The problem I see here is that you're jumping into the story too quickly, like you were figuring it all out as you were writing it rather than before you started writing it. That's okay in a first draft, but not always the nest way of doing it. I lost interest right away because all I saw was a bunch of ideas strung together without a proper understanding of what to do with them. Before you write a second draft, it might be useful to write up character histories, and a history on the fantasy element of the story, what it is, how it exists, and what people do with it. Read and watch stories that have similar concepts, and see how they were handled. The first scene should not throw the reader into a story without a clear image of who those characters are.
Please, sit down before you fall down.
Belloq, "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
“Tobitha, would you mind staying after class for a moment?” said Mr. Winslow quietly as she walked by his desk.
Good hook! It establishes a character, a setting, and a description of what is going on, without slowing down the action!
I think that some of your characters words don't meet their intention. For instance, Mr. Winslow could have been more subtle in his questioning, it seemed slightly obvious.
However, it isn't big because it acts like another hook, so I ended up ignoring the hokeyness and rushing for the next sentence.
The hokey coincidences are obvious, so you might want to smooth them out a little, but everytime you use one, you include a hook, which ends up enticing the reader more than it repulses them.
Even though I'd add in some more dialogue to make it a little more casual of a mentioning, it is solid enough to continue.
One thing is that the age of the character's age isn't established, which made the character a bit difficult for me to connect to. Perhaps it is better that way, because giving this character an age might give a reader a false set of assumptions.
So, remarkably, the only thing I can criticize you for is not putting a space in between your paragraphs for easier reading.
To tell you the truth, I didn't have high hopes coming in, but you actually got some good stuff here. It could use a little extra work, to smooth out some of the rough edges. The edges are few and actually give the story a little bit of a comic book charm to it. It also spurred my creative instincts, which means we have a winner.
