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Enid is four, and her best friend’s name is Maria. They meet each other on the sixth week of term, when Maria walks in, head down, eyes red, and Enid bounds up to her and they make friends immediately.
She comes home with the joy of the day light in her chest, and finds her mother. She starts to babble to her about how one day, she will marry Maria, and they will live together forever and ever, when she realises far too late that her mother has stopped smiling.
“Enid,” she says, “you do not like girls like that.” And then she had goes back to her knitting, teeth clenched, and Enid stands like a statue not knowing what she’s done wrong.
(She does not recall, after that, a single instance of her mother smiling at her.)
______________________
When Enid is six, she begins to find ways to make her mom pay her attention.
She starts small, bringing her toast with jam in bed, a cup of tea, a painting she’s done.
Each time her mother would find something wrong with it. She wasn’t hungry. She liked unsweetened tea. The painting looked unfinished.
So she tries harder. Unsweetened tea. Drawings she had spent hours or days on. A cushion she had learnt to sew in a heart shape.
It is never enough.
Her mother always sees a flaw in her creation.
When somebody is always finding flaws in what you do, the easy thing is to become the flaw. If her mother would hate her anyway, Enid would give her reason.
She plays up at school, pulls the hair of the boy in front of her, throws her pen across the room when she can’t do her math problems.
Her teachers finally call her parents in when she throws her yoghurt at the teacher, and Enid is hopeful her mom might turn up, but it’s her dad who appears, tired and worn and ready to reprimand her. And so she gives up, and becomes ‘good Enid’ again, watching all the teachers sigh in relief that it was just a phase, that she’s gone back to her quietness.
(It wasn’t a phase, not really, she’s just too tired to keep going.)
______________________
By the time Enid is eight, she’s given up trying to make her mother love her because it’s an impossible task.
A part of her is glad when her mom starts to properly tell her off when she’s cross. Because at least now she knows that her mom hates her. She doesn’t have to question over and over again if this is just her way of showing love, because she knows that there is no love there to be shown.
It should help more, knowing the truth, but it doesn’t, really. It doesn’t make the ache in her chest go away. Knowing a person doesn’t love you never makes a person feel good.
Enid’s okay though, really, because she’s old enough now that she can barely remember what it felt like to be loved by her. You can’t miss a thing you never had.
You shouldn’t be able to, anyway.
Still, she looks for the love she knows isn’t there in the smallest gestures; the occasional bedtime stories, the infrequent questions about her day at school, the way her mother still makes her birthday cake every year - chocolate, Enid’s favourite.
(She knows it doesn’t help, and it will only hurt her more in the end, but she looks for love anyway.)
______________________
Twelve years old, and Enid has a boyfriend.
His name is Ajax, and he’s lovely. He likes listening to music, just like her, and he’s on the soccer team. They date in the way eleven year olds do, tentatively holding hands, going to the movies, sharing a milkshake, giving each other a peck on the cheek whenever somebody glances in their direction.
It is the happiest Enid thinks her mother has been in a long time, when she brings Ajax home. She doesn’t say anything, but Enid can see the relief in her eyes that she’s got a boyfriend. That she’s grown out of the silliness of her youth. Seen the world for what it was. She earns a nod of appreciation from her mother, and Enid, starved of love as she is, grasps it with both hands as proof of her mother’s care.
In most ways, Ajax is perfect. He is kind, and sweet, and good. He always wears a beanie, which Enid is, of course, forced to torment him about. He’s close to her mother, somehow.
And yet.
Ajax is a boy.
There is only so much questioning Enid can do, so many quizzes she can take or models she can stare at to see if something is going on there, when she’s known her answer since she before she knew what the question was.
When she tells Ajax, he’s not surprised. He’s not even hurt. He hugs her. He says that he loves her. They agree to stay friends.
(Enid doesn’t think she could’ve handled not being his friend. Sometimes it feels like he’s the only one tying her to the Earth.)
Afterwards, she hates Ajax for being so kind, because it gives her the nerve to confess to her mother.
So she sits her down, tells her that she doesn’t just think, she knows that she likes girls, and she wants her mother to be prepared if she ever brings one home. She knows that her mom hadn’t liked Maria, but this is who she is.
It’s fruitless, of course.
Her mother stares at her with ice in her expression.
“No. You don’t.” Enid opens her mouth to protest, but her mother leaves the room without speaking again. She furrows her brow in confusion. She’s unable to understand what she should have said there to make her mother listen.
(It’s not till later that she realises nothing could have made her mother still listen to her after saying something like that.)
So she locks herself in the room to listen to pop music, and when Ajax calls she tells him she couldn’t bring herself to do it, lying so she doesn’t have to confront his kindness.
And later in the night, when her father comes in to try and apologise for her mother’s actions, she rolls over in bed and pretends to be asleep so she doesn’t have to pretend to care about him when he never does anything to stick up for her.
He’s her dad. He’s supposed to support her.
Enid is beginning to think that nobody is left to love her except Ajax, who deserves so much more than her.
(Everyone in her life deserves better than her.)
______________________
Enid’s twelfth birthday comes a week later.
She’s always had chocolate cake, made by her mother, maybe not with love, but with some level of care, and this year she watches as her father rips the packaging off a store bought lemon drizzle. She eats it with tears in her eyes. It feels like a rejection.
The real rejection had come years earlier, but this one is stronger, rawer, more painful than she could have imagined.
She goes to Ajax’s for lunch, and tries not to cry when she sees the effort his parents have gone to to make this meal perfect for her.
They get her a book she’s been wanting for months. Her mother hands her a ten dollar bill.
She thinks it is there that she loses the last of the love she has for her mother.
Maybe one day she’ll find her feelings for her mom again, in a pit of landfill, for example, covered in plastic bags and beer bottle caps among all the other trash that had been thrown away and never missed.
She likes to think she’ll walk on and away, but she’s terrified that one day she’ll be passing and catch sight of it, glinting in the sunlight, and be unable to resist the love that she was never given in the first place.
(That’s the allure of impossible things, isn’t it? No matter how hard you try, you can never reach them. And no matter how times you fail, you can’t help but grasp for them again.)
______________________
She turns thirteen. This year, even her father doesn't bother. She's pretty sure her parents have both forgotten.
Ajax's parents invite her over. They've made a chocolate cake. She tries not to cry into her piece.
They know her and they care about her, and she values that. She does.
(Sometimes it hurts, though, to know that they care more than her parents. It hurts.)
______________________
Aged fourteen, Enid picks up the piano again, having dropped it when she was ten.
(Her mother had told her she was terrible. She'd never questioned it, simply packed up her music and let the piano father dust.)
It turns out she's still good. She's still really good. She's not lost her sense for the music. It doesn't take her long to progress through the grades again, and it's a real escape for her.
Her mother still tells her that she's bad at playing, but Enid doesn't listen to her, this time.
She cares, though. She'd give a lot for just one compliment after she's spent weeks learning a piece.
(Sometimes she wonders how much she'd give up for her mother to give her one gentle word.)
______________________
Enid is fifteen when her mom tells her that she’s going to boarding school. Ajax goes there too. He begged his parents to let him join her. Enid thinks they consider her fragile. Maybe she is fragile. She feels the kind of brittle and snappable that comes from fifteen years without being held together.
Her parents buy her the train ticket, and tell her good luck. Her father drives her to the station, and then walks off without saying goodbye.
Another rejection. She should be used to them by now.
(She isn’t.)
They’re going to Nevermore Academy, her and Ajax. It’s for gifted students - they’d both taken a test to get in. She’d be happy about it, she thinks, if her parents weren’t sending her off the way they are. If they’d let her apply in recognition of her talent.
(She almost laughs at herself, then, because what talent? The only gift she has ever had is driving people away.)
She meets Ajax at the train station, and his parents are there too.
“Good luck, Enid,” they tell her, and she hugs them tightly with all the force of her affection.
“Thank you,” she whispers, though she doesn’t think they truly know what she’s thanking them for.
The two of them talk all the way there, about roommates and lessons and how Ajax is going to join the football team and how Enid plans to start rowing, and Enid lets herself feel a little spark of hope that this might be okay.
(Is it really hope? She didn’t know she still had any.)
______________________
Fifteen, and three months into Nevermore, Enid can’t even put a name to her emotions.
She meets a girl, Yoko, and they become fast friends. She’s funny and she’s quick, and in another lifetime Enid might have liked her in a different way, but in this one she’s perfectly happy for Yoko to sit with her on the sofa and babble about literally anything that comes to their minds.
Ajax becomes popular quickly, befriending a boy named Xavier, who seems to be the alpha male of the pack. Enid doesn’t like him much, but she’s happy that Ajax is happy, and he always still makes sure to spend time with Enid.
(She worries, still, that her friends don’t really like her, that they just feel sorry for her, and immediately feels bad, because what kind of terrible person doubts those that show her kindness?)
She does learn to row. She joins the team for the Poe Cup, and they don’t win, but it’s fun, you know?
Enid is having fun.
There are still whispers of her past in the corners of the rooms. The sting of rejection when Ajax hasn’t seen her in a while. Her mother’s voice, coming out of the mouth of a teacher reprimanding her. Hearing it every time she takes a lingering look at a girl. It ringing in her ears every time she tries to write, or to draw, or to make something, because it is never perfect.
(Like her.)
Her parents skip the one day a year they could’ve seen her, and Enid tries not to let it hurt too much.
She tries to brighten her room up with stained glass and bright colours, but it all feels like a mask to the darkness she feels inside her.
Maybe it would be easier, she thinks, if she wasn’t here. If she was just gone. She wouldn’t have to pretend to be okay. Yoko wouldn’t have to pretend to like her. Ajax wouldn’t have to comfort her after another sleepless night spent worrying about the future.
(After all, what’s one drop of water missing from the ocean?)
______________________
She is sixteen years old, when the first stroke of luck she’s had in a long time appears in the form of Wednesday Addams.
That girl.
When Enid meets her, she’s a little scared of her, honestly, but it doesn’t take long for Wednesday to allow Enid past her hard exterior into the softness within. Enid seizes the friendship with both hands, and tries to do the same.
Half the window is stripped bare of Enid’s painstakingly glued stained glass, and it’s pretty funny, honestly, because it feels like Wednesday is trying to isolate herself from colour in the same way Enid needs it. Polar opposites, right?
(And yet, they aren’t. That darkness lives in them both.)
Wednesday competes with Enid in the Poe Cup. There’s something so special about that win - a long time in the making. And that, Enid thinks, is where their friendship is truly born.
Enid likes Wednesday because she is clever, and she is witty, and she is fiercely protective of the things she cares about. Enid is flattered to find she is part of that group. She’s not quite sure what Wednesday sees in her.
______________________
Wednesday has admirers. Two of them. Both males. Enid tries not to be jealous.
(If she looked closer, she’d understand that Wednesday looks at Enid the way Xavier and Tyler look at her. But she can’t afford to do that, to get too invested in another person, who will, in all likelihood, leave her.)
Wednesday starts to see her too. Really see her. The parts of her Enid had wanted to hide, the ugly pieces of her personality that have her standing on the balcony at midnight and just wondering what could stop her.
She tells Wednesday little stories about her past that have Wednesday’s nose crinkling in concern. She lets Wednesday see her crying for god knows what reason, and lets herself be comforted.
Yoko and Ajax like her, too. Enid often gets the impression that the three of them are conspiring against her somehow, but honestly she doesn’t care, as long as they stay with her. Walking around town with them and licking cotton candy off her fingers, she can pretend that she’s normal.
Gradually, the visits to the balcony become fewer and further between. If only because Wednesday wakes up every single time.
One night, it feels as though the world is pressing too heavily against her chest. She’s been carrying the weight on her shoulders for too long, and she can’t bring herself to go on like this any longer. She goes outside with resolution in her heart.
“What are you doing out there?” Wednesday asks from the doorway. Enid looks away from the steep drop, and meets the concern in her eyes.
“It’s cold. Come in.”
It feels like wading through treacle, to come back inside, but those dark, expressive eyes wait for her on the doorstep and hug her as Thing locks the door.
Enid knows that Wednesday, at least on some level, understands what she was doing.
Wednesday makes hot chocolate over a little stove, and, as she sits on the sofa sipping it, she thinks I would be dead by now. She feels a little regretful. But then Wednesday comes and sits with her, and slips an arm around her shoulders, and the weight on her chest lightens.
Just a little, mind. It lingers there long after Wednesday goes to sleep on the sofa with her, pressing a kiss to Enid’s cheek. But her presence is grounding.
“I am alive, because of you,” she whispers to the sleeping figure.
(She can’t bring herself to hate that.)
______________________
Sixteen and half. Enid realises it’s been weeks without feeling the way she did that fateful night.
She has a therapist, in town, now, who talks to her about her feelings. It’s not so bad to let them out, really. Wednesday goes too. They have their sessions at the same time.
It’s not easy, to talk, but it is good for her. And it’s good for her friends. They can’t shoulder the burden that is knowing what lies within Enid’s bubbly exterior.
They walk out together. Enid’s eyes are stinging and her face is tight. Wednesday looks tense and defiant.
“Okay?” Enid asks.
“Okay.”
Enid never talks about what goes on in her sessions. Wednesday doesn’t talk about hers.
(They don’t need to.)
______________________
When her parents come for the first time - actually come, rather than sending a letter, apologising for not being able to make it, Enid is a bundle of nerves. Wednesday can sense it. She comes up behind Enid and holds her till she stops shaking.
And of course, it takes all of five minutes for Enid’s mother to shoot down all the self worth she’d spent these two years building up. Her father stays silent through every barbed word. He tries to hug her, but she shrugs him off. She can’t deal with his cowardly affection.
The day crawls by.
She gets to see Ajax’s parents, who thankfully don’t comment on her red eyes. They give her a bag of chocolate bars that she’d loved back home, but couldn’t buy here, and she tries not to cry again.
Her mother laughs and calls her a greedy bitch. Ajax goes to step in, anger flashing in his eyes, but Enid shakes her head, and mouths thank you to his parents with as much gratitude as she can muster.
(It was never about the chocolate bars. It was about how they cared for her.)
Wednesday’s parents are everything she has ever dreamed of. They’re brilliant.
They look at Wednesday, and at each other, with such deep, fierce, love, that Enid wants to cry out of jealousy.
Her mother, of course, doesn’t hold back with the commentary on Enid. The Addamses look perplexed, repeatedly defending the girl ‘Wednesday has told us such wonderful things about.’
Her parents don’t listen, of course.
When it’s time to send the parents off, she ignores her own. She finds Ajax once more.
She’s always considered Mr and Mrs Petropolous to be a little bit her parents anyway. She’s teary as she says goodbye to them, and they’re the same.
Still, their love doesn’t stop the breakdown in her room later, the screaming and the crying, because why is she so inherently unlovable to her parents?
Wednesday watches her, face impassive, as she paces the room in furious tears. She doesn’t move until Enid collapses onto the sofa, anger evaporating into exhaustion.
“They don’t love me,” Enid sobs.
“But I do,” Wednesday says softly. “We all do.”
(Enid can’t help but think she doesn’t deserve her.)
______________________
She doesn’t see Wednesday for the week after that. She moves into Ajax’s room, turning up in his doorway at one in the morning. Ajax, tired though he is, makes her comfortable, lets her stay.
Ajax has always been her best friend. He knows her like nobody else. He is the only person Enid can bear to see her like this.
When she finally, finally, feels better, Ajax helps her move her few things back to Wednesday’s room. Enid is expecting a confrontation, a demand for them to talk, but Wednesday simply laces her fingers through Enid’s and says I’m glad you’re back.
Wednesday is Enid’s best friend too, precisely because she gets these things about her. She understands.
(How did she get so lucky, to have two best friends as good as this?)
______________________
When they finally kiss, it’s like a fairytale.
Enid is seventeen, and it happens like this:
They’re watching TV together on the sofa.
Wednesday turns to look Enid in the eye.
Enid doesn’t break eye contact.
Wednesday leans in.
Enid doesn’t stop her.
It’s clumsy, because it’s their first time, and their teeth are crashing and their lips are sore, but they’re giggling into each others’ embrace and Enid feels, just for a moment, completely okay.
(Wednesday often makes her feel like that.)
______________________
One day, when she's eighteen and her parents are away, she takes Wednesday to her house. She sits down at the familiar piano, and starts to play the piece that had brought her the most comfort over the years. Chopin's Raindrop Prelude.
She's clunky at first, and she's awkward with years of no practice, but eventually the beauty of the music overtakes her and she lets it fill her up. She looks over at Wednesday, who sits with her eyes shut and a smile on her face.
As the piece draws to an ending, Enid lets her own eyes close. She tries to think of just one sweet memory from this place.
And, as the last note lingers in the silence, she does.
This piano was her happy place. It's what made her feel safe.
Wednesday gives her the same feeling, and now she has both of the two in the room at once.
She stands up from the piano, and wraps her arms around her girlfriend.
There were good things here. She'd almost forgotten.
______________________
And so, in an epilogue style, their life unfolds.
They live a life of domestic bliss. When they graduate school, then university, they move in together in a little countryside cottage. Wednesday is a writer, Enid is a journalist. They sit side by side on their computers and smile at each other as they work.
They make coffee together in the mornings and curl up together in the evenings, and this is it, this is what life should be.
Enid still can’t be near anyone but Ajax when she’s in one of her lows, though thankfully they’re much more infrequent now. Wednesday still doesn’t mind at all. She lets Enid take her time, and welcomes her back when she’s ready.
After a while, Enid stops worrying that she’ll be turned away by one of them. Ajax and Wednesday never shut the door on her.
They have a cat. His name is Kitrick. They named him while drunk and can’t remember how that came about.
They marry when Enid is twenty one. Ajax’s parents give her away. Hers don’t even attend the ceremony.
She doesn’t care.
They dance for the first time to the Raindrop Prelude, and Enid manages not to cry, until she looks over and sees the tears on Wednesday's cheeks.
Soon after, they adopt their sons, Henry and Ben. They’re six and eight years old, and Enid feels more honoured than anything to give them a new life. A good life. She gives them everything her parents didn’t provide for her, and she absolutely loves it.
She teaches Ben piano. Wednesday teaches Henry cello. Their house is filled with music and laughter and happiness. Enid couldn't ask for more.
They have a beautiful life, and Enid adores every second.
The love she had once craved from her mother remains tossed away. She doesn’t mind. She replaces it with the beautiful treasures of people she’d found along the way in her life.
(The allure of impossible things cannot ever be as good as the possession of beautiful ones.)