by Zoe Barton
“You don’t mind it?” I asked Buttercup, still feeling shy. “Cleaning, I mean.”
She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, and I realized she might feel shy around me, too. That made me feel much better.
“We mermaids don’t clean, you know. We live in the water. It doesn’t make sense to wash. Cleaning is kind of fun, because I’ve never done it before.”
I thought for a second. “I’ve actually never washed my clothes by hand before either. At home we have a washer.”
“A wash-her?” the mermaid repeated skeptically.
“You know, a machine,” I explained. “You put clothes in it, and some soap, and you turn it on. Then you can come back later, and the clothes are all clean.”
“Ma-chine?” Buttercup said.
She was just repeating everything I said. It made me wonder if mermaids might be . . . well, a little slow. Then I remembered what Peter had said right after I met him, and I snorted softly.
“This is magic where you come from?” she asked.
I nodded. “Magic. Or machinery.” I didn’t want her to ask me what machinery was, so I quickly added, “I’ve never done laundry with a mermaid before either.”
She smiled, wider than before. Her teeth shone extra bright, like pearls. “You know mermaids don’t usually get along with Lost Boys. Or their Wendy girls.”
Maybe she was trying to tell me that she wasn’t allowed to hang out with me. “But you’re friends with Button,” I pointed out hopefully.
“Yes, but no one knows about it. It’s a secret.”
“Oh! Then I won’t tell, I promise,” I said, and Buttercup smiled again, gratefully.
So Peter didn’t know everything. Maybe a Wendy girl could make friends with a mermaid, after all.
We worked in silence for a while. The more I hit it, less and less dirt came free of the fabric, and when I couldn’t see any more dirt come off, I started on another blanket.
By the third blanket, I had fallen into a rhythm. Buttercup started humming, and since her song seemed so familiar, I joined in. Then we started hitting the blankets in time to the music, and when we caught ourselves striking rock against fabric in unison, Buttercup and I grinned at each other.
It did start to feel kind of fun—much more fun than it might have been if I were alone, anyway.
The sound of sleigh bells came over the water. Hearing them, I recognized the song we were humming.
I stopped myself and turned around. “Where’s that music coming from?”
“Him, probably,” Buttercup said, pointing toward the ocean. At the mouth of the river, a huge and leathery creature swam. Only a few bumpy ridges were visible above the water. “He used to tick like a clock, but he’s been singing since yesterday. Very strange. Very sudden.”
The music got a little louder, and I could hear the words “Jingle all the way!”
Then the crocodile surfaced, lifting its head out of the water, and I saw the scar around its slitted eye and the row of enormous yellow teeth.
“Yesterday, he swallowed my mother’s iPod!” I watched the crocodile’s head fall back into the sea.
“Eye pod?” said Buttercup. “What’s that? Is it like glasses? Button says he needs glasses.”
I shook my head. “It makes music. I think ‘Jingle Bells’ must be playing on repeat.”
As if it could sense us, the crocodile started swimming upstream, slowly and purposefully.
I gasped, scrambling back from the rock, away from the water. “Buttercup, get out of the water! It’s coming this way!”
The mermaid looked up, drenched blanket in one hand and rock in the other, watching the crocodile come closer and closer.
“Buttercup, hurry!” I cried, running forward to drag her to safety.
But instead of hurrying, Buttercup did a strange thing. She slid deeper into the water until her mouth was covered, and she began to hum, the same way that the mermaids had done the morning I arrived in Neverland, right before the huge wave splashed Tink.
I couldn’t hear her very well over the sound of singing, but apparently, the crocodile did. It slowed, stopped, and finally turned around, swimming back to the ocean like it was in a daze. Buttercup didn’t stop humming until it was out of sight.
My mouth was open, and I closed it with a snap.
Buttercup laughed. Or at least she smiled really wide and made an extra-loud gurgling sound, which I assumed was how a mermaid laughed.
“He never bothers the mermaids,” she said, rising from the water and taking a seat on the rock with a tiny, smug smile. “We have our own ways of dealing with him.”
“That’s so cool,” I said. “Can you teach me?”
Her smile started to look a little apologetic. “I don’t think magic can be taught, not to a human.” I must’ve looked disappointed, because she added, “But maybe I can get you a trident. That’s what we use when he’s extra hard to manage.”
I perked up. A trident would be cool.
Buttercup looked over my shoulder, toward the path that led back to the Tree Home. “Someone is coming,” she said, dumping the blanket she’d been cleaning and the rock onto the shore. “I have to go, Ashley.”
“See you soon!” I said quickly, hoping that it would be true. She was the first person in Neverland to call me by my name.
She slid under the water and started to swim out to the ocean, the way the crocodile had gone.
“Wendy girl!” shouted a Lost Boy behind me. I turned. Kyle glided through the trees. “I finished early, so Peter said to come and help you!”
“Great!” I called back, picking up the half-cleaned blanket Buttercup had left behind. Looking downstream, the way she had gone, I wondered if I would ever see her again. I hadn’t even gotten the chance to thank her.
Chapter 15.
Peter Gives Me a Tour of His House
When Kyle and I got back with the clean blankets, I figured out a much better method for drying them than spreading them out in the sun like Button usually did. Better, as in much more fun. This time, I actually convinced the Lost Boys to try it.
We flew races with the blankets tied around our necks like capes.
Whoever lost the last round had to play referee for the next. Most recently, that had been Dibs, and he wasn’t too happy about it. He watched us sourly from the finish line, which Button had scratched in the dirt with a sharp stick.
“On your mark!” Dibs called.
Across the clearing, Kyle, Prank, Button, Tink, and I all stood on the same thick branch on the Tree Home. (Peter still hadn’t emerged from his house.)
“Get set!” cried Dibs.
Our blanket-capes flapped in the breeze. We leaned forward. The Never birds squawked encouragingly from the next tree.
“Go!”
We all jumped and flew as fast as we could.
Tink took the lead. As a fairy, she had more flying experience than me and all the Lost Boys put together. Of course, being a fairy also meant that her blanket-cape was way too big for her. One good gust of wind blew her off course.
That left me in the lead. I grinned and leaned forward.
“Wow, Wendy girl—your blanket’s almost dry,” said Prank right behind me.
“Really?” I turned to look.
But the second I started to slow, Prank zipped around me and zoomed ahead. “Fell for it!”
“Hey!” I cried, trying to catch up, but Prank had already crossed the finish line.
“I like this way of drying blankets much better than Button’s,” Prank said, turning to me with a huge, smug grin. “We should’ve gotten you for a Wendy girl years ago.”
It was hard to be mad at Prank after he said something like that. I’m pretty sure that’s why he said it.
“Does that count?” Kyle asked, coming in right after me.
Button came in last, behind Tink. “I guess this makes me the referee again,” he said sadly. “I’m not very good at racing.”
“I could disq
ualify Prank,” said Dibs. He sounded like he liked the idea.
I shrugged. “I mean, it’s not like we set any rules.”
Very wicked smiles spread across everyone’s faces, and Tink rubbed her hands together gleefully. I started to worry that the next round would have more cheating than racing.
Unfortunately, I never got a chance to find out.
The door to Peter’s red house banged open, and Pan himself emerged, his fists planted firmly on his hips. “All right—who wants to help me clean in here?”
Tink tossed her cape over the nearest branch and zipped over to Peter with a merry chime. It sounded a lot like “Me! Pick me!”
“Not you, Tink,” said Peter. “You’re too little.”
The fairy stopped and drifted to the nearest branch with a sulky flicker.
Peter looked over at the rest of us.
All the Lost Boys shrank back, hanging their heads. You would’ve thought that Hook had just asked who wanted to walk the plank.
Kyle even squeezed his eyes shut and whispered, “Please no more cleaning. Please no more cleaning.”
“How about the Wendy girl?” Peter said.
I began untying my blanket-cape, trying not to pout. I didn’t feel like cleaning anymore either, but I would get to see the inside of Peter’s house.
“Bummer,” said Prank with an apologetic sort of grimace. Button and Kyle nodded, looking sympathetic.
“Why?” asked Dibs. “She’s a Wendy girl. Isn’t cleaning what she’s here for?”
I shoved the damp blanket-cape at Dibs. “Well, somebody still needs to dry this.”
Quickly, I flew across the courtyard and past Peter, ducking my head through the red house’s small doorway. Then I looked around eagerly.
Inside, Peter’s house was bigger than it looked from the outside. Big enough for furniture. Not homemade Neverland furniture like the leaf hammocks that Button made, but real furniture: a small bed painted blue, a wooden nightstand with a lantern, a rocking chair set beside the fireplace, and a bookcase with lots of shelves. The striped wallpaper peeled in a few places, but the curtains in the window were very white, almost like they were new.
Strangest of all, it wasn’t messy. Not a sock was on the floor; no pillow was out of place. I didn’t even see any dust.
Confused, I turned to Peter. “But it’s already clean.”
Peter grinned as proudly as Prank did after he pulled off some great trick. “I know. I cleaned it already. But the Lost Boys aren’t allowed in here. I tricked them so they wouldn’t get jealous when I showed you around.”
“Oh.” I didn’t mention that he had tricked me, too.
The inside of Peter’s house didn’t look too much different from my bedroom, or any other kid’s my age. Besides the fact that it was in a tree, it looked pretty normal.
But in a weird way, I felt like I was looking at a secret. Even though he was famous, even though he had adventures that my friends at school never dreamed of, maybe he still wanted what other kids had. Maybe he was a little sick of adventures. Maybe, to Peter, having a normal life seemed more exciting.
“Where did all this come from?” I asked.
Peter shrugged, like it wasn’t important. “Found it. This is what I wanted to show you,” he said, motioning me toward the bookcase. “It all came from Wendy girls.”
The shelves were cluttered with a strange bunch of stuff—a wooden badminton racket with broken strings, old playing cards yellowing at the edges, half a Frisbee with teeth marks, a very worn stuffed rabbit, an old-fashioned porcelain doll with glass eyes, a broken hula hoop, a deflated soccer ball. A very frilly apron hung from a peg on the side of the bookcase, covered in grass stains.
Looking at all of it made me feel very uncomfortable. I started going over what I’d put in my backpack, wondering what I could leave in Neverland.
Peter watched me eagerly, waiting for me to say something.
So I pointed to the object sitting on the very top shelf all by itself—a green acorn attached to a delicate silver chain. “What’s that?”
“Wendy’s acorn necklace. It saved her life,” he said proudly. He reached up and took the necklace down, holding it carefully. It was obviously very special to him. He turned the acorn over so that I could see the crack in it. “Tootles—he was a Lost Boy then—he shot an arrow at her, and it hit her right in this very spot.”
I gulped. “I’m glad that the Lost Boys like Wendy girls a little better nowadays.”
“Well, it was Tink’s fault. She told the Lost Boys to do it,” Peter said, gently returning the necklace to its shelf.
I made a mental note to be more careful around Tinker Bell in the future. I mean, I already knew she didn’t like me. But it was news that she could do something more dangerous than just pull my hair.
“And that,” Peter said, pointing to a wicker basket on the bottom shelf, “came with the latest Wendy girl. The one who helped make the food trees.”
I looked at it carefully. It was big enough for Kyle to fit into. So, Grandma Delaney had made the food trees. But I still had a hard time imagining her in Neverland, playing mother to the Lost Boys—she was so old.
“But this is what I wanted to show you,” Peter said, reaching into the back of one of the middle shelves. He drew out a book. It was beat-up, but still kind of fancy. Even though the leather spine was cracked, the fairy etched on the cover was gilded.
“How pretty,” I murmured, tracing the spine—Children’s Tales, it said.
“I know you don’t want to be a mother, but will you read the Lost Boys a bedtime story?” Peter asked hopefully, his eyes very wide. “The Lost Boys love stories.”
I glanced up at Peter, startled. I had not been expecting him to ask me that.
My stomach knotted. It wasn’t exactly guilt. I mean, I still definitely thought I would make a better friend than mother.
But like I said before, Neverland’s magic only works when you really want to become the thing you’re Pretending to be. And even though I wanted to make the Lost Boys happy, I really didn’t want to be like Mom. Even if I tried, I wouldn’t feel even the slightest tingle.
“Will you read to them?” Peter said again, offering me the old book.
I nodded slowly, taking it from his hand with a tiny smile. I could tell them a bedtime story too—my own way. After all, I could Pretend to be the very best storyteller that Neverland had ever seen.
That night, while we ate pizzas that Button had picked for dinner, I read stories to the Lost Boys. And to Spot, who had smelled the food and flown down to beg for scraps. My fingers and toes started tingling as soon as I opened the book. I even made up voices for all the characters, which I thought was a nice touch, as I read “The Three Little Pigs,” “Aladdin,” and “The Nightingale.”
I think the Lost Boys enjoyed the last one the most. The wheezy old-man voice I used for the emperor made them giggle. Peter got into the spirit too. He pulled out his pipes and played the nightingale’s part, making up a tune whenever the bird sang in the story.
The Lost Boys listened without saying a word. Dibs sat in front, his eyes open very wide, the corners of his mouth curling up.
The sun went down halfway through the story, and Peter made Tinker Bell sit on my shoulder so I would have enough light to read by. Considering how much she hated me using her as a lamp the first time, the fairy wasn’t thrilled. She crossed her arms and interrupted me with angry chimes, but once she noticed the illustrations, she didn’t mind having a front-row seat.
“And they all lived happily ever after. The end,” I said, a little hoarsely. “I think that’s it for tonight.”
I closed the book in my lap, and Peter took it out of my hands.
“Awwwww,” Dibs said.
“One more,” Kyle said. “Please.”
“You know, I’m not the only one who can read these,” I pointed out wryly. “Somebody else could take a turn.”
The Lost Boys exchanged glances, and it oc
curred to me that maybe they couldn’t read.
“Actually . . . ,” Dibs said.
“We’ve forgotten how,” Prank said with a shrug.
“Oh,” I mumbled. None of them looked at all embarrassed about it, but my cheeks were definitely burning. “Sorry.”
I felt so awkward about it that I started to reach for the book in Peter’s hand, hoping that reading another story would make it up to them.
“No, we don’t want her to read all of them,” Button said. “She has to save some for tomorrow.”
I smiled at him gratefully and rubbed my eyes. They felt kind of scratchy.
“Time for bed,” Peter said firmly, and I felt pretty grateful to him, too.
“Wendy girl, will you tuck us in?” Kyle asked, flying up to his leaf hammock. “Please.”
I stretched and rubbed my neck, sore after bending over a book so long. “I’m not sure that I know how.”
“It’s not hard,” said Button, halfway up the tree.
“Kind of self-explanatory,” said Prank in a hopeful way.
“But Mom never tucks me in,” I said, and all the Lost Boys gasped.
“She never tucks you in, and then she leaves you?” Kyle said. It was obvious that he didn’t like my mother very much.
I couldn’t let them keep thinking that way about Mom. She wasn’t as bad as I made her seem. I knew just what to do to change their opinion of her.
I flew up the tree and found Kyle’s leaf hammock. He peered out at me curiously. “Okay, so maybe she doesn’t tuck me in, but she always kisses me good night. No matter what. And she always kisses me good night exactly like this.”
I leaned past the netting around his hammock and kissed his cheek. “One to kiss the bad dreams away.” Then I kissed the other. “One to give good dreams.” And finally, I kissed his nose. “And one to keep the fairies from carrying you off at night.”
Tink chattered angrily. She apparently didn’t appreciate me giving fairies a bad reputation.
I giggled. “Sorry, Tink, but that’s how she does it. And she told me, that’s how her mom kissed her good night when she was little.”