The School Years Complete Collection. Soman Chainani

of blood. “But—but—”

      “But what? You’re the best Never by a mile.”

      “I know, it’s just—”

      Tedros held her chin up, forcing her to look into his crystal-blue eyes. “First place in every challenge. Deal?”

      Sophie nodded weakly.

      “We’re a team,” said Tedros, dimpling, and with a last brush of her cheek, he left through the Ever Doors.

      Sophie trudged across the stage to the Never Doors and paused. She turned slowly.

      Agatha sat in the pink pews, all alone.

      “I told you I belong here, darling,” Sophie sighed. “You just wouldn’t listen.”

      Agatha said nothing.

      “Maybe the School Master will let you go home alone,” Sophie said.

      Agatha didn’t flinch.

      “You need to make new friends, Agatha.” Sophie smiled gently. “I have a prince now.”

      Agatha just stared into her eyes.

      Sophie stopped smiling. “I have a prince.”

      She slammed the door behind her.

      In Uglification, Manley asked the competing 15 Nevers to conjure a disguise that would scare off an Ever “at first sight.” Hester’s potion made her whole body explode with spikes. Anadil’s turned her skin so thin all her blood vessels shined through. Meanwhile, Sophie bashed tadpoles to give herself shingles again, but somehow gave herself a spiral horn and glittered horsetail instead.

      “Because what’s scarier to a princess than a unicorn?” snarled Manley.

      In Henchmen, the Trial Nevers had to tame a Fire Giant, a nine-foot hunk of hot orange skin and flaming hair. Sophie tried to read his thoughts, but all his thoughts were in Giant. Luckily, she remembered some of the Giant words Agatha had taught her.

FIRE GIANT:	And why shouldn’t I kill you?
SOPHIE:	I know this horse.
FIRE GIANT:	I see no horse!
SOPHIE:	It is as vast as your undergarments.

      Castor intervened before the Giant ate her.

      Then Lady Lesso asked the Trial Nevers to name a “spell that can only be undone by the one who casts it.”

      “Answers?”

      Shivering, the Nevers held up carved ice tablets:

HESTER:	Petrification
ANADIL:	Petrification
ARACHNE:	Petrification
SOPHIE:	Special Spell

      “If only love was the answer to everything,” said Lady Lesso, handing Sophie another “15” out of 15.

      “What happened?” said Tedros as he pushed her through the Evers line.

      “Just a slow start—”

      “Sophie, you can’t be in that Forest without me!”

      She followed his eyes to scowling Evers. Come the Trial, they’d all be out for revenge.

      “Just do what you were doing before!” Tedros begged.

      Sophie gritted her teeth as she walked back to her room. If Agatha could do well in the School for Good, then she could do well here! Yes, she’d boil her toad eyes, she’d learn her Giant, she’d cook a child if she had to! (Or supervise, at least.) Nothing would stop her from her Ever After! She puffed her chest, stormed through her door, and froze.

      Her bed had disappeared. The mirror had been shattered.

      And over her head hung all her old outfits, noosed and mutilated, like headless corpses.

      On her bed, Anadil looked up from Killing Pretty Girls. Hester looked up from Killing Even Prettier Girls.

      Sophie barreled into the top-floor office. “My roommates want to kill me!”

      Lady Lesso smiled back from her desk. “That’s the spirit.”

      The door closed magically in Sophie’s face.

      Sophie cowered in the dark hall. Last week, she had been the most popular girl in school! And now she couldn’t even go back to her room?

      She wiped her eyes. It didn’t matter, did it? Soon she’d be switching schools and all of this would be behind her. She had the boy every girl wanted. She had her prince! Two stupid witches were no match for true love!

      Voices echoed above. She ducked into shadows—

      “Hester said whoever kills Sophie during the Trial will be her Hench Captain next year,” Arachne said as she descended the stairs. “But it needs to look accidental or we’ll get expelled.”

      “We have to beat Anadil to it!” Mona said, green skin flushing. “Suppose she kills her before the Trial!”

      “Hester said during the Trial. Even Vex and Brone know that. Did you hear their plan to kill her? They searched the Good lake to find those leftover eggs. That girl is so dead.”

      “Can’t believe we listened to that traitor’s lectures,” Mona seethed. “Next thing you know, she’d have had us wearing pink and kissing Evers!”

      “She humiliated us all and now she’ll pay,” Arachne said, narrowing her eye. “Fourteen of us. One of her. Odds aren’t in her favor.”

      Their cackles pealed through the damp stairwell.

      Sophie didn’t move from the dark. It wasn’t just her roommates. The whole school wanted her dead. There was nowhere safe now.

      Nowhere except …

      At the end of a dark, stale hall, the door to Room 34 cracked open after the third knock. Two beady black pupils peered out.

      “Hello, handsome,” Sophie cooed.

      “Don’t even try it—you’re a prince lover, you’re a two-timer, you’re a—”

      Sophie held her nose, breezed by Hort, and locked him out of her new room.

      Hort pounded and wailed outside for twenty minutes before Sophie finally let him back in.

      “You can help me study until curfew,” she said, spritzing the room with lavandula. “But no sleeping here.”

      “This is my room!” Hort sulked, plopping to the floor in black pajamas dotted with frowning green frogs.

      “Well, I’m here, aren’t I? And boys and girls can’t be roommates, so it certainly can’t be your room,” said Sophie, tucking into his bed.

      “But where am I supposed to stay!”

      “I hear the Malice Common Room is quite comfortable.”

      Ignoring Hort’s whimpers, Sophie sank into pillows and held a candle to his class notes. She had to win all her challenges tomorrow. Her only hope to survive the Trial was to go in with Tedros and hide behind his shield the whole time.

      “To humiliate an enemy, turn him into a chicken: Banta pareo dirosti?” She squinted. “Is that right?”

      “Sophie, how do you know you aren’t a villain?” Hort yawned, hunched on the burned floor.

      “I