Chapter Text
Sometimes, Rio thought she wasn’t a person at all—just a neglected houseplant.
The kind someone picks up at a fair, waters enthusiastically for the first week, then forgets by a sun-drenched window.
The kind with crooked leaves that grow wherever they can, not where they should.
And yet, she was still alive. Out of stubbornness, maybe. Out of habit. Out of inertia.
Salem was the perfect place for a plant like that to grow. Cold, quiet, and for some reason, stuck in the 1600s for what felt like millions of years.
She had moved there four months ago. It wasn’t exactly pretty, but it was... interesting. More natural than Queens, the last place she’d lived. And darker too.
She couldn’t say the same about the house she stayed in. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson’s home wasn’t interesting or natural. It was a hole. Falling apart, reeking of dead rat, stray cat, and dirty laundry pretty much all the time.
And neither of them made the slightest effort to fix it.
The first thing Rio noticed when she entered was the persistent smell of alcohol—like it had soaked into the walls and fused with the peeling glow-in-the-dark blue paint.
It felt like the house itself was hungover.
The Wilsons weren’t decent people in any sense of the word, and they were absurdly loud. Rio could swear her hearing had dropped at least 2% in the past few months thanks to their constant screaming.
There was only one good thing in that house: Billy.
Billy was eight years old and had an imagination as big as the sadness in his eyes. He was sweet, talked nonstop, said he loved aliens and Mrs. Wilson. Rio wasn’t one to judge. Aliens were cool. Mrs. Wilson... not so much.
Even though Billy was often sick, he was the first person Rio had genuinely liked. Probably in her entire life.
The night before, Billy had a terrible fever. He’d been coughing nonstop, his body shaking like a wilted flower in a storm. Rio stayed up all night watching over him, making sure he kept breathing. That’s why she didn’t have time to brush her hair or do anything else that morning. Not that she really cared.
She could live with that—but apparently, not everyone could.
“Ew, what’s that on your head? Is that... gum?”
Marlen. The obnoxiously blonde cheerleader with the screechy voice and aggressively unpleasant face, laughed behind her.
Rio felt something sticky in her hair. She reached up and found the small piece of gum already fused with her split ends.
All of Marlen’s friends cackled like glamorized hyenas, staring at her like her mere existence was offensive.
She didn’t know what she’d done to earn that kind of hatred. She’d just shown up to class one day, and the cheerleaders decided their new lunch activity would be shoving her into lockers and ruining her hair.
Not that she cared that much. She just... ignored them.
She rolled her eyes with fake indifference.
She grabbed her stuff quickly, trying to keep them from seeing her alien sketches in her notebook. Or the ones of the brown-haired girl in the sparkly purple dress she’d seen in the hallway a few days ago.
But of course. They saw them.
“Wait... is that Aggie?”
Who?
Harper, one of Marlen’s minions, snatched the notebook. She held it up like it was a crime scene exhibit.
“Give it back, Harper…” Rio said, barely above a whisper.
Probably not loud enough.
“Oh my God! Vidal’s into Aggie! I can’t believe it!”
Marlen squealed in fake excitement, shaking a redhead next to her whose name Rio didn’t know. They all turned to look at another girl, sitting a little farther away. A tall brunette in a purple hoodie and jeans.
Agatha Harkness.
A straight-A cheerleader Rio hadn’t even spoken a single word to. She didn’t look much like the girl from the sketch in those jeans.
“Aren’t you gonna say something, Aggs?” asked Marlen, as Agatha just rolled her eyes and scooted a bit farther from the group.
“Yeah, like Aggie would ever want a dirty little rat like you, E.T.”
One of them shoved her, Harper threw the notebook in her face. Rio just walked away, praying they’d leave her alone.
She liked being alone. At peace.
She was like that most of the time anyway.
Not that she had a choice. Nobody wanted to be near her ever since Marlen spread that rumor that she didn’t shower and slept with her dad before school.
She’d once almost shouted, “Joke’s on you, Marlen—I don’t even have a dad!” But she wasn’t about to waste a good punchline (as depressing as it was) on a bargain-bin blonde.
She hurried up to the second floor. There were still at least fifteen minutes before History and Literature. Enough time to try getting the gum out of her hair.
She headed to the bathroom near Room 12—the one that had smelled like cheap cinnamon since some guy broke his vape last week. Rio liked that smell. It felt comforting. Familiar. Fake.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked even worse than she’d expected. Her hair resembled a bird’s nest, and the gum didn’t help.
As a few stubborn tears threatened to fall, she wet the strand and tried to gently pull it out. After a few minutes, she gave up. She grabbed the scissors from her pencil case and cut it off.
Not like she cared that much anyway.
Then she locked herself in the farthest stall. Sat on the toilet. Hugged her knees.
She pressed her arms tightly against her chest. Dug her nails into her skin, trying not to cry over something so stupid.
She didn’t cry over things like this. Not over gum. Not over a screechy cheerleader
Not for scissors.
She wanted to sleep. Disappear. For no one to look for her.
But Ms. Calderu would notice. She always did.
She had a way of noticing everyone.
She sat there for a few minutes.
Thinking a thousand things at once. Trying to ignore the stubborn image of the brown-haired girl in the purple hoodie that refused to leave her mind.
When the bell rang, she got up. Combed her hair as best she could and rushed down the stairs. She walked into the stifling History class.
Ms. Calderu spoke like she was giving a wedding toast instead of teaching. Rio could swear she’d already gone off-topic three times about her exes and brain-eating alien cats. (Okay, maybe that part was exaggerated. Maybe.)
Rio had her elbow on the desk, her chin in her hand, while a spiral of ink crawled down her arm. She was doodling a dinosaur with a prince crown and a lightsaber.
“As you all know,” Lilia began, far too enthusiastic for a Monday at 1 p.m.,
“this semester we’ll be covering the witch trials. And to make it more engaging…”
Don’t do it, thought Rio. She could feel it coming.
“...you’ll be working in pairs.”
A collective groan echoed like the tired sigh of a gym full of socially allergic teenagers.
Rio blinked.
Pairs.
Fantastic.
She hated working in pairs. “Working in pairs” meant “the other person does everything while you try not to breathe too loudly so you don’t screw it up.” Or worse: no one wanted to work with the weird girl who drew aliens and smelled like expired cinnamon vape.
Most of the time, her classmates begged to switch. Sometimes they just ignored her and did the project without her.
It wasn’t the worst thing ever. But if she had to compare it, it was like an emotional cruciatus. Constant. Subtle.
The teacher opened her laptop—where her fate was surely written out.
For a moment, Rio wished she could vanish. That her name would disappear. That someone, somewhere, would pull her out of that school, that town, that world.
“Rio Vidal and Agatha Harkness. Group A.”
Agatha Harkness.
The girl she’d drawn.
A cheerleader. Looked stuck-up.
Great. Just her luck.
Maybe if she just ignored her, Agatha would go ask Lilia to switch.
But she didn’t. Lilia kept reading out names.
Rio scanned the classroom and spotted her. Agatha, writing seriously in her notebook, sitting while Marlen and Harper laughed at something dumb nearby.
Rio was screwed.