The School for Good and Evil #2: A World without Princes (12 page)

“Do you know what you've done to this place, you waffling wench?” Hester snarled, black eyes storming. “Do you know what you've put us through?”

She flung crumpled parchment at her from her pocket. Agatha unwrinkled a schedule, barely readable under all the graffiti.

“Girls, you stupid idiot!
Everything
at this school is about being a girl!” Hester screeched. “Do you know how hard I've tried to prove I'm more than a girl and now I have to live in a castle full of them! You can't have a school without boys! Even
we
know that, and we'd rather kill ourselves than touch one!”

“We did dance with them at Evil's Ball,” Anadil corrected—

“Shut up,” Hester boomed, spinning back to Agatha. “No one likes boys! Even girls who
like
boys can't stand boys! They smell, they talk too much, they mess up everything, and they always have their hands in their pants, but that doesn't mean we can go to school without them! It's like stymphs without bones! It's like witches without warts! Without boys, LIFE HAS NO POINT!”

Echoes shivered the mirror.

Agatha held up the schedule. “Um, and the teachers are
okay
with this?”

“Why do you think they weren't at your Welcoming?” Hester grouched, settling a bit. “They're as happy about this as we are. But they have no choice. Resist, and they'll suffer the same fate as Princess Uma.”

Agatha saw the Animal Communication teacher wasn't on the schedule. “Where is she?”

“The Dean changed her class to Animal Hunting, since girls have to be self-sufficient and can't depend on boys for food. Part of the Five
Rules
,” Anadil puffed, turning the sink faucet on to terrorize her rats. “Uma refused to teach the class, of course, on the grounds she wasn't going to kill animals she'd spent her whole life befriending.” She stroked her quivering wet rats and looked up. “The next morning, a staircase evicted her into the Woods.”

“She's probably better off,” Agatha said, slightly relieved that she wouldn't have to learn more owl hoots and dog calls from the prissy pink princess. Then she saw Anadil still glaring at her.

“Do you remember what's
in
the Woods?”

Agatha's chest clamped.
Princes.
Vengeful, bloodthirsty princes.

“Why didn't the Dean rescue her?” Agatha croaked. “They'll kill her—”

“You think that's bad?” Hester barked, blood engorging again. “Do you know how much Nevers hate bathrooms? Do you know how much our bile boils just being near one, let alone hiding in one with
sapphire
toilets
? That's how much we don't want to go to the classes here.”

She glowered so hatefully Agatha swallowed her defense of Uma's fate as the worse.

“You want Sophie to stay alive? You want to avoid war between boys and girls? You want your happy ending?” Hester's eyes burned into Agatha. “Kiss Tedros.”

Agatha could feel her heart rebelling from its clamps.
The correct ending
, Professor Dovey had said.

Agatha's cheeks splotched red. Betray her best friend? Abandon Sophie
forever
? After all they'd been through?

“I can't,” she said, and slumped against the stall door. A cough suddenly came from behind it.

Hester bared sharp teeth.
“What.”

“Can I come out now?” peeped a familiar voice.

“You'll stay in there until you admit you're a traitor who no one likes and who is better off stabbing her own throat than ever showing her face
again
,” Hester lashed.

Silence.

“Agatha, can I come out?”

Agatha sighed. “Hello, Dot.”

The stall door slowly opened, and an Evergirl she'd never seen, with a slender waist and auburn curls, crept through first. Agatha gave her a baffled look and peeked in the stall for Dot.

The stall was empty.

Agatha slowly turned back to the stranger. “But you're—you're—”

“Hungry
all
the time,” Dot said, and pulled her into a long hug, before Agatha drew away and gaped at her. Dot was thirty pounds lighter, with a light sheen of makeup, red lipstick, and sparkled mascara. Her hair, brown with blond highlights, was tightly curled and clipped with glittery yellow barrettes. She'd even rolled up her uniform's light blue bodice so it showed off her taut belly.

“You're not going to get rid of this school, are you?” Dot fretted, nibbling on what looked like a wad of dried kale.

“Here we go,” Anadil moaned.

“Daddy always told me I'd end up a fat, lonely villain like him,” said Dot, eyes wet. “But this place lets me be who I want to be, Agatha. I feel good here for the first time in my life. And these two make me feel so bad for it. They made so much fun of me for being fat, and now they insult me for being thin.”

“So you might as well
die
,” said Hester.

“You're just jealous because I have new friends,” Dot snapped.

The tattooed demon peeled off Hester's neck, inflated to life, and hurled a lightning bolt at Dot's head. Dot dove into a bathtub and the bolt blasted a hole in the marble wall. A tiny girl on her bed, reading
Why Men Don't Matter
, gawped through the hole and fled her room.

Grumbling, Hester summoned her demon back into her neck. Dot peeked at Agatha from the tub, now snacking on what looked like a star-shaped carrot. “She's mad because everyone else likes the Dean.”

“I like that she can't make us wear that buffoonery,” Hester said, scowling at Dot's blue bodice. “Professor Sheeks secretly taught us a charm that made us erupt in contagious boils anytime we put on the uniform. After two days of screaming girls, the Dean gave up.”

“How could she just take over?” Agatha said, bewildered.

“You have to remember how bad things were between boys and girls when you left,” Hester said. “The most eligible prince in school lost his princess to a bald, toothless
witch
. Boys suddenly saw girls as the enemy—and girls saw the boys as bullies. When the schools changed to Boys and Girls, it already felt as divided as Good and Evil. The Dean just made things worse.”

“But where did she
come
from?” asked Agatha. “She says she's Sader's sister—”

“All we know is, the night the schools changed to Boys and Girls, Professor Dovey couldn't get back into her office,” said Anadil. “She and Lesso tried to get it open for hours, and when they finally did . . . Dean Sader was sitting at the desk.”

“But how'd she get in?” Agatha said, frowning. “And why don't they fight her?”

“For one thing, the male teachers tried,” said Anadil. “And they haven't been seen since.”

Agatha gaped at her.

“As long as Dovey and Lesso had the Storian, we had a chance at peace,” Hester pressed. “But now you kissing Tedros is the only hope. Because there
is
no way to fight the Dean.”

She glared into Agatha's eyes.

“The castle's on
her
side.”

As Sophie followed the Dean through the blue breezeway from Honor Tower to Valor Tower, girls kept popping up in their path, saluting Sophie like a ship captain—

“Death to the prince!” a pimply girl squeaked.

“Long live Sophie and Agatha!” chimed an elfish Evergirl.

Sophie forced a fraught smile as she tried to keep up with Dean Sader through the glass tunnel over the lake. As she walked, the Dean squinted out at distant princes clamoring outside the school gates, testing Lady Lesso's shield with rocks and sticks. Her thick red mouth pursed slightly and she walked faster, hips swishing in a dress that seemed so much tighter than all the other teachers'. Hustling behind, Sophie peered at the Dean's reflection in the breezeway. She'd never seen anyone so beautiful—even her own mother. Proportions exactly out of a storybook, rose-petal lips, hair so lustrous and full, as if the Dean had been drawn to a page and brought to life. What did she use on her skin?
Even thistleroot can't get pores that small
, Sophie thought, comparing them in the polished glass to her own—

Her bald, toothless reflection snarled back at her, covered in warts.

Sophie choked with terror and closed her eyes.
No . . . I'm Good . . . I'm Good now . . .

She opened her eyes to see her creamy smooth face once more.

“Sophie?”

Heart racing, Sophie turned to see the Dean frowning at the end of the breezeway. Quickly, Sophie hastened to keep up, legs quavering, as more girls passed and saluted her.

“Death to Tedros!”

“Death to the prince!”

“Um, when you said slay Tedros,” Sophie fumbled anxiously, “you didn't mean
I—I—I'd
slay him . . . or that I'd be involved in anything . . .
Evil
—”

“Given your past history, I thought you'd be looking forward to it,” the Dean mused.

Sophie wiped sweat. “It's just, um . . . I know I have a rather fearsome reputation. . . . But I've changed, you see . . .”

“Have you?” The Dean gave her a pointed look. “In the gallery, you seemed quite ready to lead a war.”

“Well, one must project the carriage of leadership,” Sophie said, dripping sweat now. “But in truth, my witch days are long past, so perhaps it's best if someone
currently
Evil kills Tedros—might I suggest Hester or Anadil, both rather loathsome villains—”

“The boy who wants to
steal
your only friend, and you're afraid of a fight?”

Sophie slowly looked up at the Dean, grinning outside the entrance to Valor Tower.

“Perhaps because you don't know what it is you're fighting for.”

The doors magically opened, and Sophie gasped.

The walls on both sides of the crowded stairwell, stretching all the way up the five floors, were painted with colossal, stylized stencil murals of her and Agatha's smiling faces, haloed with wreaths of stars, above the glittering blue headline:

Instead of the leather, cologne, and animal skins of the old Valor Tower, now there were lush hanging gardens draped over the blue glass stairwell and marble columns, with azure-colored roses that showered the mob of students with petals as they headed to class, before lower-hanging vines swept them up. As Sophie followed the Dean up the stairs, girls immediately moved to the left in single file, clearing a path and greeting them with warm smiles as they passed. Through the spiral banister, Sophie saw a pack of blue butterflies zooming from floor to floor, rearranging into pictures to amuse the descending girls—a stymph, a nymph, a swan. . . . The Dean gave them a look, and with squeaky
meeps!
they zipped back into her dress.

She turned off onto the third floor and Sophie followed into a hall flurrying with activity. Against the walls, Evergirls and Nevergirls huddled side by side, watching a ghostly living scene atop the pages of
A Student's Revised History of the Woods
to finish an assignment. Above their heads, murals of an idyllic school of girls presiding over enslaved boys, watermarked with Sophie and Agatha's deified faces, stretched down the long dormitory walls.

Reena darted to each of them with plates of poached eggs and pumpernickel toast, while Arachne passed mugs of chocolate buttermilk. In a corner, a group of girls practiced oboes, fiddles, and trumpets, though Sophie couldn't tell which were Evers or Nevers, since they all had ragged hair and no traces of makeup. Standing on ladders over the stairwell, Mona and Millicent finished painting pink roses on banisters a rich shade of blue, dripping paint on two girls sparring with wooden swords, while Kiko hopped past, flinging sheets of parchment—“Book Club meeting tonight! Come to Book Club!”—before she was drowned out by Giselle and Flavia practicing a loud song from sheet music. All around, doors chorused open and shut as girls scurried to their rooms from the Welcoming and rushed right back out with their books for class, unfussed by sweaty faces and armpits.

Sophie thought of the old schools—Nevers bashing each other to get to class, Evers primping for hours and hours, everyone in such terrible competition between schools, within schools,
all the time
. And now here they were, despite the sweatiness and raggedness and satanic smell of buttercream, thriving together, happy together . . . without a boy in sight.

“How can Agatha not want this?” she breathed.

“Some will always resist change,” the Dean said next to her. “Agatha is a princess and still believes she needs a prince. Surely you know the power of that fantasy.”

Sophie thought of all the hope, all the energy, all the time she had put into her princely dreams. The conviction that a gorgeous boy of noble blood would sweep her to his white castle and eternal bliss. Agatha had taunted her ruthlessly for it before the School Master kidnapped them. “As if this muscle-bound god would even
understand
you,” Agatha scoffed. “We'd be better off together.” She'd given her usual pig snort to make sure it sounded like a joke. But Sophie knew she meant it. Agatha always thought the two of them was enough for Ever After.