Snow White Learns Witchcraft

by Theodora Goss

  And then her text in response: Arriving Thursday 2 p.m. I’ll walk from the station.

  Miss Gray’s response was another black cat emoji. It winked at her.

  “Next stop, Miss,” said the conductor. She looked up, startled. “Aren’t you one of Miss Lavender’s girls?”

  “I was,” said Thea. “I graduated last year.”

  He nodded. “Thought I remembered you, with that ginger hair.” He pronounced it jin-juh. “If you need help with anything, let me know.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and smiled. It was a weak smile, she knew that. She hadn’t been very good at smiling lately.

  “Hartfield, Massachusetts!” he called down the train corridor. “Next stop Hartfield!”

  Thea put her phone back in her backpack and zipped up her jacket. She made her way to the end of the compartment.

  Forest, more forest. And then the first houses of Hartfield, with weatherbeaten wooden siding. Suddenly they were in the town center, with its brick dental offices, boutiques, and coffee shops. The train slowed, then pulled into the station. The conductor put a metal bridge over the gap, and Thea walked across it. Here she was again, not for some sort of alumnae event, but because she didn’t know where else to go.

  From the station, she walked up Main Street, passing several antiques stores, the food co-op, and Booktopia, where students from Miss Lavender’s always congregated on Saturdays, ordering cappuccinos and egg or chicken salad sandwiches, reading Sylvia Plath or Margaret Atwood or the latest Kelly Link. Should she stop in for a moment? Maybe…

  Before she could reconsider, she had stepped inside, and there was Sam at the counter. She had not expected him to be, well, right there.

  “Thea,” he said, a wide smile spreading over his face. It was accepted wisdom at Miss Lavender’s that Sam looked like a frog. Nevertheless, a respectable percentage of the students admitted to having crushes on him, despite or because of his rumpled hair, flannel shirts, and encyclopedic knowledge of literature. He had been a clerk at the bookstore through high school. During Thea’s sophomore year he had left for college, but his mother had been diagnosed with cancer, and since his parents were divorced, he had returned to Hartfield to care for her. After her death, he had bought Booktopia with the insurance. As he reminded the town council on a regular basis, every town needed an independent bookstore. Now he was finishing his degree by taking night classes at UMass Amherst. At least that’s what it had said on the Booktopia blog, the last time Thea had checked.

  “What are you doing back here? Don’t you live in Boston now? Wait, I’ll make you a cappuccino.”

  “No, that’s OK, they’re expecting me. But thanks. Yeah, Boston. I’m starting college next fall. I think. I mean, I am. I just took a gap year, that’s all. I figured I’d stop in here for a minute, you know, to check out the writing books.” There was a special section right up front, left over from National Novel Writing Month, with everything from The Elements of Style to Anne Lamott. “And to see where we used to hang out.”

  His eyes crinkled up at the corners. “Aren’t you a little young to be getting nostalgic? You only graduated six months ago.”

  “Yeah.” Thea laughed uncomfortably. “Way too young. Well, I’d better be going. They’re expecting me. Maybe I’ll come back…for one of those books. I always meant to read John Gardner.”

  “If you have time, come back and tell me about your life in the big city. I’ll give you a sandwich on the house. Or, to be more accurate, on the store.”

  “Yeah, all right, thanks.” She turned, then pushed the door open again. Standing outside in the cold air, she thought, God, I am such a dork.

  He hadn’t changed at all. Of course, people didn’t change that much in six months. Except her. She had changed, in ways she didn’t understand. That was why she had come back here. She continued up Main Street, then turned down Oak and Maple (seriously, how unimaginative were the people who named streets in small New England towns?). And there, at the edge of town, were the brick main house and buildings of Miss Lavender’s. And the familiar sign:

  Miss Lavender’s School of Witchcraft

  Founded 1812

  Thea had never seen the grounds looking so deserted. The last time she had been here, she had been graduating, and the town had been filled with students and their parents.

  Not hers, of course. Her parents had died when she was a child, and her grandmother had been sick for many years—far too sick to travel, for parents’ weekends or even graduation. At those sorts of events, one or another friend’s parents had always temporarily adopted her, and she had felt what it would be like to have a family, for a little while.

  She walked up to the main house, which held the headmistress’s office. She rang the bell and heard it echoing through the building.

  “So you’re back.” She looked around, but saw no one. “Down here, idiot.”

  She looked down. “Oh, it’s you, Cordelia. Hello.” The tortoiseshell tabby stared up at her with yellow eyes.

  “Hello yourself. I’m not at all surprised to see you again.”

  Before Thea could ask why, the door opened and there was Mrs. Moth, looking just as she always did, in a respectable wool skirt and cardigan, gray hair a little messy as though she had been running her fingers through it. The image of a headmistress.

  “Thea, it’s so good to see you,” she said. “Do come in. I’ve just made tea. And you,” she said, looking down at the cat. “You could have told us you would be out all night. You know how Lavinia worries.”

  “I was out on cat business, which is none of your business,” said Cordelia. She slipped around Mrs. Moth’s ankles and disappeared down the hallway.

  “Cats!” said Mrs. Moth, shaking her head. “Come in, my dear. Let’s go into the parlor. I’ve prepared one of the guest rooms for you. I’m afraid everyone’s gone for the break—it’s just me, Lavinia, and Emily right now. We always give teachers and staff two weeks for the holidays.”

  Sure enough, when Thea went into the parlor, where Mrs. Moth usually met with prospective students and their parents, there was Miss Lavender sitting on the sofa. Whereas Mrs. Moth was comfortably plump, Lavinia Lavender was thin and angular. She was wearing a soft gray dress, and the white hair escaping from her bun formed a halo around her face. It would have been intimidating, having tea with the founder of the school, but Miss Lavender looked so perfectly harmless. She was so forgetful that she sometimes accidentally walked through walls. It was a good thing that Mrs. Moth had taken over as headmistress, long before any of the alumnae could remember. But older students who had taken her seminar on Philosophy of Magic warned younger ones not to underestimate Miss Lavender. How could you be expected to remember the locations of walls when you were contemplating the fundamental structure of reality?

  And standing beside the fireplace was Miss Emily Gray. Thea was almost shocked to see that she was wearing leggings and a loose sweater, as though she had just finished doing yoga or something. Her brown hair hung in a neat braid over one shoulder. It made Miss Gray seem almost human, although as soon as she said “Hello, Thea. It’s so nice to see you again,” Thea mentally panicked at the thought that she might have forgotten to do her homework. Did she look a mess? She was sure that she looked a mess. She took a deep breath.

  “Cookies on the table, and I’ll bring the tea,” said Mrs. Moth, then disappeared down the hall toward the kitchen.

  Thea quailed at the thought of having to make small talk with Miss Lavender and Miss Gray, but she should have known better. Witches don’t make small talk.

  “So what’s the matter?” asked Miss Gray, sitting down on the sofa beside Miss Lavender. “You wouldn’t have called if there was nothing wrong.”

  Thea put her backpack down and sat in one of the comfortable armchairs. While she was gathering her thoughts, trying to figure out what to say, Mrs. Moth came in with the tea things.

  “Orange Pekoe for Lavinia,” she said. “Oolong for Emily, and Earl G
ray for me. Thea, I’m guessing you want a chai latte. You’ll have to add milk.” There was nothing in the cups when she poured out, but out of the teapot came four distinctly different smells and colors of tea. Thea added milk and sugar to her cup, then stirred.

  “The thing is, I’m not sure,” she said. “You know my grandmother died last summer, just after graduation. Thanks for the wreath, by the way. She would have really liked getting a wreath from the school. That was tough, but at first I was all right. I mean, we were never close or anything. I had to meet with her lawyer, then catalog all her furniture for the auction. I sold almost everything, except Mom’s stuff. And then I had to sell the house. After that…I was supposed to be at Harvard this fall. But I just couldn’t—I don’t know, I was so tired. So I deferred for a year, and I rented an apartment in Boston. I figured I’d write…you know, start becoming a great writer.” She smiled self-deprecatingly, in case they thought she was being too grandiose, although all through school that had been her talent: senior year, to her surprise, she had been chosen editor-in-chief of The Broomstick. “But I couldn’t do that either. So I’ve been living in the apartment, doing—nothing, really. Some days I just wander around the city. Some days I don’t even get out of my pajamas.” Thea put her head down in her hands. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Miss Gray took a sip of her tea. “When you went through your grandmother’s house, did you find your shadow?”

  It was the question she’d been dreading. When she’d first arrived at school, Mrs. Moth had sent a letter to her grandmother:

  Dear Mrs. Tillinghast,

  Thea seems to have forgotten her shadow. Since she will need it to participate fully in school activities, could you please send it as soon as possible?

  With best regards,

  Wilhelmina Moth, Headmistress

  A week later, she had received a reply:

  Dear Mrs. Moth,

  As Thea may have told you, several years ago Mrs. Tillinghast suffered a stroke. Although she has recovered a great deal, she lost some of her long-term memory and fine motor coordination, which is why I am writing this letter for her. She says she remembers putting Thea’s shadow in a box, but doesn’t remember where she put the box. She says it was a very troublesome shadow, and Thea is better off without it. I’m sorry not to be more helpful, and please give my love to Thea.

  Respectfully yours,

  Anne Featherstone, Mrs. Tillinghast’s secretary

  It had happened when she was six. After both of her parents died when their small plane went down, Thea had been sent to live with her grandmother. She had hated the gloomy old house, and the gloomy old woman who told her that her mother should never have married that spendthrift, good-for-nothing Michael Graves. If she hadn’t, she would not be dead now.

  One day, after her grandmother had forbidden her from going out into the garden, she had shouted, “I hate you! You’re not my mother. I’m going to run away and you’ll never see me again, you old bitch!” Her grandmother had ordered the butler to hold her, and with a pair of gardening shears she had cut off Thea’s shadow, snip snip. And that was the last Thea had seen of it. By the time her grandmother sent her to Miss Lavender’s, the third generation to attend, she had almost forgotten it wasn’t there.

  “Most people don’t even notice,” she had said to Mrs. Moth when first asked about it. She had just arrived at Miss Lavender’s, and was trying to figure out where her room was, what classes she would be taking, whether she would fit in or have friends. It was so different from her middle school in Virginia.

  “Most people aren’t witches,” Mrs. Moth had replied. “While you’re here, we’ll work around it, but there will be certain kinds of magic you can’t do. And you’ll need it eventually.”

  Sometimes new students had said, “What’s wrong with Thea? Why doesn’t she have a shadow?” But at Miss Lavender’s one quickly learned that if one’s roommate turned into a wolf at certain times of the month, or was faintly, almost imperceptibly green, or was missing a shadow, it was considered impolite to remark on it as anything extraordinary.

  Before she had left for her grandmother’s funeral, Miss Gray had said to her, “Find your shadow, Thea. It’s time.” Well, she had tried.

  “No,” she said now, in response to Miss Gray’s question. “I looked everywhere,” from the attic to the cellar, with Anne and the butler and cook until they were all covered with dust, “but I couldn’t find it. I have no idea what happened to it. Do you think that’s what’s wrong with me?”

  “Of course, my dear,” said Miss Lavender, speaking for the first time. “You could do without it as a child, but now that you’re a grown woman—well, a grown woman needs her shadow. Without it, you’re fading.”

  Fading? She was fading?

  “It’s part of growing up,” said Mrs. Moth. “Children don’t need their shadows, strictly speaking—remember Peter Pan. But adults are a different matter. Lavinia’s right, without it you’ll fade away. It will take some time, but I’m afraid the process has already begun. Eventually even ordinary people—well, not ordinary of course, but not witches—will start to notice. Let’s just see if we can find it, shall we? This didn’t work the last time we tried—I suspect the box was shielded with a spell of some sort. But since your grandmother’s passed away and the box has been lost…perhaps, just perhaps, it will work now.”

  How could she be fading? But Miss Lavender, more than anyone, could see things other people couldn’t. In school, it was rumored that she could even see the futures—the multiple possibilities created by each moment.

  Mrs. Moth leaned down and blew on Thea’s tea. In the teacup, on the milky brown liquid, she saw an image form, in sepia like an old photograph. A castle with strange, twisting spires, and mountains in the distance.

  “I’ve seen that before,” she said.

  “Of course you have,” said Miss Gray. “We went there on an eleventh-grade field trip.”

  Then it must be…“Mother Night’s castle. Is that where my shadow went?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Moth. “And I’m afraid you’ll need to go find it. You can’t do without it much longer. When Lavinia says fading, she doesn’t just mean visually. Without it, you’ll keep getting more tired. You’ll start feeling despondent, as though you’ll never accomplish anything. Eventually, it will seem too difficult even to try. One day you might not get up at all.”

  “But how can I find it?” asked Thea. “Mother Night’s castle is in the Other Country. When we went, Miss Gray took us. Can you take me there again?” She looked at Miss Gray.

  The teacher shook her head so that her brown braid swung around.

  “Thea, my dear,” said Mrs. Moth, “you are a graduate of this school. Like any witch, you should be able to find your way to the Other Country. By yourself.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Thea woke to Cordelia patting her nose.

  “Stop that,” she said, and rolled over. That’s right, she was at Miss Lavender’s, in a guest bedroom on the second floor of the headmistress’s house. Through the window, she could see the dormitory where she had spent six years of her life. It reminded her that Shoshana had sent her a Facebook message a couple of days ago, asking if Thea was all right and complaining about Chem 101. Of her two senior-year suitemates, Shoshana Washington was pre-med at Brown, and Lily Yu was in China working for a human rights organization. She would start an Asian Literature and Culture major at Stanford in the fall. She kept posting pictures of dumplings and rainy green hills on Instagram. Thea really should keep up with them, but it was hard when she was the only one who had nothing to say. Binge-watched Netflix and ate ice cream for dinner didn’t make for a very inspiring Facebook post.

  “Are you getting up, or do I have to sit on your face?”

  She turned back over. “Cordy, how do you get to the Other Country?”

  “How do I get there? I’m a cat—I just go. The question is, how do you get there?” All c
ats knew the way to the Other Country. That was one of the first lessons in Care and Feeding of a Familiar. If you couldn’t find your cat, it was probably in the Other Country.

  Thea scratched the cat behind her ears. “Can’t you just take me there?”

  “No, I can’t take you. A little lower down…there. Now under the chin.” For a moment, Cordelia actually purred. Then she continued, “You’re a thick, clumsy human. You can’t go the way cats go. We just slip between things. You need to go through a door.”

  “I remember!” said Thea. “When we went in eleventh grade, it was through a door. And the door was in this house…But I don’t remember which one it was. Cordy, can you show me which door goes to the Other Country?”

  Cordelia swatted her hand away and looked at her with contempt. “Now you really are being an idiot. After six years in this place, you should at least know how to think like a witch.”

  Think like a witch? What did the cat mean? Suddenly she remembered a visiting lecturer, an alumna named Dr. Something Patel who taught physics at one of the local universities. She had come to talk to Miss Gray’s class about magical physics. Thea remembered her standing in front of the blackboard, chalk in hand, saying…how did it go? “One of the most important things I learned in my time at Miss Lavender’s, which has served me well as a theoretical physicist, is to think like a witch. If you can’t find the answer, a witch would say, you’re probably asking the wrong question.” Miss Gray had nodded emphatically.