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When Wednesday Addams opened her eyes, she had no idea where she was. She didn’t recognize the bed she was in or the four walls surrounding her. The room was too dark to be her room in Ophelia Hall and it lacked the comforting draft of her childhood room. There was a significant absence of pink and the window was a standard bay window, not a glass spiderweb. Enid and Thing were nowhere to be found.
Strange, she thought. All of her senses went into overdrive as she tried to process the previous night’s events. It was fuzzy, but she remembered working on her novel well into the night before stumbling into bed. She was wearing a black pajama set she didn’t remember owning.
She got out of bed and took a closer look at everything. She recognized a few items as her own, placed exactly where she would have wanted them. The fridge was almost empty save for a few items she knew only she liked, and the bathroom held her everyday toiletries. She concluded that she lived there, alone, and that this was her apartment. But what she couldn’t wrap her mind around was why she felt so off-kilter. She couldn’t remember how she went from December of her senior year at Nevermore to now.
I need coffee and a cold shower.
She hoped the shower would wash away her confusion, but it did no such thing. It only furthered her confusion and frustrated her that she couldn’t make sense of her loss of memory.
She got dressed and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee only to realize she was out of coffee. Sighing, she stepped into her Mary Jane’s and reached for her purse. She was about to put on her coat when she thought to check the ID in her wallet.
Her own deadpan face stared up at her on the little 3x2 card. Below her address was the date the ID had been issued. Her eyes widened and her breathing stopped. The ID was issued exactly ten years after the year she was supposed to graduate from Nevermore Academy.
How is this possible?
The need for coffee grew exponentially. She found her keys in her coat pocket and left the apartment. Somehow her body knew the way to the local coffee shop when her mind didn’t. She waited in line and ordered her usual quad on ice and then took a seat next to the front door. The store was decorated in red, green, and gold for Christmas. Everyone around her chatted happily about tomorrow’s festivities and all the presents they bought for their families. She tuned them out and focused on getting her thoughts together.
I stayed up too late last night and it scrambled my brain. That’s it. After my coffee, I will be in much better shape, and I can move on with my day.
The bells above the front door jungled as a customer entered the coffee shop. She looked up and felt relief wash over her.
“Xavier,” she said.
He looked older, about ten years older, but he was still Xavier. His hair was a little shorter than it was the last time she saw him and she didn’t recognize the clothes he was wearing, but seeing him after the confusing morning she had was as relieving as breathing clearly for the first time after a serious sinus infection.
He looked startled to see her. Strange, she thought, he’s never not looked excited to see me.
“Xavier, come sit down,” she said. “I’ve had quite a confusing morning and I need to bounce some ideas off of you.”
“Uh.” He stood in the doorway looking like he had seen a ghost. The bells jingled again as the door opened and that’s when he finally took a step towards her. “Wednesday? Wednesday Addams?” he asked.
“Yes, who else I would be?” she asked impatiently. “Don’t act like you don’t recognize me when you saw me yesterday.”
“Wednesday,” he said carefully, “we haven’t seen each other in ten years.”
“Nonsense. I was just with you at your shed.”
He looked nervously around the store. “Are you here with someone?” he asked. “Do you need me to call someone for you?”
“Why would I need you to call someone? Xavier, stop acting strange and sit down.”
The door opened again, and a beautiful blonde-haired woman with baby blue eyes stepped in and came up to Xavier. “There you are,” she said. Wednesday watched in horror as the woman brushed Xavier’s hair aside and kissed his cheek. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
Wednesday glanced down and saw a little girl holding the woman’s hand. She had the same blonde hair as her mother and the greenest eyes Wednesday had ever seen. The kind of green she had only seen on one person. Wednesday’s stomach dropped.
“Sorry, I uh, didn’t think it would take more than a couple minutes,” Xavier said. His eyes bounced anxiously between the woman and her daughter and Wednesday. He looked just as sick as Wednesday felt.
“Who’s this?” the woman asked politely, nodding in Wednesday’s direction.
“Oh, uh, this is someone I went to high school with. Wednesday Addams,” he said. Wednesday could see the panic in his eyes as he stared back at her. “Wednesday, this is my wife Annie and our daughter Jennifer.”
Wednesday stopped breathing. She felt the world tilt. It felt like she was on a boat in the middle of an ocean in the middle of a storm. The waves viciously rocked the boat side to side, trying to shake her off her feet and pull her into the water and drown her. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jean clad thighs. The room felt smaller and claustrophobic and suddenly she was hyperventilating. She wanted to scream. She wanted to run away from these dangerous feelings and go back to the apartment that was supposed to be hers but didn’t feel like hers. Most importantly, she wanted to go back to Ophelia Hall where everything made sense.
“Nice to meet you!” Annie said. She held her hand out for Wednesday to take. She didn’t take it. After a few seconds, Annie awkwardly took her hand back. “Okay then. Well Jennifer has to use the bathroom so I’ll let you two catch up for a few minutes.”
Xavier watched Annie and his daughter walk away and waited until they were out of sight before turning back to Wednesday. “So…how’s life?”
“How could you,” Wednesday said. “How could you marry someone else and have a child with her?”
“Don’t act like I’m in the wrong for moving on.” He crossed his arms defensively over his chest. Wednesday didn’t understand why he was angry with her. “What was I supposed to do? Be alone for the rest of my life?”
“You are supposed to be in a relationship with me,” she said.
“That was years ago.”
“It was yesterday.”
Xavier stepped out of the way of a passing customer. “Did you forget the last ten years?” he asked. “You and I broke up. We haven’t been together for a long time.”
Her head throbbed and pulsed. It felt like it was going to explode. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“What don’t you understand?”
Her eyes stung and she realized she was close to crying. She inhaled sharply and looked down at the table. “I don’t understand how ten years could pass without me remembering it.”
“Did something happen?” Xavier asked in a gentler voice. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
Annie chose that moment to return from the bathroom. Jennifer shyly hugged her mother’s leg, stealing interested glances at Wednesday. “Well we’re all good to go,” she said. “Xavier?”
His eyes lingered on Wednesday for a moment longer. “Yeah, uh, why don’t you guys go ahead without me?” he said. “Wednesday and I have more catching up to do.”
His wife looked skeptical but she trusted her husband so she nodded and gave him a quick kiss goodbye. Wednesday almost threw up. “Call me when you’re done,” she said. She tugged on her daughter’s hand. “Say bye to daddy.”
“Bye daddy,” the little girl said.
Xavier picked her up and gave her a tight hug goodbye. “Have a good day, okay?”
“Kay.”
He put his daughter back down and Wednesday had never felt more relieved to be rid of two people. He sat down and for a long time neither of them spoke. As usual, Xavier was the first one to break the silence. “Do you really not remember what happened?”
“No. I woke up this morning and felt out of sorts. I didn’t recognize my own apartment,” she said. “The last thing I remember was working on my novel late last night, and nothing else in between Nevermore and now.”
“Did you hit your head or something?”
“Not that I recall. My head feels fine.” Aside from the horrible pounding caused by the worst heartbreak of her life.
Xavier sighed. He raked a hand through his hair, and it felt good to see him do something normal in the midst of the chaos. “We broke up on Christmas Eve our senior year,” he said.
The news of their breakup hit her harder than she expected it to. It felt like a sucker punch to the gut. “I don’t remember that,” she said.
He nodded. “We had plans to meet up at my shed that night. We were going to exchange gifts. I..I painted a vision I had of us thinking it would be a nice gift. It was a look at the future – our future, but you didn’t want it.”
“The painting?”
“And our future,” he said. “You started ranting about how you didn’t want to get married or have kids, that the future isn’t set in stone, and you could still change it. I asked you what was the point of being in a relationship with me if you didn’t see me in your future, and you said you didn’t know. So I took the hint. I told you that if you’d rather a future without me in it, then you should go for it. You didn’t say anything. You just turned around and left and that was it.”
“I remember now,” she said. Her blood ran cold as the memory of that night slowly came back to her. “After I left your shed, I sat on my balcony for a few hours wishing you would understand that I needed to be alone.”
“Oh, I understood,” he said bitterly. “We talked a few times here and there in class when we had to, but it was never the same. Then after graduation, we never saw each other again. Years later I met Annie in college, got married, and started a family.”
“Xavier…” But she didn’t know what to say. She was still confused. Although now she remembered their argument in the shed and sitting on her balcony before she went inside and worked on her novel, she remembered nothing else after that. It was like she had been transported ten years into the future. Ice cold realization flooded her veins as she remembered another critical detail of that night.
While she was sitting in the cold, wishing Xavier would understand, she looked up to the sky and saw a star – the brightest star in the night sky – shining down on her. Dear God, she thought, am I in one of Enid’s ridiculous Christmas movies? She must have accidentally wished on a Christmas star and got her wish. She wasn’t sure if her nausea was because she actually believed that to be what happened or if it was the ring on Xavier’s finger.
She cleared her throat and tried again. “Xavier, I think I have made a terrible mistake,” she said.
“I think you did too,” he said, “but it’s ten years too late.”
Her body went numb with grief. She couldn’t focus, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t feel anything but her broken heart pulsing in her chest.
Xavier sighed and looked around the coffee shop like he was about to say something he knew he shouldn’t. “Look, I’m not happy either,” he said. Her eyes found his. She didn’t know whether to feel relieved that they held the same sadness she felt or guilty that they held the same sadness. “I’m just as responsible for the breakup as you are. If I could go back in time and not give you that stupid painting, I would. I would keep my vision to myself and let things play out and hope that you did actually see yourself with me long term. I’d let things fall into place as they should, and if the day ever came when you didn’t want me anymore, I’d just be grateful for the time we did have and move on.”
“Xavier, I did want to be with you long term. Your painting scared me and I lashed out,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I wish you would have told me that years ago.” He sat back in his seat and started biting his nails like he always did when he was upset. “I think about you every day. I think about what could have been, what I could have done differently, what you could have done differently. I love my wife and daughter, but not like how I loved you. What we had was special and can’t be replicated. But it’s over, it’s been over, and we should move on.”
“What if it were possible for me to go back in time and fix things?” she asked desperately.
He took his thumb nail out of his mouth and bit the inside of his cheek. He looked to be seriously considering her words, and another powerful pang of pain rang throughout her. Even with the most ridiculous thoughts and scenarios, he always took her seriously and never doubted her.
“I’d say you should take that chance,” he said. “You’ve done crazier things so I wouldn’t doubt if you somehow knew how to time travel.”
She reached across the table and grabbed his hand. The familiar spark between them shot through her, electrifying her blood, and going straight to her heart. The way he looked at their hands told her he felt it too.
“I’m going to fix things for us, Xavier,” she said. “I promise.”
***
She went back to her lonely apartment and spent the next few hours dark wandering around looking at her new life. Her apartment was just as sterile and void of any life as her room was back at Nevermore. This should have brought her comfort, but all it did was increase the sadness she felt deep inside her soul.
There was no sign of the indelible mark Enid, Eugene, and Xavier left on her. There was no black snood and matching Christmas sweater, no jars of honey, no drawings of her anywhere. That night all those years ago, she wished to be alone, and now she truly was. She pushed away the people that meant most to her all because she was too pigheaded to admit that maybe she wasn’t the same Wednesday Addams she was before she came to Nevermore and accepted the school as her home. She lived alone and was sure to die alone if she didn’t reverse her wish.
When the night finally came, she raced outside to stand on her fire escape. She searched the night sky for the Christmas star, and almost cried out in relief when she found it.
“I wish I could go back and reverse my mistakes,” she said into the darkness. “I wish I could get out of my own way and accept Xavier’s love.”
Nothing happened.
She wished Enid were there. Enid, who was full of eternal hope, would reassure her and remind her to be patient.
Wednesday went back inside and laid in bed on top of her blankets. She wasn’t tired but she didn’t want to be awake any longer. She wanted to be back in Ophelia Hall, surrounded by Enid’s unsettling stuffed animals. She wanted to go back to Eugene’s bee shed and listen to him talk about the bees’ hibernation cycle. She wanted Xavier.
Eventually, her eyes closed and she fell asleep.
***
When she opened her eyes, she was amazed to realize the pain in her chest had been lifted. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up. Her heart jumped in her chest.
She was back in her dorm room.
“Hey sleepy head!” Enid said. She was crouched over on her bed painting her toe nails a lime green.
“Enid?”
“I’m surprised you took a nap,” Enid said. “You’ve said naps are for the weak.”
“Enid!” Wednesday jumped out of bed and did something she never in her life would have ever done if she hadn’t just experienced the worst heartbreak of her life. She hugged Enid.
“What the?” Enid stood there for a second with her hands at her sides before the shock wore off. She wrapped her arms around Wednesday and returned the hug. “This would be the single best moment of my life if I wasn’t so confused.”
Wednesday let go of her like she was on fire. “I need to find Xavier. What time is it?”
“A quarter past nine. Are you okay?”
Wednesday didn’t answer. Instead, she threw on her shoes and raced out the door, forgetting to put on her coat. She ran down the stairs and through the quad, heading for the woods. On her way, she ran into Eugene.
“Wednesday? Why are you running?”
“I’m late to see Xavier,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s good to see you again, Eugene.”
He scratched his head and wondered if it were possible for Wednesday to get any weirder.
***
Xavier was putting the finishing touches on his painting when Wednesday burst through the door. He turned around and smiled, already knowing it was her. “You’re early. I didn’t – "
She cut him off by jumping into his arms. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and crushed her lips against his.
“Mmph!”
Just as Enid had, Xavier stood there frozen in shock before his brain caught up and kissed her back. He wrapped his arms around her and matched her frenzied kisses with his own. When she finally pulled away, he gazed at her with dazed eyes.
“I thought you said you’d never be the type of girl to jump into my arms,” he said, looking smug.
She scowled at him and climbed down. “Tease me again and risk losing limbs.”
He laughed, showing off his dimples with his wide smile. It felt unbelievably good to see him smile at her like that again.
She craned her neck around him. Still with wet paint sat the painting of Xavier and Wednesday in about ten years with a little girl wearing pigtails sitting between them. Xavier followed her line of sight. His cheeks turned a light shade of pink.
“I had a vision about us last night,” he said. “I know you said you didn’t want to get married and have kids, but that’s what came to me.” He paused and looked at her, waiting for her to freak out or storm out of the shed. “Are you mad?”
She took a step closer to the painting. She had done it. This was exactly where she had been before she ruined everything. “No, it’s perfect,” she said. She turned back and looked up at him with soft eyes. “Let’s make it a reality.”