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Was there anything more humiliating than becoming a teacher at your old school? Agatha couldn’t really think of any other worst situation. But she had no prospect – not unusual for her – and the previous song magic teacher had had a nervous breakdown. Since Agatha was one of the most talented song witches there was, wouldn’t she like to replace her in the middle of the year? Agatha told them she could use the money, so she had agreed, but only until the end of the year. Come summer, she was gone again.
The accommodations were better than she remembered, though to be fair the teacher’s room were very different from the students’. At least this time she wasn’t sharing it. She settled her bags in the sparse living room and looked over the aged decoration. Wood paneling on the walls, shaggy carpet on the floor, and a dusty six-pronged chandelier on the ceiling. When was it renovated for the last time, the 1970s? No, that wouldn’t do. The bedroom was equally hideous. The frame of the bed screamed when she sat down on it and she feared it would snap if she tried to laid down. Way to make her feel old and fat within her first hour back at school.
A knock at the open front door made her stand up. She returned into the living room only to see the one person she didn’t want to see standing in the doorway. Jennifer Kale, her old roommate and, for the past three years, the potion teacher. Jen was wearing pink – not surprising – and looking down at her with satisfaction.
“What’s this I hear? That the great Agatha Harkness has deigned to grace us with her presence?”
Agatha rolled her eyes.
“How have you been?” she asked, not that she cared.
Jen seemed to ignore her question as she looked around the room and grimaced.
“What is this room? If my room had looked like that I would have resigned on the spot.”
“Can you really afford to?” Agatha taunted her right back. “I heard you had some trouble. With the law.”
Jen groaned and whirled around.
“Fine. I’ll see you in the teacher’s lounge.”
“Don’t save me a seat.”
“I won’t.”
There was something thrilling about having access to all the places in the school that she was forbidden from entering as a student. The novelty disappeared quickly, but Agatha would take any inkling of excitement she could get. Entering the teacher’s lounge was riveting for three seconds. Then, she found herself face to face with teachers she didn’t know and teacher she knew because she’d had them. Jen was in fact sat at a round table with Miss Calderu, who sported more gray hair than Agatha remembered. They seemed pretty cozy, and Agatha had no desire to speak to either of them, so she crossed the room to get herself a cup of coffee before her first class.
She could feel the other teachers’ eyes tracking her movements as she walked, her blue and purple coat swooping behind her. She placed a cup beneath the machine – some things even magic couldn’t replace – and leaned against the counter, arms crossed, while she waited for her cup to fill. Some teachers looked away while others continued to stare at her.
“Hey,” she said, to no one in particular. “How’s it going?”
Nothing was going to convince her that she didn’t belong in this lounge with all these other women. She was an accomplished witch, an expert in her field, probably better in some of their field than they were. They were lucky that she had agreed to come back.
“You stole my cup.”
The voice chilled Agatha’s cool attitude and her muscles froze. She dared a glance to her side. She had been wrong when she’d thought Jen was the last person she wanted to see. Rio was standing beside her, wearing an old brown tank-top with a green jacket on top, her hair long and loose and a little wild. Agatha knew the look well.
“I was actually filling it up for you,” she lied.
Rio knew her too well not fall for that, but she played along.
“Well thank you.”
She took the coffee from the machine and poured all of its content into the sink, her eyes never leaving Agatha who tried not to wince or fidget or show her annoyance. There was only one person in the world who could read her, and she wished she’d changed enough in those last few years so Rio couldn’t anymore, but they both knew it wasn’t the case.
“I heard about your mom,” Rio continued.
“You know, I wish I could claim that, but it was all above board. Heart attack, actually.”
“Good riddance?”
Agatha continued to stare at her, trying to decipher what game her ex was playing. Rio’s lips were turned into a scowl but there was a hint of something in her eyes that Agatha knew, without a doubt, was compassion.
“Good riddance,” she confirmed.
Rio let the cup drop into the sink, spooking all the witches gawking at them.
“Have a good first day,” she said bitterly, like she didn’t mean a world of it.
She marched out of the lounge and slammed the door behind her.
“Yikes,” Jen said from her table.
Agatha ignored her and left the room to head to her first class of the day.
By the end of the day, Agatha was already tired of her new position. Not a single of her student had any talent. This was why song magic was dying out, because all the young generations were bad at it.
She rushed out of her final class without waiting for the students to clear out the room. Though she thought about retreating to her office – in fact she needed to finish setting up – she needed some fresh air. She marched through the familiar halls until she was in the garden. It was a nice enough day, warm for autumn, so she wasn’t surprised to see many of the students in the grass. She didn’t pay them any mind and, hands in her coat pockets, she entered the woods at the edge of the school.
Agatha hadn’t been back here since her graduation but she remembered the path still. It wasn’t as maintained as she remembered, filled with thorny bushes, and she had to push her way through branches until she stumbled out of the underbrush with an annoyed groan. The sun was streaming through the nearby foliage and falling on what looked like a dump. Old bottles of alcohol were strewn about the place. The fairy lights had snapped off in places and laid limply around the pillars like dead snakes. Some of the bulbs had shattered, leaving glass crushing under her boots. Her old throne, her vinyl lounging chair, had fallen from its high place and was swarmed by grass.
She walked past it and continued through the overgrown foundations toward the secret garden. The path there was a little easier to push through than she remembered, as if some attempt to clear it had been made at one point, but they had given up since. Nothing had changed there. The tree was bigger, its roots like tentacles expending over and under broken slabs of dirty stones. Agatha walked up to it and placed her hand against the bark. Somewhere in there was the memory of her first make out session with Rio. Plants have a memory, Rio had told her, and though Agatha hadn’t believed her at first, in time she’d assimilated it as a fact.
The snap of the bushes behind her made Agatha flinch away from the tree. She turned only to catch a glimpse of black and blue fabric observing her through the foliage.
“Hey!”
The figure whirled around and rushed through the vegetation. Agatha gave pursuit, pushing her way through the thorns without caring if she got scratched. A gangly silhouette crossed the ritual circle, running back toward the school. Agatha was quick to cast a stunning spell. Purple energy whizzed through the air and hit the intruder in the back. She heard a wheeze and a crash. Satisfied, she walked up to the tall stick of a person frozen on the ground, rolling them over with the toe of her shoes.
A teenager was staring back at her, looking puzzled and not as frightened as she would have liked. He had short curly black hair and eyeliner smeared around his eyes, and the school’s gray uniform under a navy sweater. Agatha squinted at him.
“Why were you spying on me?”
“I wasn’t,” the teen was quick to defend himself. “I was just going to the old garden. I didn’t know you’d be there, ma’am.”
She didn’t believe a word out of the kid’s mouth, but the longer she glared at him, the more familiar he looked.
“What’s your name, again?”
“Billy. Billy Kaplan. I was in your 10 a.m. class. Your lesson on shrieks was really interesting, actually, I’m a fan of your work on energy transference-”
“Nobody likes a suck-up,” she cut him off as she waved the spell away.
Billy’s body seemed to melt against the stone and he sat up. Agatha was sure he had a lot of things to say still, but she had no intention of listening to him.
“Miss Harkness?” he called after her as she walked away, hands in her pocket.
“Don’t wonder too deep in the woods, teen,” she shouted over her shoulder. “There are things worse than me that live off the beaten path.”
Though Agatha didn’t want to, she forced herself to travel to the greenhouse. She knew she wouldn’t survive long if she didn’t clear things up with Rio, who had to already be suspicious of her. Unfortunately, she needed her ex on her side.
A choral of gentle voices led her deeper into the room. It could have been students whispering to themselves as they worked, but the class was over, and Agatha knew that singing too well not to recognize it. She stopped by one of the tables where a dozen mandrake roots lay dormant in clay pots, as little purplish flowers wrapped around them. They were still in the process of growing, so the singing was weak and broke off every so often. A tag had been placed on the edge of the table, in case there was any doubt of what grew in the pots: ‘mandrake roots + rio agathis.’
Agatha ran her thumb over the tag. Rio had named them right before their presentation, and Agatha had shrugged in response, though only because she had been fighting back a blush.
“Don’t pull them out yet, they’re not ready,” Rio warned behind her.
Agatha turned around and made a show of raising her hands then tugging them into her coat pockets. Rio had discarded her jacket from the morning and wore a dark green apron stained with dirt, naked arms crossed over it. Agatha wondered whether she always gave classes in tank tops. If so, she must have been the gay awakening of so many students in the past few years.
“I can’t believe you’re still using those.”
“They’re becoming a standard now. And anyway, Sparky died for real a few years after we put him out of a job. The poor thing was like thirty-five, it was about damned time.”
They stood in silence for a moment, seizing each other up. Agatha didn’t avert her eyes, but she knew neither would Rio. There was something sharp on her ex’s tongue and Agatha knew she couldn’t hold it back for long. No need to linger in suspense.
“Say it.”
Rio was all too excited to comply:
“You’re a goddamned hypocrite, you know that?”
“I figured you knew that already.”
“Why would you take the job, Rio?” her ex imitated her, recalling their final argument. “Those new generations are so untalented.”
“Well, they are-”
“You’d have to be a moron to agree, you can do so much better, Rio.”
“You can do so much better.”
Rio gave her a death glare.
“Why are you here, Agatha?”
Her ex knew her too well to know there wasn’t an angle, some scheme that Agatha was working here. There was no point lying to her either.
“I tracked down a scroll that mentioned a ritual circle that was used to open the Witches’ Road only once, and it is here, Rio. The old ruin. It was staring me in the face this entire time.”
Rio scoffed.
“I should have known.”
“I just need a few months to transcribe it, then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Did Miss Blaire even have a nervous breakdown?”
Agatha did her best to look innocent, but the look never stuck on her.
“The woman was working on a spell to combine all of Taylor Swift’s songs into the ultimate song. She was basically insane already.”
“Agatha!”
Rio brushed her hands through her hair like she was already at the end of her ropes. She looked like she was about to walk away, so Agatha closed the distance between them and grabbed her forearm to stop her. Rio looked back with a storm brewing in her eyes so Agatha softened. Though she wouldn’t admit it, she had missed her these past few years.
“I’m sorry,” she told her.
Rio seemed stunned at first, but then she shook off her grasp. Agatha let her go without resisting, already missing the warmth of her soft skin against her palm.
“Are you enjoying it, at least?” she asked. “I mean, you must be. It’s been, what, six years?”
Agatha knew exactly how long it had been, but she added a little shrug as she stuffed her hands in her pockets again. Rio still looked angry, but she let out a breath through her nose, as if to push the feeling down for now.
“I love it,” she replied. “I’m glad I didn’t listen to you.”
Agatha did her best to hide her hurt, though there was no hiding it from Rio, who, to her surprise, didn’t seem to relish in it.
“Good. Good for you. Well, I should get back to my room. Lots of unpacking to do. I have some carpeting to tear out before Scratchy chokes on it.”
She walked off, doing her best to look as casual as possible. She was halfway through the greenhouse when Rio shouted after her:
“You know, for a supposed talented witch, you sure are wasting a lot of time trying to open the Road.”
“Just tell me you don’t see the vision,” Agatha replied without turning around.
“I see it, and it doesn’t take a divination witch to see where it leads too.”
Agatha only paused in the doorway, letting Rio’s words of doom sink into her heart, before she exited the greenhouse.