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Chapter Text

Agatha was seven years old the first time she tried to run away from home, a squashed tuna sandwich in one pocket and her mother's iPod in the other. She hadn't even decided on a destination yet when one of the Jonas Brothers’ voices died in her ears at the peak of a high note: the iPod's battery had given out when she was only two streets away from her house. According to the clock in her kitchen that she always thought sounded just a tad too similarly to a bomb, she had only been gone a little under an hour, so Agatha ate the sandwich and waited for the battery to recharge before she pursued a second attempt at running away.

Ten years after the fact, she couldn't remember what it was her mother had told her that afternoon before leaving for a late shift that had set her off enough to contemplate leaving home forever, only that on her second journey of the day, around the time she turned onto the first street in her neighbourhood she didn't recognise, her mother's playlist shuffled away from the innocence of Disney pop and something new began to play. She didn’t have the vocabulary then to describe what she heard, only that it sounded old. Except she had only heard that old, buzzing type of music – what Agatha later came to know as the synthetic sound of the eighties – in songs that were happy and exciting, but she could feel a stark difference now.

Who’s gonna tell you when it’s too late?

There was something tragic, something lonely, something undeniably sad about the song – something that sounded a lot like how she felt.

You can’t go on thinkin’ nothing’s wrong.

She wasn’t standing anymore by the time the song faded out, tucked into herself she sat on the curb with her knees bent and played the song again.

Who’s gonna pick you up when you fall?

She had never sat so still for so long before. She pressed the iPod to her chest, wishing she could replace her heart with it, unsure of when she had started or stopped crying, only feeling by the time the song finished again that she was exhausted. When it was over she walked herself back the way she came on shivering legs, longing for home.

If Agatha knew anything now, it was that everything becomes more bearable with music. By the age of seventeen her perceptions of music and self had become so essentially entwined that she understood how to use one to influence the other and knew that neither could exist alone. An up-tempo blend of Bowie and Idol could motivate her through an entire day of previously put-off chores, the right lo-fi mix always sent her to sleep on nights when her insomnia was at its worst, and for days like today, days filled with cardboard boxes and duct tape and lengthy verbal spats with the GPS and bathroom breaks at gas stations, Agatha had a special playlist. It was the first one she ever burned to a CD, topped with shaky handwriting in permanent marker. It read: Once More Unto The Breach.

It was exactly the kind of music her mother hated, claiming that all the songs sounded the same, so three years ago she and Callis had made a deal – she would only play Once More on road trips that started in recently emptied houses and ended in soon-to-be-filled-with-all-their-crap houses. The deal suited Agatha well enough and she never again missed an opportunity to watch the little crease form over the vein in her mother's forehead when she pressed play on the car stereo and Angie McMahon began to wail heartache; after all, Agatha was particularly spiteful on moving days. That was the emotion Once More was created to stimulate: spite, resentment and distasteful, bitter melancholy. These songs would concentrate those feelings into something she recognised and understood – a more manageable seethe that could simmer under the surface of her skin, unseen but remaining present for hours at a time.

Agatha didn’t like to let her emotions ebb and flow as they wished; letting them slip out of her grip only meant they could return at any unexpected moment. No, she far preferred this method. Controlling the music also allowed her to control her mood and after all these years of shifting from town to town, wherever her mother was needed, Agatha was more than familiar with the exhausted anger that would arise within her. It was second nature to her when that feeling reared its resentful head to slip Once More into the CD slot of her mother’s car, readying herself to hold onto her silent anger for the entirety of their journey so that when they would finally arrive in whatever town her mother had ushered her into this time, she could turn the music off, release the tension in her jaw and shoulders, and begin unloading boxes from the car.

Adversely, her unpacking music consisted of an upbeat blend of nostalgic early 2000s club songs – the kind you haven’t listened to for over a decade but when it happens to come up unexpectedly on the radio one day you’re astonished to find you still remember all the lyrics to Pitbull’s rap interlude. This was out of necessity, for her own sanity and Callis’s. One mix to hold the tension. Another to release it. A hundred more for any emotion, any occasion, scattered between CDs and mixtapes and Spotify playlists – an always accessible score to her life that ensured Agatha would never be out of control of her feelings.

The drive was, this time at least, considerably shorter than their previous move. There had been no overnight stays in questionable motels, although the price for that was waking up before the dawn to oversee the loading of the moving van. Once they had shoved and stacked the last of their suitcases into the backseat of Callis’s car there wasn’t a spare second for so much as a final glance at the house that had served them well for nearly eight months before Callis was chasing the highway like it was trying to run from her, which meant Agatha could have no hope for additional sleep until they arrived wherever they were headed. Agatha had enough trouble sleeping most nights in a comfortable bed cocooned with soft blankets, so apparently a catch-up nap in a moving vehicle was a highly unreasonable request to make of her body.

By the time her mother’s Volvo rolled them into what could only be described as the latest in a string of generic neighbourhoods Agatha had lived in, the CD had just begun its third loop and even Agatha was admittedly growing a little sick of Angie belting her misfortunes into the confined space of their car.

“Would you look at that,” her mother cooed, not really expecting her to look out the window, “Nice of them to put us up in a two-storey this time.”

They had lived in large houses before, just as they had lived in tiny apartments with expensive furnishings that were supposed to make up for the fact her mother’s work had more than once forgotten she had a home-schooling teenager that dragged along behind her and shockingly needed a place to sleep. No doubt Callis’s colleagues had been irked when Agatha decided to kick up such a fuss about not having a desk or a cupboard or a bed to call her own instead of standing in the corner quietly like the rest of the ornaments, but they were eventually relocated to a two-bedroom apartment on a lower floor. Her mother wasn’t wrong about the double storey being a relief, though when Agatha finally inspected the house – after ejecting Once More to return it to its own home in a recycled and slightly cracked plastic CD case – she saw that it was by no means the biggest house they’d ever been put up in. It did still manage to have a very small-town America quality about it, despite the lack of a white picket fence.

Callis strode ahead, lugging her own suitcases up the few steps to the house – “Look, Agatha. It has a porch and all!” – while Agatha struggled to keep her duffel bag hovering above the dirt rather than dragging through it, the weight nearly toppling her as she climbed the three perfectly white steps.

“What do you think Agatha, have we finally found our Warbucks mansion?” Callis’s cheer was undercut with the jingling of keys turning in the lock and a faint sprinkler somewhere to their right.

“More like a reverse Doctor Who,” Agatha said as the door swung into an entryway which was also the living room which was also the dining room. Her mother frowned a little, searching for a meaning to the reference. Agatha gestured to the multipurpose space, “Smaller on the inside.”

One would think after all this time Agatha would have become used to the smell of fresh paint, but she suspected she would never fully acclimate to the way the stench burned in her nostrils. The stink of new beginnings flooded the entire first floor of the house, so – knowing from Callis's boasts that the bedrooms upstairs had been repainted the previous week to ensure the usual worries that came with every new move would not have to include potentially dying of paint fumes in their sleep – Agatha instead set her sights on the stairs. She gripped her bag a little tighter, readying to lift it up the wooden staircase that looked so cramped in the corner of the room she imagined it was afraid to be stepped on and naturally shrunk away at the sight of such bipedal fiends as herself – or maybe the architect had just miscalculated the size of the room, which explained why everything from the kitchen counters to the brick fireplace looked a little squashed. She almost felt bad for the small space which would only shrink with every new box the movers stacked in the centre of the room.

To give credit to the staircase, although the orange-brown wood hardly looked new, it didn't squeak under her weight as she had expected it to. If she was the kind of seventeen-year-old to sneak out of the house she would have been overjoyed by this discovery but being the kind of seventeen-year-old she was – one that often crept into the kitchen for long-after-midnight snacks – she was still fairly pleased.

There was not much more room for air upstairs, though the little oxygen available was cleaner and blissfully paint free, as the house continued to fascinate her with its tight hallways and windows with frames of much darker and smoother wood than the staircase. They had looked so large from the outside but now that she was stood behind them, she realised that despite their size, they let in very little light. There were three identical doors – two bedrooms, one ensuite, and an additional bathroom upstairs, the text Agatha had read over her mother's shoulder had said. She chose the one nearest the top of the staircase to begin with, surprised at how desperate she was to lose the weight of the duffel bag she carried, at least for a few months – which, she guessed, would also be how long it would take to pop her right shoulder back into its socket.

It had been a good guess, not the thought about her aching shoulder but the door she had picked. Judging by the size of the room and the lack of an ensuite it was clear she was not standing in the master bedroom. The floor was not smooth, varnished wood like downstairs, but covered from corner to corner with the same short, grey carpet that stretched over the upstairs hallways that were sparsely dappled with what little sunlight found its way through the deceptive windows. She had one of her own, as well as a sliding glass door that looked out onto a small, empty balcony. That was not something the estate agent had mentioned in his text. The room itself was an odd shape, resembling something close to a misshapen Tetris block.

All in all, it was okay. She had no real complaints and was not actually so picky as she might pretend to be to her mother – usually Agatha only had so many judgements because she liked to draw comparisons. To keep notes on houses and towns, meaningless statistics she always meant to put into a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint or an essay that would one day effortlessly transition into a TedTalk, but she never seemed to get around to it. Probably for the best, she thought as she wandered to touch each wall of her new bedroom, the similarities and subtle but ultimately unimportant varieties of American suburbs wouldn't make for very exciting content.

A flash of gold caught her eye, startling her back to centre of the room where she stood facing the sliding door. She moved closer, inspecting the balcony and beyond, more than a little horrified to realise she had missed something so crucial about the room: it directly faced a window into their neighbour's home. Agatha did not stop until she was nearly pressed up against the glass, urged on by her curiosity – curious, not nosy – and saw the golden thing again. Hair, she could clearly see it now, curly, grown out, golden-blonde hair. She thought it belonged to a man but couldn't quite make out his face from the frantic way he moved about what she assumed was his own bedroom. He pulled open the top drawer of a dresser and began tugging clothes out haphazardly, dropping every item at his feet with no further inspection, besides one shirt he held briefly to his nose before wrinkling them – his nose and the shirt – and tossing the offending article into a far corner of the room Agatha couldn't spy from where she was standing.

She never got to see what it was he was hunting for. After what couldn't have been more than a second or two of watching – very different from stalking – something thudded below her feet, the collapse of an object loud enough to be heard upstairs. Likely something had been dropped or just set down too hard, but Agatha was suddenly eager to find out what it was, even if it meant braving the smell of paint and her mother's optimistic outlook on life. She needed to get out of the room; she needed to get away from the glass door before she was caught doing… whatever it was she was doing.

It wasn't stalking, she reasoned in the hallway. You need to be interested to stalk, she thought as she reached the foot of the staircase.

As it turned out, one of the movers had lost his grip whilst carrying Agatha's armchair and the chair's right back leg now had a decent-sized chip in it. It wasn't a big deal, not at that moment anyway. She wouldn't realise for another three days that the chair now permanently sat at a slight angle and rocked her off-balance every time she so much as breathed whilst sitting in it, but presently Agatha rested her elbows against the banister, waiting for her mother's attention to turn to her. It only took three repetitions of "Mom" for Callis to finally look in her direction, her eyes darting up from her notebook in a frown.

"Your stereo is in box number three, Agatha." She looked down again and seemed poised to rush outside and out of her daughter's reach for presumably the rest of the day.

"No," Agatha jumped at her only chance to speak to Callis about the situation upstairs, pushing away from the banister and off the bottom step to land right in front of her mother.

"I mean, that's not what I meant," she explained. "There's a problem with my room."

"Oh?" Callis questioned, dropping her notebook to her hip so as to afford whatever "problem" had arisen the appropriate amount of attention it needed.

Agatha explained the sliding door – Callis taking a moment to similarly remark that the estate agent had failed to mention it – and the balcony, and most importantly the view they both offered.

"It looks right into some guy's bedroom. I can see everything that's going on in there," not that I wanted to; it was five seconds, so sue me, "Which means he can probably see everything going on in here too."

Callis paused for a brief moment to deliberate the dilemma her daughter had presented. Agatha wasn't sure what answer she really expected.

You're so right, Agatha. This is an invasion of privacy. We should vacate such a house immediately; in fact, let's never come back to this neighbourhood. Why don't we just move back to our old place, or even our old, old, old place, the one in Oregon you liked so much, and I'll stay on at the hospital as a general surgeon. I'll say no to the next job, we won't ever have to move again. We'll be done with boxes and paint and boys who stand outside your window looking like Disney princes whilst not knowing you exist.

She doesn't say that, and although Agatha knows it probably would have been a strange statement, she still would have liked to hear it – or something like it. Instead, what she hears is:

"Well, in that case, the curtains are in box number five."

Chapter Text

Sometime after the moving van drove away, weighing far less than it had since dawn, Agatha had, rather than attempting to fix, clean or further unpack anything, instead spread herself out on the dull grey carpet of her bedroom floor, feet propped up on a box and crossed at the ankles. She worried faintly as she hovered her phone inches from her face that it might fall at any moment. It would be far from the first time that had happened, evidenced by the subtle bend in the bridge of her nose. It was early evening and after balancing on a stepladder for nearly an hour – thankfully without any further sighting of her neighbour – to hang the thick curtains designed to block out any and all sunlight, Agatha was satisfied enough with her progress to collapse to the floor in search of some catharsis.

If only her Walkman weren’t crammed somewhere between her hoodies and jeans in the box with a giant number seven drawn on the side that she was currently resting her socked feet on; Agatha was certain the mix of late-aughts rock she had recorded on a blank cassette three weeks ago would suit her current mood well, but she wasn't desperate enough to hunt down a boxcutter in order to retrieve it. She substituted this by scrolling through her Spotify likes, swiping right to add any songs to her queue that felt reasonably similar to her mood. At some point Callis appeared to place the neatly folded squares of Agatha's sheets and pillowcases at the foot of her bed, then slipped away for some well-deserved rest. She failed to close the door behind her and Agatha cringed at the way it swayed back and forth, smacking itself against the doorframe repeatedly. It was lucky Agatha dropped her arm to the carpet, allowing her phone to slip out of her hand as she sat up. If she had still been in the same upside down, phone-hovering position when the notification came through, she would have no doubt lost her grip on the device and been forced to stand up to nurse a nosebleed, but as the phone vibrated against the carpet, Agatha was in the process of stretching herself out as far as she could reach to close her bedroom door with a socked foot, pushing until she heard the tell-tale click.

Behind her the pop-up she would not read until the door was secure and she had settled her back against the carpet again flashed the words: @witchofthewoods posted a photo. In thirty seconds, she would see it and consider swiping away – not seriously, just enough to feel good about herself, and then worse when she ultimately clicked the notification anyway. She would go through the motions of trying to pull a fitted sheet over her bare mattress one-handed and give up after a surprisingly short attempt, choosing to climb underneath her comforter and ball up the hoodie she had been wearing all day to use as a pillow. And then she would scroll, and scroll, and scroll…

The sun watched their new house unblinkingly every day for the next week, turning their driveway into a stovetop. Although Agatha had researched the quaint town of Gavaldon since her arrival and even looked at bus schedules to calculate the most efficient means of visiting the public library, she couldn't bring herself to take more than two steps outside their front door before the heat would slither inside her hoodie, sticking the dark fabric to her rapidly dampening skin – it hardly seemed worth it, she had unpacked most of her own books by now and hey, there was always Kindle. Day by day the air grew heavy with humidity, no accompanying breeze to dampen the effects, forcing Agatha to keep her windows shut at all times for fear the very oxygen in her lungs, warmer and thicker than her mother's vegetable soup, would choke her in her sleep. A small plastic fan buzzed on her desktop, providing some small relief as she slept on top of her comforter and felt the semi-cold air tickle her legs. On the third day of relentless sunshine, she sat at the dining table and took twice as long as she normally would have to write out what should have been a simple essay. She could feel her skull sagging towards her shoulders and marvelled at how every bone in her body had not yet melted.

And finally, after six days of immersion in the kind of heatwave that must surely have inspired Dante to write his Inferno, Agatha awoke to a single white cloud, hanging low enough for her to spy it through the window next to her bed. Things improved after that. By late afternoon, Agatha was so grateful to taste fresh air again that shoving every window in the house as wide as they could possibly open was simply not enough. A beach towel pilfered from her mother's bathroom cabinet under one arm, Agatha made her way out onto her balcony and slid her headphones – the ones that had taken up residency around her neck since she finally fished out her Walkman – over her ears. She watched the clouds, now numerous and large, joining together to form fluffy, irregular shapes, and tapped her foot to the Pretty Reckless, keeping time as though she were in the band herself, imagining the pedal of a kickdrum beneath her boot. At some point a bird landed on the railing that stood between her and her neighbour's window – thankfully, the boy was nowhere to be found; by now she had almost convinced herself she had imagined him – and though it flapped its wings about while opening and closing its beak excitedly, Agatha could hear no noise it might have been making.

That was it for her life, she reckoned. Kitchen table studies. Home-cooked meals when her mother had the time, defrosted fish sticks and scrambled eggs when she didn't. Slightly more bearably sunny days, though she wished for rain every time she saw a cloud with even the slightest tint of grey. New house. New neighbourhood. Same routine. She had settled into her bedroom as best she could, feeling more comfortable now that her music was organised on slightly battered rebuilt Ikea shelves and stacked on top of her dresser, even if she had had to store a few boxes beneath her bed. The specific moodiness that came with moving had ebbed somewhat, settling instead into the general moodiness that was Agatha's resting state.

On the Wednesday, two weeks after the Woods women had moved in, Callis burst through Agatha's door, several hours earlier than her daughter expected her home. Agatha's eyes had been glued to her Social Studies textbook, absentmindedly fiddling with the corner of a page until a tiny crease formed. Her study mix – made up largely of instrumentals from various animated film scores – was turned up to a volume that would not have been unreasonable had Agatha been as alone as she thought when the intrusion occurred.

Agatha's whole body jerked as the door slammed open with a violent swing, her heart rattling hard enough for her not to consider how the stereo must have seemed near deafening to her mother from where she stood; her thoughts were more focused on the necessary steps for identifying a heart attack.

"What were you thinking?" Agatha had to shout to be heard over the music and was more than a little surprised to see her mother existing in her room without feeling the need to press her hands to her ears; she was not even frantically pointing to the stereo in a desperate plea for Agatha to turn it off. Callis merely smiled – no, beamed. Ecstatic energy seemed to radiate out of her pores, positivity acting as some sort of shield from the music Agatha finally crossed her room to turn off. When she was seated cross-legged on her bed again, tucked away enough for her mother to join her if she wanted to, she asked, a little more patiently, "Did you get off work early?"

"I have a surprise for you," Callis said, ignoring Agatha's question entirely – she was beginning to worry there had been some accident at the hospital today that had left her mother deaf. Callis took half a step before collapsing on the free side of Agatha's twin bed, the frame of which just barely fit into the oddly shaped nook – much to their relief – which was the only reasonable place in the room for it. "And yes," she continued with a sigh that Agatha's ears recognised as slightly less exhausted than usual, "Dr. Manley swapped tonight's late shift with me for the early one tomorrow; forgot a brunch his wife has had scheduled for at least a month. Who was I to pass up the appeal of ordering takeout from my armchair instead of my desk? Of course, I do feel for my patients…" Her voice petered out slightly as though she was imagining exactly how Manley's practices differed from her own. Agatha had heard enough about her mother’s new colleague over the last few weeks to spare the patients a sizeable amount of pity.

"He is a prickly sort," Callis muttered, then shook the thought away. "But no bother, on to the main event of the evening."

Agatha had long since closed her textbook, though she continued to flip through the pages while her mother spoke. Her mind was in two places at once, mentally swiping left and right on the various fast-food chains that she had already memorised within delivery range, and present enough in the conversation with her mother to add to it, "Mm, yes. You mentioned a surprise."

Maybe it’s a lock for my door, she thought with a hint of spite, but Callis seemed so genuinely excited to share her news that Agatha couldn't bring herself to ruin the moment.

"Right, so, this surprise involves something good and something bad," Callis started, not breaking her smile when she saw Agatha's face fall, "Or really, it might be two good things, depending on how you look at it. I definitely only see good, but you might be concerned by the challenge, and probably will be, considering the need for it in the first place—"

"Mom," Agatha cut in; if she hadn't interjected there was no telling how long her mother might have rambled for. The hardest part of having Callis for a doctor, one nurse had told Agatha when she was small and still tagged along with her mother to work on occasions when no babysitter could be found on short notice, was that her patients had nothing to fear when they were in her hands, if they didn't collapse from the stress of waiting for her to tell them their diagnosis first.

"Sorry." Her smile was dented by a slight cringe in her cheeks, and she carried on a little slower, "Anyway, with no further ado." If she expected a drum-roll from Agatha, she didn't get one but revealed the colourful stub of paper that had been hiding in the front pocket of her jeans anyway. Agatha lunged forward to grab the ticket the moment she saw the eccentric red and black lettering:

COVEN 66 – One night only, LIVE at the Gavaldon Palladium.

Agatha pinched the ticket so tightly between her index fingers and thumbs she feared she would accidentally rip it in half. She uttered phrases at random, everything that came to mind at that moment, unpredictable combinations of You have to be kidding me and How and But seriously, this is a joke, right and Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Callis accepted her praise humbly, and really it would fascinate Agatha later how she took the thanks without a hint of remorse for what she was about to say next. "The thing is, dear, there is a catch."

There was nothing in that moment Agatha wouldn't have agreed to, though she barely had time to wonder what the other side of the coin may have entailed when Callis dug her hand into her pocket once more, drawing from it a second ticket. The identical text stood out just as bold as the one Agatha held in her own hand and for a moment she stared at the words, failing to make sense of the duplicate. Surely her mother didn't intend to join her at the concert – Agatha was well aware of Callis's self-appointed rule about never engaging in social situations where she could not hear herself think.

"The tickets are for you and…" Callis started after what seemed like a decade of silence, then stopped and pinched the corners of her mouth into something that might have been a smile to anyone but Agatha, who only saw a nervous grimace, "A friend."

Inside her chest, Agatha’s heart rattled again, as though every door in the neighbourhood had slammed open at the same time. "I don't understand," she said.

"I'm worried about you, Agatha."

She felt conflicted about this statement, one side of her brain groaning, There's nothing to worry about, I'm doing just fine, while the other mumbled, Duh, why wouldn't you be?

All she verbalised was, "Oh. Are you?" Flat, dull, almost bored. She crossed her arms over her chest, uncomfortable with how still the room became every time one of them reached the end of a sentence. Agatha felt that silence sucked all the air out of a room, leaving behind an uncomfortable heat that prickled her skin. She wanted Callis to leave, to go downstairs and pull up Netflix on her phone while burning something on their new stove so Agatha could dig out the box of LPs beneath her bed and start up her record player; something she hadn't had a chance to do since they'd moved in.

"The thing is, dear, I can't recall the last time you met someone new. You have all the opportunity and ample free time but no matter where we go you seem resigned to the four walls of your bedroom."

Until we move again. She thought of cracking open the window – or climbing out of it – but was too stubborn to break her mother's stare.

Callis sighed. Their hair was usually of a similar length, strands the colour of a cold lake in the dead of night falling just below their ears, but Callis hadn't been to the hairdresser for months and didn't trust herself or Agatha enough with the scissors. With how quickly her own hair grew, Agatha was in the habit of trimming her ends every two weeks in the bathroom mirror. Not being used to the length, now falling past her shoulders, Callis would forget to tie her fringe back and resort to irritably tucking it behind her ears whenever it covered her eyes. When she sighed, it was so deep her whole torso sagged in on itself, her shoulders rounding, the skin beneath her eyes more purple than it had seemed before. Agatha still refused to look away.

"My deal, challenge, whatever you want to call it, is this," Callis finally said, "You can go to the Coven 66 concert next month, only if you find a peer to accompany you."

Agatha could feel her uneven nails through the sleeve of her thick, woollen sweater as sharply as if her arms were bare. "Mom, that's insane."

"Not so insane as refusing to speak to more than one person for three years."

Agatha squeezed her arm a little tighter. "I talk to people."

"Grocery clerks and librarians don’t count, Agatha."

"That's a little classist, Mom."

They were, as per usual, at an impasse. Neither seemed willing to budge despite the fact that both sides of the argument had reached their natural conclusions. Were either of them to continue, there would be nothing left to throw at each other besides childish insults.

Callis budged first, which was also usual for them, and tried to ease the tension out of her jaw, "It's up to you, ultimately. But please, Agatha, try." She held one hand out and Agatha didn't need to be told to relinquish the ticket.

Her mother left then, leaving the door open just enough that Agatha had to follow behind her to close it. Agatha didn't feel confident that she could set up the record player without breaking something at that moment, so she jabbed the button that brought the stereo back to life, hardly hearing what played despite it still being set to the maximum volume. She grabbed her pillow, gripping and twisting it – screaming into it felt a little melodramatic, though she briefly considered the idea. Instead, she collapsed backwards onto her bed and placed the pillow over her face, muffling the sounds of Callis banging about the kitchen downstairs.

Okay, she thought, Not ideal.

Callis knew very well that Agatha wasn't going to let an opportunity like this pass her by, no matter how inconvenient the means to achieve it were. She was clever, and that required Agatha to be even more so if she ever wanted to gain the upper hand. There was no question about it, Agatha would get her golden ticket through any means possible – she just hoped she could think of an ulterior method of doing so before giving in to Callis's challenge.

Agatha tossed the pillow off, hearing it land somewhere near the door. Instantly regretting this, she groaned and rolled herself onto her feet, dragging herself over to where the pillow had ragdolled against the wall between her door and dresser, but as she reached down to pick it up, her eyes met another pair, blue and wide and nearly so shocked as herself, through her partially open curtains. The boy in the room across from her had apparently only just noticed the strange viewing arrangement. He recovered far quicker than she did and let his confused expression shift into something pleasant and neighbourly; he even raised his hand in a welcoming wave. A wide grin affected all of his features at once. It was a smile that looked so genuine, the boy was probably used to most people melting within seconds of first laying eyes on him.

Agatha scrunched her nose, imagining how uncomfortable it must be to move every single muscle in your face whenever you smile and stomped forward to close the curtains without offering so much as a nod of acknowledgement in her neighbour's direction. With that awkward exchange taken care of, she turned and began to pace across her room, aware of how much static her socks must have been charging as she walked back and forth over the carpet. She wracked her brain for excuses to make, bargains to plead for, even pitiful begging tactics that she knew would never work on her mother, all the while the CD in her stereo blaring the Howl's Moving Castle theme began to work on her nerves. She eventually turned the player off and swapped it for her Walkman; the tape inside it labelled Teen Angst Bullshit was something she had not yet tired of playing after two weeks on repeat.

When the pizza arrived, Agatha did not have to wait for her mother's text, she heard the front door open as clearly as if she'd been stood right next to it, followed by slightly muffled niceties from her mother. She dragged herself down the staircase, nearly slipping in her socks as she moved, sluggish and unfocused. An odour from downstairs, sweet and slightly burnt, mixed with the smell of the pizza and tangled together as the scent wafted up the staircase. The whole thing had Agatha feeling vaguely ill. Callis had already dished up for herself and settled comfortably in the living room by the time Agatha reached the kitchen and pulled a plate from the cupboard at her knees.

"When you've finished, I've got a batch of brownies in the oven I want you to try," Callis called over her shoulder, not seeing the burning look her daughter was trying to redirect away from her and toward the pizza box on the counter – which was quite innocent in the whole matter, "It's a new recipe. I was thinking of making some this weekend and bringing them 'round to the neighbours." Her cheerful mood had returned so radiantly no one but Agatha would believe how tired and frustrated she had seemed less than an hour ago.

Agatha tucked herself up on her armchair – vintage, gingham fabric stitched in dark, earthy shades of wet dirt and grass – just next to Callis's – tanned leather, a little more expensive and capable of reclining – and half-listened to the words that tumbled from her mother’s mouth so quickly Agatha worried she might choke on the bites of pizza she managed to snatch in between sentences. "It's always good to know a few friendly faces when you're new. Did I tell you? I met the woman just across from us – Uma, I think her name was – and her husband when I was bringing in the bins yesterday. They seemed nice, but it was just a quick hello."

Callis only took two seconds to pause and swallow a mouthful of cheese and mushrooms, "And then just to our left, there's a young man – well, I wouldn't say young, but certainly younger than you'd expect for someone with a teenager."

Agatha nearly lost hold of the plate she had balanced on her knees. She swallowed around the lump in her throat, "Surely, you don't mean—"

"The boy across from you, yes. I believe he's about your age, though I only got a brief look at him when they drove off yesterday morning. He and his father – at least, I think that was his father – were on their way to the school terribly early..."

Callis did not stop her musing, and when she had recounted every person from their new neighbourhood she had so far seen or spoken to, began explaining why exactly this new brand of brownie mix would be the winner she'd been waiting for – "No more charred outsides or under-cooked insides!" – but Agatha had long since stopped paying attention, too focused on the plan that had begun to formulate in her mind. 

Chapter Text

In his dream, he walked into class. His usual seat was taken by a student with a blurry face – everyone's faces were blurry, misshapen clouds atop bodies of sharp limbs. This didn't seem odd to him, he only made a note to be careful after class about bumping into people to avoid having a dagger-like elbow pierce his side.

He’d only just arrived, but the period was already over. The bell screamed as everyone ran from the room. Elbows and knees sliced through his clothes, nicking his skin. He stumbled, disoriented by the onrushing crowd. A flood of bodies crashing over him. A riot of movement and yet no sound. Their feet silent against the tiles, the whole world quiet, save for the bell that rang and rang and rang…

Tedros opened his eyes to a dull light; the room tinted with the faintest hue of orange. Every streak spotlit the dust particles that swirled through the air. The world felt numbed by the kind of silence that might have been peaceful to anyone else, but the quiet only reminded Tedros of the dream that, although he would have been happy for it to fade as quickly as his dreams often did, remained there like the burn in your eyelids after looking into the sun. He cleared his throat just to hear the sound, then coughed, feeling the echo bounce off the walls of his living room. He was the only person in the house and knew he would be free to lie on the couch making as much noise as he needed to until he felt certain that he had returned to the real world and left that bright, hellish silence behind. He couldn't see his phone on the coffee table but didn't remember putting it there before he fell asleep anyway. In fact, he couldn’t remember anything he had been doing before he fell asleep – just the vague, exhausted thought as he walked through the front door that sitting down for a minute wouldn't be so bad, he had at least two hours before he had to leave again.

Tedros jumped when that same bell rang again – this time he recognised it as his phone. It screeched from below and he swiped a lazy arm beneath the couch where it must have fallen when he passed out. He knew the face he would see before he even saw the caller ID. Red hair and freckles filled up his screen and his chest swelled with anxious anticipation.

Tedros had yet to find any sound in the last eighteen years that dissolved silence as effectively as Yara’s voice. Her laugh alone was like acid to the ears – but, you know, in a good way. Sweetly corrosive. It ate away at silence, seeking it out in every tiny corner of the room, filling all the empty spaces with the sound of her laughter. She wasn’t laughing now.

He had clocked the time in the corner of his screen only at the second he swiped to answer the call. At the realisation that his nap had run over by half an hour, it was too late to improvise an excuse. The worst part of the familiar tone of disappointment that desaturated the voice he’d been so ecstatic to hear only a moment ago, was how unsurprised it seemed.

“Why this time?” she asked in place of a greeting.

More often lately, Tedros had noticed a resistance building within his girlfriend of little more than a year, best friend of a whole lot longer. Inside herself, she seemed to be constructing a resignation of brick and mortar, stacking together one patient piece at a time. Through every mistake, every unkept promise, he could feel her turning into someone that wanted more but was learning not to expect it.

It turned his stomach to admit he was at all responsible for dulling the most vibrant person he’d ever known, that with every careless act he chipped away at the Yara that once poured neon pink paint on his sneakers the day after he’d missed their second ever date and forgot to call with an explanation, revealing beneath her the Yara that told him it was “fine” he was already ten minutes late to picking her up for their anniversary dinner.

“I actually called ahead to change our time slot a couple days ago.” He imagined her smiling weakly as she explained. “Just in case.”

He multitasked motor-mouthing apologies and sprinting up the staircase, nearly twisting his ankle when he missed a step he could have sworn ducked out of the way just to humiliate him further. Wouldn’t that just be the cherry? Coming through Yara’s end of the line with a thudding tumble and pained cry. He wouldn’t blame her not to pity him if it happened but knew she would anyway.

His phone died then, cutting him off midway through a half-hearted promise that he was already on his way. He should have seen that coming. After all, the universe dictated that screw-ups always had to come in threes – except, of course, on those special days when it came in fours. Or sevens. He bounded in two striding leaps from the top of the staircase into his bedroom, his shoulders tense from both the lumpy couch and his lie to Yara.

He pulled drawers out at random, dug through the unsorted piles of laundry on his floor with the sanity and speed of a deranged graverobber. There was a decently clean, sky-blue button-up he had planned to wear this evening somewhere in all this mess. He finally located it in a plastic basket beneath a mountain of unmatched socks. All the while, he mentally mapped out every possible nook and cranny he might have to check in the search for his only appropriate pair of leather shoes – in the likely event they wouldn't be hiding anywhere remotely near his cupboard. So thoroughly distracted, he did not notice the face staring at him until he dove for his phone charger, a tangled knot of wire hanging off his windowsill. By the time he spotted movement inside the building he had always thought of as “the empty house next door”, it was only a momentary flurry as something rushed out of frame. It didn’t occur to him that someone might have been watching him, after all, he had never seen a single person enter or leave the house. More likely, a bat had somehow found its way inside.

He tied his laces twice to pre-empt any more attempts on his life by spiteful staircases, scooped up the corpse of his phone alongside the means to revive it, and raced out to Lance’s truck, stopping briefly to note the moving van parked next door and the dark-haired girl on the porch sporting a pair of wired earphones. Huh.

By the time he returned from his date with Yara that first afternoon he saw his new neighbour – feeling several inches smaller than he had before taking his ill-fated nap – thick curtains cascaded between them. That was probably for the best. His curiosity was an unruly thing, and with the strange positioning of his window allowing him to look directly into the adjacent house, a piece of dark fabric would more consistently ensure her privacy than his own self-restraint.

In the days since, he saw only glimpses of the girl he had first thought to be a bat – in all fairness, it wasn’t an unreasonable comparison. Once, walking home from the bus stop on a rare evening when Lance needed the car, he allowed himself several seconds to peek through the front windows of the newly occupied house. At first, he thought he was seeing double. Her mother could have been her twin, the only real difference being slightly longer hair and eyes that weren’t quite so large, though that may just have been from the exhausted way they seemed to rest permanently half-closed, as though she were ready to fall asleep standing.

Although he had never been inside the house next door, he had been told that it was a mirror image to his own. Both homes had been built by the same architect and, according to the estate agent that pitched theirs to his mom and Lance, were nearly identical. One of the only differences evident from the outside was that, instead of having a large window like Tedros’s, the room across had a sliding door exiting onto a small balcony, jutting out from the side of the house. Sometimes, it looked close enough for Tedros to reach out and climb between the two structures, but he knew all too well that that was not the case.

He saw her next coming home from Tuesday practice. Chaddick spotted her first as he slowed his car outside Tedros’s house.

“Did someone move in?” he asked, leaning over Tedros for a better view out the window, “I can’t believe it, do you see that? There’s actually a person on that balcony. Remember that time you tried to jump—”

“Yeah, Chad. How am I supposed to forget?” Tedros rolled his eyes, shoving his friend back onto the driver’s side of the car. “Do you remember almost slicing off your finger in shop? Or getting stung by that bee in the middle of a scrum?”

Chaddick winced, “You’ve made your point.”

By the time Tedros re-entered his room, stumbling as he kicked off his togs, he could see that the balcony was once more vacant. Only an empty water glass was left behind in the girl’s haste to retreat. That, coupled with Chaddick actually seeing her, was truthfully a relief. Some part of him had really begun to wonder whether his new neighbours were some sort of stress-induced hallucination. Lance had yet to mention them and, although he kept an ear out about any new students enrolling at Gavaldon High, as far as he knew, no one had started in the last week since they arrived. Now that he knew she was indeed real, it was probably only a matter of time before they were settled and he started seeing her in the school hallways.

He waited days for something to change. Froze every time he saw short, black hair in the parking lot or watching from the bleachers – scared the hell out of one freshman he almost ran down to get a better look at their face. It was never her. One week rolled over into the next and he thought, Surely. He believed that, come Monday, Professor Sader would introduce the class to a new student, just moved here a few weeks ago. Instruct them all to welcome her and finally, finally…

“It’s weird though, right?” he complained into the phone, “Or am I just a total stalker?”

Yara giggled, confirming that she was still paying attention, “Two things can be true at once.”

He’d called to bother her out of boredom and despite having isolated herself every day this week to finish an art project, she allowed her boyfriend the courtesy of lamenting to her over speakerphone.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come over?”

She scoffed, not for the first time, “Your presence is disruptive to the creative process.”

“But I’m talking to you right now, what’s the difference?”

“This is more like…” she stopped, either to think of an end to her phrase or to focus on touching up some delicate detail, “Listening to a podcast. A really boring true crime podcast about a guy stalking his neighbour.”

“Can we at least switch to video so I can see how it’s coming along?”

“Nope,” she popped the “p”, solidifying her word as final. “You’ll see it Monday; you can criticise it then.”

“When have I ever—” he started in defence.

“Last year, art final. Oil pastels on canvas.”

He thought back to what he could have told her that would warrant such a grudge. “All I said was it’s really blue. Like, nothing but blue.”

“It was a monochromatic piece.”

He sunk a little deeper into the sofa, “Sorry. Did I say sorry already?” He had.

Practice had ended early today, leaving Tedros without any plans for the afternoon. Chaddick, of course, invited him to join the team for lunch, without any real hope he would accept. He hardly ever spent time with his teammates off the field, these days.

“You should’ve gone,” Yara said, more quietly than before, “They could’ve kept you entertained.”

“You know I wouldn’t.”

She wouldn’t have been mad if he had gone. She would’ve been understanding, supportive even, of him wanting to bond with the guys for “team-building purposes”. Which was exactly why he would still choose a fifteen-minute phone call with her over a night out with them any day. “Understanding” and “supportive” were some of the last words he would ever use to describe his team.

“It’s not like I’m avoiding them I just—you know how it is. Gets out of hand too fast and next thing you know, I’m trying to knock Aric’s teeth out in the Arby’s parking lot.”

“In that case, you should definitely go next time.” Her brush clinked against a glass as she washed it.

He hauled himself off his bed, restless with energy that had not been sufficiently exercised out of him.

“Can I see you tomorrow?” he asked, increasingly desperate.

“I won’t be done.”

“Thursday, then, after practice. I’ll have the truck; we can go anywhere. I’ll drive you to Italy, if you want.”

She grabbed her phone, switching off speaker mode so he could hear her more clearly, “I’ve got ballet class.”

“I’ll pick you up,” he bargained, “Then Italy.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement coming from his neighbour’s bedroom. He hadn’t realised since coming home that she had left her curtains open. She had thrown something from one side of the room to the other and was stretching herself out of bed to reach for it.

It took Tedros a second to realise that Yara had spoken again. “Sorry, what?”

“I said I really need to focus for now, okay? Then I won’t feel guilty for slacking off in Italy. Love you.”

“Love—” he started, freezing before he could finish as he came face to face with his neighbour.

Large, dark eyes watched him without blinking, framed by a bob of shiny black hair. Loose strands clung to her ears and chin like ink dripping from her scalp.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been a pretty horror movie-esque sight, but somehow the whole image seemed utterly correct. Despite having never seen a blank, white face with bulging eyes staring at him from the window he’d looked into every day of his childhood, if anyone was going to exist inside that looming bulk of a house, it might as well be her.

It did occur to Tedros then that his thoughts regarding his neighbour were growing moderately obsessive. He couldn’t say what it was that intrigued him so much. Maybe it was simply the tantalising frustration of someone being so close yet so untouchable. Never, in all the years since his family moved into the neighbourhood, had he seen an actual person on that balcony, sitting behind that sliding door, moving through the house, turning lights periodically on and off. The building had sat, dark and dead, for as long as he’d known it, and now suddenly it was lived in. Someone now existed in the space just outside his window, but only when she knew he was not around to see her. Hiding behind blackout curtains, earphones perpetually hanging down connected to a Walkman – seriously, who even has one of those? In all likelihood, if he could only speak to her – learn her name, at least – it was possible he would cease to care, altogether.

Gavaldon was boring. He knew everyone and everything. Every corner of the town, every face at his games. If handed a pen and paper, he could sketch out the roads that made up Gavaldon and scribble in every crack in every sidewalk to boot.

But he didn’t know her. Who she was, where she’d come from, why she had yet to show her face at school. For as much as not knowing irked him, he almost hoped it would last. That if nothing else, at least one small piece of Gavaldon had the privilege of remaining a mystery. That one or even two people were allowed to live unknown within its borders.

He waved, feeling a little bit like an idiot for trying to show manners to the eerie figure watching him, but she turned away as though she hadn’t even seen him. Maybe she really was a ghost and he was cursed to only see her in brief, unsettling glimpses. Maybe he just had to accept right here, right now, that he would never sleep again. Or, he thought as he collapsed back onto his bed, maybe she’s just new in town and thinks you’re an idiot too.

***

In seeing her up close for the first time, when she appeared outside his front door the next afternoon, several things occurred to him at once.

She’d rang the doorbell, like a normal person – not something a ghost was likely to do – crossing some invisible barrier between their houses which, as it turned out, didn’t exist at all. She was taller than he thought. Her hair looked oily at the roots.

“Hi,” she said, pitching her voice unnaturally lower. It made her words sound flat and was something Tedros often did when he was nervous. “I’m Agatha.”

She was wearing a hoodie in ninety-degree heat. The nail of her left thumb had a jagged edge, torn by teeth until it was bitten down nearly to the skin.

“I just moved in next door, like, a couple days ago.”

He should have said anything in the world except, “I know”, but it was the only thing that came out. After taking a second to recover, he also managed a returned, “Hi.”

Hollow circles marked her face, telling him something of her sleep schedule. She nodded slowly, her feet turned slightly away from him, as though she were ready to run at a moment’s notice. He waited to see if she would.

Instead, the girl – Agatha – took a deep, shaky inhale and spoke in one continuous breath, “Look this is gonna sound really weird but I need you to pretend we’re like, on good terms or whatever. Like, friend-neighbours, or something. It’s part of this idiotic deal I made with my mom and if I can’t find someone willing to at least act like they can stand me, I’m not gonna get something I would literally kill the last panda for so, could you just…”

She took another breath, moving her hands around as she struggled to explain how he factored into this plan, "Tell her we hung out. She's planning on introducing herself to your dad on Saturday—"

“Stepdad,” he corrected without thinking. She stopped momentarily, irritated by the interruption – by the whole conversation it seemed, despite having come here to have it – but quickly recovered and continued.

"Sure, your stepdad, whatever. She’s gonna come over here with brownies that, neighbour to neighbour, you really shouldn’t eat if you plan on seeing your next birthday, and when she asks – ‘cause she will ask – just say we went to the park or something. I’ll make myself scarce tomorrow afternoon so it’s believable.” She pulled her mouth into a forced smile, “I think it would just save us both a lot of trouble.”

She finished her proposal by pulling a crumpled twenty out of her hoodie pocket, waving it enticingly in front of his face.

Tedros had no clue what to do. He felt awkward standing motionless in the doorway but inviting her in seemed pretty much out of the question after that offer. He hadn't yet made up his mind on what to say, so he reached out and took the money, just for something to do.

"What would you be doing instead?" He looked up, feeling that it was the right moment for eye contact, but she was staring over her own shoulder back towards the porch of her house.

“I don’t know,” she answered without looking at him, “Read, or something. Listen to music. There’s bound to actually be a park around here, somewhere.”

"There is," Tedros added, trying to be helpful, "A park, that is. Just around the corner. It has... benches."

Tedros cringed at how quickly and completely he had lost every shred of charm that was usually such a staple of his personality. When Agatha finally looked him in the eyes, it was only to be sure he felt every ounce of her confused judgement.

"I'll disappear around, let's say, six? She’ll be home, makes it more believable if she sees me walking out the door." Her voice faded out as neared the end of the sentence, becoming distracted with her own porch again.

Internally, Tedros reminded himself not to be surprised when people he didn't know turned out to be nothing like he'd pictured. Agatha had been, for weeks by then, like a painting that he only ever saw from afar. If you woke up to find the Mona Lisa hung up on your bedroom wall overnight, you’d think differently of it up close too. It was easier now to see all the little imperfections, the cracks in the canvas and smudges in the paint – the metaphor reminded him of Yara. He felt she would appreciate it, though he wasn’t sure he would share the thought with her.

At one point in life – he tried not to think of the person he had been only a year ago – it would have made more sense to him to have the flaws covered up or to simply find a new muse, but all he could feel now was an even more desperate curiosity to know how every crack had come to be. Why Agatha's mother felt the need to blackmail her daughter into befriending him. The whole scenario made little sense to him at the moment it happened, and he hadn't yet made up his mind on what to say or even think about the offer, when he was pulled out of his rambling thoughts by a small cough from Agatha. He had taken far too long to answer, and she had been standing in awkward silence for half a minute already.

"Uh..." his brain stuttered, rescuing him from wording any thought he'd had in the last minute, then finally allowed him to answer her. "Yeah. Yeah, sure."

Agatha breathed in relief, "Great. So, you're set on what to do tomorrow?"

"I've got it, yeah," Tedros was seriously going to punch himself if he said "yeah" one more time, "I mean, it's no problem." He tried to smile reassuringly but used too many teeth.

"Cool man, thanks," her shoulders visibly relaxed, "You're really saving me with this."

She hung back politely for several more seconds, in case Tedros had anything more to add. When he didn't, she offered a small smile and turned away without another word. He watched her walk back to her house – clearly trying not to move too quickly – and was about to head into his own home again when he heard Agatha shout out.

"Hey, sorry! I forgot to—um, what's your name?"

A short burst of laughter escaped him. He hadn't even realised he'd forgotten to mention it.

"Tedros," he called back. Agatha nodded once and threw up two thumbs to signal she'd heard him, then disappeared through her front door.

What the hell?

Chapter Text

The latest post was a group photo; three torsos clustered close together to fit into the frame. It looked like a selfie stick had been utilised in order to capture them all. Not exactly Agatha’s choice of outdated technology. The caption read:

@witchofthewoods: Family dinners <3

She’d been staring at the post so long, her own chirping alarm startled her. If she hadn’t set it, it was too likely that she would forget to leave the house when she was supposed to. Even the simplest of deceptions required careful planning – slip-ups in the little things were always how you got caught.

After setting terms with the boy next door yesterday, she’d returned home and spent the time waiting for her mother to clock off practising a passably realistic fake smile. Agatha had always thought of herself as a fairly good liar, but was also aware that false positivity was a weak point in her repertoire. When she finally told Callis – don’t grin too wide, shrug like you’re pretending its no big deal but secretly you’re really excited, accept the hug and let your cheeks relax for a second – her mother gave no indication of suspicion. The hard part was over; now Agatha only had to worry about selling it.

She forced herself to swipe out of Instagram, embarrassed by the amount of mental effort it took. Agatha was long past accepting that cyberstalking her half-sister was neither healthy nor avoidable. She kept hoping that, with enough time, it would get easier not to care. She had already nailed pretending not to when Callis asked her every now and then whether the two of them kept in touch.

To say that they didn’t wasn’t even a lie. Monitoring post notifications and hovering her thumb after every scroll to prevent accidentally liking a photo was about as far from “keeping in touch” as it got.

Agatha pulled a dark denim jacket over her hoodie. The temperature, though not nearly as sweltering as it had been for the past several weeks, hardly warranted the layers, but weather had never been a factor of much consequence where her wardrobe was concerned.

Satchel, notebook, pen. She also threw an Agatha Christie novel she’d read before onto the pile, having not yet made her way to the library. The final touch: a pre-chosen a Spotify playlist for her afternoon of espionage. She was poised to unroll her earphones and press play when the doorbell buzzed downstairs. She paid no heed to the shrill vibration, scooping up her items as she readied to leave.

“Agatha,” came her mother’s voice from outside her door a minute later, accompanied by a small knock, telling her to come and…

"I'm sorry, what?" Agatha spun on the heel of her boot, satchel swinging from her shoulder as she pulled the door open.

"I said your friend is downstairs. He's waiting on the porch."

"I don’t..." Agatha took a moment to process what her mother could have meant by this. It didn’t seem probable that the guy had actually shown up, unless her mother’s work had somehow managed to relocate them right next door to the dumbest person alive. Callis raised one eyebrow in question.

"The blonde boy, he said his name was Tedros. Weren't you two supposed to—"

"Oh, yeah!" Agatha interrupted, feigning a dramatic reaction to her own forgetfulness, "Obviously, yeah. Sorry he’s just—he's early. Let me," she gripped her satchel to keep it from swinging in front of her legs and slipped through the doorway, trying not to sprint down the staircase.

It had taken everything within Agatha to swallow her pride enough to ask the outlandish favour of her neighbour. Although Callis had been exaggerating with regards to the limitations of Agatha’s social interactions over the last few years, it hadn’t been by much. She had never described herself as a socially anxious person; if pressed, she was more likely to say “socially allergic”. She could speak to store clerks and bus drivers and librarians without any notable difficulty. Interactions with little meaning, necessary but limited, were easier to swallow; like a lactose intolerant person chancing a cube of cheese off the platter, it would probably be alright. But talking for the sake of building relationships, trying to show off the most palatable parts of her personality while shoving the side of her only her mother ever really saw down, was frankly exhausting. It also – as Agatha knew from previous experience – would only prove to be a useless strain on her part when the conversation inevitably failed to lead to an actual friendship.

Despite knowing all this, she had walked over to her neighbours’ house with single-minded determination, ignoring the itchy red flush breaking out beneath her collar, to put the first step of her plan into motion. Her neighbour – Tedros, as it turns out – looked at her like no one ever had before. It reminded her of the way she had pressed her face to the glass of a terrarium holding a frilled lizard when she was seven, having never seen one before. A gaggle of other children next to her squealed and scattered as the creature hissed, neck flap puffing up as it stared them down. The noise they were making irritated Agatha – not to mention, the repetitive music that blared through the zoo speakers, looping every two minutes back to the start – but she kept her gaze fixed on the lizard, fascinated.

It wasn’t an entirely comfortable feeling to be looked at like something that belonged behind glass, but she did not think he intended for it to be a mean look. She supposed he was just surprised, or confused, or was deliberating whether or not he wanted to willingly involve himself in whatever drama this girl he had never met was trying to make him accomplice to.

He had, nonetheless, agreed to help though, which made his sudden appearance outside her home all the more disconcerting. She paused next to the front door, drawing back one of her mother’s thrifted, paisley curtains to peek out the window. There her neighbour was, one arm propped against Agatha’s porch railing, the other hand in the pocket of his jacket.

Really, she scoffed, throwing the door open.

Tedros greeted her with a wide smile but was stopped before he could say hello.

“No offense, but are you some kind of idiot?” she growled, stomping towards him.

He frowned. “Full offense, actually.”

"What are you doing here?" Agatha asked, closing the door to keep Callis from overhearing.

"Six o'clock, isn't it?" he produced a large phone with a badly cracked screen from his back pocket, "Well, close enough."

Agatha had harboured a vain hope that this was some strange joke, but it seemed Tedros was entirely serious in his motive for showing up at exactly the right time, despite it being exactly the wrong thing to do.

"No, I mean,” she huffed, steam building within her ear canals, “Why are you here at all?"

It was Tedros's turn to look confused, "You paid me—"

"Keep your voice down," Agatha shushed, pushing him to walk backwards down the steps of her porch.  They both looked up towards the living room window, expecting to see two large eyes surveying their meeting. When Agatha was sure they were not being spied on she turned her attention back to Tedros.

He tried again, quieter this time, "You told me you needed a fake friend, for whatever reason, and paid me twenty dollars to fill in. So, here I am."

"What? No, I'm not trying to prostitute your friendship. I paid you to lie."

"I know that. But you see," Tedros smirked, "I do have a slight moral problem with that."

Steam overflowing, pouring, almost bursting from her ears, though Tedros either couldn’t tell or didn’t care. "Is there a reason you object so strongly to my company?"

She folded her arms to keep from punching him and looked down at her badly scuffed boots, "It's not your company, it's just... any company."

"Why?"

"That's not really any of your business," she shrugged, looking up at him with an intensity she hoped he would shrink away from.

He did not. "You kind of made it my business when you decided to hire my services as a stand-in for your apparently non-existent social life."

Jackass. Agatha all but gaped at his audacity. She didn't owe this guy anything and told him as much, "I don't have the energy to stand here having a pointless argument. So, I'm going to walk away now and go to the park. Alone."

"What a coincidence, I was just about to do the same thing." His face was completely serious, except for the light blue eyes unable to mask how much he was enjoying tormenting Agatha, "Of course, I was planning to take the car, but that's only because I'd prefer to make it there and back before sunrise."

"What are you talking about?"

Tedros shrugged, "Just a heads up, that corner I said the park was just around might actually be several corners. A couple blocks, in fact. So, unless you want to spend the whole night walking..."

Agatha covered her face with her hands to hide her frustration. She was stuck. If she simply stepped back into the house, Callis would know she'd been lying about her "new friend" and the alternate option, to wander aimlessly for several hours around a neighbourhood she didn't know, did not seem preferable. She gripped the strap of her satchel with both hands to avoid strangling the boy in front of her. No words came out when she tried to speak, only an embarrassing sputter of noises that showed Tedros – arrogant bastard – that he had won.

He turned from her without a word and jogged to the navy truck parked in his driveway. He slid into the driver's seat and turned on the engine but did not move. He waited for less than a minute, pointedly not looking away from the steering wheel, until he heard the passenger door open and felt Agatha fall into the seat next to him with a heavy thump. She slammed the door closed to emphasise her feelings about the situation.

She continued to ignore Tedros when he flashed her a toothy grin, dropping her bag at her feet and muttering, "It's just a ride, because you offered. We are not hanging out."

Tedros laughed and reversed onto the road much faster than was strictly necessary.

As they drove, the suburb unfurled ahead of them, far more dense and sprawling than Agatha had assumed. She had thought of Gavaldon at first sight as a small town, with only a few residential streets spiralling out from its centre.

“I’m gonna need that twenty dollars back,” Agatha said, breaking the silence for the first time since Tedros had started the engine.

HE turned them onto a narrower road lined with fenced-in trees. “Why?”

“Transaction not completed. You were supposed to lie to my mom, not kidnap me.”

“You paid me to create an alibi,” he chose that moment to lean on his elbow, steering one-handed as if to deliberately unsettle Agatha’s nerves further. “From my point of view, I’ve gone above and beyond in my duties. If anything, I should get a tip.”

“Hah,” Agatha scoffed, hoping it didn’t sound too much like a laugh.

The most irritating part, she decided after another minute of slightly less heavy silence, was knowing that her perfectly designed playlist would go to waste. Not that it would have been accurate anymore given the presence of her newfound companion. Even if she chose another now, from what she could tell, Tedros’s truck was several decades away from having Bluetooth functionality.

"You got anything to listen to?" Agatha asked, suppressing an irritable sigh. Even she grew tired of her own moodiness after a time.

"I mean, not exactly," Tedros pointed at the console, “There’s a CD port, but I don’t…”

“Keep them in the car?”

“Have any.”

Agatha made an unintelligible noise under her breath, "What about an AUX?"

Tedros released one hand from the steering wheel to scratch at the nape of his neck, "Uh, no. Haven't got a cable; but hey, you know what?" He clicked a large knob in the centre of the console, then twisted it to turn up the volume.

The radio DJ's voices faded in, in the process of wrapping up with a caller. The person had phoned in to request a song, which began after the introduction with an energetic beat. Agatha recognised it as something that had been trampolining around the top forty for the last few weeks. It sounded like a morning commute. Not quite elevator music, but close. Call-waiting music. It could not have suited the current atmosphere less. Tedros was about to turn up the earworm when he noticed Agatha rolling her eyes and slouching lower into her seat.

"Oh, now I'm getting it." Tedros said.

“Getting what?”

"The whole 'loner in her bedroom listening to alternative music you think I've never heard of' thing." He shrugged, "The whole vibe makes sense now. You're like one of those girls that thinks they're better than everyone ‘cause they don't like Taylor Swift."

"You literally don’t know me." Agatha tried to restrain herself. It wasn't worth getting worked up over the human Labrador seated next to her, she knew that, but she could not ignore the overwhelming urge to defend herself.

"I'm not pissed over the pop music. I just can't..." She threw her hands up in front of her, trying to articulate herself without sounding insane, "I mean, who just puts on the radio and doesn't care what gets played?"

Only then did Tedros chance a look towards his passenger, "What?"

"And,” she continued, “you're telling me you don't own a single CD. Not even an AUX cord. Are you serious?" She shook her head, crossing her arms once more. She could see the way Tedros's eyebrows bunched together, nearly hidden by the curled fringe falling across his forehead.

"You’ve lost me," he admitted.

Agatha dragged a hand through her own hair, only adding excess oil onto it, and took a breath before explaining herself. "I like music,” she said, such an understatement it was almost a lie, “Okay, lowballing it there. It's like a second language to me, and like any language it needs to make sense to be understood. You can't just string random words together and expect them to form a sentence."

Realising that she had yet to be interrupted, she gave Tedros a brief opportunity to shift the conversation away. He stayed silent and waited for her to continue.

"It needs context, that’s what people don’t really get. A playlist’s more than just the order you play songs in. You can’t just group artists together based on genre and think it’s a good mix. It all depends on the circumstance." She was speaking faster and louder than she had before. Eager, despite herself, to share her theory, "Usually a combination of emotion and situation. I mean you wouldn't start cracking jokes at your great aunt's funeral, just like you wouldn't talk about..." she thought for a second, "I don't know, geopolitical tensions at a party."

"Well, it depends on the party," Tedros quipped.

"Exactly!" Agatha yelped, "Situational circumstance dictates the need to constantly be aware of choosing the right thing to say. To me, music is like that. As expressive and specific as speech, and as necessary to curate."

Tedros didn't immediately respond, taking the time to examine Agatha's perspective.

"So, when the music is out of place with the conversation," he started, but was unsure how to finish. Agatha anticipated his question and jumped in again.

"Music inappropriate to the situation is... Unbearable." Her shoulders tensed at the thought. "And generic music is like small talk."

"Generic?"

Agatha gestured towards the radio, "Playing for the sake of something to fill the silence. It's a waste of sound."

Tedros could see the park ahead, just at the end of the lane. "But, you're not anti-mainstream music?"

"I'm not ‘anti’ any kind of music. I think every song ever written has had a time and place when it made sense to play it." She shrugged, and began to fiddle with her hoodie strings, "Some just get played more often than they should."

The car rolled to a stop, parking next to a large and lusciously green field. Flanked by two long rows of houses was a large playground built within a fenced off area. On the far end, a hiking trail disappeared into a cluster of trees. Next to the nearest swing set was a shady tree, protecting one of several empty benches from the late afternoon sunrays. Agatha set her sights on it but stopped before sprinting away to address the boy still sitting in the driver's seat.

"For the record,” she said, poking her head back through the door she’d left open in her hurry to get away, “I definitely don't think I'm better than anyone else just because I’m pedantic."

He looked up from the ignition, knotting his eyebrows into another deep frown, "Pedantic isn't the word I would use."

“What word would you use?”

"I don't know yet." He searched her eyes for as long as she would let him – no more than three seconds total – and jumped out of his seat when she attempted to walk away again. "Not to ruin your reading time, but..."

Agatha feared her grimace had softened enough to be unconvincing. There was little point in refusing him now, knowing that it would be impossible for her to walk back home alone in the dark. She wasn’t sure how long they would be allowed to stay in Gavaldon before Callis’s work inevitably relocated them again, but Agatha was certain even with years of opportunity, she would never be able to find her way from the park to her house through the twisting labyrinth of nearly identical cream-coloured homes.

Besides being temporarily dependent on her neighbour for survival, she also had to admit the mood between them had already changed. He jogged to follow her when she didn’t immediately tell him he couldn’t. She wasn’t entirely sure what song would have been right to play at the current moment, but she supposed it wouldn’t hurt to let him walk alongside her while she thought about it.