100 pages • 3 hours read
The School For Good and Evil
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Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Definitely Evil”
On the first day of class, Agatha goes through the secret passageway in her ceiling tile again. She jumps into the lake portal to the bridge and bumps into the barrier. She sees her reflection in the barrier, which tells her, “Good with Good, / Evil with Evil, / Back to your tower before there’s upheaval” (97). Agatha realizes she must act like she is evil, so she tells the barrier reflection she’s ugly. The barrier lets her through, and Agatha sneaks through the School for Evil to find Sophie and go home. The wolves track Agatha to the Gallery of Evil, chase her to the attic roof, and retreat. Agatha escapes the gargoyle on the roof by jumping into his mouth, through his body, and landing in an open window. When she finds Sophie’s room, Sophie is unsurprised to see her. She insists they trade clothes and schools, but Agatha pleads to go home. Sophie’s roommates tackle Agatha and switch their clothes. Sophie leaves, but Agatha chases her through a wall portal to the bridge. Sophie blathers about Tedros and how they can still be friends. As Sophie enters the barrier between the schools, the girls’ clothes magically change back to reflect their assigned schools. A wave picks them up and deposits Agatha in Good and Sophie in Evil.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Grand High Witch Ultimate”
Agatha lies in a puddle contemplating why she and Sophie couldn’t switch schools. She realizes Sophie hates Evil, so she will want to go home soon. Agatha goes to class feeling hopeful but fails her “making smiles kinder” class with Professor Anemone, who tells her to not smile at a man. Agatha fails her princess etiquette lesson with Castor by dropping 20 nightingale eggs from her head while practicing posture.
In uglification class, Hort forces Sophie’s face into tadpole juice to make her unattractive. Castor uses honeysuckle to restore Sophie’s beautiful face in henchman training and teaches her how to train a golden goose. Sophie communicates with the goose in her mind and begs it to help her because she’s good. Sophie wishes for Tedros, but the goose’s gold feathers turn gray. Castor explains the goose would rather give up its power than help Sophie. He gives Sophie a first-place ranking for the most evil thing he’s ever seen. Sophie’s ranking makes the School Master happy, and he waits for her arrival. In her curses and death traps lesson, Lady Lesso lectures about a nemesis, a Never’s archenemy that they must destroy to gain freedom. A nemesis becomes clear through dreams that only exceptional villains get. Sophie looks forward to lunch because Nevers and Evers get to eat together. She knows Tedros will save her from Evil, but the wolves announce that classes and lunch are canceled after a Good tower catches fire.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Wish Fish”
Tedros swims until he notices Beatrix and her friends watching him. When he climbs out to greet them, the fairies usher the girls away. He runs into a glaring Agatha instead. When Tedros corrects her sense of direction, she snorts disgustedly. Tedros’s confidence falls as he wonders if she’s a villain.
Agatha is annoyed that animal communications with Princess Uma is a girls-only class, while the boys learn sword fighting. Uma explains that students who are not good enough to become princesses become animal henchmen who are honored to help and die for princesses. Agatha is horrified. Uma has each girl communicate her soul’s greatest wish to wish fishes. All the girls wish for princes—except Agatha, who wishes not to fail. The fish whirl around her fist until a girl appears and says Agatha wished her free. After she disappears, other animals chase Agatha to become human. Agatha bolts through the castle, even when Pollux tells her to stop. She runs onto the roof, where a gargoyle corners her. Agatha sees that it’s a scared little boy, and she touches him; his stone melts. As he turns into a boy, Tedros beheads him. Agatha yells at him, and Tedros calls her a witch. Agatha punches him in the eye before a wave comes over the roof and separates them.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The 100% Talent Show”
Classes resume on the third day after the fire. The Nevers are convinced that Sophie will be Evil’s captain because of the golden goose incident. Professor Sheeba Seeks has all the Nevers show their talents in special talents class. Hester summons a demon from her body and sets the demon after Sophie. Remembering that princesses can talk to animals, Sophie goes to the window and whistles for help. Black wasps attack the demon, so Sophie whistles again; bees, hornets, and locusts join the fray. Hester is about to die when Sophie yells, “STOP!”; the animals flee. Sophie defends herself by saying that princesses can call animals. Sheeba awards her a number-one ranking.
Agatha is locked in her room for two days before meeting with Professor Dovey, the head of the School of Good, who scolds her for not listening to Pollux’s order to stop when the animals were chasing her. But since only a truly Good soul can make a wish come to life, and her effort to save the gargoyle “suggests Goodness beyond any measure” (149), Agatha can stay. Agatha looks outside and sees Tedros and his friends practicing archery on a dummy that looks exactly like her.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Bad Group”
Agatha and Sophie are put in the same forest group for their surviving fairy tales class—the only class Evers and Nevers have together—where they argue about going home. Tedros approaches and argues with Agatha about the gargoyle before flirting with Sophie. Their instructor, Yuba the Gnome, leads them into the Blue Forest and sets up a class challenge: Each student must distinguish between a disguised Ever and a disguised Never by observing their behavior. Tedros tells Sophie that if she wins the challenge and proves she’s good, he will advocate for her with Professor Dovey. For Tedros’s turn, Yuba transforms Sophie and Agatha into hobgoblins. Tedros correctly chooses Agatha as the Good one, so Sophie attacks her. They fight until Tedros intervenes, and they kick him. Sophie and Agatha transform back into girls, and as punishment for fighting, Yuba gives them magical iron shoes that burn. They stop burning at nightfall when Sophie finally agrees to go home.
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
In this section, both Agatha and Sophie are trying to fight against their fates. Every time they try to resist, however, they lose and are forced to confront that they might be exactly where they are supposed to be. Other characters reinforce that Sophie and Agatha are exactly where they belong, but the protagonists simply don’t want to see it. For example, Sophie’s golden goose incident proves that she is not as good as she thinks she is, but she refuses to accept that. When Sophie summons dark creatures like wasps and bees instead of squirrels and birds, she continues to believe that she is not Evil, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Agatha’s goal is still to go home, and when she thinks she is going to be expelled after the wish fish incident, she gets excited. However, Professor Dovey says only a purely Good soul can make a wish come to life, confirming that Agatha is where she belongs. Even so, Agatha refuses to believe this. Both girls are maturing and learning to define themselves while resisting the narratives that others set for them in this coming-of-age narrative.
This section also shows the first time that Tedros comes between Sophie and Agatha, which will be a point of conflict between them for the rest of the novel. At first, he thinks Sophie is a princess and Agatha a witch because Agatha doesn’t act as a fairy-tale princess should. Agatha doesn’t let the prince rescue her; she glares at him and punches him when he thinks he is saving her life. In a traditional fairy tale, Agatha would not be a princess, so her journey to becoming a princess subverts the tropes of the genre. Because she doesn’t fit Tedros’s parameters of who a fairy-tale princess is, he decides that she must be a witch. However, when Sophie and Agatha are disguised, Tedros is drawn to Agatha. Although Agatha doesn’t want Tedros’s attention, Sophie is jealous that he chooses Agatha, so she attacks her. This is the first time the girls physically fight, and it is over a boy. It is the beginning of their enduring battle over Tedros. Their fight is also the catalyst that leads Sophie to want to go home, which sets up the next section of the novel.
This section also tackles the idea of gender roles in fairy tales. In the School for Evil, boys and girls have all their classes together. In the School for Good, the boys get to take classes in chivalry and sword fighting, but the girls study beautification and talking to animals. Agatha points out that the gendered classes reinforce the problem of damsels in distress. If girls are taught only to look beautiful while they wait for their princes to come, then they will continue to be helpless. Her critiques of the School for Good show that fairy-tale ideals aren’t perfect. Tedros’s character also shows that he has problems with the ideas he has lived with his whole life, and he recognizes that he contributes to these narrow views. He wants things to be different and wants a girl for who she is, but he falls into old habits. He is drawn to Agatha because she is different, but he doesn’t know how to view her outside the good-evil binary, so he calls her a witch because that is the category she best fits in his head. His character arc and what he believes are set to change in this novel as he gets to know Sophie and Agatha better.
The omniscient fairy-tale narrator is used to great effect in this section, as it is the first time that readers see inside the School Master’s head. The School Master is a shadowy figure up to this point. The first glimpse inside his head shows that he is happy that Sophie is evil. This insinuates that there is something going on in the school that is bigger than the conflict between Agatha and Sophie and foreshadows future revelations about his character.
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