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Agatha wasn’t awakened by her teacher calling her name three times, but by Alice elbowing her in the side. She shot up and brushed the spit which had dribbled at the corner of her lips. Then, she realized that everyone in the small amphitheater was turned in their seat to stare at her.
“What?” she huffed.
“Your discipline for your final exam? Which one have you chosen?” her homeroom teacher, Miss Calderu, asked with obvious irritation.
Agatha stammered as her drowsy mind struggled to remember the choice she’d made. It wasn’t her fault Miss Calderu’s divination classes always put her to sleep.
“Song magic.”
Her teacher wrote down the answer and the whole room turned away from Agatha as the next young witch on the list was called.
“Jennifer?”
“Potion,” she replied from the first row of the class without missing a beat.
Agatha rolled her eyes. What a nerd. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Just one more month to drudge through, her final project to present, and then she would be free. She couldn’t wait to graduate from the Salem Academy for Witches. Song magic was her specialty; there was no way she would fail her project. She knew she would get an excellent grade – which would compensate for those other classes, such as divination, where her grades weren’t so high – and then she was out of this place.
“Rio?” Miss Calderu continued to call.
Rio had been staring out of the window on the left side of the room, but she snapped back to reality quickly.
“Botany.”
Agatha sneered. Of course, miss perfect was taking botany, not that it mattered. Rio had such high grades in every class that she could have chosen anything for her final project.
“Alice?”
“Protection,” she replied, her voice echoing just enough in the quiet room to be heard.
Agatha gasped as she turned to her. Alice gave her a shrug then shrank under her gaze.
She only waited until they’d stepped into the hallway to shout:
“Protection?”
Alice shook her head, as if she didn’t want to talk about it.
“I told you, I’m not doing song magic.”
“I thought you were kidding.” Agatha scoffed. “Who am I supposed to work with, then?”
Alice shrugged.
“Whoever else wants to do song magic. I told you, I’m not interested in it that much.”
“But you’re good at it. Why wouldn’t you take something you’re good at for your final project?”
“I’m good at protection too. Can we just drop it?”
Agatha rolled her eyes but complied, though she couldn’t swallow her friend’s betrayal.
For a few days, Agatha didn’t bring the subject of the final project again. She wasn’t too worried. Whoever her partner on the project would be, she would bend them to her will and they would execute her idea – a spell so powerful it could conjure a door to the fabled Witches’ Road. Though Alice continued to act a little sheepish around her, Agatha decided it wasn’t worth holding a grudge against her for this.
Then, at the end of the week, the list of partners for the senior’s project was hung on the bulletin board. A crowd of witches was already gathered in front of it when Agatha and Alice arrived. Agatha didn’t hesitate to elbow her way through until she was at the front. There, she scanned all the subjects to find herself. She frowned, as she could not find Song magic anywhere, so she read through it again.
“Agatha?”
Alice pointed to a line in the middle of the second sheet. Her name was under Botany, and to her great horror, she was paired with Rio Vidal. Agatha’s eyes bulged out of her skull. She snatched the paper off the board, earning shouts of discontent from her fellow students, not that she cared in the least. There was definitely a mistake, she thought as she looked over the list again, because she had asked for song music, and she couldn’t be paired with Rio.
She marched off, paper in hand, followed by student outcry. Although there were no classes on the weekend, most of the teachers could still be found either in the office or their classrooms. Agatha tracked down Miss Calderu like a bloodhound, finding her grading papers in her office. She irrupted inside without knocking and slammed the paper on the desk.
“What is this?” she demanded.
The divination teacher didn’t look up until she was done writing. Then, she closed the pen and took the paper. Agatha was fuming too much to stand still and she began to fidget, eyes glaring at the older witch.
“That is the list of partnerships for the final project,” Miss Calderu replied as she set the piece of paper down. “Which should have stayed on the bulletin board, by the way.”
Agatha’s words rushed past her lips.
“I know I asked for song magic. You can’t hold me back by giving me the wrong subject.”
“No one is holding you back. Trust me, I want you out of here as much as you do. This list was made with the others teachers. It just so happens that you were the only student this year taking song magic as your subject and we had to pair you with someone else.”
Agatha huffed and crossed her arms. She didn’t entirely believe her teacher, but there was a very simple fix to this problem.
“Fine, then pair me with Alice. I can do protection magic too.”
“Botany was the only disciple with an odd number of students. It’s too late now, Agatha, we can’t change everyone’s disciple to accommodate one student. You’ll have to make due.”
Agatha huffed. Her teacher handed her the list back but Agatha only sneered at it.
“I never knew you to be the kind of person that gives up at the first inconvenience,” Miss Calderu remarked.
“This isn’t an inconvenience.”
“Great, then I’m sure yours and Rio’s project will blend song magic and botany perfectly. Now, please, pin the list back on the bulletin board.”
Agatha greeted her teeth, but miss Calderu gave her a look that meant she had overstayed her welcome. She snatched the list back and stormed out of the office.
“On the board, Agatha,” the teacher warned before the slammed the door.
Agatha crumpled the piece of paper and threw it into the nearest trashcan.
That evening in their little wooden hideout, Agatha was still incensed. She sat above the crowd in her usual throne – an old vinyl lounge chair – while around her the ruin was bumping with music. A mixtape of punk and grudge songs were playing from a boom box in one corner. The ruin was lit by fairy lights strung from one broken pillar to the other, which turned their part of the forest into a bright spotlight, but none of them cared.
The old ruin had long since been abandoned when Agatha had found it during her first year. Twelve moss-covered pillars rose in a large circle, the paved ground between them cracked so the inscriptions had been rendered unreadable. An unstable staircase curved around the back of the circle leading to a doorway with no door and no building left to enter. Since it was Agatha’s place, she held the most honorable seat in the doorway, and Alice was allowed to sit with her on a stool, although tonight, Agatha wasn’t so sure she wanted her by her side.
“This is basically your fault,” Agatha told her.
Alice took a swig from the beer someone had brought.
“Will you just let it go? You’re paired with the best student of the year, you don’t even have to lift a finger and you’re going to pass.”
“That isn’t the problem. The problem is the principle.”
“I don’t even know what you have against Rio. I can’t even remember her ever doing anything bad against you.”
“She’s exasperating. She always has the answer to everything. She’s too perfect to be real, she has to be hiding something.”
Alice rolled her eyes.
“Sounds to me like you’re jealous.”
Agatha glared at her, but Alice was quite used to the look now and shrugged it off, taking another swig of beer before passing her the bottle.
“Why would I be jealous of her?” Agatha replied, gesticulating with the beer as she spoke. “I don’t care that she’s the best witch of our year.” She took an angry gulp of beer, then continued: “I don’t care about her. She could be a worm that it wouldn’t change a damned thing.”
“That’s not very nice.”
Agatha watched, stunned, as Rio stood beneath her, hands on her hips. The staircase stopped a foot above her, and Agatha rose from her seat to stare her down, making herself loom over her partner. Around them, a few people noticed the interaction and tapped their friends’ shoulders, so that soon enough, half of the gathering was looking at them.
“Who invited you?” Agatha asked her.
“I didn’t know I needed an invite. I was just looking for you and I figured you’d be here.”
“What do you want?”
“We should meet in the greenhouse tomorrow morning to talk about our project.”
Agatha chewed on her lip, displeased. Though, she knew Rio was right and they should get started sooner rather than later, she didn’t want to seem like Rio was leading this project.
“11 a.m.”
“9:30,” Rio countered.
“10.”
Rio scoffed.
“Fine. I’ll see you then. You better not be late.”
Rio turned around to walk away, pushing through the crowd still observing her. Agatha could not let her have the last word.
“You better not be late because I’ll be early.”
Rio turned around with a smirk. She should have mingled in the crowd but it was as if the other students had parted for her.
“Te veo.”
She walked off, leaving Agatha outraged. She fell back into her chair and shotgunned the rest of the beer despite Alice’s protest. When she was done, she threw the empty bottle over her shoulder, where it crashed in the darkness.
“She has some nerves coming here and making a scene,” she grumbled.
Alice rolled her eyes.
“Sure, cause you never cause scenes.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Alice sighed and stood up.
“I’m going to get another drink since someone finished mine. Maybe it’s a good thing you two are working together.”
Alice descended the irregular, crumbling steps, leaving Agatha on top, alone.
Agatha arrived fifteen minutes late at the greenhouse, a long glass building on the east side of the school, with rows of plants in pots. She pushed the door open with her back, hopping on one leg as she tied her shoeless. Of course, Rio wouldn’t be waiting for her at the entrance. Agatha rushed down the central aisle looking for her project partner, moving so quickly that she walked past her, only to skid to a stop and turn around.
“You and I do not have the same definition of early,” Rio told her.
She sat on a stool, tending to some purplish plant in a clay pot in front of her. Agatha barely spared the plant a glance, thinking it looked like someone had stomped on it.
“Let me make some things clear,” she said as she came to stand in front of Rio. “This may be a botany project but don’t expect to take care of plants, okay? I’m not touching dirt or fertilizer, maybe I’ll water them if I’m here but I’m not coming down here on purpose just to do it. Plants are your responsibility.”
Rio remained perfectly cool despite the demands, that annoying smirk ever-present on her lips.
“Fair enough. And anyway, I know you got a D+ at our last botany project, I wouldn’t want them to die before the presentation.”
Agatha ground her teeth. She wanted to walk away more than anything, tell Rio to get to work and she would see her in a month for the presentation. And while Agatha had no qualm piggy-backing a good grade off someone’s back, she wouldn’t try with Rio. She had every intention of proving to her that she was the better witch out of the two of them.
“Miss Calderu said we should blend song magic and botany,” she began. “Let’s take a few days, think about that.”
“Actually,” Rio replied before she could even move her foot. “I already have an idea.”
Agatha chewed on the inside of her cheek.
“Fine. Let’s hear it, then.”
“I want us to grow a singing plant.”
Agatha rolled her eyes.
“Wow, that’s so impressive, Rio, if only you couldn’t buy seed packs for singing flowers at any crystal shop these days. You can even pick your song, I hear.”
Rio shook her head.
“Will you let me finish?”
Agatha looked back at her, arms crossed, waiting for her to say something sensible, and not the dumbest idea she’d ever heard.
“I want to grow a plant that will become codependent of mandrake roots. Have you ever tried harvesting a mandrake root.”
“Of course-”
Rio barely let her finish.
“Then you know how dangerous it is. So, I want to create a singing plant that will grow alongside it and sing to put it to sleep, so it stays asleep when you pull it out.”
Agatha considered it. It wasn’t a bad idea. It wasn’t out of this world revolutionary like Agatha had wanted her project to be, but it wasn’t useless and stupid either.
“Fine, we can do that. We’ll start tomorrow.”
Before Rio could complain that they should start now, Agatha walked away.
Agatha devoted more time to this project than she would have liked, and she found herself walking to the greenhouse in between classes more often than she cared to admit. She brought equipment from the song magic class, even a tape player and her collection of cassettes.
The first step was to figure out which songs put the mandrake to sleep definitively, the perfect kill song, Rio called it with an enthusiasm that Agatha refused to acknowledge was contagious. And for that, they needed Sparky. The disheveled-looking guard dog was used to pull mandrakes from the earth. One would think that after doing it so many times, he would have learned not to do it again, but he didn’t seem to care. Rio tied a rope between his collar and the root, put on her protective headphones and stepped back. Then, she wiggled a treat in full view of the poor mutt, who ran to get it.
The mandrake’s scream as it was pulled out – interestingly Agatha learned that it rang at the same pitch as AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” – echoed throughout the greenhouse. While the scream lost its intensity the further it traveled, anyone inside the room hearing it would have died. Agatha didn’t hear a thing as she pressed her hands over the protective headphones, but Sparky crashed onto the floor as if he’d had a massive stroke.
Once Rio was sure that the mandrake had shut up, they untied it from Sparky’s collar. Rio stroked his fur a handful of times, and the dog seemed to shake death off as one shakes off muscle aches. He sat up, unaware that he had just died, and Rio smiled and gave him the treat.
In the following two weeks, Sparky died a grand total of forty-eight times. Growing the singing flower wasn’t the hard part. Rather, it was finding the right song to put the mandrake into an eternal sleep. Agatha tried every single song that she could think of, from the classics of rock to folksongs, to song spells. She even went searching for jazz cassettes, to no avail. There wasn’t a single witch in their dormitory who hadn’t contributed at least one cassette to the cause.
Agatha chewed on her nail as she waited for the result of their next attempt, a flower which had been singing “Careless Whisper” to the mandrake for a few hours now. Rio tied the rope around Sparky, stepped back, and held out a treat from a new bag - she’d had to go into town to buy it when they’d ran out a few days ago. Sparky leapt toward her, yanking the mandrake free from the ground, taking the blue and white flower wrapped around its body with it. Agatha didn’t hear the scream, but Sparky crashed onto the floor as usual. She hissed with annoyance and removed her headphones.
“This is going nowhere.”
“We still have time to figure it out,” Rio told her as she pulled her headphones around her neck.
“And then what? When we have nothing to show in two weeks, what then?”
Rio kneeled beside Sparky.
“I have faith that we’ll figure it out.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Rio didn’t reply as she busied herself freeing the mutt from the rope. Agatha crossed her arms and continued:
“I should have known this was a stupid idea. We’ve just wasted two weeks with no progress. For the best student in this freaking school, you sure have bad ideas.”
Rio stopped petting Sparky and stood to stare her down.
“If you thought it was so stupid, why didn’t you share your idea? What project did you want us to work on?”
Agatha opened her mouth to reply but she had no answer, which only made Rio smirk.
“That’s what I thought, you don’t have any ideas.”
“I had ideas for my song magic project, which was what I was supposed to do for my final project, not this!”
Rio took a step closer to her, her brown eyes filled with anger.
“Sure, give up now. I can do this without you anyway.”
Agatha scoffed.
“Of course you can, because you’re the miss perfect, aren’t you?”
Rio took another step closer to her, getting into her face, so close now that Agatha could see dirt smeared over her cheek.
“I’m not perfect, I just want to finish this project on time.”
Agatha held her ground, glaring back at her.
“Then tell me, how do we finish it?”
“We keep trying.”
Agatha rolled her eyes and walked past her, knocking her shoulder against hers.
“Keep trying, then.”
As she walked away, all she could hear was the murmur of the Careless Whisper flower still wrapped around the dead mandrake.
Agatha avoided Rio like the plague, even as Rio stared at her in class, perhaps trying to get her attention, but she fought not to look back. Then, instead of heading to the greenhouse after class, she locked herself in her room and worked on her project, the project she’d wanted to work on, opening the door to the Witches’ Road.
She’d just sat at her desk and turned on her cassette player when her roommate, Jennifer, stepped into their room and groaned when she saw her.
“You’re here again.”
Agatha ignored her, headphones chained to her ears as she drummed her pencil against her notebook to the beat of “Just a Girl.” Jen didn’t seem to appreciate being ignored, as she continued to blabber loudly.
“I liked it better when you spent all your time at the greenhouse. By the way, you still haven’t returned my cassettes to me.”
Agatha looked at the magical equation she’d written down. It seemed right, but the amount of energy it would require was such that not even the whole school together could execute the spell. That wouldn’t do.
“Could you at least clean up your shit?” Jen continued to complain behind her. “Hey, Agatha, I’m talking to you. Agatha!”
Something hard collided with Agatha’s shoulder. She pushed her headphones down and looked at the ground, where one of their failed mandrake root had landed. She turned in her chair and spotted Jen glaring daggers at her.
“Are you serious?” Agatha told her.
“I asked you to clean your shit.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“How was I supposed to know? You had your headphones on.”
Agatha turned back to her notebook, leaving the dead mandrake on the ground. She put her headphones back on. Then, as if struck by lightning, she pulled them off again to look at them. She set them on her desk and picked up the mandrake on the ground. It had no ears, but it had three distinct stalks coming out of its head. They all did.
“A three-part harmony,” she muttered to herself.
“What?” Jen replied from her bed where she was flipping through a fashion magazine.
Agatha, still holding the mandrake, ran out of her bedroom.
She did her best to sneak into the greenhouse when Rio wasn’t there, but of course, the other girl was never out for long. When she returned, Agatha was finishing her enchantment on the final batch of seeds. She heard Rio’s footsteps but didn’t say anything, hoping that she perhaps wouldn’t see her. Then, Rio stopped next to her table, arms crossed, though she didn’t break the silence. She waited until Agatha had cast her spell to do so:
“I thought you’d given up.”
“I don’t give up,” Agatha scoffed. “I was only taking the time to find the answer and save your stupid project.”
“Our project.”
“Sure, give me some credit once I’ve solved it for us.”
Rio rolled her eyes.
“Why do you hate me? What did I ever do to you that you hate me?”
“Who says I hate you?”
“I’m not blind. I know you don’t like me.”
“Not liking someone and hating them is very different.”
“Alright then. Why do you dislike me?”
Agatha sputtered. She was having trouble coming up with a convincing lie, because, as usual, a lie was preferable to the truth. Rio stared at her with those big brown eyes, waiting for an answer. Agatha knew she’d hurt her by abandoning her. She sighed.
“I don’t hate you personally. I hate that you’re good at everything you do and I’m not.”
Rio raised an eyebrow in disbelief.
“You’re jealous of me?”
“I’m not jealous,” Agatha snapped back defensively. “Why would I be jealous? It’s more like my mom is an asshole who expects me to be like you when I’m not.”
Agatha was always ready to complain about her mother, but this seemed different, less complaining and more admitting a truth she wasn’t even sure she’d ever told Alice. Rio hummed, a smirk on her lips.
“To me, it sounds a little like you’re jealous. But I’m not going to keep it against you. Let’s hear about that solution you’ve come up with.”
Agatha shook her head, glad that Rio had changed the conversation so she could get her walls back up. She picked up three seeds, one from each batch, and showed them to Rio.
“Three-part harmony. One flower per stalk.”
Rio nodded.
“Alright, let’s try it.”
She took the seeds and planted them around one of the sleeping mandrakes. Then, using her magic, she made them grow and blossom in the span of a few minutes. The stems wrapped around the mandrake, twirling together then coiling around the stalks of the root. When the purplish flowers opened, they were singing The Witches’ Road.
“Really?” Rio asked, looking back at Agatha.
Agatha picked up protective headphones and shrugged.
“Hey, it was either this or Cats.”
“Oh, a Cats fan?” Rio said as she stepped back.
“Actually, I prefer rabbits.”
Rio shook her head in amusement, then picked up the pair of headphones Agatha handed her. She whistled and Sparky walked over from his dog bed. As usual, Agatha thought he was far too excited for a dog who’d died fifty times in two weeks. Rio tied the rope around the mandake and his collar then stepped back.
“This one is for all the marbles…”
She put her headphones on and pulled out a treat. Sparky dashed toward them, yanking the mandrake out. Agatha wanted to close her eyes but she held back, if only because Sparky rounded the table without crumbling on his side. He reached Rio and leaned on her knee, tongue lolling out and tail wagging. Rio gave him the treat, then turned to Agatha in disbelief.
“We did it,” Agatha declared.
“I think so,” Rio replied with bewilderment.
While Sparky was sent back to his bed, Rio planted three more seeds around another mandrake. She left her protective headphones on a nearby table, then turned to Agatha.
“There’s only one last test we need to do. Are you ready?”
Agatha swallowed thickly. It seemed her plan was working, but self-doubt still crept in her mind. What if it had been a fluke? She would hate to die because of a mandrake scream. Rio looked back at her with confidence so Agatha kneeled beside her, discarding her own headphones. With one hand, Rio grabbed the mandrake, the other resting on the stone ground between them. As anxiety overflowed out of Agatha’s brain, she reached for Rio’s hand, who said nothing but held it back. She pulled the mandrake out.
The end of year party was the biggest party they had thrown at the ruins. Agatha was starting to regret not making a guest list, as even more people arrived. All the seniors were there, and most of the juniors, and some of the younger years, but also people she didn’t think went to their school – from the nearby town, maybe? It didn’t matter. The music was loud, the drinks plentiful, and people were even using their magic to make a little light show.
Agatha was in her usual chair, sipping whiskey from a bottle. Hers and Rio’s presentation had gone flawlessly. They had unearthed five mandrakes by hand without a single dead teacher, though the look on their faces when they’d pulled out the first one had been priceless. The memory of it made her giggle. She took another sip of whiskey, as she had no intention of slowing down.
Alice’s chair had been empty for a while, though in the crowd Agatha had no idea where her friend had gone to. She shrugged it off, raising the bottle to her lips to drink more, when she saw Rio’s figure cutting through the crowd at the edge of the circle. Agatha jumped to her feet and rushed down the stairs to get to her.
“You came?”
“Yeah, I heard you were having a party. Though I didn’t expect all this.”
“I don’t know who these people are,” Agatha waved the whole crowd off, then presented Rio with her bottle. “Whiskey?”
Rio gripped the bottle and took a swig. Agatha watched the light dance over her neck as she swallowed and pursed her lips. Since when did she find Rio’s neck so kissable? It could have been the alcohol. She brushed off the thought.
“So, what is this place?” Rio asked her as she passed her the bottle back.
“Not sure. Maybe the first location of the school? There’s more buildings over there.”
“Really?”
Agatha nodded and, without waiting for Rio to ask, she took her head and led her through the stone arch and away from the light. A handful of partygoers had moved there too, some sat on the stone foundations to make out while others huddled around crumbled decorative elements. Agatha led Rio through the grass without letting go of her hand, until they were so far from the party that they could barely see each other.
“It stops about here but there’s a pond over there. Maybe an old garden.”
“I’d like to see that.”
Rio pulled a small plastic flashlight from the carabiner at her belt – of course she carried a bunch of tools with her at all times – and flashed it through the bushes in the direction Agatha had indicated. Without hesitation, she pushed through. Agatha took another sip of whiskey then followed.
“Do I want to know why you have a flashlight?” she asked. “You know, I heard the necro kids are the ones usually carrying flashlights.”
Rio chuckled.
“Didn’t you say I’m good at everything I do? It’s not to exhume bodies, if that’s what you wondered.”
“Oh, so it’s just in case you need to explore an overgrown garden in the middle of the night, then?”
“Basically.”
They broke through the bushes into the abandoned garden. The paved floor was hidden by moss and grass growing between the slabs. In the center, the pond was green, and they could hear toads rumbling by the water. A tall tree had outgrown its bed, the roots breaking through stone to expend out. Rio turned off her flashlight to survey the hidden garden, and some of the flowers within the pond seemed to glow silver with the moonlight. Agatha offered the bottle of whiskey to Rio again. She took a sip but kept the bottle.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked Agatha without looking at her.
Agatha shrugged.
“Who knows? Not going home, for starters. You?”
“I applied for a contract that should keep me moving for a while.”
Agatha hummed. She should have tried that. There were always contracts and scholarships opening for young and prodigious witches, though whether that included her was debatable. She knew she was incredible, but did her grades show it? Maybe not.
She shook off the thought and held out her arm to take the bottle back. Instead, Rio took herby the elbow. Agatha frowned, turning to look at her. The moonlight was shining in her eyes and shadowing her face, giving her edges that Agatha had never seen before.
“You could come with me?” Rio suggested. “We work well together.”
They were both holding the bottle now, though Agatha couldn’t care less. She closed the distance between them and kissed Rio, who dropped the bottle in the grass to cup her face.
She led Rio to the nearest tree, step by step, until her back was firmly pressed against it. Rio’s breath hitched in her throat and Agatha deepened the kiss. So what, if they never saw each other again after that night? Or perhaps this was the beginning of something new? Either way, Agatha wasn’t letting the opportunity pass.