Chapter Text
I always admired the ruthlessness of middle school children. However, I prefer an honest fleche over the covert psychological warfare one would usually find in those haunted halls. Middle schoolers have an incredible ability to pinpoint the very thing you dislike about yourself and shout it in front of everyone you know. How deliciously sadistic. The clear and clean wound is commendable. To throw salt in it after the fight is just a petty display of dominance.
I did not always consider friends to be a liability. Before that, I considered friends to be my brother, my cousins, aunts and uncles. Mother and father didn’t have Pugsley and I thrown into the shark tank that is the public schooling system until a government bootlicker had the nerve to pry us out of our raven’s nest. They informed our parents that it was “illegal” to keep kids our age from having a government sanctioned education. Mother argued we were receiving a more than sufficient education in our own home. One that consisted of the botanical practice of carnivorous plant husbandry, basic poison chemistry, engineering of explosives, and even literature. Pugsley and I studied the greats: Machiavelli, Edgar Allen Poe, and Emily Dickinson. American history was not lost on the two of us either. Mother preferred us to be educated on indigenous culture rather than the rhetoric of the colonizers that stole the land we live on. She told us that the schools were not teaching children the real history of this country, and instead fed them lies in the name of patriotism.
Much to our parents dismay, their well-rounded curriculum for us was not up to government standards. In fact, it seemed to only make them more concerned of our situation. Begrudgingly, my brother and I put on our most haunting outfits and marched off to school that very week.
Despite my best efforts to keep to myself, I found myself on the receiving end of some unwanted attention when I got to fifth grade. I wasn’t sure what I did to seem as if my guard was not up, but when the girl approached me I vowed to never do it again. She glanced down at my lunch during free period, then back up to me.
“Whatcha eatin?” She asked. They must not teach proper grammar in public schools, I thought.
“This is roasted venison with yak hooves on the side. Oh, and for dessert I have live worms,” I threw in the last bit in hopes of scaring her off.
“No you don’t. You probably mean gummy worms, right?” The girl pressed.
“You wanna find out?” I held a closed container out to her.
“No… not really,” She shivered.
Something must have been dreadfully wrong with the girl, who I later learned to be named Sarah, because she could not comprehend that I deplored her company and wished her to leave with every breath I took. Furthermore, my tactics of repelling the soft and feeble were not working against her. I said a silent prayer to Lucifer, asking to be freed of this being. He didn’t listen. In fact, he did not get my message until many months had passed.
Until then, the girl continued to make nefarious advances such as asking to play at my house after school, invading my personal space during lunch, and yammering on in front of me as if I cared for a single word she said. And maybe, possibly, after some time I started to.
Inevitably, though, all children begin to grow up. Some grow in different directions. The annoying girl acquired some even more annoying friends when we got into sixth grade. I thought Sarah to be many things, such as loud, over-talkative, and simple minded. However, I never thought her to be as shallow as the new girls that tried to befriend her. I was quickly proven wrong, which I vowed to never be again.
“Don’t you think shes…kinda creepy? Why do you hang out with her?” I overheard the Heathers asking Sarah.
“I dunno,” the girl twirled her hair nervously, “She’s not so bad.”
“I heard she dissects frogs during recess. “ one girl said, wrinkling her nose.
“Ew! Sarah, you can’t hang out with her. We have to save you. How about you sleep over my house this weekend? My parents just got us a trampoline.”
Maybe it was the promise of bonding activities that didn’t involved guts or explosives. Maybe it was the harrowing narrative they tried to paint of me. But, over time, Sarah inserted herself upon my daily life less and less. Until one day, she began pretending she had never known me at all.
I did not think I’d miss her ramblings, or having someone my age to listen to my own. I had not considered that I had grown accustomed to her constant presence in my life. However, when she faded away from me I felt something I’d never felt before. I felt absence.
How could one feel what is not there? It goes against the very concept of feeling itself. Air has no sensation, nothing to interact with the nervendings behind your skin. So how was it that the absence of something could feel so heavy? Perhaps this is what dark matter feels like, I thought. Perhaps I’ve been sent off to space, nothing to breathe but darkness into my lungs. And you better bet it stung.
I had experienced loss before, with the death of my dear pet scorpion, Nero. This loss was much different, it did not result from death. Death, one knows how to mourn. Death, those around you know how to console. Loss of someone who still walks among us is much more perplexing. It was a pain I would never admit to, but would feel for many years to come.
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Due to the opinions of the criminals on the local school board, my “bad behavior” seemed to warrant me being kicked out of school, after school, after school. I minded not, they were all teaching the same mindless garbage as one another. There was nothing new, nothing different about any of them. Same lifeless halls, same lifeless faces. And that’s how I liked it. Throwing me into another school was like throwing enrichment into a tigress’ enclosure. Some fresh meat.
As middle school flew by, nothing seemed to phase me anymore. I was able to block out the faces, the sounds, the smells, all of the stimuli that once overwhelmed me. I threw a curtain over it all. I thrived in the silence of my own room, setting up my figurines in scenes from witch trials, beheadings, and riots. For my 14th birthday my father gifted me an iPod, pre loaded with his favorite true crime podcasts. He knew it was the only way to get me to accept such a frivolous hunk of technology, no doubt made of materials of dwindling resources and overseas child labor. I listened to it on my walks to and from school, which grew quite long as I exhausted all of the schools within a 5 mile radius of the Addams mansion.
I had sunken into my routine. Built a daily life that suited me just fine. Until some jocks from the water polo team, whatever the fresh hell that is, decided to pick on my feeble younger brother. I could put up with plenty of idiocy, but nothing got my blood boiling like a pack of idiots feasting on someone smaller than them. The unfair power dynamic made it just about the most cowardly thing a person could do. If you truly wanted to prove your strength, you would find even match and best them. A lamb is no match for a hyena.
“I don’t understand what I did wrong,” I said through my teeth ,” You two always taught me that standing up for the little guy was a noble act. That the world had no place for bullies who prey on the weak.”
“And we stand by that,” Morticia said, shooting a concerned glance towards my father.
“You did nothing wrong standing up for your brother, my little rain cloud. However, the authorities suggest that causing someone to lose their appendages might be a crime,” father said with a slight shrug.
“So those meatheads shove Pugsley into a locker with an apple in his mouth, and I’m the one who gets punished?”
“We live in a very backwards world, my venus flytrap. Children these days are enabled to do all sorts of things. They bully other kids, join that horrifying boyscouts gang, play recreational sports. They don’t have the Addams family values,” father explained.
Even more backwards in this world was the cluster of circumstances leading me to have to dwell in the very school where my parents met. It seemed as if everything had somehow aligned perfectly with my mothers insidious plot for me. To become a watered down version of her that would never live up to the real thing.
Much to my dismay, I was even shoved into the same dorm hall as she once was. Forced to dwell with a roommate steeped in pastels and rainbows, despite my very serious allergies. It seemed to be the perfect recipe for my demise.
Or so I thought.
Enid Sinclair perplexed me beyond all belief. Furthermore, I was absolutely determined to tune her out for the duration of our prison-stay. It would be easy, I thought, given the hundreds of classmates I’d learned to drown out on the daily.
Not with Enid. She demanded to be heard, and perceived, and listened to. At first, it reminded me all too much of Sarah. I not only kept my walls up, I stacked cinderblock after cinderblock upon them hoping that I would hear Enid’s chatter no longer. Somehow, her presence only grew louder and louder until eventually I felt the silence again. I felt the emptiness in the air when she was not around. She had not even left my life completely, just for a portion of the day, and yet I was floating in dark matter once again. It was agonizing.
I knew something had to break the tension, the unspoken tether she was fastening to us both with her every action. It was not going to be me, as I had still not made the decision to dismantle my age-old wall.
So, of course, it was Enid. It was always going to be Enid. At the end of our first semester, she did something no one had ever done for me. She protected me the way I had learned to protect others. The greatest act of nobility. Nothing could make me admire her more. Not even the hug we shared after that lifted every drop of dark matter out of my lungs from all my years of living.
And so, the anticipation of seeing her for the first time after winter break had my heart rattling at the bars of its cage. I knew I was in for an eventful semester…