Free Angel of Darkness by Katy Munger

that had once been me.
    â€˜What the hell’s the matter with you?’ the old man demanded of his son. ‘You look like someone just shot your dog.’
    Why had he gone there? I wondered. Somehow, I doubted that Adam had a happy pet ownership history.
    â€˜A rumor went around school today,’ Adam mumbled, moving as far away as he could from his father. He rolled down his window and leaned out of it, seeking the refuge of cold air against his face as his father accelerated on to the highway.
    The father actually sounded interested. ‘What kind of rumor?’ he asked.
    â€˜That the girl who got murdered yesterday was Darcy,’ the boy said. ‘Turns out it was true.’ Unlike my son, Adam did not feel so much sad as resigned. As if he had always known that Darcy’s life would end like this, that neither one of them would ever have a lick of good luck, not given where they had come from.
    â€˜Who the hell is Darcy?’ his father asked.
    â€˜Seriously? She was only my girlfriend for a year.’
    â€˜You mean that tease from a few doors down?’ his father asked. ‘The one with the huge tits just like her mother? Just like her grandmother, too, come to think of it. I went to high school with the mother. She was a slut, if I recall.’
    The thought of that creature terrorizing a high school with his greasy looks and ill-temper chilled me. Thank god I had not known him then.
    â€˜Her name was Darcy Swan,’ Adam said and he managed to infuse every syllable with hatred so thick I was astonished the father did not pick up on it. ‘And she wasn’t a tease.’
    The father pulled into the fast lane and shot past a series of cars, more interested in trying to beat a black Cougar than he was in trying to console his son. ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ he finally said, ‘her life wasn’t going to amount to much anyway.’
    Adam propped his feet up on the dash and stared at his boots. He started to chew on a fingernail, noticed that he had already gnawed the cuticles down to the quick, and dropped them into his lap again. ‘Yeah, dad, that makes me feel so much better.’
    His sarcasm was wasted on the old man.
    â€˜How the hell is your friend doing anyway?’ the father asked suddenly. I realized with distaste that he was talking about Michael.
    Adam glanced over at his father, surprised that he had asked. ‘He’s OK. His mother is there a lot and he agreed to stay there for a couple more days, at least, to see if it makes him feel any better.’ I knew just what the poor kid was thinking: it sucked to be in Holloway, but at least Michael had people who cared for him and who noticed what he was going through.
    â€˜His mother being that snooty blonde bitch that drops him off at the house sometimes?’
    â€˜Don’t talk about her that way,’ Adam said, taking the words right out of my mouth. ‘She’s done more for me than you ever did.’
    â€˜That still doesn’t make her any less of a snooty bitch. Thinks she’s better than us.’
    Adam just shook his head. He wasn’t going to take the bait.
    His father slowed and turned off the highway on to a winding side road. The kid looked up in alarm. ‘Where are we going? I’ve got homework. I have that big test tomorrow.’
    â€˜Relax. I’m just checking out a club the guys down at the bar turned me on to a few weeks ago. I’ll only be a minute. You can stay in the truck and study if you need to.’
    Yeah, because studying in the dark is so productive. He was truly Father of the Year.
    They pulled up in front of a low-rent bar I’d never seen before, which was no surprise since places like this tended to flare up like cold sores in our town. They were usually fronts for laundering cash from drug dealing or illegal gambling operations and were popular with people from a few states up because they brought in a