Chapter Text
There was a chip in Wednesday’s black nail polish on her right middle finger. Irritating. Not so much as the heavy pacing of Weems’ steps over the plush carpet.
“I may not have hard evidence, but I see you. You’re a trouble magnet.”
Wednesday scoffed. She was prepared for punishment – expulsion, even. Ironic since she was now fully invested in remaining at Nevermore, at least until this mystery was solved. “If trouble means standing up to lies, decades of discrimination, centuries of treating outcasts like second-class citizens or worse…” she muttered, glaring into the fire. She hated having to explain that her rage was a response to injustice, that it vibrated to strongly within her that she had to hold herself so outwardly stoic to keep it from bursting out.
“What are you talking about?”
“Jericho,” she retorted sharply, silencing the train of thought she’d latched onto, the running list of wrongs in her path that could be made right under the pressure of her fist. “Why does this town even have an Outreach Day? Don’t you know it’s real history with outcasts? The actual story of Joseph Crackstone?” Her throat still felt like ash when she tried to swallow and her ancestors' outcast screams echoed under the surface of her memory.
“I do.” The principal tucked a stray strand of platinum blonde hair up into her coiffed hairdo. “To an extent,” she added primly.
Wednesday firmly resisted rolling her eyes at the selective ignorance. “Then why be complicit in its coverup?” she accused. “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Weems’ mouth squeezed into a tight, red stain. “That’s where you and I differ. Where you see doom, I see opportunity. This is a chance to rewrite the wrongs, to start a new chapter in the normie-outcast relations.” Rehearsed, political. Not for the first time, Wednesday wondered what the principal’s true ambitions were.
“Nothing has changed since Crackstone. They still hate us,” she spat. Us.
“A bold claim from someone known to be consorting with the sheriff’s son. I would caution you to stay away from that boy.”
“You sound like Xavier.” Wednesday muttered, picking at the chip in her nail. “Tyler Galpin is harmless.”
“Loathe as I am to contradict myself, that boy is trouble. I see no opportunity for him to redeem himself; his relations with outcasts have been as disastrous in the past as I expect them to be in the future. It was exactly a year ago that he stood where you now stand.”
Wednesday felt the shock filter over her face too late. The verbal spar came to sudden impasse. Weems drew herself up to her full statuesque height, elegantly supplying her charge the dignity of schooling her expression back into a blank mask.
At least now they could get to the consequences of her alleged actions. As much as she enjoyed verbal sparring, the principal’s words had presented a new bone for her tenacious mind to gnaw at, a potential piece of the mystery.
“Are you expelling me?” she asked, keeping her tone as even as possible.
Weems’ smile split her face grotesquely, pleased with the power she held high over her head. “Not today, Miss Addams. As you pointed out, I have no concrete evidence against you. Consider this a warning.” She sauntered over to her desk, dismissing her without another word.
The rage in Wednesday’s throat was set to boiling by the time she returned to her room. Enid jumped, startled at her abrupt entrance, dropping the luridly colored sweater she’d been modeling in front of her mirror.
“So?” her roommate prodded. “What’s your sentence? Detention? Banishment from Jericho?” She reached out and clutched Wednesday’s arm, her nails sharpening. “Please tell me she didn’t revoke your dance privileges!”
Wednesday did roll her eyes then, shaking free of the vicelike werewolf grip. Any of those punishments would have been tolerable. She was especially keen to know what Nevermore considered an acceptable detention chore to be. “I was let off with a warning.”
Enid deflated, frowning. “Of course she’d show you favoritism. Your family is loaded. Plus your mom was her roommate back in the day.” She went back to sorting through her clothes, holding up a sheer lavender top embellished with flowers and butterflies, then a soft, stretchy sweater painted in a psychedelic wave of color. “Is this too much?”
Wednesday flinched, stripping off her blazer and tugging at her tie. “I usually enjoy being napalmed, Enid,” she deadpanned. Once she was out of uniform, she sat at her typewriter and made idle adjustments, growing increasingly more irritated as her roommate struggled to put together a date outfit. Her lecture with Weems had bitten into her usual writing hour; she was so attuned to it that even a few minutes late was throwing her off. “What did Tyler Galpin do last year?” she asked finally.
She felt Enid go still. The room was dead silent. “Tyler and his friends,” Enid bit out, breaking it harshly. Her voice was bitter, unlike her. “They jumped Xavier and ruined his Outreach Day mural. Weems approved of the concept. It was going to be really beautiful, Wednesday. You don’t even know.” Her eyes were watery. “The other boys’ dads are kind of a big deal in town. Tyler wasn’t so lucky. He was the example” She picked up the outfit she’d settled on, sucking up her tears.
Thing followed her into the bathroom and within a few minutes Enid’s voice was back to its usual timbre, the sweet, chatty cadence Wednesday had grown used to. She listened as the other girl prepared for her late-night rendezvous. The distinct itch of injustice prickled at the back of her neck as she tried and failed to get any writing done.
“I’m coming with you,” she announced when Enid emerged from the bathroom, smelling like popstar perfume and fluffed to perfection.
“What?” Enid balked. “I know you’re old-fashioned, but I don’t need a chaperone.”
“I need to ask Ajax where I can find Xavier tonight.”
Ajax was late.
Enid paced, fretting. “I’m getting the nail gun,” Wednesday decided, heading for the groundskeeper’s shed. Her roommate trailed behind her, trying to dissuade her in a high-pitched, wolflike whine.
“I probably came on too strong,” Enid hiccoughed.
Wednesday’s steps faltered. There could be some truth in that.
“Did you stand Ajax up, Sinclair?” a voice cut through her thoughts. It was low and melodic. Enid straightened her hair and the fluff on her sweater.
“He stood me up!” she countered. Wednesday admired the backbone. One of the cold-faced sirens that she’d seen flanking Bianca walked across the quad toward them. “Kent,” Enid muttered under her breath in explanation. Wednesday squirmed at the implication, at the quickness her new friend had developed to identify her poor memory with names and social connections. “Ajax’s roommate.”
A slight frown flickered over the boy’s face. His expressions were, on closer inspection, blank and shallow rather than cool and aloof. “He went to the showers almost an hour ago to get ready?”
“Are there mirrors in the showers?” Wednesday interjected.
A few minutes later Kent emerged from the boys’ facilities, his face slightly pink. “Idiot stoned himself.” Wednesday tactfully ignored the crude but praising remark he made as an aside.
Enid sighed in relief. Wednesday pushed aside the barb disappointment that snagged in her ribs; she was unused to being deprived of violence. “Do you know where I could find Xavier this evening?” she drawled instead.
“He’s probably in his studio.” He gestured toward the hallway that led to the woods bordering the east side of campus.
“You should probably be there when your date’s stoning wears off,” she advised her roommate. “I have other business.”
Once she was far enough into the woods to let the darkness cloak her, she regretted not asking for clearer directions. Just when she’d resigned herself to give up for the night, she caught the soft glow of light through the trees. She wove through and the shed loomed before her, a throbbing beat pulsing out. Instinctively, her lip curled, but her distaste was quickly soothed; she would hate having anything beyond Sight in common.
The door was unlocked. Wednesday huffed in irritation. Xavier was either bold or stupid. A predator doesn’t fear for its own safety, she reminded herself, smirking tightly.
Xavier’s hair was pulled back messily, a few strands falling over his forehead. His clothes were splattered with paint. Wednesday’s breathing hitched. Could some of it be blood? The song reached a screeching chorus and she noticed that while Xavier himself hadn’t noticed her, several pairs of bulging, luminous eyes were on her.
“Self-portraits?” she wondered aloud.
Xavier jerked out of focus and gaped at her. A twinge of embarrassment stabbed the base of her spine, but he didn’t seem to have heard.
“Wednesday,” he breathed. It sounded almost reverent despite the crack in the last half syllable, awed.
“I’m curious about something,” she said without preamble, keeping to the perimeter of the room. The monster had spared her but she was hesitant to pin Xavier’s apparent crush on her to the corkboard back in her room as motivation.
“Go ahead,” he invited with a resigned sigh, his thumb pressing into the hairs of the paintbrush in his hand. Behind him, the monster on canvas seemed to lean forward, the lanky hunch of its back swelling.
Wednesday blinked, unsettled. “Why is it that whenever the monster attacks, you’re near?”
“What are you getting at?”
“A theory," she explained, boldly. "Starting with Rowan at the Harvest Festival. Then on Outreach Day, you arrived just minutes after the monster disappeared, yet you say you didn’t see it.”
“I didn’t realize proximity was a crime,” he snarked, turning away from her.
“You’ve drawn the monster dozens of times,” she observed, picking up a loose sketch from the worktable. “Are these self-portraits?” she pitched her voice to one of interrogation.
“Do you know what your problem is?” he snatched the sketch from her roughly, ignoring her question. “You don’t know who your real friends are. I’ve been on your side since day one. I literally saved your life.” Wednesday opened her mouth to take that point and skewer him with it. Why had the monster spared her? Xavier ranted on, his voice rearing up in volume. “I believed your theories when nobody else did.” The monster on canvas behind him peeled itself off the surface and lunged at his neck, punctuating his rant with a slash of its gnarled claw.
“Xavier!”
He fell back against his easel, knocking it over. Paint splattered them both. Wednesday scrambled to find something to stop the bleeding.
“Under the table,” he wheezed.
She ducked under and found a bucket with mostly clean rags, shaking one out to press into the wound. “We need to get you to the infirmary.”
An hour later, between Kent and herself, they were able to get him back to campus. It had taken an embarrassingly long time for Wednesday to navigate Xavier’s phone after he almost passed out. The siren boy was the only name she recognized in the sparse address book. He met them halfway back to campus and slung Xavier’s other arm over his shoulders. Xavier grinned and pressed his face into his friend’s ear, whispering something garbled. Kent looked over at Wednesday. “What happened?”
“A painting attacked him. Has that happened before?”
Kent shrugged – difficult with his friend’s weight on him. “I’ve seen him use it to prank and attack other people.”
She filed that away for later and hefted her share of the weight, marching steadily forward.
Enid was in the infirmary, too, fussing over Ajax’s stiff form. A gorgon teacher was patiently explaining to her how long the stoning typically lasted and what the side effects were. “What did you do?!” she shrieked when she saw the blood running down Xavier’s shirt.
“It wasn’t her,” Xavier defended, his words slurred. “Addams only cut me with her accusations.”
The nurse ushered them over to a cot, pulling up a utility cart with fresh bandages. “It’s far too late for visitors, Miss Addams, Miss Sinclair,” the gorgon teacher said. “You can return in the morning.”
Wednesday slept poorly; she’d neglected to inform the nurse that she’d been splattered with artificially dyed paint. A rash had flared up on her arm. Fortunately, she had a bottle of antibiotic medicine amongst her toiletries, a boon from Morticia. She rubbed it liberally over the splash of dark blue on her hand and wrist before bed. Enid didn’t fare any better, tossing and turning all night until she finally succumbed to sleep sometime near dawn. Wednesday felt herself slip off for an hour of unproductive rest.
She put on the same sweater from the night before, laced her boots, and found her way back to the shed before returning to the infirmary. It was early enough that no one was on duty to deny her entry. Ajax was asleep, corporeal again, pale and restless.
Xavier looked peaceful in sleep, his long limbs hanging off the frame of the cot. He’d slept in his clothes, but his shoes were on the floor. The blood on his shirt had dried. Wednesday hovered over him for a long minute until his eyes fluttered open.
“This is a charming parallel,” she murmured as he sat up, gingerly touching his bandages. When he looked up at her, his face was soft and lit with hope.
She dropped a colored pencil drawing of the monster in his lap. “Do it again.”
He heaved an irritated sigh. “Sure, Wednesday. Make yourself comfortable in my private space. Break and enter whenever you want.”
“Kent said that you’ve used your art to prank and attack people before.”
“It’s just a parlor trick.”
“Show me,” she pushed again.
He shook his head, recoiling from the paper. “My actual thing is the precognition. I’ve been drawing it so much because I’ve been having visions of it. It isn’t of my creation. It’s sinister. That’s why it attacked me.”
Wednesday frowned. He seemed reluctant to even look at it. “Something else, then.” She pulled out a piece of paper with a pencil folded into it.
He glared at her. She glared back. Wednesday was not well versed in crushes; Xavier should be more eager to do as she asked, shouldn't he? He should want to impress her.
“Fine,” he took the proffered items from her and started to sketch loosely at first, and then in more decisive motions. She clenched her jaw as the creature started to take form, its angular legs and curved tail strikingly familiar. When it was done, he tucked the pencil behind his ear and flicked his wrist over the page. The scorpion rose from its flat dimensions and crawled over the rumpled sheets. Transfixed, Wednesday let her hand hover near it. The arachnid scraped its front legs over her knuckles almost lovingly before snapping its tail down. Wednesday withdrew her hand, wincing. It dissipated to graphite dust, leaving only the pencil stab pinprick on the back of her hand. “Satisfied?”
Only the faintest impression of Nero remained on the paper. Wednesday was too proud to ask to keep it. “Yes,” she said shortly. Xavier relaxed and put both sketches aside, bending over to reach for his shoes. She felt, inexplicably, the same fluttering in her chest she had the day they’d last been here. “I am a firm proponent of revenge best served cold,” she said. “I couldn’t fathom waiting a year.”
He looked up at her, recognizing that it was the only apology she could give.