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Beep. Beep.
Enid had never liked blood.
She had never liked the smell of antiseptic, either. But they both singed her nose now, and she couldn’t tell which she hated more.
The tough leather of the chair beneath her bent to no will. It was cold beneath her, the type of cold that permeated her clothes and infiltrated her body until the only focal point she had was the numbness of her fingertips.
It was no haven of Enid’s, though. The chair was not important. It was temporary, a support wedged between culpability and specters of previous hours. So in the end, she supposed the chair never really mattered, but it was easier to think about than the occupied bed in front of her.
For the fourth time, her claws caught the pliable underside of that chair she sat on. She curled them deeper and stared at the tile floor. The floor, too, was unmovable, offering no reprieve to the souls who sought answers from it in hopes of avoiding the reason they were seeing it in the first place.
Enid stared at the floor until her eyes burned, waiting for it to collapse beneath her and draw back the curtains of this illusion. She blinked once. Her eyes still burned. The room stayed the same, for it was no illusion. The antiseptic still burned. The remnants of old blood danced in her head.
When the floor remained just as it was, Enid released a tiny breath and drew her eyes upward. She tracked the chords plugged into the walls and watched the glowing monitors depict images she couldn’t read. She stared at the whiteboard on the far wall until its contents—the date, medications, vital check times, doctor and nurse names—were imprinted in her mind like antiseptic and blood and guilt.
Her claws caught the chair a fifth time. She pulled her hands into her lap and tugged her legs close beside her. The fluorescent lights etched into the ceiling, with their unnecessary brightness and revealing touch, hurt her head, but she followed their glow regardless. It rippled over sterile white cloth and sheets and ultimately came to dance in the bruises beneath the eyes of the girl in their embrace.
Enid stared at Wednesday for a long time. Longer than the tile floors, or the monitors, or the chords, or the whiteboard. Her face was deathly pale—paler than it usually was, the kind of pale that made Enid feel sick. Her lashes ghosted against her cheeks, unmoving, and her hands lay still across her chest. Various instruments clung to her hands, all of them waiting for the next disaster to put them to use.
Enid slid her gaze over the cuts, the bruises, and the battered canvas of her best friend’s exterior, and she willed her lip to stop quivering. She followed the line of the IV in Wednesday’s hand back to the bag it dripped from, and that will grew tenfold.
Enid swallowed back the numbness festering in her throat and dropped her head into her hands. She squeezed her eyes shut when the darkness of her palms consumed her. A shudder wracked her shoulders, a warning disguised as limitation, before she realized the numbness was instead a surge of emotion. It flowed over her unstable fortifications and preyed on everything she had done wrong.
Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday. She felt so detached from the name and the girl in front of her. The thought made the tears brimming behind her hands far too potent. She breathed an inhale and tried to keep it steady, but it shook messily past her lips. Her exhale was ragged, too.
It seemed nothing in that hospital was constant except for Wednesday’s unchanging stillness.
Beep, beep. . . . The heart monitor announced its presence again. When the beeps began to sound like pitched siren wails, Enid kept her face hidden in her hands.
Last night. Last night, she thought, listening to the monitor confirm that Wednesday wasn’t dead.
The siren wails had been loud as the emergency response vehicles tore through the night, their lights cutting in slanted rays through the foliage she and Agnes were settled in the midst of. Enid’s distaste for her had been weathered only by the urgency of their situation; the blue and red lights had no adversary amid the night, for Willow Hill’s power had been completely stripped; an alarm was blaring from within the walls, muffled as it might be; silhouettes churned in windows like shadow puppets. There was no place for the burgeoning hostility Enid had grown for her.
Where’s Wednesday? she thought, clutching her phone in her hand until her knuckles were white. Her limbs trembled with building adrenaline. Their shakes might have been spurred onward by the unease flaring in her veins, though; it trickled over her remnants of certitude until all that remained was the husk of the plan she’d agreed to.
She was five seconds from abandoning her post, leaving Agnes in the dark, and infiltrating the building in search of Wednesday. She had been gone too long. Far too long. Enid hadn’t seen her since she disappeared through the gates.
The trees shifted around her beneath the persuasion of the breeze, shying away from the alarm blaring within the gates. But the alarm’s existence only intensified the tightness swirling in Enid’s chest. It beckoned her.
Enid hadn’t known what she’d expected when the vehicles skidded into the parking lot. She hadn’t known what she’d expected when a sense of dread overtook her, its coils constricting her rationale. She hadn’t known what she’d expected when the leaves snagged at her clothes as she shifted.
But she hadn’t expected the centermost window to shatter. Its broken pieces caught the car lights as it rained onto the pavement, and falling with them came something else that had been propelled out.
A person. Enid’s heart lurched. A person falling. Enid’s breath was bated. She’d recognize her anywhere. Wednesday. Wednesday. Wednesday.
Wednesday disappeared behind the walls surrounding the building as she fell, concealing her from Enid’s view, but that did nothing to conceal the devastating sound of a body hitting the pavement.
Enid shot out of the underbrush as soon as she heard it. She distantly registered Agnes calling her name, but the warning was lost amongst the rush of blood in her ears. No. No. No. Her blurred footfalls pounding against the pavement thrummed through her body, a failing anchor in a reality that had just been irrevocably changed.
Enid had practically slammed into the iron bars of the gate in the hurried, desperate force of her gait, leaving a choked sob to rip past her lips as she scrambled against them. They’d slammed shut after the vehicles came through. A snarl befell her, a snarl unlike one that had ever settled on her features, as she pushed and tugged against them.
Her lungs hurt by the time the darkness of the lot swept around her, and its presence reminded her that the facility’s electric grid had lost power. She regained herself long enough to realize that, without the electricity inhibiting her, she could pry the gates open. Without a pause, Enid shoved and pulled and finally wrenched one of the iron fortifications wide enough to slip through.
She ran. The lights blurred in her periphery, mirroring the spots dazzling her vision like the terror snapping at her heels. She ran. Gunshots. She ran. Where was Wednesday? Faces and people in uniform poured out of cars.
Where was Wednesday? Blue and red. Gunshots. Enid’s breath came in gasps. No one survived a fall like that. No one. No one. Wednesday.
By the time her hair was an awry mess around her face, Enid shoved through the masses of the crowd until she stumbled to a halt at the front. The clouds retreated from their place veiling the waning moon, revealing the unnaturally crumpled form of Wednesday on the ground. Blood streaked lines down her face and smeared on her clothes, its crimson tinged with the watercolor of something fatal.
She was still. Too still. Her body was bent oddly. She wasn’t getting up. Enid glimpsed Thing at her side, nudging her head; it lolled back to the side limply, ceaselessly unmoving.
No. No. No. Enid heard someone call for an ambulance, she heard the sirens, she heard voices—all of them were distorted, like she was drowning in a tide she hadn’t bothered to get out of until this moment.
Wednesday didn’t move.
Something within her broke.
Enid ran forward with an animalistic cry, but Wednesday wasn’t getting any closer. Why wasn’t Enid moving? She snarled and screamed and wept and pulled forward, but something restrained her and forced her backwards.
A few officers sidled to Wednesday’s side. Enid growled from the distance she was at, pulling forward with everything she could muster, an effort born of sheer protectiveness and fear and the sobs becoming stuck behind her teeth. Broken words drifted to her again, but they hailed from a language Enid didn’t know, or maybe one she had forgotten.
“Let me go!” she wailed as another entity tugged her backward. She wrenched one arm free and reached it forward as someone blocked Wednesday from her view.
She didn’t realize she was screaming Wednesday’s name until her throat was raw.
“Wednesday! Wednesday!” Her screams echoed around the parking lot and drowned out the sirens. She tugged forward and kicked. Hot tears trailed lines down her cheeks, blurring the last glimpse she had left of Wednesday. She fought her restraints again. “No! Wednesday! Wednesday!”
Enid fought, and she fought, and she fought, and she eventually came to and realized two officers were holding her back and keeping her from Wednesday.
Another broken wail choked her when another of them stepped away from Wednesday, letting Enid catch sight of her again. She still hadn’t moved. She needed to move. Wednesday was a person of stillness, of calculation, but never had Enid seen her so devoid of life. Her body was still limp on the ground, still bloodied, still unresponsive. The knowledge was the last nail in Enid’s reasoning.
Enid’s claws had torn up the arms of one of the officers holding her by the time an ambulance flew into the scene, but still she didn’t relent. The adrenaline surging through her body was the only thing keeping her rearing at the hands that held her.
She needed to get to Wednesday. Wednesday, who fell out of a window, who wasn’t moving, who was bloody and beaten and didn’t need her and distant—
Something spoken about sedation floated to her as she managed to get her arm out of the officers’ hold again. Someone—a woman—told her to calm down, that the paramedics knew what they were doing, that she would make it worse. Enid didn’t listen, even though she vaguely knew it was true. She’d already made a lot of things between her and Wednesday worse, somewhere between biting comments and forced distance.
As an EMT ran over to Wednesday, Enid kept tugging, kept pulling, kept trying to break free because she needed to get to her. Despite everything, her terror-addled mind replayed only that.
She’s hurt, she thought frantically as another sob wracked her frame. She’s hurt. She’s dead. Enid kicked and fought with all the ferocity of a werewolf hooked on bloodlust.
“Wednesday!” she screamed again as the woman officer firmly wrestled her arm away and called for an EMT. From then, Enid’s moments coalesced into a hazy stupor; she wasn’t sure when a paramedic got to her side, nor when the fight had begun to leave her, nor when her lips started to taste like salt, but she was sure of the sharp prick in her arm. The night swirled around her like rain falling upward.
After another moment of fighting, her tugs were shaky and weak, nothing but haphazard attempts at something she couldn’t achieve. She couldn’t muster the strength to keep going. Though her instincts continued to reign within her being, begging her to keep trying, to get to Wednesday, her eyelids drooped. Her limbs grew heavy. Her body was a traitor, an adversary built on defeat.
Enid cried as she was lowered to the ground, and even still, she reached a weak hand on the concrete towards Wednesday.
Beneath her sobs and the sedative and not knowing what happened to Wednesday, that was the last thing Enid remembered from the night. She’d woken up in her bed with a note from Mrs. Addams and a mouth parched from her tears.
Beep. Beep. The machines coaxed her back to the present.
Enid lowered her hands away from her face.
Wednesday was still in the bed, still lifeless, still drained of fight. There was something so odd about it, something wrong and twisted and wrenching. Wednesday had always been vocal about her fascination with death. She’d never shied away from its essence. But death, Enid was noticing, even in its close calls, didn’t suit Wednesday at all.
Death siphoned the life from her being like machinery spun on the will of injustice. It waited outside the door. Even now, when Enid spared a glance away, she swore she could see its shadow blurring beneath the crack. One wrong move—one misplaced heartbeat, one failed breath—and its entry would be granted. She could hear it knocking already.
Knock. Knock. Beep. Beep. Enid’s only comfort came from the knowledge that the beeping was the knocking’s sworn enemy. Where the beeps were, there was life. Where the beeps were, Wednesday was not dead.
Enid shouldn’t be here. She wasn’t sure Wednesday would even want her at her bedside, for she was nothing more than a guard dog protecting something already damaged.
Wednesday had been clear in her motives, had implied desires so direct they needn’t be spoken on her tongue: she didn’t want Enid around. And though she’d denied Enid’s accusation of no longer wishing to uphold their friendship, Enid couldn’t help but allow her mind to wander. Maybe Wednesday was right in drawing away; maybe Enid didn’t deserve an ounce of her friendship anymore; maybe Wednesday was hurt, too.
But Enid was messy, and stupid, and everything plastic and pretend, so she had kicked and screamed and sobbed when she’d thought Wednesday had died in front of her. She’d fought to get closer because the idea of Wednesday not being in her life evoked a fear more visceral than anything she’d known before.
Because that’s what she’d said, hadn’t it been? She couldn’t imagine her life without Wednesday in it. Faced with the prospect now—with her best friend lying comatose in a hospital bed, clinging to the ropes of life only by the devices hooked into her body—Enid felt her world fraying at the edges.
The antiseptic’s binds grew tenfold as she wrapped her arms around her legs. She rested her chin on her knees and shut her eyes, willing away the truths of everything she’d done as of late. Exhaustion began to beckon at the edge of her awareness, so she searched for a tether to reality.
Beep. Beep. She focused on the beeping again.
Enid wanted to cry. She wanted her throat to be thick with tears. She wanted sobs to occupy the dead silence of her head, for it was in that silence that her thoughts festered. But Enid didn’t deserve to cry. She deserved to cycle through everything she had done wrong and bear witness to its truths.
Wednesday didn’t deserve the wash of cold ceiling lights turning her form ghostly, though. Wednesday didn’t deserve to be in that bed. She didn’t deserve to teeter on the precipice of death. She didn’t deserve to be in a coma.
Enid swallowed and pulled her chair forward enough to get a better look at Wednesday’s face. Her bangs were marginally displaced, as though the nurses hadn’t bothered to fix them the last time they’d checked her vitals, and her skin was nearly translucent. Enid stared, and stared, and stared. Guilt joined death outside the door, and it began knocking, too.
“I’m sorry.” The breathy words left Enid’s lips before she realized she’d started to speak. They didn’t surprise her, though. That mantra had possessed her for hours.
Wednesday’s state wasn’t Enid’s fault, not entirely, and yet Enid should have done more. She should have insisted on staying at Wednesday’s side, should have fought harder to protect her, and she should never have said anything she’d said to her.
One of the last things they did was argue.
The recollection was enough to invite tears to Enid’s eyes. Maybe she’d get to cry after all. She’d thought she had spent every last shaking breath she’d had, but it seemed she hadn’t. They were still there, she realized, dormant and waiting for the next entrance to slip into.
Enid remembered it vividly—her calloused words, Wednesday’s own biting ones. Enid had been hurt. Oh, how she’d been hurt. She wasn’t sure whether it was Wednesday avoiding her or the realization that, in her absence, Wednesday’s presence was the thing she wanted most that had raised such hostility, but it had sunk its teeth in regardless.
Another apology danced on her tongue, but she withheld it. Wednesday couldn’t hear it. Enid wanted to apologize for lashing out, for questioning, for wondering in a way that drove them apart, but it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t do anything to erase this. It wouldn’t do anything to take back one of the last few things Enid had said to her.
Beep. Beep. Enid watched the monitor images shift from her periphery as they read Wednesday’s heartbeat. What if she flatlined? What if something went wrong? Was their animosity truly the last thing they’d shared? Were there fights the last thing Wednesday would remember if death managed to break down that door?
Enid didn’t want to think about any of it, but it stayed there, eclipsing her world like her day of judgment had come early.
Her reservations began to dull soon enough. A shaky inhale preceded the blurring of her vision.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. The words were suffocating. “If there’s anything I said to—to hurt you—I didn’t mean it. You can be mad at me. I’ll understand.” An exhale. “But you have to wake up to do that. So wake up, and then be mad at me, and hate me, or do whatever it is you’re doing.”
Enid’s trepidation didn’t ebb, but every word was heavy with verity. Wednesday could be furious with her, could keep pushing her away, could replace her, so long as she was awake and alive to do so.
Her bargains yielded no results. Wednesday didn’t stir. Enid stared at the tile floor again and tried to ignore the sensation of tears on her eyelashes. She buried her face in her hands again and pulled her lip between her teeth to restrain a sob.
She wished they hadn’t fought. She wished they hadn’t argued. But wishes were futile, nothing but traces of a hope that Enid was starting to realize meant nothing. More than anything, she wished things would go back to the way they were. The dripping IV in her line of sight when she lifted her head reminded her that there might not be a chance for that.
She looked at Wednesday’s face again. It was blurred and distorted. In light of that, Enid blinked to disperse the tears in her eyes. They finally began to trace lines down her cheeks, but at least she could see Wednesday properly.
Her lip quivered as she curled her shoulders inward. Just like last night, something within Enid broke—quieter now, but damaged all the same.
“You should have let me come with you,” she whispered, clasping her hands together until they were taut. Tears thickened her voice. “You could’ve—I could’ve helped with this. I could’ve come with you and made sure you were safe.”
She knew, realistically, that Wednesday would have never agreed to such a thing. Not only did she not want Enid around—for a reason unbeknownst to her, but one she was beginning to think was valid—but she had always been somewhat sacrificial. The only way Enid could have protected Wednesday would have been by force, and even that might not have saved her in the end.
“Why are you so stubborn?” she muttered plaintively, unwinding her hands and lifting one to fiddle with the hem of the blanket draping off the bed. Tears slipped down her face anew, but they offered her no solace. They tasted like salt on her lips, like blood, like the ashes of things she had burnt between them. It was acrid, and she couldn’t rid herself of it.
Enid’s hand trembled as she halfheartedly swiped at the wetness on her cheeks. It was a futile endeavor; they were replaced as soon as they’d been vanquished, and now her fingers were smeared with the black of her mascara.
She slid her chair just a bit closer over the floor, using the thin blankets clutched between her fingers as an anchor, and rested her forehead against the mattress. She pursed her lips and shut her eyes and dug her fingers into her hair and tried not to think about the last things she’d said to Wednesday, even as her shoulders trembled silently, even as nausea swirled in her gut like a restless beast.
I’m sorry. Enid didn’t utter the words this time. She was right; they hadn’t made a difference. They hadn’t made Wednesday wake up, and they certainly hadn’t mended the hurt between them. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
She lifted her head with a sniffle and retracted her hands from her hair. She was sure she looked a wreck, and she supposed that was fitting. Enid Sinclair was nothing if not a wreck of a person.
Wiping her face once more, she drifted over Wednesday’s still form again. She managed to catch the sob in her throat this time when she glanced at the glowing monitors and their damning lines. When she looked back at Wednesday, the only thing she could focus on were the stitches on the side of her head. She couldn’t see them entirely, but she knew they were there.
Her skull had been cracked, she’d heard. It was spoken in more clinical terms, though. It was an open skull fracture. The name hadn’t made Enid feel any better. It was an antibiotic disguised as healing, for it still stung when it touched the tenderness of Enid’s soul, no matter what its intention had been.
Enid had managed to catch vague slivers of what happened between the passing conversation of Mrs. and Mr. Addams, who couldn’t seem to find it in their hearts to tell her to leave. She almost wished they would. She deserved it, deserved to be chased away and shut out like Wednesday wanted her to be. But the Addamses were too nice, too gentle, too worried about their daughter and the stray she’d somehow pulled into her orbit before she had pushed it away completely.
Tyler had escaped. That was one thing she knew. The other? He had done this. He had hurt Wednesday again.
Enid was going to kill him. She hadn’t gotten the chance to before, but she wouldn’t miss her opportunity this time. Last year, she had been new to her abilities, a trainee learning the skillset of those who had come before her. But Enid wasn’t any of those anymore. She was a soldier frothing with the hardened certainty of vengeance, and she would not be deterred.
Her teeth ached with the desire to sink them into Tyler’s flesh. Her claws twitched with the phantom sensation of his skin ripping beneath them. Retribution would come for him, and it would come in the form of Enid Sinclair. Even if it was a battle concluded by the last breath being extracted from her lungs, Enid would make sure her face was the final thing he saw.
None of that would change anything, though. She focused on the pallor of Wednesday’s skin again. Wednesday was still barely holding on, and death was still knocking at her door.
Enid didn’t realize she had been staring at the rising and falling of her chest until footsteps ghosted past the room. She blinked from her stupor only when the tears on her face were dry and nothing but tangible remnants of her culpability.
With a trembling hand led onward by a mind that wasn’t wholly her own, Enid reached for one of Wednesday’s where it lay crossed atop her chest. She stopped when she realized what she was doing. Pulling her bottom lip between her teeth, she let her hand linger in the air.
A while ago, Wednesday might not have minded Enid grasping one of her hands. Enid wasn’t so sure of that anymore.
She looked at her hand, then at Wednesday’s, before ultimately drawing herself backwards and away from the bed. She didn’t deserve to be here. Wednesday certainly wouldn’t want her here. It was this reminder that wrenched a final, shaking gasp from her lips. She stood up from the chair and stepped away from the bed on wobbly knees.
Enid watched Wednesday stay unresponsive beneath the sickly white lights before she numbly reached for the handle of the room’s bathroom. Slipping inside, Enid stumbled to the sink and wrapped her hands around it, letting her claws scrape its underside. She looked into the mirror and found a girl with messy hair, smudged makeup, and red-rimmed eyes who didn’t know what she was doing.
She breathed out shakily and reached for a paper towel to wipe away her makeup, fixing her focus on a streak on the mirror as though it could provide her with answers. When she looked somewhat presentable—not that it mattered, not with Wednesday outside the door, her future uncertain—she dropped the paper towel into the garbage and opened the door.
Allowing it to shut quietly behind her, Enid stepped further into the room and idled at the foot of the bed, opening and closing her fists. She swallowed and steeled herself, sidling up beside Wednesday and hovering a hand over her linen sheets.
Just this. That’s it.
“Here . . .” Enid whispered, pursing her lips and leaning forward. Ever so gently, she rearranged Wednesday’s bangs until they lay smooth on her head. Her voice cracked when she continued. “Can’t have them leaving you like that.”
Enid bit her lip again when she felt it wobble and drew away, putting distance between herself and the bed like it was the last righteous thing she could do. She clenched her jaw when her chin began to quiver, and she was so focused on looking at Wednesday that she nearly jumped when the door opened.
She swung around as though she’d been caught doing something wrong and offered a weak smile when Mrs. and Mr. Addams closed the door behind them.
“Enid.” Mrs. Addam’s own smile was much too warm to be directed at her. Mr. Addams walked by his wife with eyes that were already glistening.
Mrs. Addams continued after her smile lowered. “I’m happy you could come by. I’m sure Wednesday would have appreciated it . . . ,” she slid her gaze to her daughter, and something sad tinged her voice, “though you and I both know she wouldn’t have said that.”
I don’t think she would have appreciated it at all. Enid felt sick. The hand she had fixed Wednesday’s hair with trembled.
I shouldn’t be here, she thought. What came out of her mouth was a stuttered, “Yeah, probably not.”
Mrs. Addams leveled her with a look that Enid knew cut right through her facade. It wasn’t accusatory, but it was there. She dropped her eyes to the floor. Mrs. Addams didn’t say anything else, but her attention lingered. Enid couldn’t decide if she craved such a motherly focus or wanted to run away from the inspection.
As the pair circled around the bed, Enid stepped closer to the door, replacing the space they had vacated. She turned her back to the room, already beginning to wage war with her tears again, when Mrs. Addams’ voice stopped her in her tracks.
“You don’t have to leave, dear.” Enid looked over her shoulder to find Mrs. Addams watching her. Beside her, Mr. Addams was drawing a handkerchief from the pocket of his pinstriped suit. She met Mrs. Addams’ eyes when she smiled again. “You’re welcome to stay with us.”
“I—” The words lodged in Enid’s throat. She shouldn’t be welcome. She shouldn’t get to stay. They didn’t know how she and Wednesday had argued. They weren’t aware that Enid didn’t deserve Wednesday’s friendship anymore, even if Wednesday had insisted that severing it wasn’t something she desired.
She turned in the three Addamses' direction long enough to look at Wednesday. “No, that’s okay,” Enid said softly, far quieter than she had meant to be. Despite her words, she couldn’t stop staring at Wednesday.
“Are you sure?” Mrs. Addams asked knowingly.
Enid managed a shaky nod as she looked over Wednesday again, mentally cataloguing everything a final time—the chords attached to her, her wounds and their stitches, the unrelenting stillness that plagued her, the monitors that described her fate. The guilt knocked harder on the door at her back.
“Yeah.” She reached for the handle without drawing her gaze away from Wednesday. “I should—” her voice broke, and she cursed it, “—I should go.”
Before either of them could say anything else, before they could convince her to stay, Enid opened the door and slipped into the hallway. She eased it shut with finality, allowing the way her hand retreated from the handle to speak verses of farewells.
Enid didn’t deserve to come back here. She wasn’t deserving of seeing Wednesday like this, not when Wednesday had done her most to withhold her presence from her, not when Enid had done nothing but pretend to be fine without it.
She turned on her heel and started down the hallway, relishing the shadows that prospered in the gaps between the ceiling lights. Trying to avoid the passing glances of nurses, Enid dabbed at her eyes with her fingers in an attempt not to let the tears fall again. They came away wet.
Enid departed that hospital room and the hallway leading to it just as Wednesday pushed her away: as if it was the easiest thing she’d ever done. Because even if that wasn’t true, even if emotion began to make her throat close, even if her hands kept trembling when she pushed the elevator button, even when her eyes kept watering when she watched it light up, staying away was the only good thing she could do for Wednesday.
She stared at her reflection in the steel elevator doors and vowed not to mess that up, too.