Ever Never After | The School for Good and Evil Fanfiction

Chapter 1: The Pink Nightmare

When Alma Dominguez woke up from having been passed out drunk, she thought she'd ended up in Hell—not just because of a pounding headache and a roiling stomach, but also because where she found herself was the last place she wanted to be: the School for Good and Evil.

Specifically, and surprisingly, the Good school.

Everything was obnoxiously bright and disorienting, from the giant glass castle with pink and blue turrets to the colorful field of flowers, the latter of which were speaking in animated, grandmotherly voices around Alma. The sights and sounds were too much for her, and she doubled over and threw up.

The talking flowers shrieked, along with the distinct screech of a little winged person—a fairy.

It slapped Alma across the face.

Alma blacked out before the pain could register.

Between bouts of consciousness, Alma vaguely gathered that she was being carried in mid-air to the castle doors. The pair opened automatically, and she was taken through a narrow hall and into a domed and cavernous, populated foyer of stained glass with a crystal obelisk in the center. She descended gently to the marble floor, and a fairy crossed into her wavering vision and threw glittering dust at her. Instantly, Alma's headache and nausea subsided, and her senses returned in full.

A hierarchy of gold, silver, and bronze portraits of graduates from famous fairy tales decorated the obelisk from top to bottom. Beyond it, four spiraling staircases, two pink and two blue, were each emblazoned in gold with the following: HONOR, VALOR, PURITY, and CHARITY. Standing before them was what appeared to be the faculty, wearing bright, ostentatious outfits. They reminded Alma of a circus, especially the woman with big, yellow hair. Dozens of princesses who looked at least eighteen years old—Alma's age—were staring at the girl in her denim jacket, crop top, and skinny jeans, as if there'd been a terrible mistake and she wasn't supposed to be here.

She definitely wasn't supposed to be here.

Alma got to her feet.

"Okay, can anyone tell me what the hell I'm doing here?" she asked. "There's been a mistake, right? I'm going to be sent home?"

Nobody answered her.

Someone tapped her shoulder, and Alma turned around. Three tall, human-like creatures with long, flowing fluorescent hair each handed her the following: a basket of tied books with a pair of pink flats and glass heels, a frilly, pink pinafore that glittered with a silver swan crest, and a schedule. Alma skimmed the information on the sheet of parchment. She had an assigned dorm. She would be learning etiquette and good deeds and how to communicate with animals and win over a prince. She would be learning how to be a princess in the fairy tales that she'd never wanted to be in.

She looked up at the creatures. "You're kidding, right?"

But they only smiled and floated away as others entered the foyer, carrying more of the same school necessities to give to the other princesses.

Alma stood there, completely lost. She was at the School for Good and Evil, a place that once could've only been found in Crescenta as a theme park, Fantasialand. As far as she knew, she was no longer in the city, but somehow beyond it. She didn't understand. Nobody could leave, as venturing outside the city's boundaries, whether through woods or by sea, would eventually circle them back inside, as if Crescenta were all there was. It was all recorded history had ever known, as if Crescenta and its first humans had been placed there by curious aliens, or a God with a serious hyperfixation, and nobody could remember the truth.

Now, she was finally outside of Crescenta, in a world that she'd believed had been nothing more than a famous man-child's fictional obsession.

Sixty years ago in Crescenta, fairy tales from the School for Good and Evil had mysteriously found their way to Elias Fantasia's doorstep—according to him. At the time, as if by magic, the books had swept the city and become sensational enough to have warranted an entire theme park, which now occupied almost half of the land.