Chapter 7: The Nevermore Escape Guide
Click. Clack. Click.
The typewriter had shifted registers — faster now, harder, each keystroke landing like a nail being driven into something that deserved it.
Wednesday's eyes stayed fixed on the curling paper. The words still sitting in her memory — buttocks, bare, the whole school — turned her stomach in a way she found personally offensive. Not because she was squeamish. Because it was stupid. Stupidity was the one thing she had never developed a tolerance for.
Nevermore Academy. Her parents had presented it like a gift — your kind of people, Wednesday, finally, people who understand. What it actually was: a Gothic building full of werewolves who color-coordinated their fur and one catastrophically unhinged boy who had apparently never once in his life considered the consequences of lifting someone's hat.
She was done.
The escape plan — which had been operating at a low simmer in the back of her mind since approximately day two — moved to active status.
Her eyes dropped to the printed schedule Headmistress Weems had placed on her desk that morning:
Wednesdays, 3:00 PM — Jericho Township — Dr. Kinbott, Licensed Therapist, Mandatory Psychological Evaluation.
What had previously been the most tedious item on her weekly calendar had just become a resource.
Jericho was a small town on the forest's edge. Minimal foot traffic. Outdated security infrastructure. An independent clinic with a single-occupancy restroom accessible from the hallway.
The route was already mapped in her head: twenty minutes into the session, request a restroom break, exit through the clinic's rear utility window, reach the two-lane road behind the building, flag transportation to the regional bus terminal. After that — open road.
Clean. Minimal moving parts. Elegant.
She picked up her black suitcase — packed the previous night with the essentials: one change of clothes, her cipher journal, three throwing knives, her personal diary, and a quantity of preservatives she found comforting to have on hand — and walked toward the front entrance at 2:50 PM with the composure of someone who had made peace with what they were about to do.
Headmistress Weems was already in the driver's seat, silver hair immaculate, posture suggesting she had never once slouched in her entire adult life. She acknowledged Wednesday through the window with a nod that managed to communicate both authority and professional concern simultaneously.
Wednesday opened the rear door.
She stopped.
Victor Black was in the back seat.
He was wearing a black t-shirt that read MY OTHER SHIRT WAS EATEN BY VENOM and was in the middle of an intense, whispered argument with the symbiote on his shoulder, completely unaware that the door had opened.
"— it is one hundred percent your fault! I told you that priest looked like he subsisted entirely on communion wafers and self-righteousness — clearly not worth the effort—"
Venom snapped back, baring teeth: "Unbelievable. You were the one who went in first! You literally said 'he smells like a sacristy and bad decisions' and then went for it—"
"That was observational commentary, not an invitation! There is a difference!"
"You were more enthusiastic than I was! You said we were 'delivering karmic balance to the institution of organized religion'! And now I'm the reason we have mandatory therapy?!"
"If you didn't spend every waking moment narrating 'brains, brains, chocolate-flavored brains' directly into my frontal lobe, I wouldn't make those associations!"
Wednesday stood in the open doorway. The afternoon sun landed on her shoulders and did nothing to warm the temperature she currently felt inside.
Her escape plan — precise, self-contained, requiring zero coordination with other humans — had just made contact with the single largest unpredictable variable in the known Nevermore universe.
Weems met her eyes in the rearview mirror. "He bit a priest. Dr. Kinbott suggested regular sessions. It's on the way." She said this the way someone might say there's construction on Route 9.
On the way.
Wednesday's fingers went cold around the suitcase handle.
This was the equivalent of being handed a parachute on the way to a prison break and discovering someone had already packed it with a whoopee cushion and a party horn.
Vic finally registered the open door. The argument with Venom stopped mid-sentence. His face arranged itself into an expression Wednesday could only describe as aggressively, offensively delighted.
"Wednesday! You're coming too? Amazing — we can coordinate! I heard Dr. Kinbott uses sandboxes in therapy — we could build something, maybe a graveyard, or—"
"— or reconstruct the incident with the priest," Venom offered helpfully.
Vic slapped both hands over Venom's face.
Wednesday's eyes went completely flat.
She could see, very clearly, her train pulling away from the station — the clean, solo, well-planned escape — receding into the distance, leaving her standing on the platform next to Victor Black, who was now attempting to muffle an alien symbiote with his bare hands and losing.
Her grip on the suitcase tightened. Her knuckles went white.
She considered, briefly and practically, the feasibility of deploying one of the three throwing knives before they left the academy grounds. Just temporarily. Just long enough to get a head start.
"Miss Addams," Weems said. "We'll be late."
Wednesday took one measured breath. The air already carried the compound scent of chocolate and chaos that seemed to exist in Vic's permanent atmosphere.
She bent down, folded herself into the far corner of the back seat, and pulled the door shut with a controlled finality that communicated everything she declined to say out loud.
She sat ramrod straight. Eyes forward. Hands folded on her knees.
Vic, apparently immune to the barometric pressure drop happening eight inches to his left, leaned slightly toward Venom and whispered with the excitement of someone sharing good news: "See? I told you. Community of fate. Even therapy."
Venom's voice was flat. "She is currently calculating the blast radius if she used all three knives at once."
The corner of Wednesday's mouth moved. One millimeter. Down.
Venom was correct.
The drive to Jericho cut through the forest on a two-lane road that offered nothing to look at except trees, and more trees, and the occasional mailbox suggesting that someone had at some point made the decision to live out here on purpose.
Vic's mouth had been running continuously since the car door closed.
He opened with an attempt to engage Weems in a discussion about the symbolic significance of the tree line as a threshold between civilization and wilderness, which she shut down with a single glance in the rearview mirror that contained no ambiguity whatsoever.
He redirected.
"Wednesday. That oak back there — does it look like a hanged man to you, or is that just my read on it?"
Silence.
"Wednesday. Do you think therapists can actually tell what you're thinking, or is the whole thing theater? Because if it's theater, I have notes—"
Silence.
"Wednesday. Favorite historical method of execution, go. Mine's the brazen bull, but only for the acoustic engineering — the inventors were genuinely ahead of their time—"
Silence.
Wednesday had constructed, through force of will and absolute stillness, an invisible wall. She was operating on the Weems method — total, impenetrable non-engagement. Deny the noise a response and eventually it starves.
This method had not accounted for Vic's particular nutritional needs.
He kept going.
And going.
And then his conversational arc, with the lazy inevitability of a boomerang, swung back around to the incident. The courtyard. The canoe race aftermath situation. The specifics of what had been visible to assembled Nevermore students and faculty at approximately 2:15 PM on a Tuesday.
Something in Wednesday's carefully maintained stillness developed a hairline fracture.
The images she had been categorically refusing to process attempted, once again, to process themselves.
The noise. The chaos. The sheer, staggering stupidity of it—
"Enough."
Her hand moved.
Fast — the precise, economical speed she used for throwing knives and closing conversations — and clamped flat over Vic's mouth mid-syllable.
Silence.
Actual silence.
Her palm registered: warmth. The soft give of his lips. The sharp exhale of surprise against her skin, carrying the remnant scent of dark chocolate.
And in that exact instant—
Her vision went white.
Her psychic ability activated.
Author's Note
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