Morganna, meanwhile, was screaming like I’d set her on fire—while also spitting to try and clear her mouth. A large space had cleared around her—nobody wanted to get the nasty brown dog crap on them.
“Look what she did to me, Mr. Barron!” She wailed, pointing a trembling finger in my direction. “Just look! My face…my clothes…” She reached up to the top of her head and gasped. “It’s even in my hair!”
“Miss Plunkett,” Mr. Barron growled at me. “I do not pretend to know how magic works but you had better remove that substance from Miss Starchild’s hair at once!”
“Fine.” I was still really angry because I could see that I was going to get the blame for this, even though Morganna had started it. She had started everything, damn it! She’d been picking on me from the beginning of the semester and I was sick and tired of it.
Closing my eyes, I grabbed power again and, reckless with anger, threw it at Morganna’s head, muttering, “Off—take it all off!”
The resulting gasp from the rest of the class made me open my eyes again.
What I saw managed to quell my anger like a bucket of cold water being dumped over live coals. Yes, the dog crap was gone from Morganna’s hair—but so was her hair itself.
She was completely bald and it was my fault.
70
“Now then, one at a time. One at a time!”
Headmistress Nightworthy hammered on her antique desk to cut through the shouting.
The still-bald Morganna was on one side of the office and I was on the other. Mr. Barron had marched us both to the Headmistress’s office and told us not to come back to class until we “straightened this mess out.” So now, here we were, and I was dreadfully afraid I was about to get expelled because Morganna very much looked like the victim in this case.
How could she not? She was bald as an egg, as my mom would say.
The Nocturne Headmistress was dressed impeccably, as always, in a black sheathe dress that clung to her tall, slender frame and high black heels. She was staring at both of us with fire in her piercing blue eyes.
“What,” she said slowly, “exactly happened here? Miss Starchild, you may speak first.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her, Headmistress—she must be crazy!” Morganna exclaimed. “All I did was raise my hand to tell Mr. Barron that Emma had something on her shoe and she went berserk with her magic! First she threw the dog poo she stepped in at my face and hair and then, when Mr. Barron told her to take it off, she…she…” Her blue eyes filled with tears as she clutched at her bald head. “She took off my hair!”
With her newly bald head and her eyes full of tears, she looked like a pitiful patient with a terminal disease. I felt my stomach drop to my feet. There was no way Headmistress Nightworthy was going to listen to my side of the story! I was so expelled—I just knew it.
And I fully expected the Nocturne Headmistress to tell me as much any minute. So I was actually surprised when she turned to me and said,
“All right, Miss Plunkett, let’s hear your side.”
“What side? How can she have a side when she did this to me?” Morganna wailed. “She’s crazy! You ought to kick her out right now, Headmistress! She deserves to be expelled!”
“I will decide matters of expulsion here, Miss Starchild,” Headmistress Nightworthy snapped. “Now kindly be quiet and allow Miss Plunkett to speak, as she was quiet while you were talking.”
Morganna got a sulky look on her face and crossed her arms over her chest but she shut up for a minute, at least, so that was something.
“Miss Plunkett?” the Headmistress said, frowning at me. “I’m waiting. Please explain to me how this happened?”
“First of all, I didn’t step in the, uh, dog stuff,” I said, lifting my chin. “Morganna magicked it onto the floor under my shoe, just so she could raise her hand and make fun of me in class. And then I got mad because she’s been messing with me all semester and I…” I cleared my throat. “I threw it in her face. But I didn’t mean to snatch her bald,” I added quickly. “I was just really upset and I’m still learning to control my magic and it just…happened.”
“Why, you little liar!” Morganna seethed. “You did this on purpose! You planned it!”
“How could I plan for you to put a huge puddle of dog crap under my foot?” I demanded, getting angry again myself. “If you’d ever just leave me alone, this would never have happened! Why can’t you just stop messing with me?”
“I was messing with you? Why, you were the one that sent all those awful cats after me in the Dining Hall the other day, when you know I’m allergic to them!”
Morganna put a hand on her chest, her eyes widening in a wounded expression. Really, she ought to get an award for this performance, I thought.
“And you were the one who sent a whole pack of vicious dogs after me and Megan,” I said, glaring at her. “And put a bunch of poisonous spiders in my bed! One of which bit me!”
“You little liar!” Morganna gasped. “Headmistress Nightworthy, she’s only lying about me because she knows that I know what she did to her mother’s landlord! And she was performing magic outside of school grounds!”
“I didn’t mean to! I didn’t even know I had magic at first!” I protested, feeling put on the defensive.
“She’s lying again,” Morganna exclaimed. “She knew exactly what she was doing when she made his nose and his penis change places—just like she knew what she was doing when she made me bald! All she ever does is lie and lie and lie! She—”
“Enough!” Headmistress Nightworthy’s voice crackled like lightning and we both shut up.
At that moment, there was a light tapping on her office door. Striding over, the Headmistress threw it open and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Ah, Ms. Yasmeen! Exactly who I needed to see!”
“Mr. Barron stopped by my office just a moment ago,” the Elementary Casting teacher said, stepping through the doorway. Her bright orange hair was accented by the tight pink dress she was wearing. “He said I might be needed.”
“He was right, may the Goddess bless him,” the Headmistress said. She nodded at me and Morganna. “I’m afraid we have a “she-said—she-said” situation here and I need to know who’s telling the truth.”
“Well, higher and more complicated Sister magic doesn’t always work well on Faes,” Ms. Yasmeen said, frowning. “But a simple truth spell ought to be effective on any Other.” Pointing to Morganna and then to me, she said, “Veritas! You will both speak the absolute truth!”
I felt a strange tingling come over me and hoped that Morganna was feeling the same. Though once the whole truth came out, I was afraid I was still going to get expelled.
“All right, Miss Plunkett first, this time,” Headmistress Nightworthy directed, pointing at me. “Tell me everything that’s been going on between you and Miss Starchild.”
So I told her everything—I had no choice. I started at the beginning of the semester, back before my transformation, when Morganna liked to say nasty things about me to get the popular kids to laugh at me. Then I told about how I had made Morganna give back Spike, when she’d been using him as a living hair ornament and the skink she’d sent to live in my ear as retribution. I told about how it made me talk in rhymes until I could get rid of it by sending it back.