Darling

by K. Ancrum

  As they drew closer to the train station, police sirens got louder and louder.

  Wendy hadn’t exactly expected that whole ordeal to be over, but she figured things should have calmed down at least a little bit, and it was kind of alarming to be wrong.

  They turned down the street, and Curly glanced over his shoulder at Tinkerbelle and Wendy. “You guys should get in between us and Peter,” he said. “That way we can guard your backs.” He reached over to curl his arm around Tinkerbelle’s shoulders and gently guide her forward.

  Nibs moved aside to let Wendy get ahead of him, then he slung his arm over her and squeezed her shoulders reassuringly. “I’ve got you,” he said, hoarse like smoke.

  Wendy’s heart ached at the gesture in a way that she couldn’t describe, and she silently forgave him, too, for the incidental kidnapping. When they turned the corner, out of the residential area and onto the main street, they were plunged back into the chaos Wendy had gratefully left earlier.

  There were fewer police, but there was much more activity: The train station doors had orange cones around them and signs about redirection were posted to the door. All the station attendees had left the area, and there were only police now. Wendy couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but she did see a few people lying on the ground with their arms behind their backs as an officer stood over them, barking questions. There were a few other people being detained, and the whole thing seemed like it was escalating terribly. Wendy assumed Peter would turn at the sight of the police and take them all in another direction. She was surprised to hear him swear and start jogging toward the scene. She was just about to ask what was going on when Tinkerbelle made a noise that sounded like a cross between a gasp and a scream.

  She pushed past Peter and started running at a full sprint toward a car at the edge of the commotion. Curly and Nibs started running, too, so Wendy followed their lead. Peter wasn’t far ahead of them, and she watched him pull his scarf up over his face and take what looked like a firework out of his messenger bag.

  “Omi! Omi!” Tinkerbelle shrieked, smacking at a police car window. Immediately the nearest police officer shouted at her to get away from the car, but she refused to stop screaming and banging on the window. Behind the glass was a dark-skinned girl with long black hair. She looked exhausted and significantly less hysterical than Tinkerbelle, but she had her palms pressed against the window from the inside.

  Peter whooped, so high and loud that Wendy flinched and almost stopped running entirely. Peter twisted, deadly fast, and snatched something else out of his bag and chucked it at Nibs. The metal pinwheeled through the air like a boomerang, but Nibs leaped up and caught it squarely. It looked like the mixture of a crowbar and doorstop, with a wedge on one end.

  Peter whistled sharply and with a rhythm that made Wendy realize he was communicating with the boys wordlessly. At the noise, everyone looked up—cops and people being arrested, alike. The other kids on the ground began curling their legs underneath them as if preparing to get up and run, despite the angry shouting from the officer who had been handling them. The officer dealing with Tinkerbelle gave up on talking her away from the car and decided to bodily haul her off. He had barely lifted her up from the ground when his head snapped back violently, and he fell like a stone. Wendy looked over, terrified, and saw sweet baker Curly with a bandanna over his face and what looked like a military grade slingshot in his hand.

  Peter whistled again, and Nibs tossed the metal bar to Curly and picked up speed, leaving Curly and Wendy behind, following Peter in the opposite direction of the police car.

  “There he is!” one of the officers shouted.

  Immediately all their attention was on Peter and Nibs. Peter had duct-taped the firework, which was now lit, to what looked to Wendy like a crudely constructed Molotov cocktail—if the war films she’d watched had any accuracy to them. Peter threw it directly into a car window.

  A lot of things happened at once.

  Curly pushed Wendy violently forward, hard enough that she ran even faster, stumbling into Tinkerbelle, who was still clawing at the police car door. Then Curly yanked both girls down to the ground at once and covered them with his body.

  Wendy made eye contact with the girl in the police car, Tinkerbelle’s “Omi,” and saw her brown eyes widen with terror as she turned in slow motion to what Curly was protecting Tinkerbelle and Wendy from.

  The car exploded in the brightest red Wendy had ever seen. The Molotov cocktail provided ten times the incendiary a firework needed, so what should have been a slowly burning display in the sky instead filled the area with a light so bright that it looked almost like dawn as it went off all at once. As well as a noise so loud, it made her eardrums ache. Thousands of brilliant sparkles went in every direction, and burned significantly longer than Wendy assumed they would.

  Curly leaped off Wendy and Tinkerbelle the instant the noise faded, then spun the crowbar-type thing in his hand expertly, jammed it in the crack between the cop car and its door, and began wrenching at it.

  Wendy spared a moment from watching Curly try to break into the car to witness the aftermath of the most dramatic act of crime she’d seen in real life. All the law enforcement that had previously been focused on detaining the kids on the ground had adjusted their level of alarm to calling for backup, screaming into their walkie talkies, and peeling off in their cars or running toward the explosion on foot. As curious people began making their way over to see what was making all the light and noise, only to start screaming and coughing from the smoke, the remaining police began to focus on crowd control.

  Wendy realized that Curly was tugging on her sleeve.

  “Cut their zip ties off,” he said.

  “What?” Wendy asked dazedly. She realized the people who had been lying on the ground in the throes of being arrested were crouched on the same side of the cop car as they were. They were about high school–aged and looked as terrified as Wendy felt.

  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.

  Omi stared at her blankly, clearly not kidding at all.

  “How much does she know?” Omi asked Tinkerbelle, her brown eyes not leaving Wendy’s face.

  “Nothing important,” Tinkerbelle replied. “Enough to follow instructions.”

  “Let’s keep it that way,” Omi said, and it sounded like a promise.

  She reached a hand over to Wendy. “I’m Ominotago; only Tinkerbelle is allowed to call me Omi.”

  Wendy shook her hand lightly.

  Ominotago pointed over at the boy who looked like her. “This is Waatese, my little brother. He’s a sophomore.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Wendy said. Waatese buried his face deeper into his arms until Wendy could only see tufts of his hair.

  “Fyodor is the one pretending he’s not scared,” Ominotago said, pointing at the boy with the Russian accent.

  Fyodor raised a hand in a combination of a wave and a dismissal. “Your hair,” he said to Wendy, with a smile tucked in the corner of his mouth. “Beautiful.”

  Wendy thought about the fried curly mess, which, after all this running, must be sticking straight out from her head. “Uh. Thanks,” she said, not believing him at all.

  “He flirts with everyone; don’t pay attention to him,” Ominotago said tersely.

  “I’m Minsu,” the slightly shaken Asian American boy said from across the bus, giving Wendy a peace sign with the hand currently wrapped around his crying friend. “And this is Charles. Give him a minute.”

  Charles covered his face with both hands and continued crying.

 
Ominotago gazed at him fondly. “He’s one of our linebackers.”

  Curly reached across the seats and smacked Charles comfortingly on the back.

  “Yo, don’t hit him. He doesn’t like to be hit,” Minsu said sternly.

  Curly immediately shifted to a firm squeeze before leaning back into his seat. Wendy stared out the front of the bus window blankly for nearly a mile. Curly typed into an old phone while Tinkerbelle and Ominotago sweetly whispered to each other. The rest of the boys sat in complete silence, like they were riding home after an extremely tense day of school.

  Wendy looked over at Curly and thought about what Prentis had said. She wondered which of these people Curly had a crush on. He wasn’t acting sheepish like he’d been at the dinner table, so it was extremely hard to tell.

  Wendy glanced over at the blond, Fyodor. He could be an option if Wendy stretched her imagination a bit. Ominotago had said Fyodor was a flirt, but she didn’t say it was just with girls.

  Waatese, Ominotago’s brother, seemed a bit young for Curly, but Wendy wasn’t sure how old Curly was, either, so that wasn’t a guarantee.

  Minsu, who was still comforting Charles, was a maybe. But he had just snapped at Curly, and Curly didn’t react at all the way someone would if their crush snapped at them. He’d hardly reacted at all.

  Charles was adorable, and so far he was Wendy’s best guess. Charles was clearly emotional, but probably the most physically impressive of the entire group. She was surprised he hadn’t just ripped the zip ties off with sheer force. He looked like he could give Nibs some tips, and Nibs was no slouch in the biceps department.

  “So,” Wendy said to Curly, getting ready to start fishing for hints, “how did you all meet?”

  Curly didn’t even look up from his phone. “Ominotago and Waatese are my cousins.”