Wendy

I met Wendy when we were both still young—very young, actually. It was that awkward time when you’re no longer little children and your body is starting to change and you’re growing like crazy.

Where we met was on that blazing post-apocalyptic hellscape of a Jungle Planet called Meezed-Zedbee II, but for us it was home. She was from there; I'd just moved there.

Now, there’s a good chance that you might be all like, Wait, T … this is a sci-fi story?

And my response, as usual, is, Don’t … worry about it. Seriously, you worry too much about what you’re reading and that makes you miss a lot of details. So try not to, okay? Yes, it's on ‘another planet’ and it’s in the ‘Thirty-Second Century,’ but it’s normal, okay? Just like your life in 2022 with all its post-apocalyptic craziness is normal. So relax into it, babe, and don’t worry about the setting so much. It’s just a story that I am telling you.

So I met Wendy when we were that young. I was still going by Darien then, and she knew me as a boy. We were ‘going together’ shortly after that, which if you yourself are young now you probably don’t recognize that as an insane term that tweens used for dating. It’s all absurd because you couldn’t actually date or really go anywhere, but whatever. Idioms and slang, right?

We broke up pretty fast, as I was wont to do, and then maybe a year later I tried to go with her again, but got into a conflict with this dipshit who was, you know, properly going with her. I could tell you his name, but I already catch a lot of shit for telling you too many names of unimportant characters, and he’s only gonna be around for a second. All you need to know was he was this salty Jungle type, kina like Wendy’s dad—who will be more important later—and that he threatened to beat me up a lot but never did.

So that was the second time we were involved, you know, such as it was.

Then there was the Blast Forward, when I, uhhh stopped being Darien and was Teresa. We dated properly at that point, since this was years later, and we were at the right age to do that and everything.

Wendy had become a pretty bad bitch by that point, and had a couple of lieutenants—this real hardcase wackjob named Roxy, and the tall, dark, and beautiful Mickey. Me and Mickey would go on to have our own thing, as you will glimpse a bit later, or may know if you’ve read me before. And Roxy, well. That’s a whole other story for a different day. Oh, and Danielle was there, too, especially if Wendy wanted someone to do something stupid.

Just as an aside—so skip this paragraph if you’re easily confused or already overwhelmed—should you decide to go to Azza-Jono later, you might see a bunch of characters with the same names as these gals. But they’re not the same characters. They just have the same names and same relationships, more or less.

Why would you do that, T? you ask.

Save it for the play procedures, I say.

Anyway, so Wendy and I got together under kina bad circumstances. I’m not exactly proud of it, m'kay?

I’ve told this story before in longer form in Everything Fails, so imma give it to you short here. Basically my friend Plum wanted to date Wendy but was too chickenshit to ask her out, so their dumbass asked me to ask her out for them. Which I did, but it resulted in Wendy kissing me and us making out in the park instead of her getting together with Plum. Plum, who was … not happy and broke my nose over it. But anyway, anyway, these are just details, really. The point is we got together, she’s a bad egg, and I’m living as Teresa. That’s mostly what you need.

Wendy was feared for a few reasons. One was she was kind of batshit crazy and would do seemingly anything she felt like. Two is she had goons in Roxy, Mickey, and Danielle. And three is that her dad was a peacekeeper—this special kind of peacekeeper called a stern netter, and they specialized in catching and controlling people like Wendy. So it’s a classic rebellious youth setup, right? With Wendy being the delinquent child of the very man who goes around cowcatching delinquents and other wassails.

He was a supremely unpleasant dude, as you might imagine, with a gun on his hip, a permanent twist in his lip, and a thick Jung (that’s short for ‘Jungle’ as in ‘Jungle Planet,’ keep up please) accent. I’ve been told that the transcription of it is irritating to some readers, so. Be advised.

Here’s a sample. If I were to say, “I don’t have anything nice to say about the man,” in Jungtung, it might go, “I don have nuthin’ nice ta say ‘bout da main.” Or, perhaps, more authentically, “Ain got nuthin’ ta-say ‘bout dat muthafucka.” For the careful reader, you might notice this is a step toward the Jonovian patois in the Azza-Jono stories, but you needn’t worry your pretty head about that.

I have been advised by readers and writers—all white, if that means anything—to leave this sort of thing out, to render it in more ‘standard’ English. I stubbornly refuse, and you can think of me what you will. But I see no point in telling the story if I can't say it the right way, which is how it sounded when people said what they said.

So Wendy, her dad, and me.

Her dad hated me. Again, I’ve told this story already, so let’s say he hated me and leave it at that. Didn’t like that I was a delink (i.e., delinquent, c’mon) and that I was trans, that I smoked and drank—nevermind Wendy was way deep into some really bad shit. But that was a thing that happened with me a lot back then on da Jung; I got pegged as the bad influence.

Also, I had trouble fitting in with these girls. They were really mean, and there were all these elaborate parlor games they would play with each other. Wendy was the queen bee, so she seemed to set all the rules and command what was going on, but everyone else somehow knew what to do. I didn’t, so I often felt clueless and kinda dumb and like I was her dog or something.

She had an actual dog—this fuckoff huge mutant bloodhound named Ruthless, who she called Ruth and Babe and Babe Ruthless and Little Baby Ru-Ru and Peaches and a dozen other things. I didn’t like dogs, but they liked me. Ruthless in particular really liked me, and I kind of felt like he was protecting me whenever we were together.

So you know the title, I guess we can cut to the chase. Wendy died. She was murdered. It wasn’t ruled as that; it was determined to be accidental. She was killed in a car crash in a secluded Jungle byway.

When I found out about this, I thought I knew who did it. But I was wrong. So we’re going back there again, to revisit the scene, the suspects, and the clues, and figure out once and for all who killed her.

Play procedures:

• Write these names down as they are given here: Wendy (1) a.ka. Gwendolyn “Wendy” Glass, Roxanne “Roxy” Rollins, Michelle “Mickey” Janely. Make sure you equip them before going to Azza-Jono.
• Make a wild guess hypothesis as to who killed Wendy and why.
• Think of the people you would like to interview to try and determine the identity of the killer. You may think you can’t do that because you don’t have all the names, but you can think of their relationships to Wendy.
• Think on what might be my motive for trying to solve this. If you’ve read other books of mine, you may already know, but if you haven’t, go ahead and think of one or two reasons.

Story path:

Wendy 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 6 > 7 > 8 > 9 > 10