Darling

by K. Ancrum

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  I would like to dedicate this book to the kids who get a thrill from running in the dark of night, and to kids who get a thrill from reading about them.

  “The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.”

  “He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then when you went out you found the body; and, on the other hand, he might say a great deal about it, and yet you could not find the body.”

  Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie

  CHAPTER 1

  Wendy scowled, scrunching herself down in the car seat angrily.

  “I said no,” Mr. Darling declared.

  “I know you did, but seriously? I’ve done a background check on her. Like, a literal criminal background check, Dad.”

  “You never know who you could be meeting online,” Mrs. Darling said gently. “I know you’ve been friends with her for more than a year, but that doesn’t mean anything. She could be a serial killer for all you know. Besides, we didn’t bring you here to go running around with strangers in the night. We came here to—”

  “—adopt other kids that you also won’t let go outside,” Wendy snapped.

  “Wendy … darling,” Mr. Darling said, eyes crinkling at his own tired, ancient joke. “Can we please discuss this at another time? You can meet this ‘Eleanor’ person after you’ve had more time to get used to things and made a few new friends at school.”

  “Boring prep school friends,” Wendy muttered.

  “Lucky you!” Mrs. Darling said brightly. “We’ve just arrived at your boring new prep school! Aren’t you excited and thankful that you have parents who can provide you with a quality education in a safe neighborhood where you don’t have to take a bus to school and can walk instead?”

  Wendy scowled deeper. She couldn’t say anything to that. She was well aware that her mom had grown up in much rougher circumstances, and it would feel like a punch in the chest for her to hear Wendy say that she wasn’t thankful. No matter how much she wanted to go out on her first night in Chicago.

  Wendy kept up her silence all the way from the car through the building and into the principal’s office, taking the opportunity to look around. A lot of things were the same as the prep school she’d gone to before the move. But there was a lot more diversity. She wouldn’t be one of the only Black students, which seemed like it would be kind of nice. The uniforms everyone wore were a bit less stylish than the ones back in Hinsdale, but the girls rolled their skirts up and wore rule-breaking flourishes here, too. There were cuter guys, but that might just have been due to the quantity of them to choose from. There had to be three times as many kids in this building as there were in her entire town.

  It looked like schools in Chicago had an alarming amount of security. She was familiar with the whole metal detector song and dance. But here they had a whole conveyor belt you put your backpack on, just like in the airport. There were also a ton of actual cops just standing around indoors. Her old school only had a regular security guard on staff, and he mostly just stood around looking bored outside the front door.

  Mr. Darling clamped a hand on Wendy’s shoulder and steered her toward the administration office. “We have an appointment,” he reminded her crisply.

  The Darling family settled down outside of the dean of admissions’s office to wait. Mrs. Darling filled out a registration form and handed it back to the secretary. Wendy watched as her mom tugged nervously at her skirt and combed her fingers through her flat-ironed hair to settle it more perfectly on her shoulders. Mr. Darling squeezed Mrs. Darling’s hand gently and raised his eyebrows at Wendy. Don’t fuck this up, his eyebrows said.

  After a few minutes, the dean cracked the door open and called her name.

  Wendy stood, but Mr. and Mrs. Darling stayed seated.

  “Just me?” she asked her dad.

  “Just you,” the dean’s secretary said sternly.

  Wendy left her jacket on the chair and made her way into the dean’s office. It was a large room, bigger than some of the classrooms at her old school, and it was completely crammed with plants and bookshelves.

  The dean sat in front of a wide window. His hair was gray, his suit was expensive, his desk was massive, and his chair was tall. The chair that Wendy was supposed to sit in was small and pushed far enough back from the desk to feel awkward.

  Wendy sat in it anyway.

  The dean shuffled through the papers Mrs. Darling had filled out, seemingly just to create suspense, before finally looking up at her.

  “Welcome, Wendy. So—” he paused, looking down at his papers to check, “—you’re … seventeen, and you’ll be entering senior year in the middle of the school term. Do you feel as though your previous institution has prepared you adequately for shifting into a new environment?”

  “I think so?” Was this an interview? This was alarmingly beginning to feel like an interview. Wendy glanced down at the tight church shoes her mom had forced her into this morning and a wave of dread crashed over her body. “I … um … I did okay on the ACT prep, and I have a three-point-oh—”

  “Which is a little low in comparison to the rest of our higher-performing students, but I’ve been led to believe that you’re accomplished in your extracurriculars?”

  “Oh yeah. My parents didn’t usually get home until late, so I did a lot of clubs. I’m good with home ec, I won fourth place in the regional track-and-field four-hundred-meter dash, and…”

  “And?” The dean peered at her over his glasses.

  “And I write stories sometimes.”

  He grimaced, then folded his arms and leaned back in his giant chair. “Well. They any good?”

  “I think they are,” Wendy snapped before she could stop herself.

  To her surprise, the dean smiled. “That’s a lot of confidence. If you’re as forthright about your work as you are about handling new experiences, you’ll adjust just fine.” He shuffled the papers in front of him and then shoved them to the side. “Now, do you have anything you’d like to say that you think will influence whether or not we accept your scandalously late application?”

  Wendy looked down at her shoes. “I—” she started, then stopped. “My mom wants me to go here. I wanted to go to public school because I wanted to have a new experience, but I think that it would be really painful for my family if I didn’t at least try my best to get in here. My mom used to live here, and I think she always wanted to go to a school like this. Giving me the chance to go is the closest she’ll get to that.”

  The dean watched her curiously but didn’t say anything, so Wendy continued.

  “I know a lot of kids do things for their parents that they don’t want, and it’s always some big sacrifice. But I know the difference between wants and needs, and my wan
t to go to public school is smaller than my mom’s need to see me go here. And that’s important. If my grades aren’t good enough, then maybe my extracurriculars will help.”

  The dean nodded. “That was a good answer.” He folded his hands on his desk. “You’re an interesting applicant, Wendy Darling.”

  He wrote something on the papers and then stamped them.

  “You can go out to the lobby. If I need anything else I’ll give your mom a call. Have a great rest of your day.”

  When Wendy stepped back into the lobby, Mr. Darling immediately stood. “How did it go?”

  “Okay, I guess?” Wendy said. “He stamped the forms and said we can go home.”

  The dean’s secretary looked up. “You’re probably good to go then. Believe me, he doesn’t stamp much. You’ll get a confirmation call next Monday that has her start date, and an email with information about what supplies she needs and where to purchase your uniform.”

  Mrs. Darling sighed in relief and leaned against her husband. “Thank you!”

  The secretary snorted. “Usually I wouldn’t call it this early, but you looked like you were about to pass out. Figured you could use the good news. Have a nice rest of your day, Mr. and Mrs. Darling. And good luck, Wendy.”

  * * *

  Wendy’s quiet mood followed her all the way back to the brownstone they’d just moved into. They had unpacked the car and promptly hopped back into it to register her for school, so all her things were still sitting on the floor in the living room.

  While her parents focused on unpacking boxes in the kitchen, Wendy began lugging her suitcases and boxes up the stairs to her room. Her parents’ bedroom was on the first floor, but her room and the room where her new sibling would be living were both on the second floor, with their own bathroom. After Wendy was done shoving boxes into her room, she took a break to go into the second room. It was white like hers, but had a bigger closet and one more window. Normally, she would have taken this room, but whoever they were adopting probably deserved to enjoy having a nice big space after what they went through a bit more than she did. Wendy scrunched her toes in her socks and looked at the ground. They hadn’t had wood floors at their old house, only carpet and linoleum.

  “Are you unpacked yet?” Mr. Darling yelled from the first floor. “I don’t hear unpacking noises.”

  “I’m getting to it!” Wendy yelled back. She ducked out of the empty room and into her significantly more crowded one.

  She set up her phone on the windowsill and started a video call, then she sat on the ground and started assembling her bed.

  “Wendy?” Eleanor’s twangy voice blared loudly into the room. “Is that manual labor I see you doing? Very butch. I’m loving it.”

  Wendy huffed. “I’m not doing it for your entertainment, Eleanor, I’m doing it so I can have a place to sleep.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So are you able to meet up tonight? I want to take you to Ann Sather so you can understand what real cinnamon rolls are supposed to be like. Then I was thinking we could go to Boystown and see if we can get into a club or something.”

  Wendy sighed loudly and wrenched at her headboard. “No. My dad says we can’t meet up today. My mom thinks you’re a serial killer.”

  “Why does she think I’m a serial killer? I’m vegan.”

  “You’re vegan because you like animals. Not because you don’t want to kill people. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You think there aren’t any vegan serial killers?”

  “Anyway, didn’t you tell them that I couldn’t possibly be a catfish because we video chat? Catfishes always work really hard to make sure people never get a chance to video chat with them. Plus, if I was a catfish, I would work harder to look better than … this.”

  Wendy looked up. Eleanor had her curly blond hair bundled up into a pineapple on the top of her head and was wearing a gel mask.

  “What? You look hot.” Wendy snorted. “Why are you dressed for bed? It’s like four thirty.”

  Eleanor rolled her eyes. “Well, I WAS going to take a nap so I would be awake enough to take you on a tour of the city, but I guess that’s no longer a thing.” She whipped the scrunchie off her head and shook out her curls. “Why are your parents so strict? Aren’t they tired?”

  “Dude, I don’t know. I’m so well-behaved. I genuinely don’t get it. I’ve literally never done anything that they wouldn’t approve of, but they treat me like a criminal.”

  Eleanor shrugged one shoulder. “Well, at least you’ll be eighteen soon. Maybe they’ll let you go outside then.”

  Wendy dropped the slats over her bed frame, then tugged her mattress across the room. “Mmm. I don’t know. Whenever anything happens that reminds my mom that I’m growing up, she gets all weepy and excuses herself to go feel feelings in another room. Just … like … what do you even say to that?”

  Eleanor laughed. “Aww, that’s cute.”

  “It’s not cute, it’s annoying,” Wendy griped as she tucked in her sheets.

  “It’s cute,” Eleanor insisted. “She’ll probably calm down when the adoption goes through. Then she can focus all her mom-energy on momming someone else to death, and maybe we can finally see each other face-to-face.”

  “You wanna see my face, sweetheart?” Wendy pushed her face up close to the camera so it was nothing but a big brown blur.

  Eleanor cackled. “Go finish setting up your room. I’m just a distraction at this point.” She grinned at Wendy fondly.

  “No, no! Give me five more minutes,” Wendy said. She opened the box that held all her books and dumped them out onto the floor.

  “So needy,” Eleanor scoffed. “Okay, five more. What was the school like?”

  “Bland. The guys there were actually hot, though.”

  “I’m going to stop you right there and let you know that prep school boys aren’t ‘hot.’ You’re just confused because there were, like, eight boys at your old school and all of them had faces like a loaf of bread.”

  Wendy scrunched up her nose. “You don’t even like boys.”

  “Not again. Don’t say it—”

  “How do you even know which ones are cute?” Wendy continued, louder.

  “Ugh. I’m just gay; I still have eyes. Please, Wendy, love yourself. Do you want to end up with some boy with a bowl cut named Chet who takes you to dinner with his parents while wearing khakis and sweating a lot, or do you want to get fingered in the back of a club you’re technically too young to be in by a gorgeous fucker named Montana who has a dirt bike, plays bass, and had to retake algebra? These! Are not! Hard choices!”

  Wendy covered her face with both hands.

  “You want dumb hot Montana, don’t you?” Eleanor asked.

  “I want dumb hot Montana,” Wendy groaned through her fingers.

  “Exactly. So hold off on whatever options are in your native area, and when your parents finally let you out of prison, I’ll introduce you to Montana.”

  “You’ll WHAT?”

  “Introduce you to Montana. He’s single. And pretty okay.”

  “I THOUGHT THAT WAS A HYPOTHETICAL.”

  “It was both. Two birds, one six-foot-two stone named Montana.”

  “I can’t. Why are you so good at making me feel embarrassed? I’m gonna finish unpacking.” Wendy crossed her room to get to her phone.

  “He failed algebra and US history,” Eleanor said quickly, trying to cram in more about Montana. “But his arms are great, he can blow smoke rings, and he has a buzz cu—”

  Wendy turned the video chat off.

  She flung herself backward on her bed and laughed semi-hysterically while she waited for her heart to stop racing.

  Eleanor was the only online friend she’d managed to keep for long. Wendy was pretty good at making friends in real life, so relying on an online community for close friendships never really appealed to her. Eleanor just happened to like all the same weirdo stuff that she did back in sophomore year, and even though they lived in complet
ely different cities, they were online around the same time every day.

  When her parents announced they were moving to Chicago, it was purely coincidental that Eleanor lived there. Wendy and Eleanor were both super excited to randomly be placed in each other’s paths like that, and it seemed perfect right up until Mr. Darling firmly put his foot in the way of their in-person introduction.

  Wendy pulled up her maps app and figured out how far her new school was from Eleanor’s. It wasn’t that bad. She could probably figure out some way to meet Eleanor halfway between their schools after class was over and manage to get back home before anyone knew she’d been missing.

  Wendy did things like this back in their hometown, so it wasn’t nearly as stressful to imagine doing it here. Of course, the city was bigger, but that just meant there’s better public transportation and more emergency services in case anything went wrong. Back home if something happened, you had to wait half an hour or more for an ambulance. Here, she could probably just look up an urgent care center and take a cab.

  Some of the books she’d dumped on the floor fluttered their pages angrily as a huge gust of wind blew into her room through the window.

  Wendy grimaced and stacked them neatly against the wall. She wasn’t normally this careless, but the bookcase they belonged in needed to be rebuilt from scratch, and after doing the bed, she simply did not have the energy.

  Then Wendy slammed the window shut. It rebounded off the bottom of the windowsill and reopened itself, leaving a crack more than an inch high. Wendy scowled and pushed it back down again much slower, and this time closed the lock on the top. Then she paused and tugged the window just to check it, and to her great irritation, it swung right up again, even though it was supposed to be locked.

  Wendy shifted the lock to the other side and pulled on the window.

  Up it went.

  Great. She looked out at her new neighborhood. Things seemed quiet, and it was well-maintained enough to not immediately suggest they were about to be burgled, but this was still a problem.