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1.
Hell is a hotel with a thousand rooms and all of them are haunted. Madison’s is bigger than most, she guesses. It’s the department store that her mom used to work at before they moved to L.A. Or rather, it’s a version of that department store, muted in color and sound with a faint stink of mold in the air. The customers are all stupid and belligerent, complaining about nonsense and asking to return items that look like they were recovered from the wreck of the Titanic. And the weirdly worst part: nobody recognizes her.
Sometimes they come close. That's what makes it Hell, really. They’ll say they think she looks familiar, and where do they know her from, and she always falls for it. She doesn’t know why. She should know better, but she just can’t help herself. She always falls for it, asking if they know her from the movies or maybe her singing (she’s a better singer than she gets credit for, an ex-agent of Emma Stone once told her she could do off-broadway), but they’ve mistaken her for someone else, and when she tells them her name they get that fucking look: the blank look of complete and utter obliviousness.
The rotation is the same. The line is never-ending as far as she can tell, but it loops, the same couple of dozen dead-faced, disgruntled customers on repeat. After a while she names them in her head. The woman with the saucepan full of maggots is Gretta. The girl with the armful of toothless hair clips is Nancy. The man with the severed doll heads is Spalding (obviously). Her manager she doesn't have to name.
Once, someone new appeared to set her free. His name was Michael. He was cute, and strange, and they thought he was the first male supreme of their coven, but it turned out he was the literal, honest-to-God, Rosemary’s-Baby-style Antichrist. It was a lot.
He came here once to set her free but eventually he sent her back.
That was a while ago now, she's not sure exactly how long. Time is a slippery snake down here. The wall clocks change every time you look at them. Sometimes they have no hands, or the numbers are out of order, or they aren’t even numbers at all. There are no windows in Hell, and no mirrors either for that matter. Nobody sleeps. There's a gnawing sense, she's noticed, that time isn't even happening at all, that every minute is the same minute, every task the same task.
Mostly she’s at the register, but occasionally she’s sent to clean up spills (weird, gross, unexplained spills that whisper to her) and sometimes she has to move stock from one end of the store to the other, which takes way longer than you’d think, and then move it back again. It reminds her of that syphilis guy who pushed a rock up a hill over and over.
When the big thing happens, she’s stacking the towels. She feels a presence at her back and her hackles go up, an adrenaline-soaked deja vu. She’s sure it’s him again, come to gloat, or hurt her, or introduce her to his cloven-hoof papa. She whirls around holding a bunched up, low-thread-count beach towel, her heart pounding in her ears, and—
‘Geez, even here you get the cushy gigs,’ says the woman in front of her. Madison is stunned into silence. Mallory, the would-be witch queen, looks just how she remembers her, but brighter, more full of life, as she raises an eyebrow at the cloth in Madison’s hand. ‘What’re you gonna do with that?’
She takes a moment to compose herself and find a retort. ‘Give you lice. We have really shitty towels.’
‘Ah.’ Mallory's amused. She unfolds her arms and extends a hand. ‘You don’t know me, but I’m a friend. I’m like you. Cordelia sent me, my name’s Mallory.’
Her introductory spiel confuses Madison for a second. Did the baby supreme get her memory wiped? ‘Yeah, I know who you are, hippy,’ she says, dropping the towel, studying the girl's face. ‘What are you doing here? Did you do it? Did we win?’
Behind Mallory, Randall—the manager—is approaching. His bulldog face scrunches up in confusion and anger as he trundles towards them, and without even looking behind her, Mallory absently waves her hand at him, dropping Randall like a sack of bricks.
‘What do you mean, you know who I am?’ Mallory asks. ‘You remember me? You remember what happened?’
Madison feels like their wires are crossed somehow. She shakes her head and says, as plainly as she can, 'You're a witch at Robichaux's Academy for Little Princesses. The world ended, you were under an identity spell, I was in a sand coma..'
‘But I stopped it,' Mallory blurts out. 'Nobody else remembers, why do you?’
The import of these words breaks over Madison's face in a smile. 'You stopped it? Holy shit, you did it? You really did it. You killed that pretty motherfucker?’
Mallory reciprocates with a small smile of her own. ‘Ran him over three times.’
‘You are something else, Curls.’ She gives the girl a slow nod of respect and sweeps an arm over herself to indicate her retail uniform. ‘Now, you think you can manage getting me out of these hideous-ass clothes?’
2.
Coming back to Robichaux, she feels a sting in her gut that is something like nostalgia. Would you believe it, she missed this old place. Cordelia is standing on the porch with that warm smile she wears for everyone. Queenie and Zoe are at either side, Queenie with her arms over her chest and a fond gleam in her eye, and Zoe with a cautious, closed-lipped regard.
‘Madison,’ Cordelia greets her. ‘So good to see you again.’
Zoe steps down from the porch and gives Madison a long, reserved look. She thinks the doe-eyed girl is going to say something, but instead she places her hands on Madison's shoulders and then hangs her arms around her wool coat in a loose hug.
‘Man, bring it in, you skinny bitch,’ Queenie says warmly, and joins the hug.
‘Okay,’ Madison pulls back from the two of them and raises her hands in protest. ‘That is entirely too much physical contact for one day. Can we use our words, please?’
Mallory approaches from behind and they all turn to watch her climb the steps, so at ease with this place already. Zoe embraces her as well, a tighter embrace this time. ‘You’re so brave,' she says softly.
Gray clouds blanket the sky above Robichaux, offsetting its eerie whiteness, threatening them all with that pungent, earthy scent of Louisiana rain. It's her first proper look at the sky since she got back and as she watches the rainstorm rolling in she's suddenly struck, with the force of an epiphany, by the simple, raw wonder of it. It's the roof of the whole world.
The whole fucking world.
_____
Things are kind of surreal for a while. Her and Mallory have this big secret that she doesn’t even really get why they’re keeping. Coco is here, but she’s not the Coco Madison remembers. That Coco went through an identity spell (which is no joke), and watched the world crumble down around her. This one is just… same old boring Coco, counting calories at a glance and apologizing every time she speaks.
Her and Zoe’s room is just the way it was when she first moved in, give or take an accessory or two. Madison gets the feeling that’s Zoe’s doing, though she can’t prove it. Maybe Zoe’s feeling guilty for how she thinks Madison last died—which would be so fucking like Zoe, beating herself up over something her Frankenboyfriend did—or maybe she’s been told to keep an eye on her. Or maybe it’s a coincidence. Regardless, it’s actually kind of nice having it back the way it was. After everything that’s happened, Madison could use a little back-the-way-it-was.
Her first night home, while they’re lying in their beds, Zoe asks her what it was like in Hell. She sighs and tells her, ‘It was boring and stupid and they made me wear polyester.’
‘Are you serious? That’s your Hell, you’re wearing polyester?’
She turns her head to look at her roommate. ‘I’m dead serious. It was very traumatic. I’m going to have to do a complete purge of my wardrobe just to eradicate any triggers.’
‘Um, you kind of don’t have a wardrobe anymore.’
‘What the fuck? What happened to it?’
Zoe’s eyes dart sideways and back. 'It’s been almost two years, Madison. We didn’t exactly think you were coming back.’
Something twitches in Madison’s chest. She turns her head to look at the ceiling and tries very carefully to keep breathing at a steady pace. The roof of their room is shadowed in the dim lamplight, and it’s hard to tell the difference between the cobwebs and the cracks in the paint. Maybe there is no difference.
‘Two years without me,’ she says. ‘Now that sounds like Hell.’
‘Is that really all that happened? Bad clothes?’ Zoe asks.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, you seem different.’
Madison shrugs and rolls her eyes at the same time. ‘Look who’s talking. Should I refer to you as Councilwoman, by the way?’
Zoe shifts on her bed and props herself up on an elbow. She’s getting that earnest look she gets when she wants you to know she really cares what you have to say.
‘Can I ask you something?’ Zoe asks. ‘It’s kind of important.’
‘I need a cigarette,’ she murmurs.
‘Why—’ Zoe hesitates, and then fortifies. ‘Why didn’t you bring me back?’
Madison sits up and opens the drawer of her nightstand. She rummages through assorted junk; four dead batteries, a makeup mirror, a balled up wad of tin foil.
‘Madison?’
Adrenaline surges through her at the soft edge of Zoe’s voice. God, she hates it when people talk softly to her. ‘What do you want me to say? I’m sorry, okay?’
‘Are you?’ Zoe asks, her face smooth, her voice calm. ‘Are you sorry?’
She finds a lighter at the back of the drawer, and gives the wheel a few tentative flicks. The flame is low—really low—but she thinks she can probably manage.
‘Look, what do you say we call it even? You died, I died: in fact, I died—’ she has to catch herself ‘—twice , so if anyone should be pissed, it should be me.’
‘I’m not pissed!’ Zoe exclaims. ‘I’m just asking. Why can’t you give me a straight answer?’
‘Fuck you,’ Madison states matter-of-factly. ‘That’s your answer’.
Zoe stares at her incredulously for a moment, scanning her face. ‘I can’t believe you sometimes,’ she mumbles eventually, and falls back on her bed. Madison sits there, half-wanting to say hey, lighten up, she was kidding, even though she wasn’t really. Instead, she says something about going to see if anyone has a spare cigarette, and she leaves, and she doesn’t come back all night.
3.
A Massachusetts marsh bubbles with the methane from two entwined mammals, 13, 000 years dead. A Michigan mechanic has a panic attack in his office, knowing his sexual attraction to automobiles is only getting worse. A newborn baby in Arizona is in a fight for its life against its mother and her secret paramour, and it’s not going to win. There really is a Heaven, and there really is a Hell, and in between there is America, a place where everybody can be bought and every heartbreak is a horror story.
4.
‘Tell it to me again,’ she insists to Mallory. It’s a few days later and the sun’s out, baking the house and everyone in it. ‘You’re sure he’s dead? I mean, you’re completely fucking positive?’
‘I’m sure,’ Mallory replies. ‘I saw the obituary. I’ve been to his grave. Michael Langdon is very, very dead.’
‘That can change,’ points out Madison, pacing around Mallory’s room. It’s a surprisingly classy decor she’s got going on in here. Cool pastels and a kind of new wave minimalism. Madison eyes the armoire jealously.
‘Maybe,’ Mallory concedes. ‘But Cordelia’s been keeping a pretty close eye on the crystal ball, so to speak. If something as bad as the son of Satan was wandering around, she’d know it.’
‘Something’s wrong,’ says Madison. ‘I don’t know what it is, but this place, it feels different.’
‘The academy?’
‘All of it. Everything up here, I don’t know how, but it’s changed. You can’t feel that?’
Mallory takes her hand, squeezing it with something between concern and reassurance. ‘Maybe it’s you who’s changed.’
She wrenches out of the other girl’s grip, screwing up her face. ‘Get out of here with that shit. God, you’re already becoming Cordelia.’
‘I’m not kidding, Madison,’ says Mallory, unfazed. ‘You know, I’ve been talking to the others around here. About you.’
She can feel a lecture coming on, so she drops onto the edge of Mallory’s bed (killer duvet, btw) and makes her best let’s-get-this-over-with face.
‘About how you never met a drug you didn’t like,’ Mallory continues. ‘How you literally introduced yourself as “Madison Montgomery, movie star”, and killed a director for giving you direction.’
‘Okay, a) I fucking am a movie star, and b) he was an asshole.’
Mallory doesn’t take the bait. ‘I’m saying, that girl doesn’t sound like she would sacrifice her life to help save the world. Doesn’t sound like she’d sacrifice anything for anyone.’
Madison drops her gaze. She’s been rubbing her nails together without even realizing it. Her nails aren’t looking great, she needs to find someone in town who can do them properly, and she should probably start investigating lotions, too, she can’t find her old brand anywhere anymore, apparently they were using child labor and they got discontinued…
The other witch’s hand comes to rest on hers again, and forces her to look back up.
‘But you did,’ Mallory says simply.
They stare at one another for a long moment after that. Something about it feels kind of like a battle of wills, but she’s not sure over what, and Mallory's words float in her head, big and balloon-like and unreal. Finally, she drops the witch’s hands and sighs dejectedly.
‘Why do I remember? It’s fucking bullshit. Zoe said it’s been two years since she saw me. How long has it really been?’
Mallory brushes her hair from her face and leans forward in her chair. ‘For me, it’s been about a week. As for the other thing: look, I don’t know why you remember. My guess is that wherever Hell is, it’s outside of time. You were down there when I left in 2020, and—coincidentally—you were also down there in 2015, when I arrived. I guess the distinction between the two just didn’t apply to you.’
‘So, what, it’s just some purgatorial loophole that I remember? What the fuck?’ Madison feels a familiar heat rise up in her. This isn’t what she wanted to hear, and she knows what to do when something isn’t what she wants to hear: get really pissy. ‘What kind of explanation is that?!’
Mallory shrugs. ‘It’s the best one I’ve got. And anyway, does it really matter? I’m glad you remember. I’m glad we can talk about it. And I’m glad that you have a memory or two to be proud of.’
‘I should be proud that I got my fucking head blown off? Tell me, Curls, have you ever had your head blown off? Because it fucking sucks ass.’
‘No,’ Mallory presses. ‘We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. That’s what I mean. Maybe you should remind yourself of that from time to time.’
5.
Zoe is gone when she gets back, her hat and coat on the rack by the door (not a bad addition, but certainly not the model she’d choose) and pile of clothes on Madison’s bed, garnished with a note that reads,
Sorry about your wardrobe, here’s a start on the new collection, Z.
P.S. Cordelia wants to see you.
She studies the note for a moment, wondering if Zoe is mad at her. The note is blunt, but the gesture is nice. And who the hell writes handwritten notes anymore? She sighs to herself, lets the paper flutter to the floor, and parks herself astride the clothes pile. She starts sifting through it, the day’s heat slowly draining from the room. There’s some decent stuff in here. A cute little cream skirt with ruffles; a mesh top perfect for fall, and a great little black gown. It kind of reminds her of the one she lent to Zoe, all those years ago. Jesus, all those years ago: she sounds like a grandma. She’s not even 30.
At least, she thinks she’s not.
The lazy afternoon sun through the window, the pile of clothes, the last few days: she suddenly feels that she could curl up like a cat and sleep for a month. But she doesn’t want to sleep. She gives herself a couple of abrasive slaps in the face and shakes her head, hoping to dislodge whatever’s gotten her in such a weird mood. She guesses she better go see the supreme, before it turns into a whole thing.
As she walks through the academy halls, peered at from all angles by long-dead witches immortalized in oil paint, an image comes to her out of nowhere, vivid as the portraits. It's her and Zoe, the night they first met, stumbling home in distress after a frat party that had turned into a horrific disaster, an unthinkable, bloody, blurry disaster, Zoe panicking like a child, saying, Holy shit, Holy shit, over and over until Madison wants to scream at her, don't you get it, are you stupid, this is how the world is, almost crying for reasons she doesn't know.
_____
Cordelia is in the greenhouse, hunched over a microscope. Supremacy suits her. She carries herself differently, a gentle strength that just radiates off her. Even sitting down, she seems taller than before.
‘Can’t believe you’re still working on your potions,’ Madison says as she enters. ‘Figured that shit's below your pay grade for sure.’
The older witch glances over and smiles. Damn, even just the way she moves her head is assured. ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she says. ‘I love it here. And Misty has brought a lot of botanical knowledge with her from the swamplands.’
‘That and how to finger-fuck four cousins at once,’ Madison says idly, running her hands over the chemists’ desk.
‘Madison,’ Cordelia warns, low in her throat.
‘Sorry,’ Madison holds her hands up in mock-surrender. ‘Sorry, just a joke.’
Cordelia puts her microscope to the side and takes the seed out from under it, placing it carefully in a pot of dark loam. ‘De solo et in lucem,’ she murmurs, holding her hands over the pot and caressing the empty air. ‘De solo et in lucem. De solo et in lucem.’
Before their eyes, the seed sprouts and blossoms, verdant and resplendent, like something from a time-lapse video. Cordelia looks at her with a glowing smile, her hands trembling above the plant.
‘What’s that mean, anyway?’ Madison asks, watching the bright blue flowers unfold. ‘I never really got the deal with Latin. Seems like ancient bullshit to me.’
‘It means “up from the soil and into the light”,’ Cordelia tells her. ‘And the Latin is about tradition, and lineage. You forget, we come from some of the oldest blood. From the first magic.’
Madison rolls her eyes. ‘Whatever. You wanted to see me?’
The spell done, Cordelia turns in her seat and claps her hands to her thighs. ‘Yes. I was thinking that you could take Misty out into town tonight. Show her around.’
‘What?’ Madison is legitimately shocked by this. ‘That’s ridiculous. She’s lived here longer than I have.’
Cordelia tilts her head. ‘Well. Yes. But believe it or not, she’s never been into the inner city. Who better to introduce her than you? You’re a natural born metropolitan.’
She shifts her weight awkwardly, not wanting to say it in front of Cordelia, who always had a soft spot for Misty. ‘We don’t exactly get along, if you recall,’ she prompts, hoping that will suffice.
The supreme doesn’t flinch. ‘Yes, I recall perfectly well. Let’s call this a chance for you to start fresh, shall we?’
The thing left unsaid, of course, is that Madison once tried to kill Misty, and had been beaten down pretty thoroughly for her troubles. It’s hard to argue with that kind of leverage, but she tries her best anyway.
‘Is this a request, or an order?’ she asks.
‘It’s a request,’ Cordelia’s smiles again. ‘For now.’
She’s good. She’s fucking good.
‘Fine,’ Madison sighs, ‘but I choose the venue. I do not want to spend the evening in some dive listening to Fleetwood Mac.’
‘Like you deserve Stevie,’ comes a familiar bayou-tinged voice from behind her. Misty lingers in the greenhouse doorway, her smoky and mysterious eyes twinkling playfully, her dress sweeping the ground like a weeping willow. ‘And for your information, I can finger-fuck five cousins at once.’
Cordelia swallows a grin at Madison’s face and stands up. ‘Alright, that’s settled then. You go, have fun.’
Misty sticks her tongue out at her new companion, and twirls around to disappear across the lawn. Madison takes a step to follow her, but Cordelia catches her arm.
‘I’m choosing to trust you, Madison,’ she tells her evenly. ‘If you break that trust, if you hurt Misty or any of the girls here—you and I are done. You will never set foot in Miss. Robichaux’s Academy again.’ Cordelia fixes her with a plain, stern look that tells her the woman isn’t bluffing. ‘Say you understand.’
There's a familiar and unpleasant tingling on the back of her neck. Madison concentrates on keeping every muscle in her face perfectly still. ‘I understand.’
6.
They end up at a retro cocktail bar in East New Orleans, one of those places named after its own street number where the bartenders wear red vests. She hasn’t had anything to drink in what feels like a thousand years, so she orders an old fashioned—sugar cube, no ice—and the sting of bourbon on her throat is a bittersweet one. Misty is kind of adorable (but you did not hear Madison just think that) as she carefully studies the drinks list, seeming to read every page twice and then very purposefully asking the bartender for a Sex on the Beach.
‘Why that?’ Madison asks, actually half-curious.
Misty turns to look at her with a look of breathless surprise. ‘I’ve never been to the beach,’ she tells her, and Madison finds herself laughing for the first time in a long time.
The feeling of being tipsy—half-remembered and dredged up from the depths—is exuberating. She doesn’t know why she ever stopped drinking, besides the court mandates, of course. She polishes off her drink in four sips. Her second, she does away with in three.
Halfway through her third, and completely out of the blue, Madison says, ‘I used to do a lot of coke, you know. Like, a lot.’
Misty is running her ring finger around the rim of her glass when Madison speaks. She glances at the blond girl and smiles. ‘You like it?’ she asks.
‘Yeah. I mean, yeah. It’s good. It’s fine.’
‘That ain’t exactly a rave review.’
‘I don’t know, I kind of hardly felt it after a while.’
‘When did you start?’
‘I don’t know,’ she takes something between a sip and a gulp. ‘Mmm,’ she murmurs, swallowing. ‘No, actually it would have been on set for Rise of the Hornets, so… 14? Yeah, 14.’
‘You were 14?’ Misty clarifies.
‘Yeah.’
The older witch takes a thoughtful sip on her straw, saying nothing.
Madison finishes her drink and gestures for another. ‘People think I’m stupid,' she says, twisting in her seat to face Misty, 'because of the hair and the international movie stardom, but I’m not. I know what this is. This whole, “oh, take Misty out on the town.” I know you’re supposed to be, like, checking up on me.’
‘Why would I do that?’ Misty asks, cool as a cucumber.
She throws her hands up in disbelief. ‘I’m a liability. You think I don’t know that? Of course I know it, everyone knows it.’
Misty slurps the last of her glass through the straw and places it on the bar. 'You know what,’ she says to the bartender. ‘I think I’ll just have a beer. Do you have beer?’
‘Admit it!’ Madison prods her.
‘Alright, alright,’ Misty says, deadpan yet playful. ‘You got me. I’m your secret handler. I got a swat team on the line right now, ready to bust in and take you down if you raise that glass too fast.’ A cheeky grin breaks out as Misty rushes to stem her beer bottle’s froth with her lips.
‘Really,’ says Madison, employing her legendary bitch face. ‘You’re going to try sarcasm against me, really? You can’t beat me, Swamp-Thing, I’m Gen Y, I’ve got irony in the blood.’
‘Look, the way I see it, we got the death penalty around here and you’ve gone and paid for your sins already. And then some.’ Misty swivels on the barstool and crosses her legs. ‘I ain’t here to babysit you, Hollywood. I’m here to see how you’re doing.’
‘How I’m doing,’ Madison repeats flatly.
‘Yeah, you know, feelings? Emotions? You remember those?’
‘I try not to,’ she tosses back half her fourth drink. 'It's bad for the skin.'
Misty looks at her for a second, absently helping herself to a nearby bowl of beer nuts and pointing at Madison with a handful of them. ‘You know, I actually watched one of your movies a few years back.’
Against all of her will, she feels a little rush to hear that: the old dopamine kick she used to hunt for on lonely nights, drinking red wine and googling herself. ‘Really?’
Misty nods, slowly but emphatically. ‘Mm-hmm.'
‘Which one?’ she asks reluctantly.
‘Is It Serious.’
Madison groans and presses a hand to her forehead. ‘You couldn’t pick something outside my valium phase, Gator-Aid?’
‘You were good,’ Misty smiles, countering Madison’s dismissive snort. ‘No, I mean it. I gotta admit, I was surprised. I don’t usually go in for those romantic comedies, but you were really good. I was’—she hiccups—‘I was rooting for you to get with that pretty dark-haired boy. And I felt sad when you didn’t.’
‘Yeah, that was a bummer ending,’ Madison recalls. ‘The producers hated it, but it worked.’
‘My point is,’ says Misty. ‘For someone who doesn’t have feelings you sure know what they're supposed to look like.’
Madison plonks the empty glass down on the bar. This is better. Yeah, this is just the kind of buzz she likes, sweet and loose with a little edge. ‘I’m. Fine,’ she enunciates clearly to her drinking buddy. ‘I’m fine, okay? So you can relax, alright? Christ.’
‘Alright, I’m backing off,’ says Misty, and starts peeling the label off her bottle, the sacramental offering of barflies the world over.
_____
During her fifth drink, Madison and Misty discuss whether Marilyn Monroe was a witch and if so, what her specialty was.
During her sixth drink, they dance to a pop song neither of them know.
During her seventh drink, Madison goes outside and smokes two cigarettes in a row, closing her eyes and feeling her head pulse.
After that, she asks the big question that’s been churning in the back of her mind since she got back.
‘Hey, Swamp-face?’
‘Yeah, Hollywood?’
‘Where's Kyle?’
Misty sighs and runs a hand across the bar top. There’s a palpable change in the air. ‘Yeah. I asked that self same question when I got back.’
Madison scrunches her upper lip in a wince. ‘Is it bad? It’s bad, isn’t it.’
‘Come on, girl,’ says Misty. ‘You know what happens to folk who hurt our own. You were our own.’
It’s more or less what she figured. His absence at Zoe’s side in 2017 had been suspicious. His absence from Robichaux in 2015 was downright foreboding.
‘He’s dead,’ Madison voices the unspoken thought.
Misty looks up to the ceiling. ‘I remember when Zoe brought him to my swamp, scared and confused as a newborn baby. I tried to make him right.’ She grabs her beer, casting her gaze down again in regret. ‘Poor Zoe. She really cared for that boy.’
Madison picks up on something in Misty’s tone, a shadow behind her words. ‘Who killed him?’ she asks.
The swamp witch gives her a silent look and she feels her stomach flip.
‘Zoe did it?’ she asks, dumbfounded. ‘Zoe killed him?’
'She said he was her problem to deal with,’ says Misty, her mouth tightening into a straight line.
Of course. She doesn’t know why she didn’t see it before. She can picture it now: Zoe, conflicted and heartbroken, her big stupid dewy eyes sparkling with sorrow, taking the knife, or the gun, or the torch, or whatever it was, saying it was her responsibility, that if she hadn’t gone and gotten herself impaled then none of this would have ever happened…
‘I need another drink,’ Madison says sharply.
Misty puts a palm on the bar, gentle, tender. ‘I think you might have had enough, there, Hollywood,’ she says.
‘Fuck you,’ Madison tells her. ‘Fuck all of you. I’m Madison fucking Montgomery, I’m gonna drink ‘til the sunrise, and if you don’t like it you can suck my dick.’
_____
She doesn’t drink until sunrise, but she does get what Misty calls “a mighty powerful drunk”. She staggers out of the place at just after 2 a.m. with the older witch under her arm, guiding her swerving feet. Misty hails a cab for them and pats Madison’s leg as they get settled in the back seat. ‘Now you just try to keep from upending that gutful of booze all over this nice man’s car, alright, I don’t have that kind of cash.’
Her whole body buzzes with warmth. She bursts out laughing for no reason.
When they get back to the academy, Cordelia is waiting on the lawn in a dressing gown. They’ve probably been texting, Madison thinks. Checking I didn’t do something bad.
If the supreme is concerned or annoyed, she doesn’t show it. She retains her cordial smile and says, ‘It looks like you two had quite a night.’
‘We might have gotten a little carried away there, but all’s well,’ Misty replies.
Madison points her finger in the vague direction of Cordelia. ‘Marilyn was a telepath,’ she says. ‘She was a telepath, not a pryo—pyrokinetic. Thass stupid.’
Cordelia’s smile widens a little, ‘You know,’ she says kindly. ‘I bet you’re right.’
Turning to Misty, Madison concentrates on the girl’s eyes and says, low and secretive, ‘Thanks for not being a complete and total asshole.’
Misty chuckles. ‘I had a nice time, too, Hollywood. You know, I think you just might have told more truth tonight than I heard from you in the last three years.’
She stares at Misty for a few seconds, slightly wobbly, then she defensively mumbles, ‘I can tell the truth.’
Misty and Cordelia take her back into the greenhouse for a glass or two of water, and they politely talk around the fact that the two of them are several rungs of sobriety lower than Madison. She's feeling a little better when she walks out of there, her strappy shoes in hand and the soft grass on her feet, half an hour later. Halfway across the lawn, she turns back to the older witches and raises an arm as though she is about to give some farewell, but she turns back around and says nothing.
She wonders what the two of them talk about after she leaves. Maybe Cordelia sits down with Misty and they make themselves a pot of coffee and she asks, ‘So, how is the girl doing?’ And maybe Misty says, ‘She’s not gonna work out, Delia. She’s too far gone, we should send her back to tinsel town and let them deal with her.’ Or maybe she says, ‘She’s still a little rough, but I think she’s gonna be alright. We shouldn’t abandon her. She needs our help.’
What Cordelia and Misty really say to each other in the small hours of the morning, in the academy greenhouse, after Madison leaves, we’ll never know.
_____
Zoe is still up when Madison creeps through the door with the universal careful clumsiness of late-night drunks. Propped up in bed with a lamp and a book, Zoe flicks her eyes over and says, ‘I thought maybe you’d found another room to stay in.’
She feels a burst of endorphins when she sees her, their sober tensions forgotten. ‘Zoe!’ she whispers excitedly.
The corner of Zoe’s mouth curls up in a cool smile. ‘Shit, how much have you had to drink?’
‘Pfffffsssshhh,’ Madison waves away the question, but then bursts out into a giggle. ‘A lot,’ she confesses.
Zoe gets up and pads over to her in bare feet and the most Zoe-esque, nerdy pajamas Madison can imagine. She puts the back of her hand to Madison’s forehead and her face makes a shape of reticent concern. ‘Do you need to puke?’ Zoe asks. ‘You should do it now’.
She pulls Zoe's hand off her face, holding the girl's wrist in her fingers. It makes her think, for a second, of Cordelia; how she had held Madison's own wrist and said, I'm choosing to trust you. Zoe's eyebrows are bent in that stupid, open-hearted, sympathetic look she gets, and Madison realizes she hasn’t seen her up this close in ages. They were friends, once, the two of them. It was a long time ago, but it burns at the back of her mind now, a forceful thought that she can't push back. Her eyes slowly focus on Zoe, on her stupid soft skin and her stupid bronze-gold hair, and without even really meaning to, she pushes herself forward and kisses her on the lips.
Zoe tenses. After a second, she pulls away, furrowing her brow and splaying her hands in exasperation. ‘What the fuck, Madison?’
Madison takes a step forward. She doesn’t know why she’s doing this. It’s stupid. Everything is so stupid. ‘Don’t you think I’m pretty?’ she whispers, whiskey on her breath, lifting her hand to cup Zoe’s cheek.
But Zoe pulls away.
Not much, not hardly at all, but she does do it. She pulls away, she crosses her arms, she drops her gaze down and to the side, and suddenly Madison feels as if the tide has rolled out, like the feeling you get in the exact moment when you wake up and realize it was only a dream, that you haven't been cast in the new AMC drama in what critics are calling the come-back of the century, that you're still right where you've always been.
‘You’re mad at me,’ she says quietly.
Zoe looks up and lets out a pained sigh. ‘I’m not… I’m not mad at you, Madison…’
‘You’re mad at me because of him,’ she barks, surprising herself with the anger in her tone.
Zoe opens her mouth and closes it again, unsure if Madison is saying what she thinks Madison is saying. Her eyes flutter in surprise and worry. 'I'm not...' she begins, reaching out tentatively, but Madison doesn't let her.
‘I never asked you to do that,’ she hisses, slapping Zoe’s hands away. ‘I never, ever asked you to do that. Why did you do that?’
Their room hums with the low, ambient hum of dead silence. Zoe stares at her, pity and regret and reproach in her eyes, obviously unable to say anything, because what can she say, what can she possibly say that will sound honest and painless? She killed for her once before, Zoe had, and now, in spite of her stupid, open heart and the love it had harbored for Kyle, she had killed for her again. What could she say that would fix that?
Eventually, Zoe marches back to bed, falling onto the mattress and pulling the covers aggressively up to her chin. ‘Go to bed,’ she mutters, ‘You’re drunk. We can talk in the morning.’
So Madison climbs into bed, and she doesn’t even worry about removing her makeup as she slams her face into the pillows, and she thinks how funny the word mattress is, and how she should go out into town more often, and how she could have had any life she wanted with her fame and her powers, she could have gone out and literally conquered the world, but she didn’t, and she doesn’t know why, and she’s so obscenely comfortable right now she thinks she could just melt.
She hears herself starting to snore but she can’t make herself roll over and stop.
And then, after a while, she’s sitting on the hard, uncomfortable wooden floor of the house they lived in in Sacramento, when she was 5 years old. All the furniture is covered in plastic, like they’re getting ready to leave and never come back. Her throat is itchy and she keeps scratching at her neck, and she’s wearing the loose, ugly cat costume from her first school play at Edmonton.
She looks down slowly into her lap to find an old video game controller, one of those chunky, angular ones they used to have. She follows the cord with her eyes and it leads into a big, rabbit-eared antenna TV sitting right there on the floor with her. A menu screen for some game called ‘Route 666’ is telling her to PRESS START, so she clumsily jabs at the start button, and then it tells her to pick her vehicle, but they are all the same: identical buses.
A slight sniffling draws her attention to the open plan kitchen behind her. It’s her mother, only her mother is Fiona somehow, and she’s softly crying while she stares out the window at the twilight, smoking her cigarette and taking swigs of vodka straight from the bottle.
‘Mom?’ she inquires, but there’s no response. ‘Mom, what are we having for dinner?’ Her mother, she suddenly knows with an unsettling certainty, can’t hear her. She just stares out the window, crying and drinking and never saying why.
‘Don’t you worry about her, Maddington Bear’, comes her father’s husky voice. Madison turns back around and the TV is gone. Instead, her dad is standing in the living room archway with his camcorder out and pointing the lens at her.
‘What are you doing?’ she half-laughs, getting up and brushing off her thighs. ‘Put that thing away!’
‘It’s your big scene, sweetie,’ he reminds her. His face is completely obfuscated by the camcorder. ‘You didn’t think old Dad was going to miss your first big scene, did you?’ He turns over his shoulder and shouts to no one. ‘That’s my little girl up there! She’s gonna be a millionaire!’
Madison feels a tight discomfort in her belly. She realizes that the house is completely empty. ‘My big scene?’ she asks. ‘But, wait, I thought… What are my lines? What’s my part?’
The camcorder’s red light buzzes loudly. The lights are very bright and very hot.
‘You don’t remember your part?’ her faceless dad asks. ‘Silly girl. You’re the bitch.’
Her stomach lurches. A powerful nicotine craving suddenly washes over her and her throat itches like crazy.
‘What?’ she asks, quietly, fearfully.
‘You know. The bitch. The cunt. The one who huffs and sighs, pisses and moans, snaps and snarks. The one who wants everyone to grovel at her feet. Who lies when people need her help.’
‘No,’ she whispers.
‘The selfish one, the cruel one, the worthless one.’
‘No, no,’ Madison shakes her head.
‘The one who leaves her friends to die.’
Tears sting her eyes and her heart thumps in her throat. She croaks back: ‘I don’t want to anymore. I’m tired of playing that part. I… I have range.’
‘Afraid not, Maddington Bear. Don’t worry, I still love you—‘
Her dad lowers the camera, and his face isn’t his face: it’s Kyle’s, and it’s Michael’s, and it’s Michael’s, and it’s Kyle’s…
‘—but I like you better in polyester.’
He raises his hand to her with murder in his eyes and she wakes up, gasping, crying, clutching at her throat, swatting at the air.
There’s a rustle of covers as Zoe flicks on a lamp. She looks over at her roommate in panic and quickly comes over to her bed. ‘Madison. Hey, Madison. Hey. What’s wrong? What happened?’
The distraught girl looks up at her. Zoe doesn’t know exactly what she expects to happen, but whatever it is, it certainly isn’t this:
Madison buries her face in the folds of Zoe’s pajamas and grasps fistfuls of it with her hands. She leans into her completely. She starts shuddering, and then she starts sobbing, and then she starts howling; wretched, forceful, animal howls like Zoe’s never heard in her life. She places her arms around Madison uncertainly, completely ill-prepared for such keen frailty. She rubs her back and says, ‘it’s okay, it’s okay’ over and over, and Madison howls into her damp night robe until her lungs are empty and her throat is swollen and raw.
7.
She’s gone before Zoe wakes up in the light of day.
She sneaks out not long after sunrise, meticulously careful not to make a single sound, and even though her legs ache and her head throbs, she walks all the way to the edge of the grounds and onto the sidewalk. She's still in last night’s dress and no shoes, her ruined makeup untouched, feeling nauseous and hollowed out. She paces the streets. She takes out a cigarette and lights it but the taste is suddenly unbearable, dank and gross. When she tries to think of the night before, of weeping in front of Zoe and clinging to her like a child, her mind seems to slide right off it, throwing up random thoughts and images to evade it. She shoves the cigarette pack into an overstuffed trash can, disgusted to her bones.
It’s an overcast, humid day and the New Orleans air is thick and oppressive. It makes her think of the greenhouse. She stops by a marble water fountain in the square and thinks about taking a drink from the spray, but instead she dunks her head straight into the pool, blinking against the sting of the water and watching the bed of pennies swimming before her eyes. A memory floats up to her of an aquarium one of her directors had had in his office, the gentle sound of the hum and the bubbles as he had propositioned her, the way the exotic fish had stared at her with their ink-blank eyes. The muted underwater drone. The fountain pool chill. She feels like she could just about stay down here forever.
A tap on her back brings her up for air.
She stands up and a great splash comes up with her. Her hair is matted to her scalp and water runs down her back, into her clothes, dripping rapidly from the hem of her dress. A middle-aged man in a security guard uniform, probably employed by the council, is giving her the once over.
‘You’re not allowed to do that,’ he tells her with the deep disinterest unique to public servants.
She starts to say that he should throw the book at her when a young girl, maybe 16, stops and stares open-mouthed at the scene. The girl is wearing a purple shirt and a backpack with both straps over her shoulders, and her hair tied up in a bun. She talks to the guard:
‘Oh my God, don’t you know who that is?’ the girl asks. ‘That’s Madison Montgomery!’
There is a ringing in her ears and the chill of the water creeps down her spine.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m not. But I get that a lot.’
Backpack Girl gives her a squint of incredulity. ‘Um, no, you’re definitely Madison Montgomery, I’ve seen like all of your movies. I even watched you sing for that bushfire charity event in 2012.’ The girl throws her head back, miming a microphone with both hands. ‘Give me the strength to make it through, show me a way to light the fuse,’ she mimics tunelessly and passionately.
‘You got the wrong girl,’ Madison tells her, her fists clenching at her sides.
‘I painted your face for art class,’ the girl continues, ‘and my teacher said that I have like a really solid grasp of anatomy and that I could be a professional if I really wanted, and I told him it was easy when you have literally the perfect human face to work with.’
‘I’m not her!’ she yells, and she takes a step forward and suddenly vomits all over the red stone paving of the square, missing Backpack Girl by inches.
‘Ew!’ exclaims the girl, jumping backwards and fixing Madison with an angry look. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’
Everything, she thinks, and the security guard puts his arm around her and says, ‘Okay, miss. Let’s go, we need to have a word.’
_____
Cordelia arrives at the police station looking honestly kind of fabulous, wearing some pretty exquisite lipstick and rocking a sleek little black purse. She takes one look at Madison and removes her glasses, soft worry lining her features. Madison knows she looks bad: she tried to rub her smudged makeup off before Cordelia could see her, but it only made it worse.
‘I know, I’m stunning, right?’ she says humorlessly.
‘What happened?’ Corelia asks, with an innocent disbelief that makes Madison want to scream.
‘It’s nothing, I took a dip in a fountain and apparently that’s a fineable offense in this shitty town, and I didn’t bring my purse.’
‘She also vomited on a public thoroughfare,’ the on-duty officer behind the counter chirps up.
‘Yeah, thank you, Dudley Do-Right!’ Madison directs to him loudly.
Cordelia bows her head slightly. ‘Well, I’m glad you felt comfortable enough to call me.’
Madison shrugs, avoiding her gaze. ‘Someone had to pay. You were nearby.’
This isn’t the first time she has been detained by the police, not by a long shot, but it’s the first time she’s ever felt ashamed about it. A lot of people, and a lot of tabloid magazines, have called her shameless, but it's not true. She knows exactly what shame is.
Cordelia makes an embarrassed-Mom smile (she’d recognize it anywhere) and addresses the officer. ‘I’ll settle that fine now. AmEx okay?’
_____
The ride home with Cordelia is silent, and Madison imagines resentment simmering in the older woman. A secret wish, growing more overt by the day, that she had never taken Madison on. She can feel it coming: the talk. The we-think-this-project-isn’t-quite-right-for-you talk.
As they pull into the academy grounds and Cordelia parks the car, she turns to Madison and says, ‘Would you come into the head office for a minute. There’s something I wanted to discuss with you.’ She’s being nice, but Madison isn’t fooled. She stares at Cordelia, motionless.
‘Just for a minute,’ Cordelia says, that old smile of hers unwavering. Madison sighs and steps out of the car.
When they arrive in the office, a nice big room with a hell of a view, Madison refuses to sit. She intends to turn around and leave the second this is over, maybe leave the country altogether. The world is a big place, and if she really put her mind to it, she thinks she could learn how to disappear.
‘Madison,’ Cordelia says. ‘Mallory tells me that this isn’t the first time you’ve been brought back from Hell.’
She feels the tension plummet out of her, reeling from the whiplash of how wrong she’d gotten the purpose of this meeting. After a few seconds, she starts to get angry.
‘She told you? That little liar, she said it had to be a secret or it would fuck up the spacetime… whatever!’
‘That is a possibility,’ says Cordelia. ‘But Mallory’s worried about you. I’m worried about you, too.’
Madison realizes right then that she is tired: dead tired, the kind of tired where you can feel grit under your eyelids and cotton in your head. Everything since Mallory came to bring her back to Robichaux has been a trial, and her short and fitful sleep last night did nothing to help her. Exhaustion washes over her in waves. She takes a seat, hoping it’s not obvious that she feels like she could collapse. ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ is all she says.
The supreme of her coven puts her fingertips together, composing her next words. ‘I’m told that in the future that will no longer happen, most of the girls under this roof meet with some pretty ugly ends,’ she says, gauging Madison’s low-energy movements. ‘Including you’.
She watches Cordelia. She tries to keep the muscles in her face perfectly still. Oscillating peaks of panic and fatigue hit her in succession. She focuses on staying still, staying upright.
‘That must have been very difficult for you to see, to experience,’ Cordelia ventures. ‘I can’t imagine how difficult.’ She leans forward and places her palm on Madison's knee. Madison looks down at it dumbly. The supreme continues. ‘Madison, I want to thank you. From the bottom of my heart. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for what you’ve been through, but I can tell you that I am so, so proud of you.’
A great fog is rolling in inside Madison’s head. Like the incident last night, she can’t make herself concentrate on Cordelia’s words. They’re a slippery rope she can’t grasp. You can't return this item, ma'am. You don't have a wardrobe anymore. It's a purgatorial loophole. The producers hated the ending, but it worked.
‘I need to lie down,’ she hears herself say, and her legs lift her off the chair and clunkily down onto the carpet of the head office. She barely hears what Cordelia says next. Her brain is switching off like a series of lights and, vaguely, she registers Cordelia grabbing her shoulder before the fog envelopes her.
_____
When she wakes up, it’s almost dark again. She doesn’t remember getting up off the floor, but she’s now on Cordelia’s office couch, with a thin shawl and thick coat draped over her. There’s a bottle of water and a bowl of fruit on the ground by her head, obviously a makeshift care package left by the supreme. She has no idea how long it’s been, but it feels like she’s slept for days. Her body aches slightly and sleep hangs about her head like a veil, but she doesn’t feel sick anymore.
She opens the heavy door and steps out dazedly, just in time to see Mallory ascend the stairs at the end of the hallway and approach her with a light jog.
‘Hey, I was just coming to check on you,’ says Mallory.
‘I fell asleep,’ she says stupidly.
‘Yeah, sounds like you needed it. Had a pretty big night, huh?’
She doesn't reply to this. She droops a little, trying to piece together the last few hours, her lights slowly turning back on. ‘You told her,’ Madison remembers. Holy shit, did she throw her cigarettes away earlier? Why would she do that?
‘Yeah.’ Mallory makes a sympathetic face. ‘I’m sorry. I know I said we shouldn’t. But I was worried about you. After our talk the other day…’ She leaves the sentence unfinished, as though the point’s been made. ‘And Cordelia is our supreme. I thought she should know.’
She's not sure that’s completely true: she thinks that maybe Mallory really just wanted Cordelia to tell her what to do, to take this terrible unplaceable burden and give her somewhere to put it. But she doesn’t say that.
‘I think I should go back to my room,’ she says instead. As she starts walking, Mallory skips to her side and begins walking with her.
‘Actually, there was something we wanted to ask you, me and Cordelia. She was going to bring it up, before you passed out.'
‘No, I don’t want to have a threesome with you,’ says Madison, her old instincts coming online.
Mallory rolls her eyes. ‘Ha ha. No, we were thinking, since you’re like an OG member of the coven, and we’re expecting a big influx of new witches in the fall, maybe you could… take up a position here? At the academy?’
‘What? As a teacher?’
‘Yeah. You are the strongest telekinetic here and I’m sure the students would love it.’
‘Really? Have you met me, Curls?’
Mallory grabs her arm, stopping her in her tracks. ‘Just think about it,’ she pleads. ‘I think it’s a good idea. I think you could do it. Anyway,’ she looks over her shoulder down the hall to their left. ‘This is me. I’m glad you’re feeling better.’
She takes off down the hall, and as she approaches her room, she turns back to look at Madison, still standing where she left her. ‘Think about it,’ she repeats, and disappears through the door.
_____
Zoe is pacing the room when Madison gets back. When she turns around and sees her, she sags, and a roulette of emotions spin across her face. ‘Where the fuck were you?’ she barks, almost shrilly.
Madison is genuinely taken aback. ‘I went for a walk.’
‘A walk?’ Zoe says coldly. ‘I haven't seen you all day!'
She feels herself grow defensive. ‘Old lady supreme summoned me to her office and I crashed on her couch. What’s the problem?’
‘What’s the problem?’ hisses Zoe. ‘What’s the problem? You had a total nervous breakdown last night—’
Nervous breakdown. That can’t be right. That’s not what it was. Was it?
‘—and I wake up this morning, you're not here, I get back from class and you're still not here, I don’t know where you are, I don’t know what you’re doing, you could be out somewhere slitting your wrists…'
‘Jesus,’ Madison flinches. ‘Dramatic, much?’
'Fuck you!’ Zoe yells. ‘You can’t treat me like this, Madison, you can’t jerk me around like this. I’m not a fucking pinball machine. I’m your sister in this coven and I deserve better. Do you even remember kissing me last night?’
Madison averts her gaze. ‘Yes.’
‘Uh huh,’ says Zoe, staring daggers. ‘What was that about? ‘Cause you haven’t exactly been affectionate towards me in the past, and I think I’m being pretty understated about that.’
‘I was drunk,’ she says. She’s kind of in awe of how intense Zoe is being. She didn’t think the girl had it in her.
‘You were drunk,’ Zoe repeats bitterly. She starts pacing again, breathing heavy and hard, working toward some inevitable eruption. ‘Why didn’t you bring me back?’ she blurts. ‘No bullshit, no jokes, just tell me. I want to know, I need to know. Why didn’t you?’
‘It’s not important,’ says Madison, but it is, and there’s a dam inside her that’s coming apart, a dam that’s been straining her whole life, holding back some deep dark ocean with unspeakable things swimming in it.
Zoe holds the bridge of her nose and squeezes her eyes shut. ‘Can you just be a fucking human being for once? I mean, why are you like this?’
‘I am a human being,’ Madison trembles.
‘Then tell me! Tell me why! Why did you refuse to bring me back?!’
‘Because I’m bad, Zoe, Jesus Christ! How do you not get that by now? I’m bad, I’m a bad fucking person!’
‘No, I don’t accept that,’ Zoe says, her mouth tightening. ‘That’s an excuse, not an explanation. Goddamn it, Madison, I fought to bring you back when Fiona killed you, and you didn’t even lift a fucking finger to return the favor. After everything we’ve been through together, that’s what I get? Well, I deserve an explanation and I deserve an apology, and if you can’t give them to me, then…’ Zoe hesitates, fire shining in her eyes. ‘Then I guess we really have nothing to say.’
She’s never seen Zoe this angry. And the thing of it is, she’s right. Madison knows she’s right, any idiot could see it. Like it or not, they had been through a lot together. And she knows, deep down, that this is it: there are no more rehearsals after this, this is the very last chance she has with Zoe. Her legs are wobbling, and she carefully lowers herself onto the bed. She takes a shaky breath. She closes her eyes. I can tell the truth. I can.
‘When Fiona cut my throat,’ she starts. It's so abrupt that it takes even her by surprise. After she realizes what she's said, she takes a moment. Then she continues. ‘It hurt. At first. And then I felt warm. I thought, well this isn’t so bad, if this is death then at least I’ll be comfortable. But then the warmth started melting away, and then… I started to get cold.
'As I died, it kept getting colder and colder. It went on for, I don’t know how long. A darkness, a coldness, sinking deeper in my bones but never hitting the bottom of me. After a while, I thought, maybe there isn’t any bottom. Maybe I’m a bottomless pit that not even the cold, infinite darkness of death can fill.
‘And then when I came back, it was like a little bit of that death was still buried in me, somewhere deep, and no matter what I did I couldn’t get warm. Not completely. And when I looked… when I looked in Kyle’s eyes, I could see the death in him, too.’
Zoe listens to her, sitting on her bed and interlacing her fingers on her lap, watching Madison intently.
‘It was like,’ she continues, ‘all of a sudden I understood what people mean when they say they have a connection. There’s no other word for it, I felt a connection with him. And I wanted to share it with you.’
‘Why me? Zoe prods.
‘I liked you,’ Madison says simply, a glisten in the corner of her closed eyes. ‘I actually did like you. You killed that frat boy asshole for me. Nobody else has ever killed for me. And you just… cared. You cared like it was no big deal. I liked that you cared about me. There, I said it: I liked that you cared. I don’t know why I wanted us together, the three of us. All I know is that I wanted it. It felt right.’
‘So if you liked me so much then why didn’t you help me?’
Madison clenches her fists and takes another very deep breath. ‘I hated Kyle for loving you. And I hated you for it, too. I hated you both so much. After I heard him say it, all I could do was hate. It was like the cold again: I hated and I hated and I hated but it never filled me up. And when you…'
I can.
'...when you died, I thought, now I can hate her forever. She’ll never do anything nice for me, never defend me, never care about me, ever again. And once they see what a real piece of shit I am, neither will any of the others. I thought, if I can just do this one bad thing, in front of everyone, then I’ll be alone for the rest of my life in a way that I can’t ever undo. And that’s what I wanted.’
She braces herself, and opens her eyes. Zoe sits on the bed, looking at her. And that’s all. She’s not repulsed. She’s not violent. The room is still here, calm and ordered and straight lined: nobody died, nothing exploded. The world didn’t end.
Zoe fetches a deep sigh and runs her hands through her hair. ‘That was a shitty thing you did, Madison,’ she tells her, matter-of-fact.
‘I know,’ Madison responds.
‘It was a really shitty thing,’ Zoe repeats.
‘I know,’ she says.
Zoe glances away from the despondent girl. It isn't what she'd expected, or hoped for, or anything. It's dull, somehow, and ugly, and obvious in the most miserable way, and worst of all it's ordinary, ordinary old jealousy and loneliness and self-loathing. She wishes she hadn't asked. But she had to. She had to. ‘Okay. Well, I appreciate—‘
‘I’m sorry, Zoe.’
The words are so quiet Zoe almost misses them. When she looks back at Madison the girl is slumped and glassy eyed, her face gone slack, a sad and scared child in a grown woman's body. Despite everything, Zoe realizes she feels sorry for her.
‘I should have brought you back,’ says Madison. ‘I should have brought you back. I’m sorry.’
Zoe climbs down onto her knees and pats Madison’s hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ Madison whispers. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You,’ Zoe tells her, as straight as she can without being mean, ‘are a deeply, deeply messed up person. But if your little trip to Hell means anything, it means this: you do have a soul, Madison Montgomery.’
Madison laughs despite herself, wiping her face with the back of her hand. ‘I’m serious,’ Zoe says, though she’s half-laughing herself. ‘You’re right; you’re a human being, a real live one. And you can be a good human being, too. You really can. I believe in you.’
She presses her forehead against Madison’s. ‘Just promise me you’ll try,’ she whispers.
Madison feels her eyes spill over as she takes Zoe’s hand.
‘I promise,’ she says.
8.
That night—the night she apologizes—is the worst of it. After that, the weather changes, both figuratively and literally. A week later, the trees on the grounds start turning brown, and new girls start turning up again. Madison slowly puts together a new wardrobe: one even more sensational and trend-setting than the last. She talks it over extensively with Zoe and with Misty, but eventually, she accepts the position as teacher in Miss. Robichaux’ Academy for Outstanding Young Ladies, and she even starts practicing her telekinesis, something she hasn’t done in years. Grinning at her sisters, she demonstrates by levitating a cherry, and making the stem tie itself in a knot.
After Misty starts spreading the word about how good Madison was in Is It Serious, Coco tests the waters regarding a movie night: a special Madison Montgomery Marathon. They let her pick the movies and after a great deal of prompting, she lets Zoe help her choose. Zoe tells her they just have to show Nebraska Nights, calling it her best performance. The movie night goes ahead, and at the end, Mallory leads Madison out in front of everybody and makes her take a bow.
Sometimes she helps out Cordelia with her potions. She starts taking an interest in the Latin, always asking what it means and trying to keep the meaning in her mind as she says it. Once she comes close to telling Cordelia that she doesn’t know what she would’ve done without her and the coven, but she chickens out at the last minute and just tells her she looks pretty hot for an old hag. Cordelia laughs and says, ‘Coming from you, Madison, that actually means a lot.’
About a week later, she finally works up the courage to thank Mallory for bringing her back. ‘I know I never said it,’ she tells her. ‘But I’m glad you did.’ They spend the afternoon together debating hairstyles and their various merits, and eventually she asks Mallory if there’s any room for her to tell somebody about the other Madison, the other Mallory: the ones who braved an apocalypse in the year 2020.
‘I think we should both get at least one confidante,’ Mallory says after thinking for a moment. ‘Just make sure you really trust them.’
_____
‘What’s this about?’ Zoe asks, semi-playfully, as Madison unwinds all the blinds and locks the door, sitting them both down on floor cushions. ‘Are we doing a seance?’
Madison sits on the floor with her friend, takes a deep breath and reminds herself: I’m a human being. She takes Zoe’s hand and looks her in the eye, promising herself that she won’t look away, no matter what.
‘Zoe,’ she says. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’