Work Text:
Time, as every Night Vale preschooler learns, is weird. Everyone who grew up in Night Vale has fond memories of that nursery rhyme,
Hickory, dickory, dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one,
The mouse subjectively experienced a thousand years before it struck two,
Hickory, dickory, dock.
But on the whole, it’s less weird for children than it is for adults. There's no special reason for this, either scientific or sinister; time everywhere is less weird for children than it is for adults. Children in school have marking periods, summer vacations, semesters, final exams; everything is clearly delineated, a consistent progression from here to there. For adults, time is a hazier mass of holidays and birthdays and anniversaries and deadlines, all of which sneak up on you without warning. The sudden transition from child time to adult time is likely why a disproportionate number of people who grow up in Night Vale get stuck at the age of nineteen (or, for those who manage to put it off by going to the community college, 22); they're waiting for an end to summer vacation, a marking period that will never start.
Still, despite this protection, children certainly aren't immune to the strangeness of time. Every year, there are new classmates who were just your age and had lived in Night Vale their whole lives, but who also hadn't existed the year before; and there are always a flew "early bloomers" who jump straight from elementary school to high school. Relatively unremarkable, on the whole.
Nita Cervantes was also relatively unremarkable. Her mother, Beatrice, was a Night Vale native and a member of the Sheriff's Secret Police, although officially, she was a mailbox; cover identities are an essential part of secret law enforcement. Her father, Juan, was a former Interloper who, at the age of sixteen, had left a house that was in no way a home, drove and drove and drove with no conception of where he was going until he was pulled over in the Scrublands by Beatrice, who had been nineteen for only a year or two. She gave him a warning for underage despairing without a permit, then helped him get a job bussing tables at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner.
Beatrice stayed nineteen for a few more years, waiting (although she didn't realize it at first) for Juan to catch up, and they got married the day they both turned twenty, which saved them a lot on cards and gifts down the line. They got a house together which, although small and intermittently haunted, was in every way a home, and after a few years they had Nita.
Nita started sixth grade in 1981. She already spoke Spanish and Double Spanish at home, and didn't want to study Modified Sumerian because learning a language that nobody would speak natively for a few thousand years felt like a waste of time, so she took Russian, the only other language being offered at the time. All of the Russian students got paired up with pen pals studying English in Nulogorsk. Nita's pen pal was named Gavrie, and (because it turned out that both Nita and Gavrie were very shy and didn't have any pals of the non-pen variety) they soon became close friends, exchanging considerably more than the assigned one letter a month.
Even after the class ended, they kept writing to each other. Nita told Gavrie how hard it was to sometimes have to pretend that her mother was a mailbox, grabbing her jaw and pulling it uncomfortably wide to look for letters inside. Gavrie told Nita that nobody in Nulogorsk called him Gavrie; they had a different name for him, a girl's name, because for some reason no one there would just believe him when he told them that he was a boy. Nita could tell from the way he had written that letter that it was a fourth or a fifth draft, every article carefully in place and every word perfectly conjugated, and realized that for some reason he was worried about sharing this with her. She didn't understand that—lots of things outside Night Vale were strange—but she thanked him for sharing and told him she was glad that he at least had somebody who would believe him about being a boy, and call him the right name.
They kept writing all through seventh grade. Gavrie told Nita that his father had finally taken him fishing with him, and sometimes even called him "son." Nita told Gavrie that she'd gotten a little brother, Marco, who actually was a mailbox part of the time, and had to use all her skill with English and Russian both to really describe how it felt, funny and beautiful and a little bit envy-inducing, to watch her parents bottle-feed a mailbox, or thump a baby on the back until he spit up postage stamps.
In 1983, Nita and Gavrie both started eighth grade.
They were both fluent, at this point, in their own language that they'd cobbled together from English and Russian and a little bit of Double Spanish. Instead of going to the eighth grade dance, Nita put on her best dress and did her hair and makeup and sent a picture of herself to Gavrie, and spent hours writing and rewriting a letter that, in the end, just told him that she liked him and asked him to be her boyfriend. Just that one, incredibly important thing, the feeling that had ballooned in her chest over the last few years until it filled her head and her fingers and her toes and felt like it must be shining from her eyes and pouring from her lips like stamps sometimes poured from Marco's. Just that.
He said yes. Nita put her very grown-up lipstick back on and kissed the page where he said yes thirteen times, then sent it back to him, hoping that he could siphon off a little bit of the joy that was filling her before she burst completely.
The next year, Nita and Gavrie both started eighth grade.
Some of the teachers looked at Nita a little funny, and she had a bunch of different classmates, but what did she care about them when she had Gavrie? Sometimes Nita would send a second letter before she even got one back from him, because he was the only person she wanted to talk to. Sometimes it felt like the only language she could really speak her mind in (or write her mind in) was English/Russian/Double Spanish.
The next year, Nita and Gavrie both started eighth grade.
Nita and Gavrie talked about the future sometimes. Sometimes they talked about the far distant future and the Blood Space War, but mostly they talked about their own, closer future. Nita loved Night Vale, but Gavrie wanted nothing more than to be a fisherman, so they agreed that they would live in Nulogorsk together when they grew up, unless Nita made so much money as a stock market analyst (all kids have their wild dreams) that they could move back and forth, spending every summer in Nulogorsk and every winter in Night Vale.
The next year, Nita and Gavrie both started eighth grade. This time, Nita noticed. She asked Gavrie about it, but he didn't think there was anything wrong; he was pretty sure this was the first time he'd started eighth grade. He remembered all their conversations, though, so Nita shrugged it off. Time was weird. Hickory, dickory, dock.
Years passed. Nita's parents tried to tempt her into growing up with promises about her quinceañera and getting to go to high school and didn't she want to graduate someday? She ignored them. It was more important that she was the same age as Gavrie. When he started ninth grade, she would too. She didn't care that the students around her were strangers, weirdly obsessed with day-glo colors and gel pens and musicians she'd never heard of. She cared about stories of taking the boat out in the cold Nulogorsk pre-dawn, casting the nets and watching the sun rise. She cared about the way she and Gavrie signed their letters to one another: "Ttee aammoo, Я люблю тебя, I love you."
In 1997, Nita, Gavrie, and Marco all started eighth grade, and even Gavrie had to admit that that was sort of weird, since he could remember Nita telling him about Marco's birth. Their respective stacks of letters were far too tall to be the result of just a few years of correspondence. Nita assured Gavrie that she didn't mind. Someday the clock would strike two for him, too, and then they could both move on. Until then, why push it?
Then came the ban on writing utensils, simultaneous with the official announcement that writing to Nulogorsk just wasn't interesting any more and everyone should knock it off. Nita started writing her letters by flashlight, in crayon, in the middle of the night. She explained what had happened to Gavrie, who thought it sounded pretty unlikely but was willing to take her word for it.
In 1998, Beatrice and Juan were sure that finally—but no. Marco started ninth grade, suddenly became the older sibling. Nita started eighth grade, and so (according to the letters Nita received at a secret PO box in the sand wastes) did Gavrie. He urged her to move on, but Nita told him that she didn't care if all of Night Vale moved on without her; until he started ninth grade, she wouldn't either. It was young love, young love that never aged, caught in a static moment of innocent ecstasy and stretched across decades.
In 2000, Gavrie's letters started getting strange. Sometimes it took months and months for the next one to come. Sometimes he talked like it was the first time they'd ever been in eighth grade. Once Nita even got a letter in stiff, broken English, clearly just a stranger filling an assignment, in Gavrie's handwriting but signed with some girl's name. It's hard to write under the blankets, with a flashlight in one hand and a crayon in the other, when you're crying, begging your boyfriend to please not forget you. Time was weird, but it was supposed to be weird like a fairy tale, like Sleeping Beauty's frozen castle before the witch's spell saved her from the prince's kiss, like her mom laughing at herself for staying 19 until her dad caught up, looking over at him with love in her eyes while she told the story.
Nita started eighth grade. Nita started eighth grade. Nita started eighth grade. The mouse ran up the clock and it was 2014 and she hadn't gotten a letter from Gavrie in seven years, and that one had been in French, but she had promised, she had sworn, and what if she got another letter from Gavrie, still in the eighth grade and still in love with her, and she was old , like nineteen or even thirty? She had always been shy and quiet, but she became even more withdrawn, sometimes spending hours just staring out the window at the weather.
The submarine from Nulogorsk came, and for a moment Nita hoped, hoped so hard that it felt like the force of her hoping had to bend the world into the shape that she wanted it to be... but no. She couldn't look at Megan Wallaby after that, even though she knew it wasn't Megan's fault. What if her body donor was Gavrie, a Gavrie who had kept living and growing while Nita stood still? Even if he hadn't been, he was a sign that Gavrie was so far away, across space and time and maybe universes or maybe death.
And then Nita made a friend.
Janice was a popular kid. Not like the popular kids in one of those classic teen movies like The Hunt for Red October or The Exorcist, where the popular kids hold that position because everyone's afraid to get on their bad side; Janice was just nice to everybody. Her uncle talked about her on the radio a lot, and sometimes people would sort of tease her about it in school the next day, a hint of envy under the teasing, but she wouldn't get embarrassed and she wouldn't brag. She would just smile and say that was the way her Uncle Cecil was, and she loved him for who he was. That was the thing about Janice: she liked everybody for being exactly who they were, and because of that, you couldn't help but like her back.
Nita didn't know Janice (except from the radio) until the sixth grader came up to her at lunch one day and said, not beating around the bush or anything, that she'd heard that Nita had been in middle school for decades.
"I just don't get this stuff they're trying to teach us in math, with the letters instead of numbers," Janice said. "My mom's too busy to help, and my stepdad and Uncle Cecil get distracted, and Uncle Carlos says he only knows science math. But you must have this stuff down backwards and forwards by now, right? Do you tutor?"
It had been easier to do math back when they were allowed to use pencils, but Nita took out her wax tablet and her stylus, and Janice took out hers, and they worked through some problems together. It took a few lunch periods, but eventually Janice really got it that some numbers would let you replace them with any old letter, but others only let you use their favorite letters, and some didn't like being replaced at all.
"Thanks so much for the help," Janice said, beaming. "Since we don't need the quiet anymore, do you want to have lunch with some of my other friends?"
And just like that, Nita had friends. She'd seen it happen to other people, the way a loner could make one friend and then make friends with all their friends and suddenly have a dozen, but it had never happened to her. She went to Janice's birthday party and actually met the Voice of Night Vale (and actually saw him almost get into an actual fight with Janice's stepdad, until Janice's mom calmed them down), and she ate cake and they all watched The Hunt for Red October 2: Blue November, and then the adults left or went to sleep and they all played truth or dare.
Nita, inevitably, got asked who she had a crush on, and she said he went to a different school. Everybody listened for the "Middle School Crush Falsified" alarm for a moment, but when it didn't go off, people started asking Nita all kinds of questions about what school and how she met him, until Janice got them to back off by admitting that she had a crush on a girl in her Weird Spanish class.
One by one, the others fell asleep, until it was only Nita and Janice. Nita was used to late nights, writing with her crayon and her flashlight.
"I stay up late sometimes," Janice said. "My stepdad takes me out to look for the lines in the sky, arrows and circles and dotted lines that explain everything. Sometimes I think I almost see them."
It was a dangerous confession to make, especially to a Secret Policewoman's daughter, but Janice didn't seem to care.
"My crush lives in Nuolgorsk," Nita told Janice. The story poured out of her, words never before spoken aloud now said for the first time, as so many words are, into the listening hours after midnight. She thought she would cry by the end of it, but decades of middle school hardens you, and she shed only one tear.
"And that's why you're still in eighth grade?" Janice asked at the end.
"That's why," Nita confirmed. "I know it's silly, especially now. I haven't heard from him in years. I probably never will again. I don't even know if it's him I'm in love with any more, or if I'm just in love with the love I felt before, or if I just feel like I can't change course now, not after so long." She hadn't known that was true until she said it, and braced herself, even though she knew she didn't need to, for Janice to laugh at her. But she didn't get laughter or pity.
"What if it's the Registry?" Janice asked.
"Huh?" Nita frowned. "The Registry is just for recording middle school crushes, and making sure no one cheats at Truth or Dare. It doesn't enforce them."
"I know, but..." Janice searched for the words. "My stepdad says that some of the things we think are just normal, like the vague, yet menacing government agency watching us or elections being decided by Raydon Canyon, might actually be... not 100% the best all the time."
Nita held her breath at this near-blasphemy.
"Maybe, after so long holding your crush on Gavrie, the Registry doesn't want to let go either," Janice said. "We're supposed to be the bosses of it, but we're not even allowed to look at it. Maybe it thinks it can be the boss of you."
"Maybe," Nita said doubtfully. "But how could we even know? And what would we do, if it was true?"
Janice told her. A few weeks later, Nita sat glued to her radio, nearly holding her breath.
At the end of that summer, Nita said a tearful goodbye to Janice, because they'd be going to different schools for a few years. Janice was starting seventh grade, and Nita was starting ninth grade at Night Vale High.
"I'll see you at your quinceañera," Janice promised.
Hickory, dickory, dock.