The Wednesdays

by Julie Bourbeau

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Julie Bourbeau

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2012 by Jason Beene

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bourbeau, Julie.

  The Wednesdays / by Julie Bourbeau. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In a village where peculiar things happen every Wednesday, one boy must save the town to save himself.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89975-1

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Villages—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B6646We 2012

  [E]—dc23

  2011021132

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Kieran,

  who inspires me every day of the week

  • • •

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  A special thank-you to my agent, Jessica Regel, for taking a chance on me when I had only the vaguest sense of what it meant to be a writer. Many thanks also to the editorial team at Knopf, especially Katherine Harrison, for catching, encouraging, and polishing until my little manuscript grew into a book.

  And finally, much appreciation to John Newman of the Village Clocksmith, who so patiently answered my truly weird questions about the inner workings of clock towers.

  here was nothing in particular about the boy standing in the open window to indicate that he was anything other than perfectly ordinary.

  But he was a boy, no denying that. And the creature staring up at him was cold and wet and unbearably grumpy, and if not this boy, then he’d have to keep trudging about in this blasted storm, and…

  The boy would do just fine, he decided.

  He sneezed, and then wiped his dripping nose with the back of one hairy, spidery-fingered hand. He was ready to proceed.

  The steps were simple. He had but to stare at the boy and chant three short words. But he needed to stare and to chant with intensity—with feeling and with purpose, with malice and with spite.

  He pushed his rain-drenched hair out of his face and narrowed his large silver eyes. Focus. An arrow of lightning struck the ground at his feet, causing him to smile a sharp-toothed grin. Yes. Perfect. The storm picked up speed, with drumbeats of thunder and brilliant slashes of lightning all around. Unaware of the danger that lurked below, the boy in the window leaned out farther to witness the beautiful fury of the storm.

  Everything was in place.

  “I. Choose. You.” The creature’s voice boomed nearly as loud as the clap of thunder that sounded at the same moment. With his mission now complete, he slunk off into the night. He’d said the words. Now it was time to wait.

  alfway up the steep slope of Mount Tibidabo was a very small village where very strange things happened … but only on Wednesdays.

  The rest of the week was quite normal, as far as small villages in this day and age go. It was only on Wednesdays that the villagers shuttered their windows, locked their doors, and hunkered down to wait out the oddness, which always ended promptly at midnight.

  In addition to being punctual, the strange Wednesday happenings were also mostly harmless. Oh, occasionally people stubbed their toes on a piece of furniture that was mysteriously rearranged or lost their footing on suddenly slippery surfaces; once Polly Simmons had to go to the hospital in the city to have her stomach pumped when her tea was unexpectedly switched with her perfume. But even then, Polly was all right in the end, and she later confessed that she had often thought about trying a sip of perfume just to see if it tasted as lovely as it smelled.

  So, overall, it wasn’t really much of a bother, and since the rest of the week in the village was pleasant enough, the people just shrugged their shoulders and stayed indoors one day out of seven.

  It was on one of these Wednesdays, which started out no stranger than any other, that things started to become much, much stranger than usual for one boy in particular.

  • • •

  Max V. Bernard did not like to stay indoors on Wednesdays. He had no siblings to play with, since his baby brother, Leland, was too young and too ill-tempered to be any fun, and the family pet was a grumpy old cat who did nothing but sleep on the guest room bed. His mother and father spent their Wednesdays drinking lots of coffee, mopping up baby spit, and playing canasta, which in Max’s opinion was truly the world’s most boring card game. Max thought Wednesdays were dreadfully dull.

  Because Wednesdays in the house were so boring, Max often found the need to bend the rules here and there. As far as he was concerned, being scolded was at least more interesting than playing canasta. So it was that on this particular Wednesday, he was breaking the rules by peeking out of a secret peephole. Although his father carefully sealed up the windows and doors each Tuesday night before bedtime, Max had a few tricks up his sleeve. At the moment, for example, he was hiding in the attic, where he had discovered that one of the slats in the shutters was loose and could be pried open just enough for proper spying.

  Max was peering through this secret slat with wicked glee as a confused group of tourists wandered about through the center of the village. Tourists often caught the worst of the Wednesday weirdness, since they, of course, weren’t aware that they really ought to be indoors. There was a large amusement park at the top of Mount Tibidabo and a popular seaside city at the base, so it was only natural for travelers to assume that the village halfway between the two would make for a pleasant stop. Six days out of the week they were correct: the local cafe served lovely lunches, and old Mr. Fife’s shop displayed beautifully carved wooden butterflies that sold by the dozens to cheerful visitors.

  Travelers who arrived on Wednesdays, however, always left in a hurry—more often than not in a manner quite different from the way they had arrived.

  Max watched as the group of tourists paced up and dow
n the street, scratching their heads in confusion as they passed one business after another that was shuttered, locked, and dark. The group consisted of two men, both wearing plaid pants, two women—one of whom was enormously fat—and one frizzy-haired teenage boy who looked every bit as bored as Max felt. One of the men, a red-faced sort who had an enormous camera slung around his neck, had taken it upon himself to try to rouse the town. He marched up to the city hall building and rapped loudly on the ornate metal door. No one answered, of course, but he insisted on pounding furiously on the doors of three neighboring buildings before finally giving up. He was clearly unaware that no one in the village ever answered their door on a Wednesday.

  The man’s face grew redder and redder as he rattled on the doors, and the rotund woman, who Max guessed was probably his wife, yoo-hooed and hallooed shrilly. Finally, the man erupted. “What’s the matter with this lunatic town? It’s the middle of the day on a Wednesday—you can’t just lock up the whole confounded place! I know that you can hear me!” he bellowed at no one in particular.

  “We’d just like to buy some sandwiches for the road,” trilled the second woman hopefully.

  “And some sodas!” the teenager demanded in a sulky tone.

  They were met—naturally—with silence.

  Max grinned as he watched the group get into their minivan to drive away. He, of course, knew that cars rarely started on Wednesdays.

  Sure enough, mere seconds later the red-faced man burst angrily from the driver’s seat, this time to pound on the door and windows of the village mechanic shop. He must have been feeling defeated, though, because he gave up after only a few irritable knocks and rattles. Instead, he glumly organized his fellow travelers to push the silent car while he steered. The steep roads of Mount Tibidabo made it easy for stranded travelers to coast downhill to the city at the bottom of the mountain, and before long the car picked up speed and the unfortunate travelers hopped back in.

  “One, two, three, four …” Max gleefully began to count in his head.

  He never even got to five. CLANG! The car’s bumper fell off and bounced loudly on the pavement—an entirely predictable event for anyone who had lived in the village long enough. Bits and pieces fell off absolutely everything on Wednesdays.

  Max didn’t get a chance to see whether the tourists would stop to retrieve the bumper, though, because his fun was interrupted—rather abruptly—by an angry howl from downstairs.

  “MAXWELL VALENTINO BERNARD! You’d better not be up there letting the wednesdays in!”

  Max hastily tried to close the shutters, but it being Wednesday and all, the slat stuck and then broke off in his hand. His mother and father burst into the attic at the same time; his dad was carrying baby Leland under his arm like a football.

  “You let the wednesdays in, and they made my cake fall! It’s completely ruined,” screeched his mother angrily.

  “And they broke my television again,” said his father dejectedly. “Now I’ll never know who made it to the semifinals.”

  Baby Leland just sneered at him.

  Max felt sorry for his father, who he knew had spent the whole week looking forward to watching an important table tennis tournament on TV. But he felt sorrier for himself about the ruined cake. It was supposed to be his birthday cake, after all.

  Baby Leland chose that moment to launch into his sixth screaming fit of the afternoon. He glared at Max while he howled, clearly demonstrating that he, too, thought Max was a careless nitwit.

  “Oh, come to Mommy, my poor colicky little darling,” Max’s mother cooed, reaching for the baby. Leland settled contentedly into her arms, looked Max directly in the eyes as if to say “watch this,” and then hiccuped up a torrential flood of baby spit-up.

  Max and his father simultaneously stepped back, not only to avoid the mess dripping onto the floor, but also because Max’s mom was growing redder and redder in the face, as if she, too, might erupt.

  Max wrinkled his nose in disgust as he shook off a fleck of spit-up from his shoe. “Ew, yuck.” They were only two thoughtless syllables, but Max’s comment pushed his frazzled mother over the edge.

  “That’s it, Maxwell Valentino!” she bellowed, her face reaching peak redness. “I’ve had quite enough of your Wednesday thoughtlessness! Last week you opened the back door to let the cat out, and the week before that you opened the fireplace flue because you swore you heard an owl stuck inside. If you like the wednesdays so much, then you might as well just go outside and play with them!” She thrust baby Leland back into his father’s arms with a squishy, splatting sound and then pointed down the stairs.

  Max’s father gasped. He seemed to be equally startled by the dramatic proclamation and the wet, smelly baby now squirming in his arms. For a moment it looked as if he was about to disagree with his wife, but then he reconsidered as he remembered that Max had spoiled his beloved television watching for several weeks in a row. And the fact that he was now also covered with baby spit-up did nothing at all to elevate his mood. With a sharp elbow of encouragement from Max’s mother, he nodded in solemn agreement. “That’s right. And don’t let me hear you complaining about them turning your trousers inside out again, or crying if your bicycle tire goes flat, or …” He trailed off. “You’ll just have to manage the wednesdays on your own,” he concluded, and slunk off with baby Leland to see if, by some miracle, his television had unbroken itself.

  Max sighed melodramatically as his mother marched him to the door, but he wasn’t actually upset at all. He wasn’t afraid of the wednesdays. It was a beautiful spring day—his birthday, no less—and he was free to roam!

  His mother hesitated with her hand on the doorknob, though. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea for you to go out there after all,” she said, beginning to doubt her earlier haste. “Perhaps you could stay in and help me get a new cake started instead.”

  Max wouldn’t hear of it, though; he wanted OUT. “No! You said I could go outside!” he reminded her in a pleading tone. His mind worked quickly as he saw from his mother’s expression that she remained unconvinced. “Besides, it’s my birthday. Birthdays are lucky days, so the wednesdays can’t do anything to me today!”

  “Hmph. I sincerely doubt that, but go on with you,” she relented.

  She opened the door just wide enough for him to scoot out, and by the time she had pulled it shut and latched it tightly, he was already running down the front path at full steam.

  ax didn’t bother with his bike—tires went flat too often on Wednesdays, and spokes tended to suffer all sorts of mishaps. Besides, the village was small, and he could walk just about anywhere he wanted to go.

  He headed first for the community pool. He hadn’t brought a swimsuit, but there was no one around to see him, so he simply tossed his clothes in a heap and dove in. “Swimming in my birthday suit on my birthday,” he sang to himself happily as he paddled and somersaulted through the clear blue water. He found that he quite liked having the whole pool to himself for a change—there was no one to tell him to stop doing cannonballs off the edge, and there were no grumpy lap swimmers shooing him out of their lanes. He spent ages working on his backflip; it was so nice to jump off the diving platform as often as he wanted without having to wait in line!

  Eventually he grew tired of swimming alone. He hadn’t brought a towel with him, so he first tried shaking himself off like a dog, but that didn’t quite do the trick. Luckily, he spotted a discarded towel lying crumpled up near the fence. “Hoo-rah!” he crowed at his good fortune. His mother would have called the towel “filthy,” but Max wasn’t feeling picky.

  He was rubbing his head briskly with the towel when he felt something pull at his hair. “What’s this?” he wondered aloud. He pulled the towel away in disgust as he realized he had just succeeded in rubbing someone’s old chewing gum into his hair.

  He pushed his way into the changing room to look at the damage in the mirror. It took him a few moments to find the light switch, and then the rare opportuni
ty to swing like a monkey from locker door to locker door distracted him. When he finally got around to checking the mirror, he was startled to see that not only was his hair standing up in gummy, sticky spikes, but also that his skin was a distinct shade of pale blue.

  The pool had seemed exceptionally blue. There must have been some sort of dye in the water, he reasoned.

  “I’ll get you, wednesdays!” Max yelled cheerfully. Far from being angry, he actually thought that his blue skin and spiky hair looked fantastic. He practiced several monster postures and growls in the mirror before deciding that his new appearance was more like a space alien than a monster. He stared at his reflection in the mirror for as long as he possibly could without blinking—he thought he remembered reading somewhere that space aliens didn’t blink. Satisfied, he went to get dressed.

  Predictably enough for a Wednesday, Max’s shoes were not where he had left them. He pulled on his clothes and found a pair of cowboy boots stowed in an open locker. They were ridiculously large on him, but he quite liked the loud clomping noises they made when he walked.

  He clomp-clomped back into the village square, doing his best impersonation of a blue Western space alien. He stopped in front of the pharmacy’s large window to use the reflection to twist his gummy hair into one large horn on the top of his head. Pleased with the results, he spun on his heels, ready to hunt for wednesdays.

  ax decided to start looking for the wednesdays in the park. He didn’t really know what to look for, but the park seemed as good a place to start as any. The cowboy boots were starting to chafe his feet a bit, so he shuffled more than he clomped. He hadn’t shuffled very far into the park when he caught sight of someone sitting on a bench, facing the opposite direction.

  Max snuck up behind the mystery figure as quietly as the boots would allow and then catapulted himself over the bench.

  “GOTCHA!” He sprang menacingly at the bench’s occupant. He realized too late that it wasn’t a wednesday sitting on the bench at all—it was crazy old Mr. Grimsrud.