"That's right," says the man on the other end of the line, sounding relieved. "Her name is Wednesday Addams and we think she's about eleven. Speaks mostly English. She turned up out of nowhere a few months ago, and..." There is the pause of someone searching for a path around a difficult topic. "...we think she'd do better in a place with fewer other children. She doesn't get along with them. Can you take her?" The question has an edge of desperation to it.

"English? Where in the world did you get a - mostly? - English-speaking child?? ...Right, out of nowhere, you said." He shakes his head and puts his confusion off to deal with later. Either the man doesn't know, or doesn't want to say anything about it for any of a wide variety of reasons, and either way there's no point in pushing when there's not much he could do with the information. "Well, we're in luck, I know enough English to get by with an eleven-year-old." He's not sure if they even knew that, or if they were just going to try dumping her on him regardless.

With a girl who'd 'do better in a place with fewer other children' he'd normally figure she'd gotten hurt and was too terrified to keep dealing with it, but something about the man's tone is making him second-guess that assumption. "Doesn't get along with them how? And yes, I'll take her," he adds preemptively before the man can start on the version of the story tailored to be convincing rather than useful, "just please tell me what I should be prepared for."

"...she... gets in a lot of fights," the orphanage director says evasively. "We can have her on the train tomorrow morning."

"Gets in a lot of fights," he repeats a touch helplessly, trying to imagine an eleven-year-old girl who manages to do enough of that to distress the personnel of an orphanage full of badly-behaved teenage boys, and mostly failing. "Do you know what about?"

"Not really," he admits. "She's... confusing."

"I get that impression." He sighs, sympathizing with the director's obvious discomfort, but in all honesty he's curious to meet this child more than worried about whatever trouble she might try making with nobody but him around. "Anything else you can tell me?"

After a pause, he just says, "Good luck."

That gets a laugh out of him. "Thank you, I think. So, the early train tomorrow, you said? I'll be there." He ends the conversation, to the man's clear relief, and turns to Henryk, who's been half-listening from his desk.

"He makes her sound like she's going to stab me in my sleep." He shakes his head, amused more than anything. Of course there's some chance she really will try to stab him in his sleep - none of the kids have yet, but there's a first time for everything - but you can't live your life worrying about that sort of thing. "Come by in a few days to check if I've gotten murdered, would you?"

"Mm, I suppose I can find the time."

The next morning he's waiting on the platform ten minutes before the scheduled arrival time, although of course the train is more likely to be an hour late than ten minutes early. He brought a crossword book.

The child who gets off the train is small and slight, but walks with an upright posture and steady step, and looks on the world with an impassive expression; all together, the effect is that at first glance she looks younger than her alleged age of eleven, and at second glance she looks like an inexplicably miniaturized adult, and then the viewer is left to average out those impressions on their own time. Her hair hangs in two neat braids on either side of her head, and the immaculate black dress she's wearing looks much nicer than an orphanage could probably afford. She sweeps her gaze carefully up and down the platform, being sure not to miss anything, though there aren't terribly many people waiting for the train and in short order she has identified Marek as the likeliest candidate for her new host and is striding calmly toward him.

The platform is indeed rather empty, and the sign Bobowa Miasto* looks odd surrounded by a landscape containing more fields than houses.

There's only one man standing and waiting rather than getting on the train himself. He's in his late thirties, tall, brown-haired and bearded. He looks relaxed, but even relaxed he stands up straight and moves a little like a soldier. His clothes are neat, but worn, and much less nice than the girl's presumably Western dress.

He walks up to meet her. "Wednesday, yes? I'm Mark** Dąbrowski." He nods to her nearly like he would to an adult, looking curious but not smiling in the face of the terribly serious-looking child. His English is a bit slow, and strongly accented, but she's probably had enough time to get used to that. "Did you have anything else?"

*City

**Apologies for the multiple spelling variants, but I couldn't help myself. In the narration, any dialogue in Polish, and dialogue that is spoken in Polish but translated into English by the author, I'm using Marek, that being his actual name, according to the modern US translation convention of leaving names as they are - but in the dialogue where he himself is speaking English, he's translating his name to the English equivalent, according to the Polish convention he would've been taught.

"Yes. Nothing else," she says, returning his nod with a very serious one of her own.

"All right. Where are you from? This is a..." he searches for a word for a moment "...surprising dress."  Given the lack of luggage, he hopes she won't mind not all of her clothes being like that.

"There are many answers to that question. I could say 'America', or 'the future', or 'a wealthy family'. The dress must be explained by at least one of them, but as to which, I couldn't say."

"The future, yes." He gives her a wry smile at that. It doesn't occur to him that she could mean it literally, since it's a familiar metaphor, and the West might as well be the future as far as he can tell. "For now I hope it won't be very bad here." He'd like to say he hopes she can go back home soon - but can she? That seems like a painful conversation best left for a later day.

"We'll go to get you something to eat and somewhere to sleep, at least." He smiles and starts walking, since the train finally departed, meaning they can cross the tracks and be on their way home. (Sometimes he wonders who decided right across the road was the best place for a train station, but it's not as if it's busy enough for it to make much difference.) It's a fifteen-minute walk, across the river bridge and then down the road bordered by trees, fields and the occasional house. "You probably have questions?"

"The orphanage sent me to you because they couldn't handle me. You have a military bearing, so maybe they expect you to keep me in line by force—I wouldn't try it, if I were you—or maybe that's a coincidence and they're just hoping I'll lead a quieter life if there are fewer normal children around. They might even be right."

He laughs out loud at the casual threat, surprised and nearly approving. "A very honest child. Yes, let's try not to beat each other. It mostly doesn't do anything good." Not that he's against it in principle, but it really mostly doesn't help, and he's not sure he could bring himself to hit a girl in any case.

It takes him a moment to think about how to explain himself in a foreign language and decide he can't. "I'm... A quiet life and no other children, yes, that's most of it. It's just me, so I don't have to mind so much if you do strange things."

"Well, I do a lot of strange things, you can be sure of that. If you don't mind, then maybe we'll get along just fine."

"What kind of strange things? The director didn't want to talk about it." He sounds a little amused by that.

"Yes, I imagine the director was reluctant to admit that I tied an older boy to a chair and electrocuted him. It turns out that sort of thing really impacts people's willingness to feed and shelter me."

That is rather less amusing - and also absolutely bizarre, but he can think about that after he asks the important questions. "I... can see that. So, why did you do that?"

"Well, most proximally, because he and his friends ambushed me on the back stairs and threw me down them."

She seems remarkably uninjured for having been thrown down the stairs.

Maybe it's been a few weeks since the stairs incident. He's not sure how long it takes for an eleven-year-old girl to arrange an electrocution, since that is not a thing that happens, but if it does happen, maybe it takes long enough for bruises to fade!

In any case, he still has more important questions remaining. "And, just be thorough about it, why did they do that?" Then he checks his train of thought and realizes something else is missing: "And is he alive? I assumed someone would tell me if you killed him, but maybe not." Now is the first time Wednesday can hear restrained worry in his voice, rather than just varying degrees of surprise.

"He's alive." She takes a moment to consider before adding, "I intended for him to recover fully aside from the psychological trauma, but I think he may also have some nerve damage."

There's a relieved but also deeply baffled look as he considers whether that really sounded like she's experienced with the various possible effects of electrical torture or whether it's just the language barrier and her odd way of phrasing things, but again, that seems a conversation for later.  "I think it could be worse."  He should ask about the boy, though, next time he calls.  "So, do you know why they threw you down the stairs?"

"That's another question with a lot of possible answers. I could say 'because I'm a witch', or the more generic 'because they didn't like me', but I think the reason they chose that specific method of attack was probably because they'd already learned that I can beat them all in a fair fight."

Oh no, it's not only bizarre again - he's starting to suspect things are not going to stop being bizarre any time soon - but also ethically complicated. He was really hoping there was some kind of simple reason for all this... He sighs and takes another moment to firmly push the bafflement back. He really does want to be fair about whatever it was that happened.

"Should I assume it was one of those, " he pauses to search for words, "complicated spirals that start with someone not liking someone a little and keeps slowly getting worse until one of them... get electrocuted... or is there something else I should know about why all of it happened?"

"Well, I did mention I'm a witch. I also made a habit of interfering with them bullying the other children."

"I have many questions about how you're a witch, but I'm trying to deal with one thing at a time!" He wasn't shouting at her, just frustrated, but still immediately looks to see if she seems scared by the raised voice. She's still a young child no matter how bizarre and serious she is.

Her level stare appears no different from usual. After a moment, she says, "That's fair."

"I'm sorry. You're just... very confusing. Are all Americans like this?"

"No, I'm almost this strange and off-putting to normal Americans."

"Bogu dzięki,"* he mutters to himself. At least he's not alone in feeling outclassed by an eleven-year-old girl.

"Just please don't tell anyone you're a witch. Especially the priest."

*"Thank God"

"What's in it for me?"

That gets her a new and different variety of incomprehending look! "Most people don't... like getting thrown down the stairs...? Or burned and drowned, or whatever they most recently did to witches..." He should really stop babbling and focus on something sensible and useful in this conversation, but he's having trouble making his brain cooperate. Maybe it's the witchcraft.

"Don't you think life is dull without a little mortal terror now and then?"

A quiet laugh. "I spent half my life in the army, so you got me there." Still a concerning preference in a young girl, but he has trouble judging other people's life choices, these days.

But there's judgment and there's judgment. He grows serious again, and after a thoughtful moment stops walking so he can look at her properly. "All right. If you tell someone you're a witch, because you want some mortal terror in your life, and they give you the thing you want, I don't think it's fair to hurt them for it."

"Isn't self-defense the most classic of fair reasons to hurt someone?"

"Is it really self-defense if you made it all happen on purpose? I think that's just starting a fight."

She considers this line of reasoning.

"Hmm. I think... that would be reasonable if I wasn't a witch. Then the only reason I was saying so would be to start the fight. But I am a witch, and I think it would be cowardly of me to lie about it if anyone asks, just so they don't try to burn me at the stake."

What is this conversation? How did they get here?? But her answer is honorable and he can't disagree with it.

"I think..." he answers carefully, "you're a child and a girl, and it would be just fine for you to lie so people don't burn you at the stake. But if you don't want to lie, it would be wrong for me to tell you you should." Although he very much hopes things aren't going to get to the point of any burning. "So... don't tell people you're a witch for no reason, because that's starting a fight, here. But if someone asks, do what you think is honorable. ...And please try not to kill anyone."

He didn't even notice when he started to seriously take under consideration that she could kill people. Maybe she can't, and she's just read a lot of books about people who could. But when he tries leaning on that explanation too hard, he feels like he's lying to himself.

"Being a child and a girl is no reason to be a coward. But... all right, that's fair. I can do those things."

"Thank you." He gives her a deep nod, nearly a bow, acknowledgment of a genuine favor from someone deserving of respect.

Then takes a long breath to clear his head, and smiles. "Now we should maybe stop having this impossible conversation on the side of the road." He starts walking again. "It's only a few more minutes to my house. Are you hungry?"

When he nods, she returns it; when he smiles, she doesn't quite smile back, but she makes a slightly less grave expression, maybe.

When he starts walking, she follows; when he asks if she's hungry, she shrugs slightly. "I could tolerate a meal."

He hopes she decided he's someone she can get along with. He likes her already.

The yard is fenced off from the road. He points out the various features as they pass them - orchard, vegetable garden, potato cellar, chicken coop, "and a few minutes into that wood is the riverbank, be careful, it's easy to miss" - unlocks the door and does the same through the house. It's old - not the really old wooden sort, but the brick sort someone built by hand maybe before the war, with a big archaic wood-burning stove in the kitchen and a fireplace in the living room. That's all there is downstairs besides the entry hall and the bathroom, and upstairs has three bedrooms, one larger one in the middle and two smaller ones on each end of the hallway. "Pick whichever one of those you want - not much difference, but this one has a west window," and a larger bed that folds into a couch, a tiny desk, and a big wooden wardrobe, "and this one north," and a smaller proper bed, bigger table, and a long chest of drawers. All the walls are white, all the furniture is various shades of wood-brown, and the concept of purposeful decoration is clearly alien to this house.

Well. It's better than the orphanage, on a number of levels. She walks back and forth between the two rooms a few times and then picks the one with less bed and more desk.

"All right. We'll have to get you some things later, and for now I'll start lunch - it should be about an hour. Come down to talk if you want, or rest or look around."  She might have more questions - he certainly does - but she also might want a while of peace and quiet in a room with no other humans in it. It's probably been a long time since she's had that.

He did leave a fire under the stove, so cooking is not as long a process as it could be, but boiling water that way still takes a while even if he's not doing anything complicated. There's boiled potatoes, boiled green beans, some sort of meat stew, and tea. The concept of asking about people's food preferences also appears to be alien to this house, or possibly to the entire surrounding culture, not that she has many data points to rely on.

The first—no, all right, first she'll find and use the bathroom. The second thing she does is meticulously go over everything in her room to see what's there and what isn't. In particular she's looking for things to write with and on; a typewriter would be too much to hope for, but a notebook seems conceivable.

Regardless of her results, her inspection is completed about three-quarters of the way into that hour, and then she goes downstairs to see how lunch is coming along. Her expectations have been set very low by the orphanage, but it does not seem like he will exceed them by much of a margin.

The drawer under the bed contains sheets. The chest of drawers contains a very random but neatly folded assortment of clearly hand-me-down children's clothes in a variety of sizes, some rather worn toys and a surprisingly large and varied box of wooden blocks, and indeed a few thin notebooks and pencils and a couple of mostly-filled early school exercise books. The wall next to the bed is warm to the touch - it's above the kitchen stove, if she thinks through the layout of the house.

"How is everything? Not America, I know." He likes his house well enough, but there's no point in pretending other places aren't better than this.

"Adequate. I presume I am allowed to use the notebooks?"

The bare adjective makes him wince slightly, although it's entirely fair. "Of course you are. We should sort through the clothes and see if there's enough you can wear - I can buy some if there isn't. What else... We'll have to figure something out about school..."

"I refuse to wear colours," she says. "I've sorted the clothes in my room into acceptable and unacceptable on that basis. What about school needs figuring out, exactly?"

He's somewhat inured to the strangeness by now. "I won't buy you new clothes because you refuse to wear colors, but if there's enough there, that's fine." Is she the sort to throw a tantrum about his lack of inclination to buy unnecessary things? He wouldn't guess so, but he'll find out. "Theoretically you should be going to school, but I don't think you can and don't think you want to, do you?"

"I can teach myself out of a textbook. I've found it to be a necessary skill in the American public school system."

He makes an amused noise. "So they haven't fixed everything either. But yes, I can probably convince the school to count that, if you take some tests to show you're learning. But all the textbooks and all the tests are in Polish, and you should learn it anyway." If she's staying in the country for more than a few weeks - another thing he should ask the orphanage about next time he calls them.

"I can do that."

"Good," approving nod. She really seems a perfectly straightforward child, as long as you avoid the difficult topics. Which he really should get back to sometime soon, but the practical issues do need to be settled first. "We'll go to the school tomorrow and get all of that done. Other than that... What do you like doing?"

"Witchcraft. Beheading my dolls. Long walks in the graveyard. I'm thinking of writing a novel."

Well, he did walk right into that one... Although he was expecting the witchcraft, and the other ones are all less concerning, if not exactly normal.

"You are such a strange child - but all right. Sounds like we need more notebooks... We do have two graveyards - no, three, but only two of them make for good walks."

He remembers to check the potatoes, which turn out to be done, so he plates up the food for both of them and puts it on the kitchen table. (Unlike in the orphanage his potatoes don't have black spots, he reliably remembers to add salt to the water, the beans aren't nearly as badly overcooked, and she can have real butter to put on everything, but the basic nature of the food is indeed no different.)

"Better than the orphanage," is her comment on the food once she tries it. "More notebooks would be appreciated. At home I had a typewriter but I don't expect you to provide one."

"I can ask around for typewriters, but probably won't find one." A used one someone's getting rid of, he doesn't think to specify, because buying a new typewriter for a child is just not the sort of thing anyone does. "And I suppose you're free to behead all the dolls, but what are you going to do when you run out?"

He has a sinking feeling the answer will involve witchcraft.

"At home I constructed a little mausoleum for them. I suppose I won't behead these ones until I can offer them a suitable resting place."

"That's... very thoughtful of you." She's so consistent about all of her strangeness! It's really rather impressive.

"I probably have enough woodworking tools to make a mausoleum, if you want to try that?" He offers tentatively. It occurs to him that instead he could not encourage her in doing any of the creepy things she's apparently exclusively interested in, but... it's not as if there's any harm in beheading old dolls, and it's better for pretty much anyone to have something they like doing.

"I... would appreciate that," she says, sounding a little surprised.

Oh no, did she think he was going to sit here and do nothing but disapprove of everything she was interested in? She probably did, and not unreasonably so, and he feels bad about it.

"I... You're very strange, I know I keep saying that. But I like you, and I want to find things that will be good for you here."

"I'm not accustomed to being liked by anyone outside my family."

Oh no, the poor child... "Now I just want to hug you. Can I?" He doesn't really expect a yes, but what does he know about strange American eleven-year-old girls? Not very much, clearly.

"I do not hug."

That gets a smile. So maybe he can predict her a little. "That's fair. So, a mausoleum, and I should show you where the graveyards are... Does anything else look interesting around here?" Not that there is much, when he tries to think about it from her perspective. He doesn't expect her to like gardening, and he's not sure about the forest or the river either, for all that most children enjoy those - but it's still worth asking.

"The forest wasn't bad."

"There's an old German bunker in it, up near the high school." Which is a perfectly normal childhood interest, even. The first time he heard about it, he went there to make sure there was nothing likely to explode, but there wasn't, so he left all the interesting junk, random sharp bits of metal and spiders as he found them. "And some bigger forests further away. Do you ride a bike?"

(She looks intrigued by the bunker.)

"I can, yes."

He mentally awards himself a Wednesday Point for identifying something intriguing.

"Good, that'll make far trips easier. And today it sounds like we should go for a walk and I can show you where everything is - or do you want to look around here first?"

"I think I'd rather go for a walk."

"All right." And they're about done eating. "Let me wash the dishes and we can go."

"Reasonable."

A considering pause.

"Do you want help washing the dishes?"

He wonders if she feels like she has to, or just wants to contribute. The second thing seems more like her, in which case he appreciates it.

"It doesn't need two people, but you can do it next time if you like?"

She nods, and helps collect the dishes to be washed, and then watches him wash them because she has not washed very many dishes in her life and it is not an area of expertise.

It's not a particularly complicated process. The clean dishes go into a drying rack set into a cupboard above the sink, and the clean pots go back on the stove, since there's plenty of room there for all of them. It has definitely not occurred to Marek that anyone, especially a girl, could be unfamiliar with washing dishes.

The walk takes them back past the train station and up a short steep bit of road from there, set in a sort of canyon with buildings a few meters above on both sides. "That's the church - the new one, I wonder if you'd like the old one - and that on the other side is the high school. Used to be a noble manor - that's why they had a private bridge over the road to the church, see?" There is indeed a strange little walkway over their heads. "The bit of forest with the bunker is up past the school that way - if you go up the stairs and right, there's a trail. It's a pretty narrow strip of forest, you can't get lost." He figures it'll be a good place for her to explore on her own when she feels like doing that - even if she wasn't a strange serious child, eleven is considered a reasonable age to go all over the place on your own, here.

She takes it all in very thoughtfully, nodding along at the assorted landmarks.

They walk up the road to a larger and flatter one - still empty of cars, but there are some people walking around, and some more normal-looking buildings, stores and the like.

An older boy waves to Marek. "Dzień dobry! A to kto?"* He nods to Wednesday and looks her over curiously.

"Nowe dziecko z sierocińca. Mówi tylko po angielsku, i nic poza tą sukienką nie ma, pojęcia nie mam skąd się wzięła. Co to się dzieje na świecie... " Might as well be clear about her not having anything else, fancy as she looks. Not that people around here steal very much, but with an American, someone might get ideas...

"Po angielsku! Bóg jeden raczy wiedzieć. Mnie tylko rosyjskiego uczyli. I co, do szkoły przecież nie pójdzie?"

"No nie pójdzie. Może przynajmniej jakieś książki uda się dla niej znaleźć. Odezwij się jakbyś miał pomysł skąd. Albo gdzie pożyczyć rower, albo maszynę do pisania."

"Pomyślę. A teraz nie będę wam przeszkadzać, po co ma mała stać i nic nie rozumieć." Also her stare is getting a little unnerving, to be honest.

"Tak, miałem jej okolicę pokazać. To cześć, i odwiedź mnie kiedyś."

"Jasne, do widzenia!"

They exchange nods and go their separate ways.

"Did you understand any of that?" Marek asks Wednesday after a moment. Might as well get started on figuring out how much Polish she managed to pick up.

*"Good afternoon! And who's this?"

"A new child from the orphanage. She only speaks English, and doesn't have anything except this dress, I have no idea where she came from. What's going on in the world..."

"English! God only knows. I only got taught Russian. And now what, surely she can't go to the school?"

"Yep, she can't. Maybe I can at least find her some books. Let me know if you have any idea where. Or where to borrow a bike or a typewriter."

"I'll think about it. And now I'll stop bothering you, no point in the girl standing here not understanding anything."

"Yes, I was going to show her around. Bye, come visit me sometime."

"Sure, goodbye!"

"'Good afternoon', 'orphanage', 'English'... after that I was mostly lost until 'goodbye'."

"Mhm. Did they try to teach you much of anything?" It really doesn't sound like they did. Not that he knows much about fourth grade education, but immersion is supposed to work faster than this, isn't it?

"People mostly didn't speak to me. I know how to recognize the orphanage's meal calls and I have an extensive vocabulary of the sort of things angry teenage boys shout at people they don't like, but I don't know what most of it means more specifically than that."

He does not look happy with that information. "That place sounds worse every time I hear about it. I try to tell myself they're doing what they can without most of what they need, but..." He sighs. Maybe one day he could think about fixing that. Once the politics calm down.

"Anyway, most of the village is that way," he points behind them along the main road, "the school, the library, the doctor, the old church, most of the stores." But he thought it might be better not to inflict everyone on her at once on the first day. Or her on everyone, maybe. Either way.

"But here's the main graveyard." It's a big old-fashioned type, with plenty of trees and a lot of graves varying in age and appearance, most with flowers and grave lanterns on them. It even has several small mausoleum type structures near the gate, and she'll see more if they go further in.

As they enter the graveyard, her precisely even stride relaxes just a little. She's still far more serious and composed than any normal eleven-year-old, but there is perhaps something of a sense that she feels at home here.

Marek notices and looks quietly happy. It does, of course, continue to be somewhat creepy and baffling, but he's already managed to get pretty accustomed to leaving that in the back of his mind, and... look at her. She looks like she'll be all right.

He stops talking for a while, to let her look around and relax - and to see where she wants to go and what she pays attention to.

(And crosses himself belatedly, having been too distracted to remember it when they walked in.)

She reads the inscriptions on gravestones, and studies the architecture of mausoleums. She looks at grave offerings with respect and is careful to step around them without disturbing them.

She is so good. He really does appreciate her, and gives her a fond look as he trails behind.

The inscriptions are mostly in Polish, but some in Latin, if only religious phrases - maybe she understands those. The mausoleums are mostly not very architecturally interesting, but there's really quite a lot of them, for families who have lived here for centuries.

Marek goes down a side path to briefly kneel at his uncle's single and much simpler grave and re-light the candle on it.

Further in there's a little sectioned off military graveyard, filled with identical simple iron crosses, many of them nameless. He kneels and prays there too.

She mostly ignores his detours, focusing instead on the stylistic details of the graves and mausoleums, the differences between graves for the rich and graves for the poor.

There's plenty to look at, every grave different from every other one.

Marek, detours finished, is content to keep wandering around for most of an hour. He might translate a few of the more interesting inscriptions for her, if she seems interested. They see a few other people, but everyone is quiet and absorbed in their own thoughts, and even Wednesday's dress doesn't seem nearly as out of place here.

"There's an old Jewish cementary fifteen minutes up that hill, if you want? Or we could leave that for another day." Something softens his voice, whether it's the somber location, or the time spent quietly side by side, or the way she looks like she fits here.

She is glad to see the inscriptions translated—and also pronounced; she mostly hasn't been encountering Polish spelling and Polish pronunciation at the same times for the same words. Being able to get both at once and at her own pace helps a lot.

An hour is plenty of time to soak up the ambiance. She considers, when he asks, and then says, "I think I'd rather leave it for another day. Thank you."

"All right." He's quiet during the town portion of the walk back, and waits until they've passed the train station before asking: "So, how did you manage to tie an older boy to a chair?"  It's not as if it's outright impossible - he can think of ways to get it done despite a size and strength difference, and of course she could've made it much easier by knocking him out first (or poisoning him? or possibly witchcraft?), but how she went about it will be useful information. ...Hopefully more useful than confusing, anyway.

"He was unconscious at the time."

"Mm, that did seem like the simplest option." He really shouldn't look approving, she's eleven, but he's never been much good at hiding his feelings. "And how did you get him that way?"

He only now notices that she keeps answering his questions, and he's fairly sure telling him the truth, even when she could just not do that. It fits with what she said this morning - she refuses to be afraid of the consequences of telling the truth. God, what a child.

"I ambushed him in the dark and choked him out."

"Impressive. ...And honestly less confusing than I expected." A bit of a smile. "Where did you learn to do all that?"

"My uncle Fester taught me," she says, with a smile that is fleeting but genuine.

A smile! That's at least five Wednesday Points, surely. "He must be very good."

And now for the less fun half of that set of questions... "And, ah, who taught you how to electrocute people?"

"Well, Uncle Fester gave me the idea, but he doesn't need tools for it and I do. In that respect I'm mostly self-taught."

"Also impressive, if kind of worrying." (His subconscious word processing looked at 'he doesn't need tools for it', decided the literal interpretation made no sense, and seamlessly spliced in an assumption that he has a fancy device instead of needing to make do with what must've been the electric wiring. Speaking a foreign language makes that kind of smoothing more likely, because he's half-guessing the exact meanings of sentences anyway.)

He looks at her for a moment, thinking. "You know, when I think about it, it sounds strange and bad, but I don't think it was worse than throwing him down the stairs. More pain, but less damage, probably. More scary, but you wanted to scare him." And that's the right way to end that sort of escalating conflict, really. "You keep doing that - you sound like you're doing something bad, but when I think about it, you aren't."

"Hmm," she says noncommittally.

After a few more seconds, she elaborates, "I don't mean to be good and I don't mean to be bad. I just mean to be me."

"Oh." That's a surprising idea to him, but it does fit her.

"So how do you decide what to do to be yourself?"

"...I don't understand the question. How could I not know who I am?"

He's not sure how to explain what he's asking either, especially not in English. But there's something there, and it's important.

"I think most people don't. Do they seem like they do, to you?"

"I suppose not," she acknowledges.

"I think I know who I am, but mostly it's that I try to do the right thing. I'm not sure how else I would do it." He's never really thought about that before. It's an odd feeling, having an eleven-year-old give you a new perspective on your entire life.

"...if the only way you know who you are is that you try to do the right thing, how do you tell yourself apart from all the other people who try to do the same?"

It's entirely fair that she's interrogating him a little, when he kept doing that to her. He's glad they're having a less one-way conversation. But most of his questions were so much easier than this.

He has to think about that for a moment, and then just give the not-very-good answer that comes to him, because he can tell he could think about it for hours if not months and not have much of a better one. "Not everyone's right thing is the same. Both what they think is right, and what they can do to make it happen."

"...hmm. Maybe." She's clearly not satisfied, but also not inclined to push.

He looks embarrassed, a little, but not defensive about it. He knows he's not the type of man who could be a philosopher. "I know that wasn't a whole answer. It's complicated, and harder in English. But when I was eleven I'm not sure I had an answer at all."

A slow, thoughtful nod.

"I've always known exactly who I am. Since before I can remember. I've never been anything but me." The distant shadow of a memory passes across her face. "Not that there haven't been some learning experiences along the way."

"I'd like to hear about those someday." He'd like to know more about her in general, but he shouldn't push. "But that is a very good way to be, I think."

"I think so too."

He smiles at her, and unless she starts another conversation, they walk the rest of the way to the house in companionable silence.

Once they're back, he finds another blank notebook in the other room and draws her a little map of the village and surroundings: his house, the river and the nearest three bridges, the train station, both schools, both graveyards, both churches, the doctor's office, the village square where most of the shops are, the library, the sports stadium, the surrounding smaller villages, and other assorted points of interest like the little forest trail with the bunker on it, some larger forests within walking distance, and the old noble manor turned museum. He labels them all in Polish (dom, rzeka, stacja, szkoła, cmentarz, kościół, bunkier, lekarz, rynek, biblioteka, stadion, las, bunkier, dwór although that one confusingly also means "outdoors") and explains what they are, which leads into an explanation of Polish pronunciation and spelling - it's mostly straightforwardly phonetic, and he writes out all the weird cases and extra letters on the next page for her, cz sz dz rz=ż drz=dż ch=h ó=u ś ć ź dź ń ł ą ę. No, he can't explain why three sounds can be spelled two different ways when everything else is a one-to-one correspondence, and there are some other sounds that he can tell apart but it may turn out that she can't. Can she roll an r?

She speaks Spanish, so yes, unless Polish rolls them differently. Telling sounds apart goes pretty smoothly; she's a little more reluctant about trying to repeat back the unfamiliar ones, but crushes her hesitation with an iron will and does it anyway.

It does roll them the same way. Spanish also has mostly the same basic vowels and some of the weird sounds (ń is ñ), and if she speaks any French that will have some more of them (ż is j, ę in un like the number, ą is like the en in trente - not that Marek knows this beyond "I think French has those"). Ł is just English w (and w is just English v, and v is missing from the Polish alphabet), cz/sz/dż are just English ch/sh/j. (Some of the more confusing sound distinctions (ś/sz, ć/cz, ź/ż) mostly appear in Chinese out of common non-Slavic languages, but Marek doesn't know this and probably Wednesday doesn't either.)

Marek flatly cannot pronounce either version of English th and gets a lot of the English vowels somewhat wrong, so if she can't get some of the sounds right she won't be alone in it. Not that he really expects her to lower her standards just because someone else is failing them.

Still, overall every letter or occasional digraph is always pronounced the same way (or, sometimes things get simplified in certain ways in common pronunciation, but if you do them exactly you'll still be fine), so once she's gotten all of them she should be able to just pronounce any written word even if she has no idea what it means. He writes her down some basic words and phrases and checks if she can pronounce them right: tak = yes, nie = no, może = maybe, dzień dobry = good morning/afternoon, do widzenia = goodbye, dobranoc = goodnight, cześć = hi/bye, przepraszam = sorry, gdzie jest = where is, potrzebuję = I need, czy mogę = can I, jedzenie = food, woda = water, telefon = telephone, pociąg = train, łazienka = bathroom, spokój = calm, nie wiem = I don't know, nie rozumiem = I don't understand, nie chcę = I don't want, nie mam = I don't have, dobrze = well / all right.

Writes down the police station's phone number for her, while he's at it, and its address, and his own full name and address ("Telefonu nie mam - did you understand that?").

Wednesday studies with more focus than most eleven-year-olds. Honestly, she studies with more focus than most adults.

"You don't have a telephone?" she says. "Well, I suppose it is the past. And Poland. I don't know which is more relevant."

Wednesday seems like she's going to have absolutely no trouble staying out of school by passing tests.

"Yes. Me neither." He still hasn't caught on to her meaning the past literally.

"When I was a child we didn't have water pipes, but now almost everyone does. But electricity still sometimes stops working. Candles are there, if that happens." He points to a drawer near the fireplace.

"Almost everyone?" she says, a little incredulously.

He looks a touch defensive at that, but only briefly. She has every right to dislike being stranded here. "We're trying. Does everyone, in America? I suppose they would."

"...I'm not sure," she says, thoughtfully. "I would've said they did, but... there's more to the world than I've seen, clearly."

"And more than I've seen, certainly." A rueful smile.

"So... do you want to tell me about witchcraft?" He's avoided that strange-sounding topic for a while, and it made sense to get to know her better so he'd know how to interpret her answers, but he really shouldn't just leave it unasked forever. Some part of him might prefer not to know, but he's learned where that sort of impulse leads.

"What do you want to know?"

"... Anything?" He gives her a helpless look.

"Why do you want to know?" she asks next.

What a good, sensible child. He really should follow her example and use his brain. What and why does he want to know?

As usual, the practical things are easier. "So I know what to expect, mostly. If you do any of it around here, what sort of thing would it be? What would it look like?"

Probably it's not real witchcraft that works, but he has an odd dreamlike feeling of being less sure of that than he'd like to - and many things that don't work might still be important to know about.

"...I'm not entirely sure," she admits, after a long silence. "Probably the most relevant witchcraft I know is the ritual to contact the spirits of my ancestors, but I don't think Grandmama Frump is dead yet and she's the only one I've practiced calling up enough to be sure of how to do it."

He waits patiently as she thinks.

"Yet??" Maybe the poor woman was expected to die soon, but it still seems a strangely callous way to talk about it. "...Wait, practiced? I am very confused."

"Grandmama Frump died when I was a toddler. Mother and I have been calling her up every year on her birthday since then. But I haven't been born yet, so she's probably still alive."

"This is not making me less confused." He certainly looks utterly baffled. Not that he blames her, he's sure her life really is utterly baffling, but nothing she says makes sense. "In what... way... haven't you been born yet?"

She looks confused right back at him. "I've told you before, I'm from the future. I was or will be born in 2006."

"I didn't think you meant it like that!"

He can see how that confusion happened, but that's much easier than figuring out what to do with it.

"You realize that doesn't make any sense, no?"

"Oh. Well, that's how I meant it. I was confused about it, too; I didn't believe the people at the orphanage the first few times they told me what year it was."

"Why did you start believing them? Everyone lying to you would make more sense than..." A vague gesture attempting to encompass the entire bizarre impossibility.

"Well, in addition to being inexplicably in the past I was also inexplicably in Poland, so something very strange was already going on."

He can't very well argue with that.

"What happened, exactly?"

"I went for a walk in the family graveyard, was struck by lightning, and woke up in an alley."

He only shakes his head, his mind refusing to process any further impossible claims for at least the next five minutes.

"You know I just shouldn't believe you." He doesn't know if he does. But he doesn't know if he doesn't, either.

"Believe me or don't. I won't lie just to make your life less confusing."

That gets her an apologetic look. "I don't want you to lie, I just want..." What does he want, exactly, besides for things to start making sense? For her not to look at him like that. And not to worry that she may be right. "I want you to not hate me."

"I don't hate you. You're really very tolerable, as people go."

He smiles. "Oh. I'm glad."

And he's glad they're only having this strange conversation now, when he knows what a fascinating and honorable child she is, and she knows he's - better than the other people she had to deal with, at least.

"I don't know if I believe all this, but... do you see why I wouldn't? Would you believe it, in my place?"

"I see why you wouldn't. It's... not part of the world you live in."

"It really isn't. And I'd like to think I've lived long enough to know what kinds of things really happen and what kinds don't. But I could be wrong."

He could. It's not as if it hasn't happened before.

"It's not part of the world I grew up in either, but it's... closer. And I don't mind believing incredible things, if they seem to be happening."

That's... very logical, really. "Well." Another slight and half-embarrassed smile. "I was going to ask you about witchcraft, but maybe I've had enough incredible things for one day. Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," she acknowledges.

"I'm afraid for the rest of the afternoon you can watch me do farm work or you can do things on your own." He feels bad about how few things there are for her to do - he hadn't with the other children, but she's clearly different, used to having a typewriter and fancy clothes and probably a lot of other things that wouldn't even occur to him. Still, she has notebooks, and at least some toys, and plenty of places to explore if she feels like it. And he does have work to do every day. "Oh, and here's a house key - lock the door if you go out when I'm not here."

"Anything else you want to know, first?" He shouldn't just go off and leave her sitting here not knowing what to do with herself. If that's a problem she ever has. Maybe she doesn't.

She accepts the key, thinks over the question, then shakes her head.

Well enough. His life is definitely strange to her, but it's not as if it's particularly complicated.

He weeds what needs weeding, tosses the greens to the chickens, digs up some early potatoes, waters the large garden from the rain barrel, harvests some vegetables for dinner, feeds grain to the chickens, checks the nest boxes for eggs, eventually comes back to bring the various food into the pantry.

He does occasionally look around to see if she's visible outside, but otherwise leaves her to her own devices for the couple of hours until sunset. He's only a little worried about what she might get up to on her own, and they're not the sorts of worries it'd be useful to talk about.

She spends most of the afternoon in the house writing, and some of it watching him to see what the tasks of this life are. The tasks of this life seem to involve a lot of... dirt. She's not sure she approves, but she's no longer rich so she'd better get used to it.

It's a good thing it's fall rather than spring, which involves a lot more dirt than this. He doesn't seem to mind it, in any case - he's not cheerful about his work, exactly, but he's quietly satisfied, and sings to himself sometimes. Or narrates some of his tasks to her in Polish if she comes close enough to talk to, on the general principle that it might be useful practice.

He doesn't ask her to do anything, except maybe offering her a handful of grain to toss to the chickens if she's around for that. Children tend to enjoy trying that - he's not at all sure she will, but she might make an interesting face about it.

She makes her usual face, but she does toss the grain to the chickens, and impassively observe their response.

The chickens are wary of the strange new person, but very excited about the food. (Clearly nobody around here has high culinary standards.)

"Maybe you could behead one of those, at some point," he offers. "If you don't mind it not ending up in a mausoleum." There's more than a dozen, and he does eat them sometimes, so why not, really. He guesses it might be more interesting to her than feeding them.

"I would like that."

"Very good." He looks happy to have identified a rare thing she likes rather than just tolerates. (And awards himself another three Wednesday Points.) "On Sunday, probably."

"Hmm, and what do you think about fishing?" It seems less Wednesday-ish, intuitively, but it does involve killing things...

"My father and brother love to fish. I don't mind it but I wouldn't seek it out."

"Huh, I guessed it wasn't as interesting to you, but I wasn't sure. Maybe I'm getting better at guessing." He seems a little pleased about that.

"Yes, it seems you are."

He smiles at her, then ducks into the chicken coop to look for eggs. He scrambles them for dinner with onions, tomatoes and chives from the garden. (And bread and butter, which at least indicate he does eat things he didn't produce on his own.)  That comes out pretty good, being simple food with fresh ingredients, and leaves a frying pan, two plates and some silverware for her to wash if she decides to do that. (Marek doesn't mention it, just doesn't immediately do it himself.)

Dinner is surprisingly pleasant but not so much so that she's moved to comment unprompted. It might show on her face a little.

She does wash the dishes afterward, with probably more attention to detail than these dishes really warrant, and accordingly slower than Marek would.

He does pay enough attention to her expressions that it might result in an improvement in his cooking over time.

He thanks her for dealing with the dishes and doesn't evince any opinion on her speed.

Once she's done: "Do you want to try on the, ah, acceptable clothes, and see which ones fit? Most probably won't, but I can make things shorter and so on, that should help." He doesn't think he has enough to put together a reasonable 3-5 outfits in her exact size, even without the color restriction, and he would really prefer to avoid buying more - the orphanage is supposed to give him a stipend but it usually doesn't happen - but it's the sort of problem he can usually solve with a bit of work, and he doesn't mind that.

"Yes, that seems reasonable. Are there more clothes in the room I didn't choose? I could look through those and see if there's anything more in black and white."

"There are, let's go see."  Her room contains the sorts of clothes he conceptualizes as belonging in dressers, so shirts, pants, skirts, nightgowns/pyjamas and tights and so on, and the other room contains the sorts of clothes he conceptualizes as belonging on hangers in a wardrobe, so coats and dresses and suits (there's only one suit, black but much too big for her). He should perhaps either acquire more furniture or stop sorting them this way, now that he thinks about it.

He leaves her to try things on, but sits in his bedroom so he can provide comments on how much adjustment is doable, if she comes out to ask.

Counting things that can be hemmed or narrowed to fit (which Marek seems to think he can do quite a lot of), they end up with three white blouses in various styles, one boys' button-down shirt in white and one in black, two white t-shirts (one plain and one with a black heart outline on the front), a checkered black-and-grey long-sleeved flannel shirt, a black knitted vest and a grey sweater, two black skirts (one ruffled and one plain) and a grey polka-dotted one, two pairs of black pants, grey shorts, two white summery dresses, an odd long-sleeved white satin dress that might be identifiable as someone's First Communion outfit, a black wool coat, and plenty of white socks and tights and underwear since for children they only come in white anyway.  And three times as many things that absolutely won't fit, but hopefully she can identify those by sight without having to try them all on.

She sorts it all into neatly organized piles and inventories them with an eye to future outfit assembly. Shirts: eight, that seems like plenty. Skirts and pants: five and a half (shorts are a questionable concept), that seems reasonable but not ideal. Dresses: three or four, counting the one she's wearing and with some uncertainty about how to count the fancy one. This having been established, she goes back through the unacceptably colourful clothing to see if she can find any skirts or pants that have little enough colour it could be bleached out of them, or maybe cut out if something is mostly white with patches of colour, or anything like that; and she goes through the things that definitely don't fit to see if there's anything that could potentially be patched together into one more usable skirt. She also keeps half an eye out for another potentially salvageable vest or sweater as she goes; having one each of those is enough to be going on with, but she'd like to have one or two more.

There's a terribly colorful skirt that upon closer inspection turns out to be a perfectly acceptable white skirt with terribly colorful ruffles, a charcoal one with a lot of pink embroidery one might  patiently pick out (and maybe even redo in a more acceptable color), greyish-brown pants that could perhaps be bleached, a black sweater with blue sleeves and hem which seems like it should be possible to convert into a black vest, and a few much larger skirts or nightgowns that could probably be cut down into a skirt her size, skirts not being complicated garments.

(There's also a white nightgown and grey pyjamas in her size, which the author forgot to include in the previous list because there are really too many types of clothes.)

She reports these findings to Marek and says she wouldn't mind picking out all that embroidery (and all those ruffles) herself if he has a seam ripper or a suitable pair of small scissors or, failing that, a small sharp knife. On consideration she'd rather not butcher larger garments to make smaller ones just yet, but she'll set aside all the much-too-big acceptable clothes in case of future need.

He has not heard of the concept of a seam ripper and needs it explained to him, but he does have small sharp scissors and approves of her intended usage. (And asks her to save the ruffles in case they're useful for something else later.)

He asks to see which clothes do fit properly so he'll know the size to use for the other ones, and gets started on the quicker adjustments. He's no seamstress, but he was a soldier in the "it's your job to maintain your uniform and keep it presentable and you won't get a new one any time soon" era, so he knows the basics well enough, and has plenty of black and white thread in contrast to a much more uneven supply of colors. He owns an iron, and starts out by pinning and ironing the hems on all the too-long things to what should be about the right length - and asking her to check if it's what she wants, since she seems to care about details rather a lot. Well, she is a girl, even if she mostly doesn't act much like one. And on second consideration, he's not exactly an expert on girls.

She is quietly pleased to be consulted for approval on where to hem things to, and has fairly exact opinions on the matter which she delivers with precision and endless patience. In between consultations she starts in on the Abominable Ruffles, taking care not to damage them too badly in the removal process since Marek said to save them.

He notices the positive reaction, and continues to consult her on various details as they come up. He's also very patient about getting things right - there's no hurry, and it's perfectly nice work to spend several evenings doing. She may have picked up by now that he just likes having something useful to do.

They can sit companionably by the living room fireplace with their sewing and ruffle-removal, and Wednesday can be taught various clothing-related Polish words if she'd like.

What an unexpectedly agreeable way to spend an evening.

Marek agrees entirely.

Sometime after 9 he'll point out that it's late and she should probably head to bed, if she doesn't do it on her own first.

"Is there a good reason to go to bed this early?"

He considers it for a moment. "Normally you'd be going to school in the morning, but you're not, so I suppose there isn't. What time were you planning on?"

"Midnight."

"Mm. I'll be asleep by then, but sure." He nods, and explains the question: "If you were staying up all night I might complain about the waste of electricity, but midnight isn't bad."

"If I stay up past midnight I can turn the lights off."

"And walk around in the dark?" ...On second thought, she did say she ambushed that kid in the dark and choked him unconscious. She'll probably manage not to fall down the stairs. "Well, maybe you can. And you can wake me up if you need to for some reason." Not that he expects that, but she hasn't even been here one night, maybe something about the house will turn out to confuse her.

She nods.

He thinks about other potential problems an eleven-year-old left on her own around the house at night might have. "Feel free to eat food. Don't drink the tap water without boiling it. And don't add wood to the fires by yourself - or do you know how?"

"I've worked with fire before but I can wait until you have time to show me how to do it properly, just in case."

"Might as well do that now," especially if she's going to be up for God knows how long instead of staying warm in bed. He shows her where the dry firewood is stacked up one side of the entry hall, how to lean it over the half-burned pieces so it'll catch well (although it sounds like she knows that already), how to angle things to make sure nothing falls out of the open living room fireplace, reminds her to make sure the kitchen stove door is closed and latched (not that she seems the type to be careless about anything), how to check for proper airflow - none of it is particularly complicated as long as you know how fire works and aren't afraid of it.

And then it's another hour or so of quiet sewing before he says goodnight and goes up to bed. (And washes first, which reminds him to show her where the towels and extra toothbrush and so on are. He assumes American bathrooms aren't so different that anything in his needs explanation - well, the laundry machine might, but that's not relevant. Everything else is indeed familiar, if odd-looking. There's a bathtub with a handheld showerhead, but they apparently haven't invented shower curtains yet, which may seem like a fraught combination.)

He sleeps well and keeps his door closed, so she's unlikely to wake him up unless she means to. He'll be up around six in the morning if left to his own devices.

She follows along very attentively with all his explanations, and after he goes to bed she does end up boiling some water to drink before she goes upstairs a little before midnight to brush her teeth and avail herself of the acceptable pajamas. Then it's just a quarter hour of staying up making notes on Polish to study before she goes to sleep at about ten past.

In the morning, she wakes up at half past eight and attempts to figure out how to shower here. Perhaps the handheld showerhead should be deployed cautiously and with precision. She also, though she does test the temperature controls first thing, uses hot water only to wash her hair and turns it cold again once that's over with. Conditioner would be too much to hope for, wouldn't it. Ah well. It's still better than the orphanage.

Conditioner is indeed nowhere in evidence. The handheld showerhead can be deployed cautiously and with precision and not end up getting water all over the bathroom, if one is good at caution and precision, as Wednesday no doubt is. The hot water doesn't run out while she's washing her hair, which is another improvement on the orphanage.

Breakfast is scrambled eggs again (that really is rather a lot of chickens for one or two people), with sausage this time.

"It would be good to go to the school today and see how to get you signed up. We could wait until your Polish is better, but then they could want you to go to classes, so I think we shouldn't." It's not lying - it is manipulating events in order to get around the rules, but he's lived under communism for too long to default to any other way of relating to official rules.

"Yes, that seems reasonable. Let's do that."

They do that. She gets to see the main part of the village, which Marek explains is really nearly a town, not like the more typical villages around it  - there are several stores and even one restaurant, multiple intersections in which both streets are paved, a little square with alleys surrounded by flowers, entire blocks of row-houses instead of freestanding farms, and so on. The walk is nearly half an hour, and then there's a bit of a wait for the school secretary to be free.

The old secretary retired recently; the new one's a transfer from one of the neighboring villages and Marek doesn't really know her, but he can get along with most people just fine, so he doesn't come in expecting any real problems.

"Dzień dobry pani. Jestem Marek Dąbrowski i mam pod opieką dziewczynkę z sierocińca w dość skomplikowanej sytuacji. Mówi tylko po angielsku."*

The woman looks suspicious, perhaps at the mention of the orphanage, which he doesn't like but can't honestly blame her for. "Jak to tylko? Skąd się wzięła?"

"Prawdę mówiąc nie wiem dokładnie, poza tym że z sierocińca w Krakowie... Może pani do nich zadzwonić i dopytać o szczegóły, ale to chyba jakaś skomplikowana sytuacja, nie wnikałem."

She sighs theatrically but doesn't contradict him. Yes, these things happen. "Tylko tego nam brakowało. I co pan chce z nią zrobić?"

"Nauczyć polskiego," he spreads his hands to indicate his lack of other options, "a w międzyczasie powinna w teorii być zapisana do szkoły, ale z chodzenia na lekcje nie będzie mieć żadnego pożytku. Myślę że--"

She interrupts him, clearly annoyed. "Że co, będzie tylko udawać że chodzi do szkoły? Nie ma czegoś takiego, proszę pana. Ma być w szkole, to będzie, na pewno więcej się nauczy niż od siedzenia w domu."

"Proszę pani, przecież prawie nikt z nauczycieli tu nie mówi po angielsku!" He really wasn't expecting this sort of insistence, and doesn't know how to convey to her how much this idea doesn't make sense.

"I co z tego? Dziecko szybciej się nauczy polskiego w szkole niż od pana," she gives him the condescending look of an education professional who knows that learning is something that happens in school, "a im szybciej będzie mogła normalnie brać udział w lekcjach tym lepiej."

In all honesty, she might even be right that Wednesday, or at least some other child that wasn't Wednesday, would learn faster with more immersion - assuming people actually try to talk to her, which apparently hasn't been happening so far, but he does think the school will be better about that than the orphanage was - but putting her in another environment full of largely unsupervised children does not sound like a good idea. And it's not what he told her would happen, and he's definitely not going to change that decision on her without even talking to her about it. (With another child he might, but Wednesday both has strong preferences and is reasonable about them, and it doesn't occur to him to treat her as if either of these things wasn't true.)

He wishes they could've had the whole conversation in English, so Wednesday could understand instead of standing there probably only catching single words, but even if the secretary spoke English it would've been asking for trouble to try for something that strange. Of course pausing the conversation now to talk to a child is also going to look bizarre and pointless from this woman's perspective, but it's not as if there's much of a rapport here to try to preserve. "Przepraszam panią, muszę z nią o tym porozmawiać." She looks about as baffled and annoyed as he expected, but doesn't comment.

"Wednesday, the school secretary insists that you should go to the normal classes and try to learn Polish as you can." He's not sure what a reasonable question to ask next is, really. "Do you... think you could do that? Without it ending badly? I think I can figure out something else, if not, but it will be more complicated, and it's possible that she's right." He doesn't expect she's right, but it seemed fair to consider the possibility.

"Good morning. I'm Marek Dąbrowski and I'm taking care of a girl from an orphanage, in a rather complicated situation. She only speaks English."

"What do you mean, only? Where did she come from?"

"To be honest I don't know exactly, besides the orphanage in Kraków... You can call them and ask about the details, but it sounds like a complicated situation, I didn't want to get into it."

"That's really all we needed here. And what do you want to do with her?"

"Teach her Polish, and in the meantime in theory she should be enrolled in school, but going to classes won't do her any good. I think--"

"What, that she'll just pretend she's going to school? You don't get to do that. She's supposed to be in school, so she will be, and I'm sure she'll learn more than from sitting at home."

"But almost none of the teachers here speak English!"

"So what? The child will learn Polish faster at school than from you, and the sooner she can take part in lessons normally the better."

"Excuse me, I have to talk to her about it."

"I'm provisionally willing to try it but I don't expect it to go any better than any of the other times someone has tried to make me interact with normal children. And I would be annoyed if the inevitable catastrophe made the school so upset that they didn't want me staying with you anymore."

He smiles a little. "I wouldn't give you back and I don't think they'd argue with me - but the inevitable catastrophe would not make things easier, you're right." She's going to need to be registered at some school in order to get graduation papers and have a decent chance of a normal life, assuming things go on for that long, and getting kicked out of one is only going to make it harder to find a different one that will take her. Might as well skip to that step without getting kicked out first, if nothing can be worked out here.

And now that he's made a decision, everything is suddenly easier, as it usually is.

The people in the village tend to forget that the strange quiet man who moved in alone into a little farm by the forest, wears mended clothes, takes in orphaned children, and helps old people with their chores, is someone with a complicated political past, who grew up in a big city, with more opportunities and a better education than most of them, and knows how the world works better than they do. It's easier for him and everyone else to pretend it's not true, especially since the sum of the events of his life is enough of a strange tangle that nobody can tell whether it's better to be him than not - but this is important, and so he stops pretending. As he turns back to the secretary, his posture becomes that of a military officer, used to attention and a certain level of respect, his tone is cooler and less conciliatory, his voice even loses its usual touch of local dialect.

"Proszę pani. Poczekajmy na dyrektora, niech sam zdecyduje. Nie chcę robić tu nikomu kłopotów - sytuacja jest skomplikowana," he's definitely implying something more like high-level politics than like 'the children will hurt each other in worse and more complicated ways than usual', "i wszyscy będziemy mieć najwięcej spokoju jeśli ona będzie się mogła uczyć w domu."*

The woman nods slowly, surprise and new consideration in her eyes. He's even more clearly a threat to her position now - being the school secretary genuinely is a sort of power, in a place like this, and she's quite possessive of her newly achieved place up the ladder - but the sort of threat that might be best to compromise with, or at least to redirect to someone else. She gives Wednesday a proper look, too, instead of half-ignoring her under the assumption that she's a typically ignorable child, and something in the girl's face seems to push her to a decision. "Dobrze, poczekajmy w takim razie."

He nods gravely and takes Wednesday out of the office to wait in the corridor. Sighs and relaxes somewhat, once nobody's watching them.

"Well, that could've gone better. I keep forgetting how some people are."

*"Ma'am**, let's wait for the director and let him decide. I don't want to give anyone trouble - the situation is complicated, and we'll all have more peace and quiet if she can learn at home."

"Very well then, let's wait."

**They've been calling each other standard courtesy titles this whole time, as you normally do in Polish but not in English so I haven't been translating it that way, but now he's being extra pointed about it.

"What did you threaten her with?" she wonders, following him out.

He laughs softy. "Oh, nothing. I slightly implied some politics." For all he knows there may really be complicated politics. An entire bizarre spy plot, maybe. There's certainly nothing normal about her.

"So now we're waiting for the school director, who may decide to do what I want or not, but if he doesn't I can just find you another school." It's not as if anything is stopping him from doing that. It's nice, sometimes, having a life in which you can simply do what you want.

She nods thoughtfully.

Such a quiet child. Marek stays quiet too, and they wait for over an hour - the director teaches geography as well, so most of his time is spent in classes. There's a recess in the meantime, during which Wednesday can observe rather a lot of children between the ages of 6 and 15 walking or running past, some of them giving her variously odd looks (while Marek gets either ignored as an uninteresting adult or nodded to as a familiar one). A group of the younger ones runs outside to have what is by all appearances a consensual brawl in the concrete-tiled yard. Nobody seems to see anything wrong with this, or at least nobody interferes.

Eventually the director has a free period and, having in the meantime been informed of the situation by whatever mysterious forces function in schools, invites Marek and by silent extension Wednesday into his office.

Marek continues not to pretend he's a normal resident of a quiet village, although he's softened it a little compared to last time, and phrases the truth with the maximal amount of vaguely disquieting implications. (He needed to draft it in his head while they waited, he's natively nowhere near that good at sounding disquieting, but nobody needs to know that.)

"Przysłano mi z krakowskiego sierocińca amerykańskie dziecko, którego z różnych powodów nie chciał mieć u siebie ani sierociniec, ani żadne inne związane z nim placówki. Z tego co wiem, najlepiej będzie jeśli będzie mieć spokojne życie z daleka od tłumów, ważnych miejsc i przede wszystkim grup dzieci. A poza tym nie mówi po polsku. Oczywiście legalnie rzecz biorąc musi być zapisana do szkoły," meaning you cannot simply get rid of her without my cooperation, "ale myślę że najprościej będzie jeśli dostanie indywidualny tok nauczania ze wszystkich przedmiotów, kupię jej podręczniki, i będzie się uczyć w domu i zdawać egzaminy raz czy dwa razy do roku. Czy możemy wstępnie zgodzić się na takie rozwiązanie?"*

The director, a somewhat tired-looking man old enough to perhaps have grandchildren at the school, nods slightly, and keeps looking between Marek and Wednesday, not entirely comfortable with either of them. "Dobrze, możemy, jeśli jest pan pewien że to będzie w porządku. Będzie musiała porozmawiać z psychologiem..."

They figure out the arrangements for her to see a child educational psychologist - she comes from Tarnów once a month, so they'll have to go there themselves next week if they don't want to wait for that, which they probably shouldn't. Marek conveys all this to Wednesday once they've left the office, then goes back to get the enrollment forms from the secretary. He's quick and scrupulously polite about it, still in that new not-from-here way, and they can finally head out, before any of the other children reappear for another recess.

*"I was sent an American child from the Kraków orphanage - one who neither the orphanage nor any of the institutions associated with it wanted to house, for various reasons. As I understand it, it will be best if she has a quiet life far from crowds, important places, and especially groups of children. She also doesn't speak Polish. Of course legally speaking she has to be enrolled in school, but I think it'll be simplest if she's assigned individual study in all subjects, I buy her textbooks, and she learns at home and takes exams once or twice a year. Can we preliminarily agree to that solution?"

"All right, we can, if you're sure that'll be all right. She'll need to talk to a psychologist..."

In fact she caught enough of that to proactively ask him, once he's done talking, "Did someone say 'psychologist'?" When he confirms as much, she doesn't say anything immediately but looks somewhere between amused and resigned.

"You have to talk to one to learn at home instead of going to classes. She should mostly ask you school questions, but it shouldn't cause any problems if you're strange to her, after everything I said." He looks a touch amused as well. "And it'll just be once."

"Acceptable."

"Oh good." He lets the amusement leak into his voice. "Not sure what I'd do if it wasn't. Although I could probably think of something..."

"Yes, you seemed to do very well at handling those bureaucrats."

"Thank you, I think." A smile, then a confused shake of the head. "But God, that was strange. Maybe I don't quite know who I am after all..."

"Oh?"

"Well, you saw." He isn't sure how to explain it. "I try to... be normal, help people, not make them feel threatened. I spent the last three years like that, and it worked, and I liked it. But... you saw what I did, the moment it stopped working the way I wanted it to."

"Hmm." She takes some time to absorb that.

"Well." He shrugs, after a moment. "I don't think it was wrong, and it did work. But I felt like I was two people, and I'd rather figure out how to be one."

"Well. I admire your effectiveness," she says, dryly amused. "But—I won't tell you not to be you."

"Thank you," he smiles with genuine warmth, "for both of those." Even dryly amused admiration from her means rather a lot to him.

"I don't think being me should mean being less effective. Less... pretending I'm a harmless sort of person, maybe."

A thoughtful nod.

He will have to think about it, but he's rarely fast at his thinking, when there isn't a situation demanding immediate action.

In another few minutes' walk down the main street he turns to point out a door. "Here's the public library. I don't think they'll have anything in English, but we should check. And do you have books you like that might have Polish translations?"

"Il Principe?" she says, a little hopefully.

He looks blank, his foreign languages being limited to Russian and English, but faithfully repeats the title to the librarian, who gives Wednesday a very strange look. "Nie, nie mamy Machiavelliego. Ale wiem że jest polskie tłumaczenie, myślę że pan je znajdzie w którejś miejskiej bibliotece..."*

Marek recognizes the name where he didn't recognize the title, but it's not particularly surprising, at this point. "Dziękuję, poszukam. W takim razie czy ma pani jakieś sugestie dla dziecka które lubi czytać takie rzeczy ale dopiero uczy się polskiego?"

She looks doubtful of the wisdom of those particular criteria, but... it's an unusual and interesting problem for a librarian, she's not going to resist it very hard. "Hmm... Stare baśnie i legendy? Bracia Grimm, o tym jak Popiela zjadły myszy - wszędzie jest pełno makabrycznych historii jak się nad nimi zastanowić, często razem z historią. Jakieś książki historyczne napisane w miarę prostym językiem też powinny się znaleźć. Ale tak naprawdę to zależy co to znaczy 'takie rzeczy' - chodzi bardziej o ciężki nastrój, czy o cyniczne podejście do świata, czy o strategię polityczną?" Her first guess was that the eleven-year-old girl just wanted to read, well, creepy things, rather than being invested in Machiavelli specifically, but on second thought who knows.

He translates the question and hopes Wednesday can get some books she'll like out of this. He was not a big reader as a child, so he can't be much help - he mostly just has fond memories of Dzieci z Bullerbyn, as un-Wednesday a book as one can possibly imagine.

*"No, we don't have Machiavelli. But I know there's a Polish translation, I expect you'll find it in one of the city libraries..."

"Thank you, I'll check. In that case do you have any suggestions for a child who likes to read those kinds of things but is only starting to learn Polish?"

"Hmm... Old fairy tales and legends? The brothers Grimm, about how king Popiel was eaten by mice - there are macabre stories all over the place when you think about it, often together with history. There should be reasonably simply written historical books somewhere, too. But really it depends on what "those things" mean - is it more about a dark mood, or a cynical approach to the world, or political strategy?"

"Oh, I think I would love old fairy tales," she says. "A dark mood and a cynical approach to the world are both fine ways to get my attention. I do enjoy Machiavelli's thoughts on political strategy but I don't expect most political strategy handbooks to be nearly so riveting. Though, while I'm thinking about strategy, I don't suppose they have Sun Tzu's Art of War?"

Oh, the librarian likes this girl. She has real book opinions! Interesting ones, even!

"Nie, Sun Tzu w ogóle nie ma polskiego tłumaczenia, właściwie to dobre pytanie dlaczego... Ale mrocznych starych baśni znajdzie się sporo." She walks around looking for them, and other potentially interesting things while she's at it, occasionally consulting Wednesday or Marek for approval. "Hmm... procesy czarownic? Czy palenie na stosie to jednak przesada w jej wieku?" (Of course it's too much, by any reasonable person's standards, but she's not a reasonable person, she's an enthusiastic librarian.)

Marek barely manages not to laugh. "Myślę że może być." It is theoretically possible that Wednesday, who says she's a witch, would rather not read about people like her being killed in horrible ways - but really, who is he kidding? He does turn to ask her, but less for confirmation and more to see what exactly she'll say. "Thoughts on books about witch trials?"

*"No, Sun Tzu doesn't have a Polish translation at all - it's a good question why, really... But dark old fairytales I can find plenty of."

"Hmm... witch trials? Or is burning at the stake too much at her age?"

"I think it'll be all right."

"Oh, I love those."

Wednesday Points for both him and the librarian!

He's content to keep translating the conversation for a long while - it's great to see them getting along, and probably good language practice as well. They end up with a big stack of variously creepy books (a set of less known Brothers Grimm fairytales [example], some rather bloody Polish legends [example], the Kalevala which is somewhat less bloody but still seems like it might be in the right mood [wikipedia], an old history of witch trials in Poland [example], a particularly cynically written nonfiction book about the unpleasant lives of late feudal peasants), plus an English dictionary, that being the only book they had with significant English in it.

"Zobaczę czy znajdę coś ciekawego następnym razem kiedy będę kupować książki..." It's always so much nicer to buy books when you know what people want. "Zakładając że ona nadal tu będzie za parę miesięcy?" She looks at Marek questioningly, and he smiles. "Myślę że tak."

He looks quite happy by the time they leave. "Looks like you two will get along great. And this was the public library, not the school one, so it shouldn't have too many children in it." It'll have some, when they're out of school, but only the more bookish ones, and she probably won't mind those.

"I'll see if I can find something interesting next time I'm buying books... Assuming she'll still be here in a couple of months?" "I think she will."

"Yes, she was very helpful and not at all annoying," she says, so levelly that it's almost hard to tell if she's sincere—but given how well she took to that conversation, it would be bizarre for her to be sarcastically complaining about it now.

He thinks he knows her well enough by now that he can assume she means it. "I think she liked having someone to talk about interesting books with. It probably doesn't happen very often. Maybe by the time you've read them you can come back and have a conversation with her by yourself."

"I might do that."

It would be nice if she made a friend. Not that he's going to try to insist on anything like that, but he's pretty sure it's generally good for people, even very serious disquieting ones.

They get home close to 2 and hadn't eaten anything since breakfast, so he reheats something quick for lunch (fried potatoes with random leftover meat/vegetables thrown in, which isn't bad really, frying improves nearly everything) and makes tea in the meantime. And once they've eaten and cleaned up, they can read books!  Unless Wednesday would rather do something else - he does ask, just doesn't really expect a different answer.

Wednesday is happy to settle in with her books. Getting through the language she barely speaks is going to be a slog, but she can always ask Marek about words she doesn't know, and then make notes to refer to for next time. A reverse lookup in the wrong-ended dictionary also seems not out of the question, if she has a good guess about what something means. And it's nice to have a project.

He thinks it would make sense to start with an easier version - he can read a chapter of something out loud and translate/explain whatever she doesn't understand, then she can take a turn reading out loud and get her (presumably rare) pronunciation mistakes corrected and get more explanations. Unless that's too much interaction for her and she prefers to do more of the work quietly on her own. He'd enjoy it, though.

She acquiesces to this plan after some consideration.

Oh good! He briefly worries that maybe she's just agreeing to it to make him happy and would prefer to read on her own, but then remembers everything he knows about Wednesday, which pretty clearly indicates she would never do such a thing.

Which book does she want to start with?

How about good old Grimm.

That works! Marek attempts to just read and translate as needed without inserting too much commentary, but he does make faces: the wicked queen being a witch makes him wonder how Wednesday feels about that, the witch turning her eleven stepsons into swans seems bizarre and impractical, making her stepdaughter unrecognizable by dirtying her face makes everyone sound deeply incompetent. Overall he's entertained but unconvinced that any of this makes sense, although he does realize making sense isn't really the point.

The concept of gathering stinging nettles in graveyards to knit into shirts makes him look at Wednesday with amused curiosity, wondering if she'd find it a correct activity.

Wednesday does learn quite a lot of new words! Both wiedźma and czarownica mean witch and he's not sure what the difference is; swan is łabędź which is a kind of excessive number of tricky letters; stinging nettles are pokrzywy, do they even have those in America?

It's a surprisingly good way to experience a book. Wednesday looks just the tiniest bit cheerful about it, which is more cheer than you usually get out of Wednesday.

"I think we do, though I've heard it's often the case that the same name belongs to one plant in America and a different one in Europe, so they might be completely different stinging nettles."

Wednesday looking a tiny bit cheerful makes Marek visibly happy. That, and he's enjoying this entire book-reading interaction. The book itself isn't really something he'd want to read on his own - back when he was Wednesday's age he's pretty sure he'd have found it bizarre and a bit depressing and honestly much too girly, and now he's grown out of some of these complaints, but it's still not his sort of thing even to the extent that books ever are - but reading a book together, instead of on his own for no clear benefit, is really quite nice.

"Is that true? I had no idea. Well, now I'm curious." He gets up with a stay-here-ish wave of his hand, goes out the front door, and takes about twenty seconds to come back with a decent-sized stinging nettle held unconcernedly in his ungloved hand. He holds it out for her inspection, taking care not to let it touch her unless she wants to do that. "Are they like this?"

She studies it thoughtfully, and touches it exactly once with a careful fingertip. "Hmm. I'm no expert, but I do think this looks like the same plant."

Predictably, it stings when she touches it.

"Good - I wouldn't want you to have trouble avoiding them. Or to miss out on painful but mostly harmless revenge possibilities, I suppose." He sounds perfectly cheerful about that. If she can restrain herself to nettles everyone will be perfectly happy (well, nearly everyone), and they are traditional.

A hint of a smile. "Noted."

"And about things being different in America, be careful with mushrooms. ...As food, I meant, not revenge, although that too."  That option he's less happy with, but it's not as if telling her that would stop her, and he's not even entirely sure he'd want it to.

"Understood. I have no intention of handling poisons incautiously."

That gets her an only slightly wry smile. "I didn't think so, really."

"Your turn to read?" He passes the book over.

She nods, and applies herself to the task with careful attention, reading out each passage in the original and then either venturing a translation or asking about words she doesn't recognize.

He provides definitions, corrections and comments as necessary, appreciating her patience at the rather demanding task. She's going to do just fine learning the school material at home, and in a quarter of the time, he bets.

Asking him about words does make it obvious that he's missing many of the English equivalents - more than one would expect from his conversation. He sounds slightly embarrassed every time it comes up, and comments after the third time he had to talk around something: "My English isn't as good as it sounds at first, is it. Maybe if I started asking you about words it would get better faster than by guessing."

"It seems only fair to trade vocabulary lessons for vocabulary lessons," she agrees.

"Mm, all right," he smiles. "Maybe you can finally tell me what 'interfering' means."

"Hmm, how to explain... if you are trying to do something, and I am getting in your way or making it more difficult, I am interfering. If you have something important to do, and I am bothering or annoying you while you do it, I am interfering with your work. If you have something to do that you want done one way, like watering a plant only a little and only in the mornings, and I sneak into your garden and water the plant twice that much in the afternoons, I am interfering with your gardening."

Unsurprisingly, her explanations are just as thorough as her other work.

"Mhm. And which of those were you doing about the bullying? ...I'm only guessing about what that means, too, but I'm pretty sure I'm more or less right." Still, a whole-paragraph definition from Wednesday will still add plenty of useful information, and he may as well get in the habit.

"Getting in their way and making it more difficult. And bullying, hmm... a child who likes to beat up other children, or say nasty things to them, or take their things by saying 'give me that or I'll beat you up', is a bully. Bullying is doing those things and things like them."

"Yes." He didn't realize talking counted, but, well, he can imagine talking that probably should. "It was good of you to interfere with that."

"I didn't do it to be good. But I see what you mean," she concedes.

"I know you didn't," he smiles, "but I'm not going to stop giving my opinions just because you don't do things for the same reasons. Well, maybe I would if it was just annoying you, but I think we're getting along better than that."

"Yes, I think we are."

Another smile. "It'll be funny when the orphanage director calls me to ask how bad things are."

"I was expecting him to just want to forget about me."

"Mm, maybe. But he does have a job and he usually does it, so I expect he'll talk to me again eventually." 

"What will you tell him?"

"That you're a great thoughtful responsible kid and I like you very much and will be happy to have you here for however long you want," he gives her a quietly fond look. "And then he'll make the sort of confused face you can see even over the phone."

"I can see how saying that would confuse him, yes." She looks just a little bit amused.

"Exactly," he grins. It's not as if he dislikes the man (although Wednesday might), but the situation is still funny.

"Did you go to school back in, uh, the future? Have they figured out how to make it go better?"

"I went to school. It was... mostly tolerable. I think I'm not suited to being around normal children."

"Mm. I suppose I can see that. Did you find any children you got along with at all? I'd think there must be some, somewhere."

She shakes her head. "Maybe they exist, but I've never met one." She takes a moment to consider the question further. "Except maybe my brother, but I don't think that counts."

"Yes, that seems different."

"Now I'm trying to think if we would've gotten along back when I was your age. Depends on the context a lot, but... probably, I think?"

"Really? I find that hard to imagine. What were you like, when you were my age?"

He thinks for a moment. "Describing yourself is hard... I was a boy scout and very serious about it, the way some children can get very serious about things. Being honorable, helping people, feeling like I was given a place in the great joint project of making life better for everyone. Back when we thought we could just all do that," he sighs. "And of course all the outdoor things - I liked pretty much all physical activities, didn't like reading very much. Liked people but wasn't good at talking to them, so instead I followed them around and tried to help them with things. I did a lot of keeping bigger kids from being mean to the smaller ones, so we would've had that in common. And I think I would've liked the way you're very serious about things, even if they're different things. I would've definitely thought some of them were strange or bad, but I bet you would've been able to out-argue me about them," grin. She can do pretty well at that now, she would've argued circles around him when he was that small. "But of course maybe I would've annoyed you terribly," cheerful shrug. "You'd know that better than me."

"Hmm. No, that does sound more tolerable than most children," she acknowledges.

"Good to know." He may be a little ridiculously pleased on behalf of his 11-year-old self, in all honesty.

"What's your brother like?"

"Smaller and weaker than I am. He won't even take revenge on his bullies, I have to do it for him. I hope he'll learn to fend for himself without me."

"I hope so too." He looks a little worried, but only briefly - it's not something he can do anything about. "Or that someone helps him. I'm assuming the teachers are no use," since apparently the future, metaphorical or otherwise, has not solved all problems, "but what about your parents? I don't think you said much about them, but I got the impression you liked your family."

She takes a few seconds to think this one over before finally admitting, with some reluctance, "My parents are... good. We have our differences, but they understand the important things. I do wish Mother wouldn't insist on sending me to school, though. It's never been anything but trouble."

The reluctance is odd, especially for Wednesday, who doesn't usually seem to feel normal human levels of unwillingness to admit things. But, well, parents are usually a difficult issue, and she still is 11. He nods.

"Do you know why she insists on that? If I disagree with her, I'd like to at least know what about."

"I think she's still hoping that someday I will learn how to get along with normal children."

"Ah. I hope you will too - or normal adults, at least. Honestly children may not be worth dealing with for everyone. It's... children grow up, you know, and they become pretty different people you need to deal with in different ways, and... if you want someone's life to go well, really you should aim for the final goal, them being a competent adult, rather than trying to get them on a normal trajectory as early as possible, even if that's often the obvious thing people think of."

Is he making sense? He's not entirely sure he is. He doesn't normally try to explain the thing he's doing, he just does it. Most of the time there's absolutely no call to explain your... childraising philosophy?... to eleven-year-olds under your care. But talking to Wednesday makes him want to give her some reason to trust that he's making reasonable decisions.

"But what if I do not want to get along with normal adults?"

"Depends on what you mean. I think it's useful to have the ability to get along with normal adults, enough that you can go to university or buy things in stores and so on, but setting up your life so you mostly don't have to do that is a type of being a competent adult."

"At home I could expect to grow up rich enough that I wouldn't need to do much of that sort of thing. Here..." She sighs. "I suppose I'll need to learn."

"Ah. Yes, here you do need to be able to deal with at least one of people or soil, and you didn't look very happy with soil either." He may be a tiny bit amused by her clash with normal life.

"But you don't really seem the type to turn down a useful skill anyway."

"Skills can be useful and also annoying."

More seriously, she adds, "But sometimes annoying things are necessary."

He nods. "Both of those are true. You need to do some things, unless you prefer the consequences of not doing them, but either way you don't have to like it."

"But my other point about your mother's decision was... It can be hard to learn how to deal with something if it's constantly annoying you, and easier if you get some time away from it. It's like with everything else - if you fall off a wall you were trying to climb, sometimes the best thing to do is to push yourself to keep trying, but sometimes you've strained your muscles or broken your leg and you'll have a better chance of climbing the wall if you take some time to recover. And in my experience pushing someone else to do things doesn't help even more often than pushing yourself. Sometimes it does, but it sounds like you've already spent plenty of time trying that, so I think it's a good idea to try something else."

She mulls this one over for a good few seconds before she says, "I see what you mean, and I agree."

"I can hope your mother would too, if she was here. But since she isn't, well, let's give you a break and see how it goes."

"Agreed. On both counts."

And then they can do a few more rounds of reading, and eventually Marek will go to sleep and leave Wednesday to whatever it is she does at midnight.

She organizes her notes and refreshes her memory of some vocabulary and then goes to bed, thinking idly of the novel she's planning to write.

What a good child. He keeps leaving her to her own devices and so far she keeps spending that time doing responsible and useful things. And nobody's gotten electrocuted even a little bit!

The house smells like baking bread when Wednesday wakes up the next morning.  If she comes downstairs about the same time as yesterday, she can have it still warm for breakfast, with boiled eggs and various produce from the garden.  (Or possibly other things if she asks or looks for them, but this is what's already out.)  There's no meat, which she may have noticed being a regular pattern on Fridays in the orphanage as well.