Page 29 of Darling

Curly handed her a wicked-looking pair of gardening shears. “Come on! We don’t have much time. They’re minors and they didn’t do anything.”

“We don’t know that!” Wendy cried, but Curly was no longer listening to her. He had backed up about ten feet from the cop car, then without warning, sprinted back at it, leaping at the last minute. He flew at a horizontal angle, slamming the bottoms of his feet against the bar wedged in the door with breathtaking athleticism and accuracy. The car door gave a groan of protest before hanging at a looser angle, but still firmly shut. Curly landed hard on the pavement. He groaned in pain, but scraped himself up off the ground, anyway. Then he grabbed the bar tight in his fists and wrenched again, this time with all his might. The bandanna over his mouth and nose had fallen and revealed his face, still soft with baby fat, teeth clenched in a grimace of effort, eyes pressed shut. He pulled so hard an involuntary screech escaped his throat.

Then with a noise quieter than Wendy would have thought, the police car door cracked open, and the girl inside flew out and right into Tinkerbelle’s arms. They pressed foreheads together, Omi cupping Tinkerbelle’s jaw in both hands, an inch away from a kiss. Tinkerbelle swooned against her, sobbing something Wendy couldn’t hear, looking more tender than Wendy could ever have imagined the icy girl who had painted her face and shouted at her in the street could look.

“Oh my God, dude, please!” one of the guys behind Wendy begged, his eyes wide with terror. “I just got a college scholarship, and all we did was walk out of the train station, and they said we were witnesses or something. I can’t get arrested. My parents will kill me. Please. Please!” He looked like he was on the verge of tears, so Wendy numbly started working on cutting his zip ties off.

Curly was standing there, looking at Tinkerbelle and Omi with the gentlest expression. He put his arms around the pair and held them as they rocked back and forth in relief. He kissed Omi on the top of her head and curved his arm up so he could cup the back of Tinkerbelle’s skull in his hand.

“This nice, but we need to leave from here,” one of the boys on the ground said in a heavy Russian accent when Wendy finally got to him last. The instant his hands were freed, he leaned over and smacked Curly on the back, hard. “Focus,” he said firmly.

Curly pulled away from Omi and Tinkerbelle, looking a bit dazed for a moment, and then his vision sharpened. He tilted his head to listen, then started walking away from the car.

“Don’t run,” the Russian said to Wendy in a conversational tone. “Draws attention.”

Wendy looked over her shoulder, and the other boys were following at the same pace, occasionally glancing over at Curly like he was their savior and a demon at the same time. They blended in with the crowd that had come to watch the explosion, as they walked up Broadway to Lawrence Avenue. Wendy tried not to look around too desperately, thinking hard about how she looked and wishing she hadn’t let Tinkerbelle decorate her face so ostentatiously. Behind them, over the sounds of people yelling and cop car sirens and fire truck sirens, there was the flash of green light and the boom of another explosion that followed as Peter presumably threw another Molotov firework. Wendy flinched, and Curly reached back and pulled her in front of him, protectively.

The instant they turned the corner, Curly started picking up speed until he was jogging.

“He’s going for the bus!” one of the boys exclaimed, and they all ran behind him. Curly smacked the side of a bus with a flat hand, and the doors that had been on the verge of closing reopened. Curly jumped inside, then stuck his hand out, waving for them to follow quickly. Wendy thanked God and also Jesus that she’d worn tennis shoes and forced her aching legs to continue churning until she was safely clinging to the pole just inside the bus’s front door. Curly pulled his wallet out of his jacket and slid two twenties into the meter.

The bus driver, a rotund and serious-looking Black man, eyed the group of children warily. His eyes slid from Wendy’s garish makeup to the welts on the other kids’ wrists to Tinkerbelle and Omi holding hands tightly, landing at last on the tool with which Curly had wrenched open the cop car door. A tool which, in the hand of a teenager and not a locksmith, was clearly only to be used for mayhem. Then, with a sigh, he decided to mind his business and close the door. The bus pulled away from the street.

Wendy’s heart felt like it was about to slam right out of her chest. She needed to sit down, and she needed to sit down now. She pushed through the group, made her way to the back of the bus, and collapsed into an empty seat. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, covered her face with her arm, and focused on breathing hard enough to get oxygen back into her tired muscles. There were so many horrifying things happening that her thoughts were reduced to only the most banal, probably as a psychological shield to protect her from going completely to pieces. Currently she was thinking about how she needed to start working out more. She’d probably done what was equal only to about a mile of running and walking, but physically, she felt like she was about to die.

Fabric brushed her leg and Wendy cracked her eyes open. The rest of the group had settled around her, completely filling the seats in the back, Curly and the Russian on her left side, Tinkerbelle and Omi on her right, and three other boys split between the two forward-facing seats right in front.

Now that Wendy was finally catching her breath, she did some inventory of the people she’d released from police custody.

Omi was gazing at her with a lot more concern than someone who had only recently been in a cop car should have for someone else. She, like the rest of the group, looked about seventeen years old. She was wearing black skinny jeans and a black T-shirt with a matching blazer over it, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Her black hair was parted down the center, and she had one side braid tied off with a thin red ribbon. She looked like she was on her way to an art gallery, not like she’d left the house specifically to run around in the streets.

In fact, all the kids were dressed nicely.

The Russian boy was in actual dress pants, although he had a T-shirt on and no jacket. To Wendy’s amusement, his blond hair was combed back into a pompadour. He was clearly trying to look charmingly vintage, and if Wendy was honest with herself, it was working. He was also the tallest of them and seemed the most laid-back about what had happened, his legs propped up on the chair in front of him as he gazed out the window.

The least laid-back about what had happened had to be the boy who had begged her to cut off his zip ties. He was openly weeping into the shoulder of the boy sitting next to him. He, too, was dressed fashionably in a slender-cut denim button-up shirt, with chinos rolled up at the bottom. He was African American, and like the rest of them, he was very muscular and stocky.

His friend, an Asian boy who seemed quietly shaken, had on a white dress shirt and dark jeans. He looked self-conscious about comforting his friend and was pointedly looking away, but he kept his arm firmly wrapped around his crying friend’s shoulder.

The last boy looked a little bit like Omi and was curled completely into a tight ball, knees under his chin. Only his dark eyes and eyebrows and short dark hair were visible above them. He looked a little bit younger than everyone else and a little less muscular, but still athletic.

“Are you the football people? Peter said we might be meeting up with you?” Wendy guessed.

Omi’s expression immediately changed, her face shuttering closed like a slammed door.

“Is she one of Peter’s friends?” Omi asked in quite literally the prettiest voice Wendy had ever heard.

“Don’t call them that,” Curly said quickly. “Peter only does because no one can stop him.”

Tinkerbelle shook her head at Omi and put a gentle hand on Omi’s knee. “No, she’s not Peter’s friend. Peter kidnapped her from her house, and now she’s coming with us to the party.”

Omi frowned harder. “You should go home,” she said firmly to Wendy.

“She can’t,” Tinkerbelle said with a sigh. “Peter has been looking at her with that face that means he’s focused on her and will be until something more interesting comes along. If she runs without reason…”

The silence on the bus was deafening until the Russian boy tapped the unlit cigarette he was holding against the seat in front of him and glanced at the girls. “He hunts you down,” he said with a crisp nod before turning back to the window.

“What? Seriously?” Wendy asked. They had to be joking.