A plot twist The weirdo came back. He came back in January, and again in March, then again in June and July. The police had an APB out on him and a drawing of him had been on the news a couple times, asking people to call in if anyone had any information about the stalker. Zevalyn started taking self-defense classes. It was kind of scary, having a crazy guy stalking her.
He was spotted over a dozen times during August and she and her parents kept finding weird pamphlets for a 'magic school' on the porch. It was totally debunked on Snopes, though. The pamphets had been produced as some kind of promotional prank years ago for a hotel in Pheonix and they keep popping up and getting redistributed every year somehow. The Verbena Hotel denied being involved in any run except the first one.
Crazy dude was apparently mixed up in that somehow. Maybe he escaped a mental facility in Pheonix. That wasn't terribly far away from where Zevalyn and her parents lived. Mom and Dad both worked in the city there.
The appearances abruptly stopped after the school year started though, after ramping up in intensity all summer.
Other people had tried to talk to her and her parents about sending her to a private boarding school nearby and those calls stopped, too, just as suddenly, but that was probably just because they stopped accepting new students after the school year began.
Still, it was kind of weird. The day she turned twelve on September second, everything suddenly got calm. The doorbell stopped ringing. The phone stopped ringing. Random people she'd never seen before stopped randomly talking talking to her on the street or in town about weird things and showing off cute little magic tricks.
On September 3rd, new people moved into the house across the street from her, with a girl her own age who instantly hit it off with her.
And that was that. Zevalyn was a seventh grader at Bumstead Middle School with a new best friend. The weird dude disappeared like he had never existed and she got on with her life, putting that very strange and scary year behind her.