The School for Good and Evil

by Soman Chainani

  Frozen still, Agatha watched dozens of scared eyes bore into her. Her first thought was that after tomorrow she and Sophie could take their walks in peace. Next to her, Sophie watched children memorize her face in case it appeared in their storybooks one day. Her first thought was whether they looked at Belle the same way.

  Then, through the crowd, she saw her.

  Head shaved, dress filthy, Belle kneeled in dirt, frantically muddying her own face. Sophie drew a breath. For Belle was just like the others. She wanted a mundane marriage to a man who would grow fat, lazy, and demanding. She wanted monotonous days of cooking, cleaning, sewing. She wanted to shovel dung and milk sheep and slaughter squealing pigs. She wanted to rot in Gavaldon until her skin was liver-spotted and her teeth fell out. The School Master would never take Belle because Belle wasn’t a princess. She was . . . nothing.

  Victorious, Sophie beamed back at the pathetic villagers and basked in their stares like shiny mirrors—

  “Let’s go,” said Agatha.

  Sophie turned. Agatha’s eyes were locked on the mob.

  “Where?”

  “Away from people.”

  As the sun weakened to a red orb, two girls, one beautiful, one ugly, sat side by side on the shore of a lake. Sophie packed cucumbers in a silk pouch, while Agatha flicked lit matches into the water. After the tenth match, Sophie threw her a look.

  “It relaxes me,” Agatha said.

  Sophie tried to make room for the last cucumber. “Why would someone like Belle want to stay here? Who would choose this over a fairy tale?”

  “And who would choose to leave their family forever?” Agatha snorted.

  “Except me, you mean,” said Sophie.

  They fell silent.

  “Do you ever wonder where your father went?” Sophie asked.

  “I told you. He left after I was born.”

  “But where would he go? We’re surrounded by woods! To suddenly disappear like that . . .” Sophie spun. “Maybe he found a way into the stories! Maybe he found a magic portal! Maybe he’s waiting for you on the other side!”

  “Or maybe he went back to his wife, pretended I never happened, and died ten years ago in a mill accident.”

  Sophie bit her lip and went back to cucumbers.

  “Your mother’s never at home when I visit.”

  “She goes into town now,” said Agatha. “Not enough patients at the house. Probably the location.”

  “I’m sure that’s it,” Sophie said, knowing no one would trust Agatha’s mother to treat diaper rash, let alone illness. “I don’t think a graveyard makes people all that comfortable.”

  “Graveyards have their benefits,” Agatha said. “No nosy neighbors. No drop-in salesmen. No fishy ‘friends’ bearing face masks and diet cookies, telling you you’re going to Evil School in Magic Fairy Land.” She flicked a match with relish.

  Sophie put down her cucumber. “So I’m fishy now.”

  “Who asked you to show up? I was perfectly fine alone.”

  “You always let me in.”

  “Because you always seem so lonely,” said Agatha. “And I feel sorry for you.”

  “Sorry for me?” Sophie’s eyes flashed. “You’re lucky that someone would come see you when no one else will. You’re lucky that someone like me would be your friend. You’re lucky that someone like me is such a good person.”

  “I knew it!” Agatha flared. “I’m your Good Deed! Just a pawn in your stupid fantasy!”

  Sophie didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “Maybe I became your friend to impress the School Master,” she confessed finally. “But there’s more to it now.”

  “Because I found you out,” Agatha grumbled.

  “Because I like you.”

  Agatha turned to her.

  “No one understands me here,” Sophie said, looking at her hands. “But you do. You see who I am. That’s why I kept coming back. You’re not my good deed anymore, Agatha.”

  Sophie gazed up at her. “You’re my friend.”

  Agatha’s neck flushed red.

  “What’s wrong?” Sophie frowned.

  Agatha hunched into her dress. “It’s just, um . . . I—I’m, uh . . . not used to friends.”

  Sophie smiled and took her hand. “Well, now we’ll be friends at our new school.”

  Agatha groaned and pulled away. “Say I sink to your intelligence level and pretend to believe all this. Why am I going to villain school? Why has everyone elected me the Mistress of Evil?”

  “No one says you’re evil, Agatha,” Sophie sighed. “You’re just different.”

  Agatha narrowed her eyes. “Different how?”

  “Well, for starters, you only wear black.”

  “Because it doesn’t get dirty.”

  “You don’t ever leave your house.”

  “People don’t look at me there.”

  “For the Create-a-Tale Competition, your story ended with Snow White eaten by vultures and Cinderella drowning herself in a tub.”

  “I thought it was a better ending.”

  “You gave me a dead frog for my birthday!”

  “To remind you we all die and end up rotting underground eaten by maggots so we should enjoy our birthdays while we have them. I found it thoughtful.”

  “Agatha, you dressed as a bride for Halloween.”

  “Weddings are scary.”

  Sophie gaped at her.

  “Fine. So I’m a little different,” Agatha glared. “So what?”

  Sophie hesitated. “Well, it’s just that in fairy tales, different usually turns out, um . . . evil.”

  “You’re saying I’m going to turn out a Grand Witch,” said Agatha, hurt.

  “I’m saying whatever happens, you’ll have a choice,” Sophie said gently. “Both of us will choose how our fairy tale ends.”

  Agatha said nothing for a while. Then she touched Sophie’s hand. “Why is it you want to leave here so badly? That you’d believe in stories you know aren’t true?”

  Sophie met Agatha’s big, sincere eyes. For the first time, she let in the tides of doubt.

  “Because I can’t live here,” Sophie said, voice catching. “I can’t live an ordinary life.”

  “Funny,” said Agatha. “That’s why I like you.”

  Sophie smiled. “Because you can’t either?”

  “Because you make me feel ordinary,” Agatha said. “And that’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”

  The tenor-tolled clock sang darkly in the valley, six or seven, for they had lost track of time. And as the echoes faded into the buzz of the distant square, both Sophie and Agatha made a wish. That one day from now, they’d still be in the company of the other.

  Wherever that was.

  2

  The Art of Kidnapping

  By the time the sun extinguished, the children were long locked away. Through bedroom shutters, they peeked at torch-armed fathers, sisters, grandmothers lined around the dark forest, daring the School Master to cross their ring of fire.

  But while shivering children tightened their window screws, Sophie prepared to undo hers. She wanted this kidnapping to be as convenient as possible. Barricaded in her room, she laid out hairpins, tweezers, nail files and went to work.

  The first kidnappings happened two hundred years before. Some years it was two boys taken, some years two girls, sometimes one of each. The ages were just as fickle; one could be sixteen, the other fourteen, or both just turned twelve. But if at first the choices seemed random, soon the pattern became clear. One was always beautiful and good, the child every parent wanted as their own. The other was homely and odd, an outcast from birth. An opposing pair, plucked from youth and spirited away.

  Naturally the villagers blamed bears. No one had ever seen a bear in Gavaldon, but this made them more determined to find one. Four years later, when two more children vanished, the villagers admitted they should have been more specific and declared black bears the culprit, bears so black they blended w
ith the night. But when children continued to disappear every four years, the village shifted their attention to burrowing bears, then phantom bears, then bears in disguise . . . until it became clear it wasn’t bears at all.

  But while frantic villagers spawned new theories (the Sinkhole Theory, the Flying Cannibal Theory) the children of Gavaldon began to notice something suspicious. As they studied the dozens of Missing posters tacked up in the square, the faces of these lost boys and girls looked oddly familiar. That’s when they opened up their storybooks and found the kidnapped children.

  Jack, taken a hundred years before, hadn’t aged a bit. Here he was, painted with the same moppy hair, pinked dimples, and crooked smile that had made him so popular with the girls of Gavaldon. Only now he had a beanstalk in his back garden and a weakness for magic beans. Meanwhile, Angus, the pointy-eared, freckled hooligan who had vanished with Jack that same year, had transformed into a pointy-eared, freckled giant at the top of Jack’s beanstalk. The two boys had found their way into a fairy tale. But when the children presented the Storybook Theory, the adults responded as adults most often do. They patted the children’s heads and returned to sinkholes and cannibals.

  But then the children showed them more familiar faces. Taken fifty years before, sweet Anya now sat on moonlit rocks in a painting as the Little Mermaid, while cruel Estra had become the devious sea witch. Philip, the priest’s upright son, had grown into the Cunning Little Tailor, while pompous Gula spooked children as the Witch of the Wood. Scores of children, kidnapped in pairs, had found new lives in a storybook world. One as Good. One as Evil.

  The books came from Mr. Deauville’s Storybook Shop, a musty nook between Battersby’s Bakery and the Pickled Pig Pub. The problem, of course, was where old Mr. Deauville got his storybooks.

  Once a year, on a morning he could not predict, he would arrive at his shop to find a box of books waiting inside. Four brand-new fairy tales, one copy of each. Mr. Deauville would hang a sign on his shop door: “Closed Until Further Notice.” Then he’d huddle in his back room day after day, diligently copying the new tales by hand until he had enough books for every child in Gavaldon. As for the mysterious originals, they’d appear one morning in his shop window, a sign that Mr. Deauville had finished his exhausting task at last. He’d open his doors to a three-mile line that snaked through the square, down hillslopes, around the lake, jammed with children thirsting for new stories, and parents desperate to see if any of the missing had made it into this year’s tales.

  Needless to say, the Council of Elders had plenty of questions for Mr. Deauville. When asked who sent the books, Mr. Deauville said he hadn’t the faintest idea. When asked how long the books had been appearing, Mr. Deauville said he couldn’t remember a time when the books did not appear. When asked whether he’d ever questioned this magical appearance of books, Mr. Deauville replied: “Where else would storybooks come from?”

  Then the Elders noticed something else about Mr. Deauville’s storybooks. All the villages in them looked just like Gavaldon. The same lakeshore cottages and colorful eaves. The same purple and green tulips along thin dirt roads. The same crimson carriages, wood-front shops, yellow schoolhouse, and leaning clock tower, only drawn as fantasy in a land far, far away. These storybook villages existed for only one purpose: to begin a fairy tale and to end it. Everything between the beginning and end happened in the dark, endless woods that surrounded the town.

  That’s when they noticed that Gavaldon too was surrounded by dark, endless woods.

  Back when the children first started to disappear, villagers stormed the forest to find them, only to be repelled by storms, floods, cyclones, and falling trees. When they finally braved their way through, they found a town hiding beyond the trees and vengefully besieged it, only to discover it was their own. Indeed, no matter where the villagers entered the woods, they came out right where they started. The woods, it seemed, had no intention of returning their children. And one day they found out why.

  Mr. Deauville had finished unpacking that year’s storybooks when he noticed a large smudge hiding in the box’s fold. He touched his finger to it and discovered the smudge was wet with ink. Looking closer, he saw it was a seal with an elaborate crest of a black swan and a white swan. On the crest were three letters:

  S.G.E.

  There was no need for him to guess what these letters meant. It said so in the banner beneath the crest. Small black words that told the village where its children had gone:

  THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL

  The kidnappings continued, but now the thief had a name.

  They called him the School Master.

  A few minutes after ten, Sophie pried the last lock off the window and cracked open the shutters. She could see to the forest edge, where her father, Stefan, stood with the rest of the perimeter guard. But instead of looking anxious like the others, he was smiling, hand on the widow Honora’s shoulder. Sophie grimaced. What her father saw in that woman, she had no idea. Once upon a time, her mother had been as flawless as a storybook queen. Honora, meanwhile, had a small head, round body, and looked like a turkey.

  Her father whispered mischievously into the widow’s ear and Sophie’s cheeks burned. If it were Honora’s two little sons who might be taken, he’d be serious as death. True, Stefan had locked her in at sundown, given her a kiss, dutifully acted the loving father. But Sophie knew the truth. She had seen it in his face every day of her life. Her father didn’t love her. Because she wasn’t a boy. Because she didn’t remind him of himself.

  Now he wanted to marry that beast. Five years after her mother’s death, it wouldn’t be seen as improper or callous. A simple exchange of vows and he’d have two sons, a new family, a fresh start. But he needed his daughter’s blessing first for the Elders to allow it. The few times he tried, Sophie changed the subject or loudly chopped cucumbers or smiled the way she did at Radley. Her father hadn’t mentioned Honora again.

  Let the coward marry her when I’m gone, she thought, glaring at him through the shutters. Only when she was gone would he appreciate her. Only when she was gone would he know no one could replace her. And only when she was gone would he see he had spawned much more than a son.

  He had borne a princess.

  On her windowsill, Sophie laid out gingerbread hearts for the School Master with delicate care. For the first time in her life, she’d made them with sugar and butter. These were special, after all. A message to say she’d come willingly.

  Sinking into her pillow, she closed her eyes on widows, fathers, and wretched Gavaldon and with a smile counted the seconds to midnight.

  As soon as Sophie’s head vanished beneath the window, Agatha shoved the gingerbread hearts in her mouth. Only thing these will invite are rats, she thought, crumbs dribbling on her black clump shoes. She yawned and set on her way as the town clock inched past the quarter hour.

  Upon leaving Sophie after their walk, Agatha had started home only to have visions of Sophie darting into the woods to find this School for Fools and Crackpots and ending up gored by a boar. So she returned to Sophie’s garden and waited behind a tree, listening as Sophie undid her window (singing a birdbrained song about princes), packed her bags (now singing about wedding bells), put on makeup and her finest dress (“Everybody Loves a Princess in Pink”?!), and finally (finally!) tucked herself into bed. Agatha mashed the last crumbs with her clump and trudged towards the cemetery. Sophie was safe and would wake up tomorrow feeling like a fool. Agatha wouldn’t rub it in. Sophie would need her even more now and she would be there for her. Here in this safe, secluded world, the two of them would make their own paradise.

  As Agatha tramped up the slope, she noticed an arc of darkness in the forest’s torch-lit border. Apparently the guards responsible for the cemetery had decided what lived inside wasn’t worth protecting. For as long as Agatha could remember, she’d had a talent for making people go away. Kids fled from her like a vampire bat. Adults clung to walls as she passed, afraid she m
ight curse them. Even the grave keepers on the hill bolted at the sight of her. With each new year, the whispers in town grew louder—“witch,” “villain,” “Evil School”—until she looked for excuses not to go out. First days, then weeks, until she haunted her graveyard house like a ghost.

  There were plenty of ways to entertain herself at first. She wrote poems (“It’s a Miserable Life” and “Heaven Is a Cemetery” were her best), drew portraits of Reaper that frightened mice more than the real cat did, and even tried her hand at a book of fairy tales, Grimly Ever After, about beautiful children who die horrible deaths. But she had no one to show these things to until the day Sophie knocked.

  Reaper licked her ankles as she stepped onto her squeaking porch. She heard singing inside—

  “In the forest primeval

  A School for Good and Evil . . .”

  Agatha rolled her eyes and pushed open the door.

  Her mother, back turned, sang cheerily as she packed a trunk with black capes, broomsticks, and pointy black witch’s hats.

  “Two towers like twin heads

  One for the pure,

  One for the wicked.

  Try to escape you’ll always fail

  The only way out is

  Through a fairy tale . . .”

  “Planning an exotic vacation?” Agatha said. “Last time I checked, there’s no way out of Gavaldon unless you grow wings.”

  Callis turned. “Do you think three capes is enough?” she asked, bug eyes bulging, hair a greasy black helmet.

  Agatha winced at just how much they looked alike. “They’re exactly the same,” she muttered. “Why do you need three?”

  “In case you need to lend one to a friend, dear.”

  “These are for me?”

  “I put two hats in case one gets squashed, a broomstick in case theirs smells, and a few vials of dog tongues, lizard legs, and frog toes. Who knows how long theirs have been sitting there!”