Page 43 of Darling

“This. All of it. Looking after Curly, Nibs, and the rest. Making sure everyone is okay. I know they talk about me behind my back and that they think I’m mean and stuff, but somebody has to be in charge. Somebody has to make the hard choices and sacrifices even if it makes them the bad guy, you know? I never wanted to be a dad; I just wanted to have fun with my friends.” Peter looked absolutely crestfallen.

He covered his face again and sniffed. “And then James shows up like it’s no big deal, and—”

Peter was crying again.

It was incredible how he cried like he was starring in a film. His face didn’t get puffy, snot didn’t drip from his nose, and his voice didn’t get all squeaky. He just naturally wept, his eyelashes clumping in wet spikes with just enough tears to drip delicately down his chiseled cheeks and angled jaw.

“James used to live with us,” Peter explained, his voice rough with anguish. “But he left. As soon as he grew up, he left and never came to visit any of us again. He was our family, and he just stopped visiting, and no one knew what happened to him. The twins cried for weeks. I … didn’t even know what to tell them.”

Wendy also didn’t know what to think. She watched as Peter wiped stubbornly at his face, as if he were embarrassed to be crying but unable to stop.

“And Curly thinks I drove him away, and I don’t know how to tell him that I didn’t,” Peter sobbed.

He rubbed his eyes harder. “I shouldn’t.” He took a moment to take a deep breath. “I shouldn’t be bothering you with all of this. You don’t even know any of us that well.”

“I—I’m sorry,” Wendy stammered, still at a loss for what to say.

The sparkler was getting low, spitting out its last bits of light.

“What do you even do when someone treats you like that, you know?” Peter asked, golden eyes wide. “We loved him, and he didn’t even say goodbye. And just now, he just left the train … Left us all, again.”

Wendy remembered Nibs’s moan of horror and the clench of Tinkerbelle’s hand and thought quickly. “Sometimes people just change as they get older, and they do things they might regret later. I’m sure if he knew just how much he meant to you all, he wouldn’t have left so suddenly.”

Peter was looking at the ground, at the train tracks rushing beneath them. Then he wiped his face again and took a few moments to compose himself. “I hate growing up,” he said to Wendy quietly. “I don’t want to change into someone who doesn’t care about my family. I just want things to stay the same.”

He pulled his gray jacket closer around himself and shivered. “You’re a really nice girl,” he said, incredibly heartfelt, and for the first time in more than an hour, Wendy didn’t feel like he was lying.

The sparkler she was holding breathed its last and went cold, plunging them back into darkness. Wendy looked at the burnt tip for a second, then tossed the sparkler down into the rushing steel below.

Peter’s eyes tracked the motion, then dropped. “When you go home,” Peter began quietly, “and you start living your life. When you go to school and have fun with your parents and get taller and bigger and smarter. When you have the whole world ahead of you and all the opportunities there are to offer in your hands. When you’re old enough to have your own daughter who wants to go on adventures and wants to see the world, will you remember us? Me and Tink and Curly and Nibs? Because when people grow up, they forget how…”

Peter was still gazing forlornly at the ground, so Wendy looked past him and into the train car beyond. She could see everyone’s faces staring through the grime of the door. Tinkerbelle was half out of her seat and leaning forward to make sure Wendy was okay. Curly and Nibs were leaning into the aisle, doing the same.

Wendy looked back at Peter, then cupped his cheek. Peter allowed his face to be tilted upward until it was completely reillumined by the moonlight. This close, Wendy could see his imperfections, the sheen of makeup covering his dark circles, the turn in his nose that told her it had been broken at least once, the salt encrusted at the corners of his eyes, and the stubble that pricked at her fingertips.

“I will never forget this,” Wendy promised.

Peter turned his head and kissed the swell of her palm—so gently it felt like a brush of a feather, but with too much heat and stickiness.

“Thank you,” he said, voice rough, “for being so nice to me.”

Peter straightened himself to his full height and stretched, leaning against the train car door as the wind blew his curls around riotously. The train was now going so fast and the wind blowing so hard that one of the flowers Dorothy had pinned in Wendy’s hair finally flew off. Peter reached out and caught it, plucking it from the air like he was picking it off a tree, rather than grabbing something flying at God knows how many miles per hour past him, and Wendy was once again sobered by how dangerous this boy was.

He didn’t try to put the flower back into her hair—though Wendy could see the thought occurring in his eyes for a moment. Instead he tucked the sprig of baby’s breath into his own hair and smiled bashfully back at her, looking ten times sweeter and more innocent than Wendy knew he was.

“Are you ready to go back in?” he asked. “I’m sure the others are missing us.”

Wendy nodded. Absolutely. She was absolutely ready to not be alone with Peter.

Peter pulled open the train car door and held it open so Wendy could walk safely in front of him. By the time she had a foot in the train car, Tinkerbelle had sat back down and Nibs and Curly were back in a signed conversation.

Fyodor had apparently found a light and was passing a cigarette back and forth with Tinkerbelle. They looked up as if surprised to see Peter, and Tinkerbelle handed the cigarette back to Fyodor. He took one last hard drag before dropping it to put it out, but Peter snatched it before it hit the ground and shook it warningly in Fyodor’s face.

“They’ll make your skin look like shit,” he said, putting the cigarette out against the window. “You want to look like you’re fifty in your thirties, keep smoking like this. If you’re really serious about modeling, Fyodor, you need a solid skincare regimen, not this crap.”

Fyodor clicked his tongue in the back of his throat and pulled a comb out of his pocket to straighten his pompadour. It was subtle, but Wendy could tell that everyone was relieved she was back. She could hear the mild giddiness in Minsu’s voice as he continued talking to Charles. She couldn’t tell if this was another fake conversation, because everyone seemed so engaged. It was different when you were a part of a situation and you see the shift from silence to mid-discussion—this felt like walking into a warmth that existed for ages before she got there. The only person who wasn’t involved was Ominotago, who had her phone out and was again focused very hard on texting.

“We’re close,” she said without looking up. “We have to walk for a few blocks, but we have only one stop left.”