Darling - K. Ancrum Page 0,3
her fingers.
“Exactly. So hold off on whatever options are in your native area, and when your parents finally let you out of prison, I’ll introduce you to Montana.”
“You’ll WHAT?”
“Introduce you to Montana. He’s single. And pretty okay.”
“I THOUGHT THAT WAS A HYPOTHETICAL.”
“It was both. Two birds, one six-foot-two stone named Montana.”
“I can’t. Why are you so good at making me feel embarrassed? I’m gonna finish unpacking.” Wendy crossed her room to get to her phone.
“He failed algebra and US history,” Eleanor said quickly, trying to cram in more about Montana. “But his arms are great, he can blow smoke rings, and he has a buzz cu—”
Wendy turned the video chat off.
She flung herself backward on her bed and laughed semi-hysterically while she waited for her heart to stop racing.
Eleanor was the only online friend she’d managed to keep for long. Wendy was pretty good at making friends in real life, so relying on an online community for close friendships never really appealed to her. Eleanor just happened to like all the same weirdo stuff that she did back in sophomore year, and even though they lived in completely different cities, they were online around the same time every day.
When her parents announced they were moving to Chicago, it was purely coincidental that Eleanor lived there. Wendy and Eleanor were both super excited to randomly be placed in each other’s paths like that, and it seemed perfect right up until Mr. Darling firmly put his foot in the way of their in-person introduction.
Wendy pulled up her maps app and figured out how far her new school was from Eleanor’s. It wasn’t that bad. She could probably figure out some way to meet Eleanor halfway between their schools after class was over and manage to get back home before anyone knew she’d been missing.
Wendy did things like this back in their hometown, so it wasn’t nearly as stressful to imagine doing it here. Of course, the city was bigger, but that just meant there’s better public transportation and more emergency services in case anything went wrong. Back home if something happened, you had to wait half an hour or more for an ambulance. Here, she could probably just look up an urgent care center and take a cab.
Some of the books she’d dumped on the floor fluttered their pages angrily as a huge gust of wind blew into her room through the window.
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