Page 81 of Kill Your Darlings

Back at the house, Wendy went to her room. She thought of writing another letter she wouldn’t send to Thom, but decided against it. What she really wanted to say in that letter was that maybe her momhad somehow been responsible for her father’s death. It was what she’d been thinking about since hearing her mother in the bathroom. Did she hold his head under when he was drunk? Or maybe she just let him drown? Maybe that was all there was to it. But even though she had these thoughts, she didn’t plan on writing them down. Never. Somehow she knew that what her mother did, she did for Wendy more than anyone else. And Wendy knew she would never do anything now to hurt her mother.

So she decided to not write a letter to Thom. Besides, they weren’t letters to him anyway. They were to a pretend version of him, or maybe they were just letters to her future self. She picked up her pen and wrote the word “POEM” at the top of a blank page in her notebook in all caps. Underneath she wrote, “By Wendy Eastman.” Somewhere between her previous obsession with the poetry anthology she’d stolen from her old school in New Hampshire, a book calledPictures That Storm Inside My Head, and her new obsession with Edgar Allan Poe, Wendy had decided that she might like to write poetry herself. She didn’t know what those poems would be like, only that it was a way of writing about yourself without writing about yourself. Or something like that. She’d decided to give it a try.

1982

i

It wasn’t a typical yellow school bus, but more like a tour bus, with plush seats and tinted windows. Wendy Eastman, one of the first to arrive for the eighth-grade trip to D.C., decided to sit about three-quarters of the way back. If you sat too close to the front, you looked weak, and if you sat all the way toward the back, the kids tended to be scary. She was only fourteen, but she’d already moved towns ten times that she could count. Being a new kid at a school didn’t bother her all that much, but it was good to have some rules for survival.

As the bus filled up, getting louder and louder, she turned so that she was looking out of the window at the middle school parking lot. There was a dissipating layer of dew on the sports fields in the distance, and the sky had a pinkish tinge. She’d tried to get out of this trip, but apparently all the eighth graders were required to go, or that was what her mother had told her. Wendy did wonder about that, because she saw the check that her mother wrote out of her own bank account to send her on this trip. If it cost money, it couldn’t be required, right? But it didn’t matter. Her mother wanted her to go,enough that she had somehow come up with the money, so Wendy had decided to make the best of it.

Still, it was one thing to keep to yourself in school and another to have to be by yourself on a three-day road trip with other students. There would be nowhere to hide. And it wasn’t starting well; she could see in the reflection of the window that the kids now coming onto the bus would reach the empty seat, see that it was next to her, and move on. Maybe she’d luck out and have both seats to herself, and then she could read all the way down, not have to talk to anyone.

But just before the bus began its journey—Mrs.Chappell, one of the parent chaperones, was calling out names from the front of the bus and ticking the names off on her clipboard—Wendy saw a boy running across the parking lot, a plaid suitcase banging against his legs. It was Thom Something—she knew his name because he’d frozen up while reciting “In Flanders Fields” in their shared English class, but their teacher, Mr.Stone, had been kind about it. Mrs.Chappell reopened the bus’s door and went down and helped him stow his bag, then Thom was slowly walking down the aisle, looking for a place to sit. He passed Wendy’s seat, then came back and sat down next to her. Some kid two rows back made a kind of oohing sound that got a tepid laugh.

“Hey,” Thom said.

“I’m Wendy.”

“Oh, yeah. I know. We take English class together.”

They didn’t talk again until they were on the highway, riding along on the hiss of the wet road, the windows blurry with rain. Wendy had decided not to talk unless he talked to her first, but she was intrigued by the book that sat unopened on his lap. It was by Roald Dahl, an author she knew, but the book, a hardcover clearly borrowed from the library, was one she hadn’t heard of.The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. She asked him about it.

“It’s short stories and they’re pretty gruesome. More for adults than children.”

“Gruesome how?”

He said there was a story about two bullies shooting all these birds and then tormenting another boy. Then the bullies kill a swan and tear its wings off, making the boy wear them. It did seem gruesome, and she wondered if he was making it up to impress her.

They stopped at a Burger King for lunch, and Thom went and found friends to sit with, while Wendy got a table for herself. Mrs.Chappell must have felt bad for her, because when she finally got her food she sat with Wendy and asked her a string of questions about her life. Wendy thought it was probably more humiliating to eat with a chaperone than it was to eat alone.

Back on the bus she thought Thom might find another place to sit, but they wound up next to each other again. She had her own book with her now that she’d retrieved from her baggage; it wasCujoby Stephen King, a paperback she’d snagged from her older brother Alan’s room the night before. She hadn’t started it yet.

“Oh,” Thom said when he saw the book. It had occurred to her that she was one-upping him in the gruesome book contest.

“Have you read a Stephen King book before?”

“No, but I sawSalem’s Loton TV. Did you see that?” Thom said.

Wendy had heard all about that show, and how terrifying it was, from her brother. “No,” she said. “Was it scary?”

She thought Thom might act all brave, but instead, he said, “Are you familiar with the term ‘scarred for life’?”

She laughed. “Yeah, I heard it was scary.”

“Who told you that?”

“My brother saw it and told me about it.”

“He’s older?”

“Yeah. He’s a freshman at the high school.”

“I have an older sister. She’s a junior. She tells me about all the scary movies she sees as well.”

“Like what?”

“Everything.Friday the Thirteenth.The Omenfilm.”

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