Never After (School for Good and Evil x Reader)

Chapter 1

"So we can't take a walk?" Sophie asked.

Agatha started to close the door but then paused. I could see the gears turning in her head.

Eventually she sighed. "A short one." Agatha trudged past us both. "But if you say anything smug or stuck-up or shallow, I'll have Reaper follow you home."

Sophie ran after her. "But then I can't talk!"

After four years, the dreaded eleventh night of the eleventh month had arrived. In the late-day sun, the square had become a hive of preparation for the School Master's arrival. The men sharpened swords, set traps, and plotted the night's guard, while the women lined up the children and went to work. Handsome ones had their hair lopped off, teeth blackened, and clothes shredded to rags; homely ones were scrubbed, swathed in bright colors, and fitted with veils. Mothers begged the best-behaved children to curse or kick their sisters, the worst were bribed to pray in the church, while the rest in line were led in choruses of the village anthem: "Blessed Are the Ordinary."

Fear swelled into a contagious fog. In a dim alley, the butcher and blacksmith traded storybooks for clues to save their sons. Beneath the crooked clock tower, two sisters listed fairy-tale villain names to hunt for patterns. A group of boys chained their bodies together, a few girls hid on the school roof, and a masked child jumped from bushes to spook his mother, earning a spanking on the spot. Even the homeless hag got into the act, hopping before a meager fire, croaking, "Burn the storybooks! Burn them all!" But no one listened and no books were burned.

Agatha gawped at all this in disbelief. "How can a whole town believe in fairy tales?"

"Because they're real," Sophie said.

Agatha stopped walking. "You can't actually believe the legend is true."

"Of course I do," said Sophie.

"That a School Master kidnaps two children, takes them to a school where one learns Good, one learns Evil, and they graduate into fairy tales?"

"Sounds about right."

"Tell me if you see an oven."

"Why?"

"I want to put my head in it. And what, pray tell, do they teach at this school exactly?"

"Well, in the School for Good, they teach boys and girls like me how to become heroes and princesses, how to rule kingdoms justly, how to find Happily Ever After," Sophie said. "In the School for Evil, they teach you how to become wicked witches and humpbacked trolls, how to lay curses and cast evil spells."

"Evil spells?" Agatha cackled. "Who came up with this? A four-year-old?"

"Well, the faces of the missing Gavaldon children illustrated in the storybooks is evidence enough for me," I chimed in.

"I don't see anything, because I don't read dumb storybooks."

"Then why is there a stack by your bed?" I asked.

Agatha scowled. "Look, who's to say the books are even real? Maybe it's the bookseller's prank. Maybe it's the Elders' way to keep children out of the woods. Whatever the explanation, it isn't a School Master and it isn't evil spells."

"So who's kidnapping the children?" Sophie asked.

"No one. Every four years, two idiots sneak into the woods, hoping to scare their parents, only to get lost or eaten by wolves, and there you have it, the legend continues."

"That's the stupidest explanation I've ever heard."

"I don't think I'm the stupid one here," Agatha said.