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Enid wasn’t sure she’d ever gone from elated to confused as fast as when her new roommate walked into her dorm and punched her swiftly in the face.
She reeled back in shock, eyes wide, hand coming up to touch her face which had, from the bridge of her nose to her upper lip, gone numb with stinging pain. Her hand pulled away and she examined it dizzily.
Oh. That was what red looked like.
Principal Weems still stood in front of the doorway, gaze fixed somewhere on the wooden floor, her mouth hanging a touch open. Enid was pretty sure that was the most surprised she could possibly look.
Weems’s jaw shut with a click and she seemed to collect herself. She looked over her shoulder at the door that sat ajar, presumably to see the empty hallway that Enid’s roommate had stormed down without an explanation. Apparently, her parents had followed while Enid was distracted.
Enid spat blood carelessly onto the floor. She could feel Weems’s eyes fall on her next and thought she probably looked certifiably insane with that bloodstained grin on her face stretching ear to ear, but she couldn’t care less if she tried. She laughed giddily and covered her face in her hands.
“Oh my God,” she said, swinging forward onto her toes then back onto her heels. She jumped in place, and squealed again, “Oh my fucking God.”
Weems was apparently too confused to lecture her about language. She could barely muster taking a few steps over to Enid and offering her hand as comfort.
“Are you alright?” she said faintly. “I … I haven’t a clue what could have made her do that. I’ll have to have another talk with her parents. Perhaps Nevermore Academy isn’t the best fit, after all…” She cleared her throat, apparently remembering the laughing and bleeding child in front of her. “Do you need to go see the nurse?”
Enid shook her head. “No. No. I’m totally fine. I’m great, actually. This is great. This is amazing.” She turned to look at her side of the room, now bursting in what she had known, consciously, were pinks and oranges, but seeing them in full definition was a whole different experience.
“Wow,” she said, to Weems and to nobody in particular. “I am so good at interior design. Was no one going to tell me how nice my room looked?”
She walked (stumbled, really, though that didn’t matter) up to her window, leaving a trail of blood that dripped from her nose and mouth, and touched her hands to it reverently.
“This is awesome,” she said decisively, before fainting.
—
There was a whole orchestra’s worth of percussionists banging on Enid’s head as if in a fucked-up, arrhythmic solo. Her mouth was as dry as a desert in drought. This is fine, she thought to herself, lying on crisp rough bedsheets and with no clue in the world where she was or how long she’d been there.
After an inscrutable amount of time, she blinked her heavy eyelids open and saw Yoko peering at her from over her sunglasses, sipping at one of her mysteriously-procured blood packets. Also, she was in the infirmary—not a surprise, really, she figured, as her last memories trickled back into her consciousness like sweet, sweet honey.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Yoko said. “No way in hell was I going to wait by your bedside like you were an injured war hero for more than twenty minutes.”
Enid’s lips peeled open like the mouth of a Ziploc bag—that is to say, painfully and with a lot of tearing skin. Then, eloquently, she said: “Uh… huh?”
“Don’t worry, that psycho didn’t actually break your nose,” Yoko said before taking a long drink. “Mm. No, just a split lip and a nosebleed. Oh, and a mild concussion, I guess, but that was probably obvious to you from the fainting. The nurse said you should be fine.”
Enid blinked. “Good?”
“Yeah,” Yoko agreed. Her packet emptied and she tossed it in the trashcan by Enid’s bed. “Now you have to tell me what happened.”
Enid slurred out something that even she didn’t fully comprehend.
Yoko looked at her strangely. “Uh. Do you want some water?”
Enid nodded. Yoko was gone for a moment, and came back with a little plastic cup that she’d clearly just gotten from the water cooler in the nurse’s office. Enid gulped it down gratefully.
Once her throat had stopped sticking to itself, and some of the fogginess in her brain had cleared, she sat up in her stubbornly-creaky bed.
“Are you good?” Yoko asked, kind of cautiously, like Enid was in danger of collapsing again.
Enid mumbled a vague sound of assent.
“Okay,” Yoko said, clearly not quite believing her, but pushed on regardless. “So? Tell me everything. All Weems gave me when I asked was the watered-down version: blah blah, emotionally disturbed, blah blah, needlessly violent… Go on, there has to be more to the story.”
“Uh, yeah,” Enid said, a moony smile spreading across her face. “I met my soulmate.”
Yoko’s brow furrowed and she looked more concerned than ever for Enid’s mental state. “Um, okay. I think I’m gonna get the nurse.”
She was halfway through standing from her chair when Enid put a weak hand on her knee. Despite the fact that Yoko could definitely snap her like a twig, she stayed.
“No, I’m serious,” Enid said, eyes wide and hopefully earnest rather than stir-crazy. “So she comes in, right? And suddenly everything’s bright and colorful and all that funky stuff, and as I’m thinking, you know, ‘wow, color is so cool’ and ‘holy shit, I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this girl,’ she just swings her fist and punches me in the face, no warning.” Enid barely remembered to take a breath. Then she eyed Yoko’s uniform appreciatively. “Also, wow, purple looks really good on you.”
Yoko blinked, leaning back subtly in her chair, like she was both taking this all in and plotting her escape plan. Eventually, she managed, “Don’t you think it’s a bit soon after meeting your soulmate to be hitting on me?”
“Ha-ha, like Divina would let me live if I was,” Enid said, then looked up at the ceiling dreamily. “Also, I’m devoting the rest of my life to my roommate. I’d probably kill for her.”
“What’s her name, again?”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Enid said dismissively. “We’re literally bound together by the universe, Yoko. We’re destined for each other.”
“You don’t know her name, and she punched you in the face as soon as she realised you were soulmates,” Yoko summed up. “Yeah, that seems like a great start to your universe-approved romance.”
“You could never understand, you cold-hearted cynic.”
“My soulmate didn’t punch me, kick me, or bite me when I met her, but sure,” Yoko said. “I’m the crazy one.”
“I wish she would bite me,” Enid said, hands clasped to her chest.
“Wow.” Yoko stood up. “Okay, you’re officially whipped, and I need to get to class.”
“Aw, really?” Enid complained. “But I’ll be bored in here. Can’t you skip?”
“Nah, Principal Weems only gave me one period off to make sure you ‘woke up to a familiar face,’” Yoko said teasingly. “Plus, since she knows I’m in here, she’ll be checking that I went to Bio. Have fun mooning over your emotionally disturbed roommate.”
“I will have so much fun,” Enid said.
Yoko snorted. “Okay. Try not to get anything else broken by the time I see you again.”
Enid grinned. “I can’t promise that. As soon as I get out of this room, I am totally going looking for her, and as I see it, there’s a fifty-percent chance she kicks my ass.”
“You know, most people would have their spirits dampened if their soulmate’s first reaction to seeing them was violence,” Yoko said, eyebrow raised over her sunglasses, arms crossed.
“Most people are heartless cowards,” Enid said. “It’s all going to work out, Yoko. The universe declared it. Also, I have to say, I was right—” she pointed to the ends of her hair, “—pink is fucking awesome.”
—
It took another two hours of waiting and periodical examinations before the nurse reluctantly let her go, after making her promise that she would come in once a day for the next two weeks and immediately if she felt any strong symptoms, along with the express instructions that she should go back to her room and stay in bed for the rest of the day. Enid thanked her profusely and practically skipped out of the infirmary with her get-out-of-class-free card, and started towards her dorm.
Not to stay in bed, of course—God, no. Just on the off-chance that she would find her roommate in there, possibly sulking.
She didn’t, but that wasn’t totally surprising. She took a moment, still, to appreciate her side of the room, bursting with color, and another to change into her spare uniform that was decidedly less blood-stained. In that time, she happened to glance in a mirror.
Her face had been cleaned of blood, but her lip still had an ugly gash down it, and she was wearing a thick white patch over her nose where her skin must have broken. Her hair was mussed—she did her best to smooth it down, too eager to leave to properly style it. Her mascara had obviously run under her involuntary tears, but she was glad to see that it had mostly come off with the blood—only a little dark shadow under her eye remained.
It was probably fine.
Still, as she made her way quickly out of her room again, a seed of doubt had been planted. She didn’t exactly look like prime soulmate material just then.
Then again, when she’d looked her best earlier (prepared, as she always was, for when she knew she was about to meet a new girl her age, just in case) things hadn’t gone as planned either. Clearly, her looks weren’t important to her soulmate. Enid wasn’t sure whether to take that optimistically or pessimistically, so she ignored it and strode on down the hall.
—
First she found Bianca with her friends, minus Yoko, skipping. Sorry, not ‘skipping’—when cool, rich kids did it, it was probably called something else.
“Hey,” Enid said, cautiously approaching the group.
Bianca rolled her eyes. “Yeah?”
“Um, any chance you’ve seen, like, a goth girl with long, dark braids walk by?” Enid asked squeakily.
Bianca looked at her. “Uh, no? Why?”
She very clearly didn’t care about the answer, so Enid only shrugged and said: “No reason. Thanks!” before darting away.
—
The bell rang. Students spilled out of classrooms and roamed the grounds, enjoying the after-school sun.
Enid came across Xavier lounging on the grass outside and sketching something mysteriously in his notebook. She tapped him on his unwashed head and he looked up, brow furrowed, pulling out his earbuds.
“Oh, hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Enid said back. “By any chance, have you seen, like, a short-ish girl, dressed all in dark clothes, long dark braids, bangs? Kind of intense-looking? Maybe being followed by two equally gothy-looking adults?”
Xavier frowned. “Um, no. Do you mean Wednesday Addams?”
“Who?” Enid said, but her eyes shone. She had a clue.
“We were friends when we were kids,” Xavier elaborated, shrugging. “Sorry, that description was just so specific. She might look different now. Also, no idea why she would be here. She’s kind of anti-social. Boarding school doesn’t seem like her scene.” He shut the cover of his notebook, which Enid thought was presumptuous, as she was five seconds away from taking off again. “Why?”
“Life-changing things,” Enid said. “No biggie. Thanks for the help, sort of. Bye.”
“Bye?” Xavier called after her as she sped to the most remote, anti-social place on Nevermore’s campus she could think of to look for maybe-Wednesday-Addams.
—
“Eugene!” Enid burst into the bee-keeping club headquarters. Actually, ‘headquarters’ probably made it sound a lot bigger and grander than it really was. It was more like a bee-keeping cubby house.
Eugene looked up from some confusing-looking chart and grinned. “Hey, Enid.”
Enid kind of figured Eugene had a schoolboy crush on her. It was patently obvious from the amount of times he’d tried to get her to join bee-keeping at this point, which had been annoying, but now she was glad for it. Otherwise, she’d never have known about this place.
She took a cursory glance around the room, however, and saw nothing. No dark head of hair, no piercing eyes. There wasn’t much room for error, either, since there was barely enough space for two people to fit comfortably.
“You haven’t seen a goth-looking girl come through here, have you?” she said anyway, hopefully. “Long dark braids, bangs, eyeliner, might go by Wednesday?”
Eugene shrugged. “No. Do you want to see the new grasshopper I caught?”
“Maybe later,” Enid said, and ducked back out the door.
—
She was going three-for-zero now, and starting to lose hope. There was always the possibility that Principal Weems had, actually, expelled her roommate on the spot—or at the very least, gently recommended that she complete her education elsewhere. She’d mentioned her plan to do something like that while Enid was still delirious with pain and excitement, back in her dorm room hours ago. Enid had been stoutly ignoring it.
She was sure that Weems would have let her roommate stay, if not at school at least long enough to explain, if one of them had explained that they were—you know, bound at their very cores by the universe and all that jazz. But Enid hadn’t done it, and by her roommate-maybe-Wednesday’s reaction, she couldn’t be sure she had done it, either.
Real, unignorable doubts were starting to congeal in Enid’s gut. What if her soulmate really did want nothing to do with her?
She shook her head. No point in worrying, she told herself, to only some avail. That wasn’t a problem she could solve.
She was half-considering going straight to Weems’s office to explain the situation they were in, about to turn around in the random, darkly-lit, undecorated hallway she’d stumbled into, when she caught sight of something—someone—huddled in the corner.
Enid blinked. The figure was sat down on the ground, wearing a purple and black Nevermore uniform, with nails painted black and long dark plaits. Despite her roommate’s apparent distress, she couldn’t help but smile.
“Howdy, roomie,” she said chipperly, bouncing down the hallway to land in front of the figure.
Her roommate looked up at her angrily through dark eyelashes, like Enid was the thing she hated most in the world, the scourge of her life. Enid had never seen anyone more beautiful. (Score.)
She stuck out her hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”
The girl’s eyes travelled down to her hand and levelled the same disgusted glare on it. “I don’t care. I hate you, truly. Never speak to me again.”
Enid retracted her hand and instead sat herself down across from her, trying her best to stay blissfully optimistic even though this could not be going worse. “Ooh. Grouchy.”
“Yes. Obviously,” the girl said darkly. “You have completely and utterly destroyed my life simply by looking at me with your … ugh, your blue eyes, I suppose. You are the bane of my existence and someone should put an end to you. In fact, I just might.”
“Ah,” Enid said. “Okay, off to a great start.”
“We are not.”
“No shit,” Enid said with a groan. “You hate me. You just met me five hours ago and you’ve already given me three injuries.”
The girl’s mouth seemed to relax slightly at this. “Really?”
Jesus. She sounded pleased.
“Four, if you count my concussion,” Enid said. The girl looked even happier at this, which was bizarre, but Enid was beyond delighted to be the cause of it. “I’m Enid Sinclair, by the way.”
“Not a personal best, but I’ll take it,” the girl said, leaning back against the stone wall and decidedly ignoring the second half of what Enid had said.
Enid waited expectantly as the girl continued to remain nameless.
The girl seemed to notice this, and sighed. “I suppose you’d like to know my name, then, as your overeager countenance indicates. I’m Wednesday Addams, though you shouldn’t look it up on the internet. Might ruin your image of me. Or improve it, if you have your priorities in order.”
So Xavier had been right after all. And Enid was definitely looking her up on the internet later.
“Cute name,” she said.
Wednesday glared. “I am not cute.”
Enid was willing to argue that point, but let it go in favour of asking the question she both was desperate for and terrified of the answer to.
“Uh, so, Wednesday,” she said carefully, testing it out on her tongue and savouring every syllable, “um, why exactly did you punch me? And, uh, why are you already plotting my murder?”
Wednesday rolled her eyes as if it should be obvious. “You’ve ruined my life, you moron.”
“Oh,” Enid said blankly. “Not a fan of the soulmate thing?”
“I wouldn’t have been if I knew it was going to be like this,” Wednesday spat, and Enid felt her heart sink. She was preparing to apologise and leave, resigning herself to a soulmate-less, Wednesday-less existence, when Wednesday continued: “I mean, all this bright … cheeriness. It is completely assaulting my eyes. Ugh. At every turn, there’s some new hue to be observed. I thought I would be safe outside but no, it turns out nature has betrayed me as equally as humanity.”
Wednesday leaned forward as Enid looked at her, eyebrows inching towards her hairline.
“The sky,” she said slowly, “is the worst thing I have ever seen. There’s no escape from it. Just blue pastels at every turn. Don’t you miss when it was only a gloomy grey dome over the world? I feel sick looking at it.”
Enid’s mouth was starting to twitch into a smile.
“And look at this,” Wednesday spat, pulling down the collar of her uniform. “Hives. Everywhere. I think I may be allergic to this … toxin. I can’t live like this. I well and truly can’t. How does everyone stand it all the time?”
Enid couldn’t help it. She laughed.
Wednesday’s eyes widened dangerously, and her lips pursed. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked quite genuinely like a madwoman. Enid could not find it in herself to be intimidated.
“Oh my God, you punched me because I made you see color?” Enid said through hiccuping giggles. “You punched me because … because I was your soulmate. Holy shit. Okay. So it had nothing to do with me?”
“It had something to do with you,” Wednesday protested indignantly. Enid raised her eyebrows. “Your room. It was like you made the express choice to blind me as soon as everything became … ugh … colorful.”
“Hey! I actually like my room.” Enid pouted. “I made it that way so I couldn’t miss when I met my soulmate. Also because greyscale was getting boring as fuck, and I didn’t want it to be the same as always once I could see color.” She shrugged sheepishly, vaguely embarrassed. “I, uh, I was always optimistic I’d meet my soulmate in school. Just a feeling I had.”
“I was always pessimistic of the same thing,” Wednesday sniffed. “I suppose we were both right.”
“I guess so,” Enid said, smiling. “Um. So, are you still pessimistic now?”
Wednesday looked at her consideringly. “Not quite. The hair will have to go, though. If you insist on being a blonde, at least remove the other two colors from my eyesight. Looking at them is like squeezing bleach directly into my pupils.”
“Hm. No,” Enid said, then poked Wednesday in the knee. Wednesday looked affronted. “You should see my wardrobe, by the way, if you don’t like my hair. It’s nearly all pink and orange.”
Wednesday’s eyes widened in horror. “Pink is unequivocally the worst color I have so far been introduced to.”
“What? That is objectively not true,” Enid said. “Roses, blushes, sunsets. All things I’ve been reliably told can be very pink.”
Wednesday closed her eyes tightly and looked miserable. “Don’t get me any roses, then. And don’t take me to watch any sunsets. And don’t you dare, not in a million years, make me blush.”
Enid grinned brightly. The trajectory of this interaction had done a total 180, and she couldn’t be happier with where it seemed to be going.
“I wouldn’t dare, sweetheart,” she teased, gently tweaking Wednesday’s nose.
Wednesday slapped her hand away. “What did you just call me? No. No, we’re not doing that.”
“Right,” Enid said. “Got to work up to it.”
“There is no ‘working up to,’ and there is no ‘it,’” Wednesday said, pointing sharply. “You had better bury any awful nickname-calling habits you may have for the forseeable future. I’ll warn you, I’ve smuggled multiple weapons onto the grounds that Weems has no clue about.”
“She’d better not find out,” Enid said. “It’s a miracle she’s let you stay at all.”
“Hardly,” Wednesday said. “I’ve done worse. Again, do not attempt to find out about my past.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Enid said with a smile. She stood up and offered a hand to Wednesday. It was slapped away and Wednesday stood on her own. “You know, we shouldn’t make the violence thing a habit.”
“Don’t provoke me, then,” Wednesday said. “Problem solved.”
She started down the hallway and Enid didn’t bother to ask where they were going. She figured it was back to their room, possibly to have a heated discussion about decorations, but she would also definitely follow Wednesday wherever it was she wanted to go. Possibly to the ends of the earth. She hadn’t been lying to Yoko when she said she might kill for this girl.
It was strange—though the carpet turned a lush crimson, and the sky (the beautiful sky) outside became a rich, endless blue, and even the grey walls had grown a touch of depth—Wednesday seemed to stay in greyscale. Enid watched as her figure moved, her hair the inkiest black and her skin so pallid it was nearly ash. Even the purple of her uniform seemed duller than Enid’s own, and the hives the color was apparently causing were closer to a muted mauve than the angry red they should be.
Enid never thought she’d prefer black and white to color, after all the stories she’d heard about the blooming beauty of discovering one’s soulmate.
She jogged lightly to catch up to Wednesday, falling into step with her. She offered her pinky finger which, after a moment’s hesitation, Wednesday linked with hers.
But maybe color became just another kind of monochrome when everything in the world had that same vividness. Wednesday stuck out like a black swan in a rose garden.
“That window will have to go, as well,” Wednesday said matter-of-factly. “I’d rather be exposed to the elements than have my vision constantly assaulted by an elephant-sized kaleidoscope.”
“They’re stickers, actually,” Enid said cheerfully, nudging Wednesday with her shoulder. “And how about we make a compromise?”
“...I’m listening.”
“We’ll peel half of them off, straight down the middle,” Enid said. “And when you inevitably get tired of your boring, monochrome, soulmate-less side of the room, you’ll come running over to mine.”
“I very much doubt that,” Wednesday scoffed. Then, after a pause, “But it does sound like a decent plan.”
Enid’s head was vaguely throbbing, her warm hand linked at a point with Wednesday’s, which was ice cold. Her split lip ached and Wednesday hadn’t apologised for it, and probably never would.
Wednesday was brooding, impulsive, violent and snarky. She was also the one constant between the world Enid had known up until she met her and the one that came after.
In other words, she was pretty much perfect.
Enid tugged on Wednesday’s hand and offered her a giddy smile. Wednesday rolled her eyes.