Chapter Text
Wednesday’s POV
I’m still kneeling in the wreckage of our momentum. Almost balanced on apology and grovel. The watch sits in my palm where he placed it, a small, obedient heart pretending to be metal.
“It’s really warm,” he says again, as if the observation might change if he repeats it. “Like it’s been in the sun.”
“It’s been somewhere worse,” I reply before standing.
Tyler wipes the dust off his jeans. Up close, his innocence isn’t just an idea. It’s clear in his features. His jaw doesn’t yet show stubbornness. His eyes try to look brave but only manage to look sincere. His mouth looks dangerous because it’s so human. It hasn’t yet learnt how to be cruel.
“I didn’t see you,” he says, stepping back. “It’s my fault.”
“It is,” I say, because the truth shouldn’t be left alone. “But I was also thinking, which is dangerous while walking.”
He laughs. It’s a little late, like it took him a second to find it. “So… we both share the blame.” He holds out his hand like a peace offering. “I’m Tyler.”
“Yes,” I say, not shaking his hand. “I noticed.”
He blinks, then smiles awkwardly. “You’re new here?”
“New to tonight,” I say. “Not to the idea of it.”
He looks me over. My dress is too plain for the town square, my posture too sure to apologise. He tilts his head like a cautious animal, half curious, half careful. “Do you want… I mean, I work at the Weathervane. If you need napkins. Or a phone? I can give you a free coffee. It seems fair after I knocked you over.’’
“Compensation means someone got hurt,” I say. “I’m fine. And the last century and I are still on good terms.”
He stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets, trying to look relaxed and almost pulling it off. “Still. It’s late. You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m precise,” I tell him. “Being precise is rarer than just being okay.”
Behind us, the café bell rings for another customer. Tyler glances toward it, then back at me. He seems torn between responsibility and curiosity. He chooses responsibility, which is usually the safer mistake. “I should get back,” he says. “We’re closing soon. If you need anything. I’ll be right there.”
“I know where the café is,” I say.
He squints, half amused, half confused. “Cool.” He starts to leave, then turns back. “Hey… What’s your name?”
I think about all the futures that depend on saying it. Then I say it anyway. “Wednesday.”
“Like the day?” he asks, confused.
“Like the warning,” I correct.
He grins, then looks embarrassed by it. “Okay, Wednesday-like-the-warning. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“You will,” I say. It’s not a promise. It’s a truth I can’t help admitting.
He raises a hand to say goodbye, realises it looks like a salute, and disappears into the light and noise of the Weathervane. The door closes behind him, causing the bell to give a smug little ring.
I stand still long enough for a streetlamp to make fun of me. My mind, usually sharp and quick, circles the thought and refuses to land. I have what I didn’t come for: proof that life still happens, that mistakes still count, and that the universe can be argued with. What I don’t have is what comes next.
…
I try to compose myself because I feel the tension. Remembering what happened during the day usually helps me put my mind at ease. I think about them in order: grave, woods, town, Enid, Tyler, Weathervane and now evening. None of them tell me what to do next.
What doesn’t help is that I look fourteen on the outside. Inside of me, it’s a mix of half-built structures and broken pieces arguing inside one skull.
I realise that my parents, at least this version of them, are unaware of what is happening. I know they could be worried. So I know I need a phone to fix that issue, fast.
I walk back into the Weathervane. The warmth greets me right away. The smell of coffee and sugar greets me. I notice that the staff are closing up. It’s a calm routine of a town that believes it’s safe: wipe, stack, count.
Tyler is wiping a table in slow circles, as if making quiet amends. He doesn’t look at me.
I walk to the counter. “Can I use your phone? I ask.
The waitress, who has her hair pinned tightly back, slides the phone toward me without stopping her tip-counting. “Local calls only,” she says automatically.
“The past isn’t long distance,” I tell her.
…
The phone cord curls around my wrist like it owns the place. I dial home by instinct. I know most 14-year-olds wouldn’t bother to remember their parents’ home number.
The phone rings a few times before someone from home picks up.
“Addams residence,” says Morticia, with just two words.
“Mother’’ I say dryly, as if it’s the most normal thing that a 14-year-old is across state lines.
There’s a pause where I can almost hear all her carefully sharpened thoughts getting ready. “Wednesday,” she says. “You’re alive. Where are you?!’’
“I’m in Jericho.”
My mother lets out a slow, controlled breath. “Jericho is hours away from your school. They’ve called twice to say you’ve gone missing. Are you aware they think you’ve been kidnapped?”
“They worry for fun.”
“I worry correctly.” Her voice makes the café’s air feel colder. “Why are you there?”
“I wanted a field trip,” I say. It’s a clean lie. It’s one of the polite ones. “For research.”
“At midnight?”
“Dawn is too dramatic.”
“You are fourteen, not forty,” she says. “Stop pretending to be an adult just because you dislike rules.”
Something sharp flickers through me. It’s an old, wordless irritation. If only you knew you were talking to another adult, I think. One with more ghosts than birthdays. But I swallow it. Explaining would only make her right in ways I don’t want to admit.
Her words hit where my body remembers being older. I’m fourteen on the outside, twenty-six on the inside. Two versions of me trying to share one spine. I look at my hands. They’re small, smooth, and still innocent. They haven’t earned their scars yet. I keep my voice calm, not to rebel, but to stay in control.
“I’ll come back soon,” I say.
“You’ll come back now.”
“I’ll come back,” I repeat, “soon.”
There’s a silence between us. It’s like waiting for the storm to come.
Come home,” she says. “Don’t make me come over to Jericho!’’
“I have to go,” I say. “There’s something I need to…”
“Don’t you dare hang up the phone, missy!”
…
I don’t mean to touch the mug beside the register, but I do. It’s porcelain, still warm, with a faint crescent of dried foam where his thumb must have been. Suddenly the world tilts.
The vision doesn’t come gently. No, it hits me hard.
A basement breathes out rot. The stone walls sweat like they’re hiding something. There’s a lantern that flickers, casting sickly yellow light that makes the shadows meaner. There are shelves that hold jars labelled in Latin. The language of elegant lies. A table scarred by old choices. Chains hang like punctuation waiting for a sentence. Laurel Gates bends over a notebook, her pen poised like a needle. The Hyde serum is almost finished. Her voice sounds sweet on the surface but is sharp underneath. Her voice cuts through the air: “Our sweet boy is stronger than the research predicted.”
Suddenly she turns around. Her perfume tries too hard to smell innocent, so much so that it feels wrong. It reeks of a mixture of roses and daisies.
Tyler is standing in the doorway. He’s not a monster yet. He looks scared and confused. Obviously he’s still just a boy in my vision. Gates smiles at him with the kind of gentleness people use on pets or weapons. “Soon you’ll be free of them,” she says softly.
Then everything snaps back to the present. The café comes back in pieces: the cash register coughing coins, a chair scraping the floor in apology, the clock above the pie case lying by a minute like it wants to please. The phone cord tightens around my wrist, cheap metal biting into skin. My hand grips the mug too hard.
I hang up the phone, ending the conversation with my mother abruptly.
…
I set the phone down carefully. The click sounds final, like it just cut one future away from another. The mug is still where I left it, steam rising like it owns the place. If he hasn’t turned yet, if the corruption hasn’t started, there’s still time to stop it.
Tyler walks over to the counter, holding a few coins for the tip jar. He pauses when he sees my hand gripping the counter, the phone cord tight around my wrist like a promise I didn’t mean to make.
“Everything okay?” he asks, polite in that harmless way people are before they realise how little politeness actually fixes.
“Yes,” I say. “Unfortunately.”
He smiles, thinking I made a joke when really I didn’t. “Need a ride? It’s late. I can ask my dad…”
“No.” I cut him off before the thought can grow roots. “Thank you.”
“Sure.” He taps the counter twice, then goes back to wiping tables.
I leave because staying too long leads to feelings, and feelings lead to mistakes. The bell gives me away as I step out, and the street takes me back without asking questions. The lamps glow like small, careful moons. The river nearby argues with itself in whispers and loses politely.
Suddenly a plan forms in my mind. It feels complete and certain. If I want to be sent to Nevermore two years early, I just have to make myself impossible to manage. Schools mistake obedience for goodness and anger for truth. That makes them easy to manipulate. A “field trip” can become an “escape”. A locked door can decide it’s open. Authority is just a dance, and one wrong step, in the right rhythm, can change everything.
I walk until the tidy shopfronts give way to trees, until the edge of town remembers it was forest first. The watch against my chest feels like a verdict choosing to be close instead of cruel. I press my palm to it until it warms, agreeing with me.
If time wants to replay its tragedies, I’ll interrupt. If history wants patience, it won’t get mine. And if Nevermore thinks it can wait for me, it’s wrong. Because I have work to do.
…
Morning arrives politely, the way liars always do. The sky is bruised in soft colours where the night refused to leave quietly. I slept well on the cot inside of an old ranger shed whose best quality is that it doesn’t ask questions. I wash my face in the river.
By six o’clock, I’m back on the road. The town lines up its shops like neat, sharp teeth. I buy a newspaper so anyone watching will think I care about the news. The headlines brag about the usual things: budgets, weather, and a missing cat whose photo has been printed too large for its dignity. Nothing about monsters. That’s perfect because it means the world still thinks it’s normal.
My current school is only a few hours away if you drive with bad intentions. Which I do. When I arrive at school. It greets me with its fake charm. The grass is trimmed too short. Even the hedges are ugly trimmed. The brick buildings pretend to have history, which clearly isn’t the case.
The headmistress, who believes obedience is the same as goodness, doesn’t yet realise she’s about to learn something.
I walk into Latin class one minute late. The teacher puts on his best disappointed face. I sit down without apologising and, instead of translating the assigned text, read out loud the notes he’s scribbled in the margins upside down from his lectern. His face turns a satisfying shade of offended. The class stares at me, and I enjoy it. A little too much.
In history, I fix the teacher’s timeline and refuse to quote the textbook because it’s wrong.
In chemistry, I ask for hydrochloric acid and explain, when denied, that there are cleaner ways to carve truth into stubborn materials.
In Art, I draw the Gates’ basement from my vision, sharp enough that the teacher mistakes it for emotional expression and asks me to explain my method. I say, “Observation.” She doesn’t appreciate it.
By lunch, the dean already knows I’ve become “an issue”. He schedules a meeting. I tell him I won’t go, and then I do, because an audience makes everything more interesting. His office smells of a mixture of sweat and leather.
“Miss Addams,” the dean begins, folding his hands, “we are concerned.”
“Too many pronouns,” I say. “You mean you’re concerned.”
He blinks, not used to being dragged from the safety of “we” into “I”. “Your teachers report you’ve been disruptive.”
“They’re confusing accuracy with disruption,” I say. “It happens often in places that worship rules more than results.”
His jaw tightens. He has the look of a man already writing a report in his head. “We expect cooperation.”
“Cooperation is something I give when it’s earned,” I reply.
“Wednesday…!”
“Miss Addams,” I correct. Sometimes respect has to be demanded in small, irritating ways.
The meeting ends because it has nowhere else to go. He’s showing off his authority by only helping me to get what I want. He gives me detention, then follows with a call to my parents and eventually adds a note to my record. I sign everything as if I’m giving autographs at a very boring event.
…
After classes, I take my time walking to the empty auditorium. I turn on every light and sit at the pipe organ without asking permission. I play Bach because it shows exactly how I am feeling.
The music fills the hall and spills into the corridors, climbs the stairs, and seeps into the administrative offices. By the time I hit the final chord, the headmistress, the dean, and two teachers have gathered, all sharing the same expression of official outrage.
“Miss Addams,” the headmistress says. “My office. Now.”
“Gladly,” I say.
We have a performance titled Expectations. She quotes rules. I quote results. She offers detention. I offer strategy. She threatens suspension. I recommend transfer. It’s tidier. The conversation spins in circles until all the pretence drains out of it.
“Where would you like to be sent?” she finally asks, mistaking curiosity for control.
“Nevermore Academy,” I say.
The headmistress laughs. It’s a sharp, unfriendly sound. “We don’t send our students to circus schools for misfits.”
I tilt my head. “Then you’ll be happy when I’m no longer your problem.”
Her eyes narrow. The dean starts shuffling papers. I can see them both thinking about what matters most. Their reputation, money, or the board members who panic at anything interesting.
When schools have to choose between covering up trouble or dealing with it, they always choose the cover-up. Between discipline and transfer, transfer wins.
“Your parents”, the headmistress says, sounding proud of herself, “will never agree to this.”
“Consent”, I say, “is just a door that opens when the right letter arrives. You’ll write to Headmistress Weems at Nevermore. You’ll send my records. You’ll copy my parents. They’ll sign it. You’ll call it a joint decision.”
“You assume a lot.”
“No,” I say. “I calculate.”
…
The paperwork that follows takes forever. The headmistress calls Nevermore. Eventually calls turn into emails. Emails turn into results. I go back to my room and pack carefully.
The watch rests in my hand for a moment too long. “You’re not a miracle,” I tell it. “You’re just a wound that remembers how to open.”
At three in the morning, I wake up with the kind of certainty my family calls a vision and doctors call overthinking. The watch burns hot against my skin. I don’t feed it blood. I feed it purpose. Outside, the ravens, both younger and somehow the same, move through the air like punctuation marks. Somewhere in town, a woman with a basement and perfume that lies even better than she does is sleeping peacefully, believing she’s in control.
…
Dawn arrives with poor taste and good timing. By eight, a long black car pulls up outside the office, purring like it knows it belongs here. My mother steps out wearing black, her disapproval as stylish as always. My father follows, smiling like chaos is a love language.
The headmistress is ready to be judged and to pretend she’s winning. She gets neither. Mother reads the transfer letter once, then corrects it with her fountain pen. A pen that’s probably ended wars. Father kisses the pen like it’s a holy relic. The headmistress signs where she’s told. The dean pretends to look important. But they’re clearly not.
…
We don’t discuss reasons on the drive at first. My parents don’t know about time travel. They just know me. That’s enough. The car hums along the road, steady as a heartbeat trying to be calm.
Finally, Mother speaks. “Running away, Wednesday. How tediously traditional of you. Couldn’t you think of something more original than vanishing into the night?”
“I wasn’t running,” I say. “I was investigating.”
“Investigating what?” She asks, her voice sharp enough to carve marble. “Your own capacity for chaos?”
“The limits of the present,” I say. “And I found them disappointing.”
Mother sighs the way people do when they love something they can’t control. “You frightened us,” she says quietly. “That is not an accomplishment.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” I say. “Fear is just proof of attachment.”
“Spare me your philosophy,” she replies. “You are fourteen. You have plenty of time to perfect arrogance.”
“I’m ahead of schedule,” I say.
Father chuckles softly from the driver’s seat. “She gets it from you, querida.”
“She gets the dramatics from you,” Mother fires back.
“I prefer to call it passion,” he says, smiling. “Our little scorpion went on an adventure. Who among us didn’t at her age?”
“I never broke curfew,” Mother says.
“No, but you broke hearts,” he replies. “I’d say our daughter is merely exploring the family talent for disruption.”
Mother’s lips tighten, but her eyes soften, if only slightly. “You could have been hurt,” she says. “Or worse.’’
“I was careful,” I answer. “Statistically, I’m more dangerous than anything I might have met.”
Father beams. “That’s my girl.”
Mother cuts him a look. “Do not encourage her, Gomez.”
“I can’t help it. She reminds me of you the day you threatened your debate coach with a fencing foil.”
“That was different,” she says.
“It always is,” he murmurs, still grinning.
For a few miles, no one speaks. The silence is comfortable in the Addams way. It’s full of affection disguised as tension.
Suddenly Mother breaks it. “You will call every other day,” she says firmly. “A rule we shall all pretend to follow.”
“If you insist on being legendary,” she adds, “at least be punctual.”
“I prefer accuracy to fame,” I say.
“Be both,” Father suggests, squeezing my hand with the tenderness of someone who knows sharp things can love gently, too.
Eventually Jericho greets us the way small towns greet weather: by pretending they expected it. We stop at the Weathervane because Father believes coffee is sacred.
The bell goes off. Tyler looks up at us. We could pass for a haunted family portrait.
“Welcome,” he says, voice calm, eyes curious. “What can I get you?”
“Black,” I say.
“Black and resentful,” Mother adds.
“Something that tastes like victory,” Father says.
Tyler laughs late. “I can manage two out of three.”
The cups arrive. My parents pretend to be ordinary for a few minutes. It suits them. I let the warmth teach my hands how to hold something without breaking it. Tyler glances my way twice, as if he senses something but can’t name it. He stays where he is.
…
Outside, the car hums again. The gates of Nevermore rise ahead. They’re like stone and iron wound together. The school perches on the hill above Jericho, its towers cutting into the grey morning. The air shifts as we drive through the gates. It’s colder and cleaner. It’s touched by the smell of old rain trapped in stone and ink drying on forgotten pages.
Nevermore does not look welcoming. The courtyard is too neat, the cobblestones too rehearsed. Ivy crawls up the walls with suspicious discipline. The air carries hints of cedar polish, candle wax, and something faintly metallic. Beneath it all is the damp sweetness of the forest pressing close.
Larissa Weems, still alive in this timeline, greets us at the front steps with a smile.
“Mrs Addams,” she says to my mother, every word carefully sharpened. “Wednesday.”
“Headmistress,” Mother replies, her vowels lined with eyeliner. “We bring an exceptional child and a pile of paperwork.”
“Both heavy,” Weems answers. “Let’s lighten the load.”
Inside, the halls smell of polish and chalk. The portraits on the walls watch with proprietary interest. The air tastes of dust and history. We pass classrooms where the windows have learnt to filter sunlight into respectable gloom. I recognise the rhythm of the place.
Students, who I think are my future classmates, walk past in uniforms too new for stains. I arrive as a rumour with luggage. My dorm room has a bed and a desk. I set the watch on it; it behaves for now.
Weems clears her throat. “You’re early, Miss Addams.”
“Time is inaccurate,” I say. “I prefer to fix it.”
“See that you don’t fix too much,” she warns. “This is a school, not a lab.”
“Labs are safer,” I say. “They label their explosions.”
Her look promises a semester of arguments worth having. What follows is a long wait in her office. Forms are exchanged. A tour follows where I have to pretend that I don’t know every corner.
My parents leave with the careful pride of people. It’s like they have successfully delivered a curse to its proper address.
My mother kisses my forehead. Father tells me to aim for the eye. They fade into the distance and then into memory. I watch them go from my dorm window, feeling the campus close around me like a net I chose to enter.
At dusk, I walk the school’s edge. The gargoyles stand guard, damp stone breathing out the smell of moss and rain. The ravens gossip from the eaves. The air is heavy with woodsmoke and lake water. Lamplight edits the paths into sentences.
Nevermore, at night, smells like candle soot and secrets. It’s like a place that doesn’t want to sleep. Somewhere beyond these walls, a woman with a basement is sharpening a story she plans to carve into a boy. Somewhere else, a dinner bell tells on the living. The watch against my chest warms, like a quiet agreement.
I sit at my desk and write the next list:
• Greenhouse: visit late; plants hear better than people.
• Library: get a key to the restricted section; the past keeps records.
• Fencing club: watch them; precision exposes truth.
• Laurel: find her mask among the faculty and town leaders.
• When the visions return, follow them completely.
I sharpen a pencil. The page fills neatly.
The hallway bell rings for lights-out, pretending darkness is the school’s invention. I turn off my lamp. It’s fun to obey when no one expects it. The bed is hard. Sleep considers me, then decides against it. I’ll return the favour later.
Between half-sleep and defiance, I see flashes: a boy’s hands around a mug, a woman’s pen carving lies, and a watch’s second hand deciding to move. My body rests; but my mind stands guard.
If the universe wants to repeat its tragedy, I’ll interrupt the script. If history wants patience, it won’t get mine. If Nevermore thinks it can contain me, it’s mistaken.