each other, and I still don’t have a plan.

I need an escape, and fast.

Searching for an answer, my eyes land on Grace. She’s dressed as an alien, but that’s no longer an oddity. It’s weirder now when I see her in school. She looks incomplete without a fully committed costume.

“Hey!” I say, running over to join her before I can consider what it means. I need to buy at least three minutes away from my mom before I’m forced to admit that the whole thing about being friends with Darcy is a lie. Or before I admit something even worse, like my plan to leave the coven altogether.

Grace arches one eyebrow as she asks, “You want to bob for apples?”

“No,” I say, trying out a friendly laugh, attempting to encourage her penchant for long-winded speeches.

“Then why are you up here?”

My terror dawns fast and burns bright. In reaching Grace, I have walked myself right into the apple bobbing contest. There are three contestants standing farther down the stage. They each have a giant bucket of apple-filled water atop a long table in front of them. There is one more open bucket with no one waiting behind it.

“Actually”—my throat is so dry that I have to clear it two times before I can finish my sentence—“Idowant to bob for apples.”

“Really?” Grace doesn’t bother to hide her skepticism, which she has every right to have.

My head fights my attempt to nod.“Mm-hmm.”No part of me wants to bob for apples in front of Fableview locals and tourists alike, but what am I going to do, run back down the stairs? Rejoin my family in their quest to find Darcy? Admit everything in front of the entire town?

Grace leans toward my ear. “Darcy’s not here,” she whispers. “She didn’t want to help me with this for some reason.” She says it both sympathetically and accusatorily, like it might be a disappointment to me but is somehow also my fault. Either way, she thinks Darcy is the reason I’ve decided to apple bob in the first place.

She is, but not in the way Grace thinks. If this is a place where Darcy isn’t, then this is the exact place I want to be. And it’s where I want my family to be too.

“No worries,” I say. I chance a glance into the audience and see my parents and Cal have stopped to watch this, all three of them equally confused by my unexpected interest in apple bobbing.

So far, this is working out as well as it could have.

Grace hands me a pair of lime-green goggles, and it’s nolonger working out as great as possible, but it’s still better than the alternative. I swallow back my rising dread as I take the last spot in the lineup, next to who else but Kyle Holtzenberg. At least my participation now has some interest beyond avoiding my family’s search for Darcy Keller. I may not be good at many things, but I am good at beating other people when it counts. And I’d love to beat Kyle Holtzenberg at this.

“Youwoulddo this,” I say to him.

“What’s your deal?” Kyle asks. “You don’t speak a single word to anyone all year, and then suddenly you’re everywhere I am. Tell me honestly. Are you, like, in love with me?”

My face muscles almost twitch. The laugh is right there, desperate to escape, but I push it down. “Finally, you’ve noticed,” I deadpan. “It’s been impossible to keep it in. I came up here to spell out ‘I love you’ in apples, but this works too.”

Kyle looks to our other competitors for sympathy. I don’t recognize either of them. One of them is wearing a shirt from Witches of Fableview. A tourist, most likely.

“I really can’t tell if you’re joking.” There’s a plain urgency in his voice that makes me want to soften a bit. It’s not very fun to play these kinds of games when the other party doesn’t understand the rules.

“I’m not in love withyou,” I say, putting an unintended emphasis on the word “you.” It comes out sounding like I’m in love with someone else.

Kyle gives me a pesky scowl, like he knows exactly who it is. I scowl back. The both of us are ten seconds away from sticking our heads into buckets of apples and slobbering around until we can gather a bunch of them into other buckets. No one knows anything up here, about any of this.

“There will be one minute on the clock,” Grace announces. “The person to successfully drop the most apples from their bucket into the container at their feet is the winner.”

“What’s the prize?” I ask.

Kyle scoffs. “You don’t even know what you’re doing thisfor?”

“I’m doing this for you, baby.” Forget taking it easy on him. I need to take it harder. The competition has already begun.