#wrote a lil other school drabble on a whim so it is. super not edited.

[dateamonster]

Wisps of smoke were sifting through the gap in the supply closet door, and Coach knew well enough what that meant. She opened the door and the girls inside startled, nearly upsetting the censer filling the space with the thick scent of sandalwood.

She took in the scene: four juniors surrounded by assorted sports equipment and spare jerseys, crowded around a channeling board in a circle of tea candles. It wasn't one of those cheap mass-produced boards with the characters only printed onto some varnished slab of plywood either. If she were to guess, Coach would peg it as belonging to one of their parents.

"Girls, we talked about this," she sighed. "No séances on school grounds."

One of the girls, a blonde wearing what appeared to be an homage to a Victorian mourning dress complete with black veil, began to whimper and the others flocked to her side with crystal pendants all a-jingling to comfort her.

"Have a heart, miss, her boyfriend just died."

The begrieved wailed, "Danny!"

"Shaunee, sweetie, we've been over this. Daniel isn't dead. He just changed schools."

"Same difference," a witchlet with a severe purple smokey eye muttered under her breath.

"He hasn't answered any of my texts in weeks," Shaunee sobbed, eyeliner already streaming down her face. "Something must have happened to him. I'm a quarter banshee, I know about this stuff!"

Coach repressed the urge to roll her eyes. "Okay, everybody out. And put out those damn candles, that's a fire hazard. This is your final warning, ladies. If I catch any one of you using magic unsupervised one more time, it's a week's suspension for all of you."

The young witches cried out their collective complaints.

"And I'm confiscating that board, too."

"Miss, no! My mom'll kill me!"

Called it. “Well luckily if she does I’ll have this handy board so I can make sure you're attending detention from beyond the grave."

"Detention?!"

"Yes, detention. You're lucky I'm not sending you straight to the principal's office." A collective shudder went through the group at the thought, Coach included. She didn't prefer to subject anyone to that, no matter how deserving. "You brought an unauthorized magical object into school and now my basketballs smell like a Bath and Body Works."

A couple of the girls smirked at one another with badly repressed laughter. "Smelly balls."

"What's that?" asked Coach. "You want to run ten laps?"

"We're not even in class right now!"

"Twenty laps it is. Hop to it."

Another collective groan as they trudged out to the track. Coach gathered up the channeling board, the candles, the incense, and took them to her office. She unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk and tossed the lot in, to rest with the confiscated bounty of semesters past. Firecrackers, vape pens, a compact grappling hook launcher, several softly glowing amulets of various ornate designs, a petrified severed lamb's head with taut leathery skin and haunting glass eyes that followed you around the room, and a couple accumulated grams of weed. And now this, of course.

Certainly, Coach thought, she had gotten into her fair share of trouble at that age, but back in those days she would have never dared talk back to a teacher like that. This generation was a new breed. Or maybe she was just going too soft on them.

The lamb's head distended its ragged jaw and emitted a low gurgling string of Old Arabic.

"Oh what would you know about it."