"Mr. Wonka?" Charlie looked up from the prototype he was working on, a spider shaped candy with licorice legs and a gumball body, it was a little to insect like to be appetizing at this point though… something had to be done about it. But hours working on inventions along side Willy Wonka had not dulled his inquisitive nature. If anything, it had increased his tendency to question.
"Hm?" the chocolatier replied, looking up from his work. He had come, over the past few weeks, to expect such interruptions. Most of the time the questions were simple enough for him to answer, like 'Where do Oompa Loompa's go when they're not working?' or 'If all the Cotton Candy Sheep are Pink, where does the Blue Cotton candy come from?' but from time to time they were also irritating reminders of his past. Were he the sort prone to showing his emotions, his face might have betrayed a little uncertainty anticipating which sort of question this would be, but as he was not, Charlie was presented with the masking smile Willy wore 90 percent of the time, dropping it only in favor of the occasional genuine smile.
"When you were a kid… did you have any friends?"
"I'm sure I did," he replied, turning his attention back to his work and hoping the boy would take his phraseology, for the clue it was, an indication that he didn't care to discuss the topic.
"What were they like?"
Silence. Willy didn't want to answer the question posed to him. It's not that he didn't like his old friends… but he didn't like to remember the Long Road Home… how his father had never come for him… how he was an Unwanted Child. A few weeks ago, he likely would have responded to this question with a remark about mumbling, but he found, that it had lost its charm after Charley had confronted him on the subject, a few days ago, asking why he always accused people of mumbling when he didn't like what they were saying. Now he simply pretended not to have heard the question at all.
"What were they like Mr. Wonka? . . . Willy?"
He might have answered… except he wasn't there anymore. He was across town, and decades in the past.
"Hey WILLIMINA!" the scrawny teen sneered. He was a year and a half younger than Willy, but he'd been at the Long Road home a lot longer, and loved to torment the undersized newcomer. Ever since Willy had arrived there, 4 years ago, Justin had tormented him as best he could. It had bothered Willy for quite some time, but recently, he really didn't care. "WENDY Wonka!"
"Yes Love?" Willy answered, in a breathy voice, batting his eyelashes at the other boy, and flipping his ponytail over his shoulder. If he was going to make insinuations as to the true nature of his gender, Justin was just asking to be embarrassed… which he rightly was. Willy flashed a pearly white grin to his friends as Justin shuddered, turned tail, and fled.
"That's right Justin! RUN!" Annabelle called after her older brother. "That's what he gets for being such a brat." There was a tittering laugh from the assembled, all of them younger than Willy by at least 3 years. There were about 60 kids at the Long Road home at any time, between the ages of 6 and 18, and Willy being 13, that left just under half the kids in said age range. Many of them were to young to really be counted as friends so much as admirers, but a fair number of the older ones, as old as 10, or in Annabelle's case, just recently 11, could be counted as such.
"What are you making for desert tonight Willy?" Carline asked, "C'mon… you can tell us! We're your friends!"
"I told you," he replied, "It's a surprise."
They knew he'd never tell him, but they always asked anyhow. They also took it quite well when he insisted he could not tell them. They were after all, his friends. Many of his smaller admirers had taken to throwing temper fits in an attempt to get him to disclose the surprises… but to no avail. If they were going to be such brats about it he had no qualms about letting them flail round on the ground.
"Flashback?"
"Yeah," Willy answered distantly.
"I'm sorry I pressed," Charlie was mildly abashed. He knew he could be overly inquisitive sometimes, and while it didn't seem to do him any harm, it was still mildly disquieting when Willy had flashbacks. Whatever he was remembering, it was usually something he didn't much want to talk about.
"It's ok," he replied, dismissively, "How's the spider sweets coming?"
"Still too spidery I think… I think we need to cartoon it up a little more."
"We'll have to hurry… I want to have them out in time for Halloween. Big candy holiday that, and the perfect time for insect themed candy. We should do something with BATS," Willy was suddenly taken with the idea. Pulling his mind from the past and into the present buy busying himself figuring out how to work bats into candy… perhaps bubblegum bodies with licorice wings… packaged in with the spiders. Halloween licorice gum assortments.
"Yeah… Bats," Charlie answered in a quiet voice. He was still curios about the past… about Willy's past. He had been piecing bits of it together over time… he knew Willy and his father didn't get along, that Willy had lived somewhere other than his fathers house for much of his later childhood, and that he never mentioned his mother. Neither did Dr. Wonka, so Charlie had come to assume she had died, possibly when Willy was to young to remember. He'd seen photos in Dr. Wonka's office, in later visits, where Willy had on a lot of metal braces… but he didn't know much beyond that. Charlie was starting to wonder if maybe Willy had never gone to school. That would explain his apparent total disregard for things even Charlie often took for granted, like gravity, or just how much of something you can fit in a given space. He didn't suppose it mattered, since ever time Willy said something impossible was possible… he managed to make it happen.
Willy meanwhile was trying very hard to push the memories back out of his head. Every time there was a moment in his train of thought, where there was no mention of licorice winged bats, the faces of his childhood playmates would start fading into his minds eye. He didn't need them anymore… being adored from afar as he was, was different than actually having to be around kids. But Charlie was a kid… Charlie was a lot like his friends. They were good kids... nice kids. They had to be good kids. They didn't have parents enabling them to become brats like Violet and Agustus and Veruca and Mike.
"They were a lot like you," Willy said, not looking up from the contraption he was configuring to try and make the bubblegum bat torsos. And for the first time, in a long time… Willy wondered where they were now. Were they still nice? Were they still good? He was making chocolate to be eaten by children all around the world… What were they doing?
"Don't you talk to them anymore?" Charlie wasn't expecting an answer. So when he got one he felt emboldened to ask more questions.
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't know where they are," Willy kept his eyes glued to his work. It was hard to maintain his cheery demeanor sometimes, and eye contact only made things harder. So long as he didn't have to look anyone in the eye, he could keep it up nearly indefinitely.
"We could try to find them," Charlie suggested. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that though Willy rarely registered any distress on his face, there were tip offs to his mental state. It was like learning a new language learning to read Willy, but he knew this expression. Willy avoided eye contact only when something was upsetting him. Charley took this to mean perhaps he was upset about loosing track of his friends, which is why he suggested they could try to find them. "I'll bet we could find at least some of them… and they might know where the others were."
"Yeah… maybe."
Dinner at the Buckets was awkward that night. It hadn't really been the fact that he'd lost touch with his friends that was upsetting Willy, but ambivalence over whether or not it was a good thing that he no longer knew where any of them were. On the one hand, he didn't have to worry that they might not really liked HIM in the first place. There was always the possibility that they only wanted the sweets… like his suppliers. He corresponded with them by mail… some of them, like Boris Mangrove, the white milk supplier, (and occasional dairy cow supplier, for the whipped cream, and the chocolate milk cows) wrote short succinct letters concerned only with business… while Wendy McIntosh, the fruit supplier, who provided sour apples, acid free lemons and a variety of unique fruits that went into many of Wonka's fruit flavored candies, sent slightly more social letters, asking how things were going… how he was feeling. But they were business partners. They wanted his money, in exchange for their products, and they were both made fairly wealthy by his business. They had ulterior motives for associating with him just as his friends had at the Long Road Home… still, he preferred the Wendy sort over the Boris sort… at least they made an effort to be friendly.
On the other hand, what if his friends really had liked him? They might not like him anymore now that he'd not talked to them in so many years… but they might still like him if they had liked him back then, and that had it's ups and it's downs too. He'd have to be a lot more social than he'd been for many years if he Now Charley had mad his decision for him it seemed, and he was going to have to try and find them… he was going to have to see his old friends again, and they might not like him. In bed that night, he mentally he ran down the people he wondered about… and tried to picture where they were now… Annabelle was probably married by now. She always wanted to be a mother… and Samantha was probably a business woman of some sort, perhaps trading stocks or something. Perhaps Bobby had his own farm by now. He always wanted to get out and have his own farm with cows and chickens and things… Carline always said, she would never leave… maybe she was running the Long Road home with Mary… perhaps Mary had retired. Anthony was probably the owner of his own tailor shop, he'd always been quite good at fixing torn clothes, and taking up the hems on dresses and pants that were too long on the other kids. He imagined them each in turn in successful ventures, happy with their lives… though some niggling part at the back of his mind told him, they might not be so happy… they might be poor and destitute… but he didn't want to think of that, he didn't want to think he'd left them out there, suffering and struggling while he sat in comfort in his factory. He didn't know if he could live with that, unless it was Justin… that would serve him right.
And what of the Applegate Girl? Wendy Applegate. He'd only met her that one Christmas, but he often wondered about her. The tiny red-headed girl with the bright green eyes. She didn't know it was his fault what happened to her… she only knew it was his name they used to tease her. If it hadn't been for her… he never would have known where his father had moved the house… and he didn't know what happened to her either.
"Willy… we found your father."
"Oh!" Wily scoffed, with a slight roll of his eyes. If that was what was so important that she had to speak to him alone, he could save her the trouble. He didn't give a flying fudge bar where his father was anymore.
"Willy listen," Mary sighed, "This is important."
"The children are waiting for their candy," he replied with a somewhat forced smile… at that age, he had not yet quite perfected his perfect porcelain mask. Having known him since he was a wide eyed lost little 9 year old, Mary was not fooled.
"He WAS looking for you Willie. You weren't wrong."
"Is that so?" he asked, as if he didn't really care, though he did. If his father had been looking for him… maybe he really did care. Maybe he was just bad at looking…
"He missed you Willy. He searched for over a 5 years…"
"Clearly not long enough," he replied, sullenly, "How did you find him then… if he gave up?"
"Two years ago, he started dating a woman, Anita Applegate. She dropped her daughter off a few months ago… right after you left Willy… we recognized his handiwork right away," she crossed the room to him, slowly, a photograph in her outstretched hand.
From the sepia toned photograph, a sullen girl with dark eyes peered back at him, her head encircled in a brace not unlike that which he had once worn. Hers lacked a great deal of the accoutrements his had come to have near the end, a fact he attributed to the fact that the poor child had only been exposed to his father for a year and a half. Though it didn't register on his face, Willy was horrified. What difference did it make if his father was looking for him, if he was still doing this to children. He didn't care about his son… he only wanted his in house victim back. No.
"Her name is Wendy. She's 13 now. Best we can tell, she and her mother were turned out of your father's house when she tried to refuse further orthodontia. Her mother apparently blamed her for loosing them yet another place to live… we've got most of it off her of course, but she's still in bad shape. She's prone to hypoglycemia-"
"Hm?"
"Low blood sugar. She has a hormonal deficiency… and we suspect she wasn't always fed as a small child, so she tends to ignore her body when it's trying to tell her she should eat something. It's not a good combination, so she tends toward being sickley. I should warn you… she doesn't know that you're related to Wilbur… but some of the older kids have taken to calling her Wendy Wonka… and she hates it."
"I didn't like it much either," Willy quipped. There were those amongst the older boys who had called him, Wendy, or Wanda, or Willimina, making fun of his squeamishness and long hair.
"Just… be careful with her Willy. Sometimes you're a little… blunt."
Willy nodded in the affirmative. He knew he could be hurtful to people sometimes… and normally he didn't care. But his father had already hurt this girl enough. He would be friendly to her. Perhaps they could be friends, commiserate in their common dislike of his father. He smiled at the thought as he made his way back out into the common room, where the children were playing with their shared toys. There were no individual gifts under the Christmas tree at the Long Road Home… there never were. But there were gifts to be shared amongst all of the children. It wasn't the same. That's why Willy had come back, to give them each something of their own. Even if they would all be eaten by the next day… each of them would have something, for a while that belonged to only them. The children smiled, when they saw him, and ran over, clambering for his attention. The teenagers lolled near the back, uninterested in the chocolatier, or too wrapped up in teenaged pride to be seen clambering with the younger kids. Whatever was going on they'd see it just as well from the back as from the front, given that they were taller than the children in front of them. He could have continued enjoying the adoration, had it not been for the splitting pain in his shin.
"I HATE YOU!" came a shrill young voice from just in front of him.
Willy looked down and found himself face to face with the child from the photograph. It didn't do her justice. Her dark eyes, which had appeared brown in the sepia toned photograph, were in fact a deep, rich green… and her hair, a bright orange. He found himself focusing on the younger girl's teeth, which though quite white, were not fully straight. They must have been quite crooked when he'd started work on her… because she still had a slight overbite and a gap between her two front teeth.
"YOU RUINED MY LIFE!" she continued, kicking him with her other foot, pale freckled face nearly red with anger. Her task completed, she bolted from the room, the other children parting in shock to let her past… in the distance her footsteps could be heard stomping up the stairs… and a door slamming somewhere above their heads.
"The second girls ward," came a voice from behind him. Willy looked behind him and saw Mary there, looking meaningfully at him. It was her way of saying that he should go after the girl… and while part of him wanted to pretend he hadn't heard her… he almost felt he owed it to this girl, to do as Mary said. Taking a single ribbon wrapped Wonka Bar, he made his way out of the common room and up the familiar stairs. He had lived in this building for 9 years… but he'd never been in one of the girl's wards. The boy children lived, 6 or 7 to a room, but they each had their own bed at least. He wondered if it was the same with their girls.
Carefully Willy pushed open the door, peering inside… to his surprise, it looked precisely like the boys ward had, except that the blankets on the beds were mauve instead of brown. Sitting at the foot of one of the beds, with a book in her lap, was a very cross Wendy Applegate. She didn't acknowledge him as he carefully crossed the room, some part of him still feeling a little strange to be in one of the girls rooms… it was strictly forbidden that the boys go in the girls room when he had been a resident and some part of him wasn't sure Mary wasn't going to storm in at any moment, and put him in the corner for breaking the rules.
"Wendy?" he ventured… but received no reply from the girl, who simply turned the page in her novel and continued reading. "Look. I don't really much care what you think of me. I just, though I should bring you your Christmas gift," he placed the chocolate bar down on her book. Some ignorant part of him thought that this simple act would make everything better. After all, that's how he'd won the affections of the other children at the Home…
"Are you trying to POISON me you FREAK!" she demanded flipping the offending confection off her book as if it was scalding to the touch. "I can't have CHOCOLATE! I'm lactose intolerant on a MASSIVE LEVEL."
"Oh… I…"
"Just leave me alone! Just GO AWAY," she screamed, throwing her book at his head. At this point, Willy felt he'd done his duty to both her and Mary, and he most certainly did not have to take this kind of treatment from anyone. With a sniff, he turned and walked out of the room with no regrets… there were other children downstairs and THEY were good kids. It wasn't fair what happened to her, but it didn't entitle her to be such a brat about it.
"Good Riddance," he said out loud, "She was a brat anyhow."
She was. But that didn't stop him wondering. She could be dead now for all he knew, sickly as she'd been. Still… it had been bad enough for him, wondering if his father was looking for him or not… Wendy's mother had dropped her off there. There was no room for doubt for her. He didn't want to see her, she hadn't been very nice… but he wanted to know where she was… just wanted to know she was ok. Annabelle might know… she had seemed to be friends with her when he'd visited that Christmas… but who would know where Annabelle was? Where were any of them? Were they ok? What if they were all out there struggling to make ends meet… what if they were hungry or miserable? He had to know if they were ok… and there was only one way to locate his old friends. He would have to go back to the Long Road Home for Lost and Unwanted Children.
Author's Note: Apologies for any grammatical errors. I lost my beta after the Prologue. He hasn't seen the movie yet and doesn't want to be further spoiled. Also, this chapter was originally published as two shorter chapters, but they were too short for my standards, so I combined them.