Page 6 of Darling

Really.

“Can you tell me about what it was like when you were living here?” Wendy asked. Hopefully a distraction would help.

“Well,” Mrs. Darling started. “We didn’t live in as nice of a neighborhood as we do now. We were in this part of the city called Logan Square, over here on the blue line by the California stop. There were a lot of families there, which was good. But the city didn’t take much care of the infrastructure, so there were a lot of crumbling buildings and crumbling roads … I’m a lot more familiar with that area than the neighborhood we’re in now.”

“What did you do for fun?”

Mrs. Darling’s mouth twitched into a small grin. “We mainly got into trouble. It was the early 2000s; it was much more common for everyone to be out running in the street until the sun set.”

Wendy threw out her arms. “AND YET—”

“And yet,” Mrs. Darling said with incredible finality.

Wendy sighed and reached into the cage to give Nana a few pets before returning to the window.

“We know you’re a good girl and your friend probably is, too,” Mrs. Darling said. “It won’t be forever, just until everyone gets settled and you get a bit more familiar with the city.”

“I know, I know,” Wendy said, defeated.

“Besides,” Mrs. Darling continued, “it’s harder to tell if something could be dangerous when you’re not as familiar with your surroundings. You’re smart and creative, but even smart and creative people can get caught off guard. Your father and I trust you—we just don’t trust this situation. You understand that, right?”

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” Wendy said with a smirk, hoping to lighten the mood.

Instead, Mrs. Darling looked pensive. “When—when I was fourteen, a couple of friends and I went out to a party with some older teenagers and things got really out of hand.”

“Is this another ‘teen mom warning’ story?” Wendy asked.

Mrs. Darling scowled. “I had you at sixteen, not fourteen, and no, it is not. Anyway, we went to a roller rink in a part of town that I had never been to before, and everything started out normally. One of my best friends met a cute boy who bought us sodas and fries. He was really glamorous in this … Billy Idol way: kind of punk rock but with a really sweet face. His friends were with him and they were also very cool and really nice to us. They paid for our arcade games, and the main guy even won my friend a stuffed animal. I remember thinking that he was amazing at Skee-Ball, could have gone pro if there was a market for that. Very light-fingered…”

Mrs. Darling looked out the window for a minute, then she gazed at the train car floor.

“After the roller rink closed, we were going to head home, but the boys wanted to hang out at this cemetery across the street. One of them had a bottle of wine and wanted to share it with the group. I remember thinking it was so funny because none of them were old enough to have gotten it from the store, but it just sort of appeared. It made me a little nervous. But mostly, I thought they were cool, and I’d never drank before, so we decided to follow them.”

Wendy sat down across from her mom and leaned her head against the window as she listened.

“He took us all the way to the center of the cemetery,” Mrs. Darling continued. “It was windy and dark, but they lit a small fire with some twigs, and we began passing the bottle around. I didn’t drink much; I didn’t want your grandfather to smell anything on me when I came back home.

“It wasn’t late enough for him to get really mad; it was only around ten thirty. Up until that point I wasn’t really doing anything I wasn’t allowed to do yet, and I wanted to keep it that way.

“Eventually, someone suggested that we tell scary stories. I remember … listening to stories told by some of the other boys, but losing track of where the leader was for a while. We were having such a good time that I didn’t really notice he was gone until my best friend complained that she was cold without him next to her. One of the boys shrugged and said that the leader liked to wander off and that maybe he’d gone to the bathroom or something. It sounded feasible, so we accepted the explanation and kept going. The story we had been listening to was building to a crescendo and we were all really invested.

“Suddenly, right before the story was going to end, one of the boys threw dirt over the fire and the entire cemetery went dark.”

“What happened?” Wendy asked quietly.

Mrs. Darling shook her head and pressed her lips into a tight line. “We were kids and we were scared, so we started running. Not just us, the boys, too, and they were yelling for—I’m sorry, Wendy, it was years ago, and I don’t remember his name anymore. I’m sure you’re probably tired of hearing me call him the leader, but that’s what it seemed like he was. Anyway, we were running, and I spotted the cemetery gate. All I had left to do was jump over it and head for the bus stop, when suddenly there was a bunch of screaming. Not yelling like we had all been doing, but horrible, frightened screaming. Shrill, like you only hear in movies. Then it was quiet.”

Mrs. Darling put her hand in Nana’s cage and smoothed it over the dog’s fur gently for a second before continuing.

“I didn’t look back. I jumped over that fence and ran so hard and fast. I ran past the bus stop and got on the train instead because I didn’t want to wait on the sidewalk. When I got home, I went straight to bed and didn’t talk to anyone until the next day.

“When I went to school, I found out that the rest of my friends had made it home safely, so I started to relax. Then two weeks later, Grandpa was watching the news while I was in the kitchen finishing dinner. There was this story on about a body having been found in the cemetery in an open grave. It said there were bruises shaped like fingers around the neck and that one of the victim’s thigh bones had been broken like someone had kicked it with all their might. When they showed a picture of the deceased, it was one of the boys we’d been with that night. One of the quieter ones, who had held my hand as we skated for a whole song when he’d noticed that I wasn’t as steady on my feet.”

“Did Grandpa know?”

“I refused to talk to him about it, but he could tell that I was getting depressed and was a bit jumpy. I got over it after some time, of course. But when Grandpa got an opportunity to work in the suburbs, he leaped at the chance and moved us all out of the city.”

Wendy tapped her foot on the ground. “Whatever happened to the leader? Do you think maybe whoever killed that boy killed him, too?”