Page 4 of Darling

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.

“Mom!” she yelled down the stairs. “The window is broken!”

“Which room?” Mrs. Darling yelled up from the kitchen.

“Mine,” Wendy yelled back.

She went into the empty room next to hers and tested all the windows. They all worked perfectly fine. Even the bathroom window locked tight when she tried it.

“We gotta fix this, Mom!” she yelled down the stairway.

“Just put something heavy in front of it. Your dad will fix it on Saturday.”

Wow. Wendy felt super loved and cherished now. She went into her room and picked up her hardcover copies of Les Misérables, Crime and Punishment, and Infinite Jest, the bulkiest books she had, and dropped them in front of the window. For now, that would have to do.

CHAPTER 2

Wendy came downstairs the next morning to find her parents making breakfast, and exactly none of the rest of the boxes unpacked.

“So … are we just going to live this way?” she asked, sliding into a kitchen chair.

Mrs. Darling glanced at her reproachfully, then went back to scrambling eggs. “We bought unpacking as part of the moving service, but the unpackers aren’t coming until Sunday. Your father got twenty percent off on the deal because of the inconvenience—and it is an inconvenience.”

Mr. Darling shot Wendy a look over his newspaper and wiggled his eyebrows. Wendy smirked back at him and dug a bagel out of the bag on the kitchen table.

Mrs. Darling continued to complain. “And aside from all that, we still have to pick up the dog from the airport, and your father is taking the car, so we’ll have to pick Nana up on the train.”

The train? “Like … Amtrak?”

“No. The city train, and you have to come with because we can’t have Nana on a leash on the train. She has to be in a gosh darn carrier, which means I need you to help me carry the other side of the kennel.”

“If you used the CrossFit membership I got you for Christmas last year, you wouldn’t need Wendy’s help with your ‘sick lifts’ because your ‘gains’ would more than cover the weight,” Mr. Darling said, hiding his grin in the curve of his paper coffee cup.

“You can’t distract me with jokes while I’m frying eggs on a baking sheet that I had to buy this morning at a corner store, George,” Mrs. Darling snapped.

“We could just unpack the stuff ourselves,” Wendy said nonchalantly. “Then maybe, instead of supervising movers on Sunday, I can go to brunch with my fri—”

“No. We already paid for it. And you’re not going anywhere with anybody until I get to speak with their parents live and in person.” Mrs. Darling sat down and started spooning eggs onto her bagel. “I’m not going to have you get kidnapped within the first seventy-two hours we’ve been in this city.”

“But if you do get to speak with Eleanor’s parents … then I can hang out with her?” Wendy asked.

Mrs. Darling chewed and looked Wendy over. “I suppose.”

“Okay, great. I’ll work on arranging that. Also, if we’re making efforts to not have me be kidnapped, could we also work on getting my window fixed? Because it would be super ironic if I got kidnapped out of our own home—”

“Yes, fine,” Mr. Darling interrupted. “Just go upstairs and get ready to pick up Nana.”

Wendy shoved the last bite of her bagel into her mouth and went to her room. She dialed Eleanor and laid back on her bed.

“It’s ten a.m. and it’s Friday,” Eleanor said quietly, her face super close to the screen, with one of the edges of her hand blocking most of the light. “I’m literally in homeroom and we aren’t allowed to have our phones out, so make it quick.”