Never After (School for Good and Evil x Reader)

Chapter 2

One girl had an overbite, wispy patches of hair, and one eye instead of two, right in the middle of her forehead. Another boy was like a mound of dough, with his bulging belly, bald head, and swollen limbs. A tall, sneering girl trudged ahead with sickly green skin. The boy in front of me had so much hair all over him he could have been an ape. They all looked about my age, but the similarities ended there. Here was a mass of the miserable, with misshapen bodies, repulsive faces, and the cruelest expressions I'd ever seen, as if looking for something to hate. One by one their eyes fell on Sophie and they found what they were looking for. The petrified princess in glass slippers and golden curls. The red rose among thorns.

I clenched my jaw.

We needed to get out of here as soon as possible.

I followed the line into a sunken anteroom, where three black crooked staircases twisted up in a perfect row. One carved with monsters said MALICE along the banister, the second, etched with spiders, said MISCHIEF, and the third with snakes read VICE. Around the three staircases, I noticed the walls covered with different-colored frames. In each frame there was a portrait of a child, next to a storybook painting of what the student became upon graduation. A gold frame had a portrait of an elfish little girl, and beside it, a magnificent drawing of her as a revolting witch, standing over a comatose maiden. A gold plaque stretched under the two illustrations:

CATHERINE OF FOXWOOD

Little Snow White (Villain)

In the next gold frame there was a portrait of a smirking boy with a thick unibrow, alongside a painting of him all grown up, brandishing a knife to a woman's throat:

DROGAN OF MURMURING MOUNTAINS

Bluebeard (Villain)

Beneath Drogan there was a silver frame of a skinny boy with shock blond hair, turned into one of a dozen ogres savaging a village:

KEIR OF NETHERWOOD

Tom Thumb (Henchman)

Then I noticed a decayed bronze frame near the bottom with a tiny, bald boy, eyes scared wide. A boy I knew. Bane was his name. He used to bite all the pretty girls in Gavaldon until he was kidnapped four years before. But there was no drawing next to Bane. Just a rusted plaque that read:

FAILED

I looked at Bane's terrified face and felt my stomach churn. What happened to him?

I gazed up at thousands of gold, silver, and bronze frames cramming every inch of the hall: witches slaying princes, giants devouring men, demons igniting children, heinous ogres, grotesque gorgons, headless horsemen, merciless sea monsters. Once awkward adolescents. Now portraits of absolute evil. Even the villains that had died gruesome deaths—Rumpelstiltskin, the Beanstalk Giant, the Wolf from Red Riding Hood—were drawn in their greatest moments, as if they had emerged triumphant from their tales. The other children gazed up at the portraits in awed worship.

Then, another portrait caught my eye. One of a boy grinning maliciously, clad in a tunic made of autumn leaves, hovering fifty feet in the air.

PETER OF MOAT BRAE

Pan (Villain)

I furrowed my eyebrows. What? No, that couldn't be right. Peter Pan was a hero. A boy who had slain Captain Hook and saved the Lost Boys from a lifetime of misery at the hands of Hook's crew.

One of the wolves shoved me forward. "Move along," he growled.

Turning the corner into a wider corridor, I saw a red-skinned, horned dwarf ahead on a towering stepladder, hammering more portraits into a bare wall. The frames on this wall held familiar faces. There was the dough boy I had seen earlier, labeled BRONE OF ROCH BRIAR. Next to him was a painting of the one-eyed, wispy-haired girl: ARACHNE OF FOXWOOD. I scanned the portraits of my classmates, awaiting their villainous transformations.

Then I saw the frame under his hammer. My own face smiled back at me.

I narrowed my eyes. I'm really considered to be Evil? Their standards must have dropped tremendously.

A dark-skinned hag with a massive boil on her cheek thrust a sheet of parchment into my hands, which outlined my schedule.

An ogre then dumped a ribbon-tied stack of books in my hands.

Best Villainous Monologues, 2nd ed.

Spells for Suffering, Year 1

The Novice's Guide to Kidnapping & Murder

Embracing Ugliness Inside & Out

How to Cook Children (with New Recipes!)

A spotted satyr threw a musty black fabric around my neck—the school uniform, a dumpy, tattered tunic that sagged like shredded curtains.

A scream drew my attention immediately. Across the way was Sophie, struggling against a wolf's hold.

"You don't understand!" she screamed. "It's all a mistake!"

The wolf bent down to her level and snarled.

"There are no mistakes."