7
More than Playing House
It was still dark when I felt someone shaking my shoulder. I could barely make out the tattoo on Nibs’ face when I opened my eyes.
“Shhh,” he said and motioned for me to follow him.
I climbed out of the hammock, rubbing my eyes, confused. Nibs is tricky because of how old he is. I mean, technically, here in Neverland, age doesn’t really matter. As long as you’re legal, there’s no worry that some scary social workers will chase you down and bust you for squatting. Still, although he hid it beneath blue hair dye, Nibs’ age was catching up with him. I could tell that he was probably even older than Pan.
Nibs turned being lost into a career. In the decades since he fell out of his pram, he’d been halfway around the world and back. He liked to brag about all the places he’d been and illustrated his stories by pointing to whatever stick-and-poke ink he acquired in various cities/houses/shows/squats. I don’t think bragging is very good form, and I’m not really sure why Pan let him get away with it. Nibs’ favourite stories were about his time in Berlin. He spent a few years among all the ex-pats there, making as much art as he could—mostly graffiti-style paintings on boards he would pull out of dumpsters. Nibs had a lover there, a filthy boi who taught him to tattoo and marked his face. I think that boi was as close as Nibs has ever come to settling down. He always got soft when he talked about that boi, but never uttered his name.
They lived in little apartment rooms behind a squatted trans bar. Together, they smoked cigarettes and tagged their bodies and all the walls with intricate abstract designs. In the winter, they huddled together to stay warm when the bar hadn’t sold enough beer to buy coal for the little stove they used to heat the apartment. On weekends, they would take a train out of the city to walk around the abandoned amusement park. Nibs always talked about the time he threw ropes and suspended that boi from the frame of the crumpling Ferris wheel. (He shouldn’t ever tell John Michael that story; I think it would break her little SSC brain.) I think that boi was the only person he ever really loved, and then he overdosed right there in their bed. Nibs was the one to find him. The way Nibs tells the story, that’s when his world ended again. From there, he came back to the States and wandered around for a bit, hopping trains and trying to disappear, until Pan found him.
Nibs and Slightly didn’t get along because Slightly was always dreaming of her life before Neverland. For Slightly, it was almost as if being a lost boi was just temporary. It’s hard to trust someone who seems like they have an exit plan, who might betray you at any moment. That’s what Nibs said he could smell in Wendi too.
“Tootles, I just can’t do it. I’m not going to listen to some little grrrl playing Mommy. That ain’t my kink, and I refuse to submit to that.”
“But we have to; it’s what Pan wants! You don’t know how it will be. You haven’t even given her a chance!”
Nibs pulled out his knife and slipped it between his wrist and the leather. Even though it was the middle of the night and all of Neverland was asleep, I yelled out for Pan. Nibs rolled his eyes. He’d meant what he’d said: once the respect was gone, so was his loyalty. He felt as though Pan had betrayed him, and so he owed Pan nothing.
Pan groggily crawled out of Wendi’s blanket bed, confused and frustrated at having been awoken so rudely. His eyes followed to where I was looking at Nibs with the knife in one hand, cuff in the other. The padlock was still intact, but the leather cuff itself had been sliced in half. There was nothing to be said. Pan wasn’t one for begging or negotiation. It was over, and he knew it. Pan took the cuff and, without a word, walked back to Wendi’s bed.
I started to cry. I didn’t want Nibs to go, didn’t want him to leave me alone, but I also knew that there was no going back. Nibs’ bag was already packed. I reached out to shake his hand, but he pulled me into a hard hug, though normally, Nibs and I weren’t very good about being close to each other, or anyone. Nibs broke away from my embrace and walked out of Neverland, a free boi.
Wendi later told me how, when Pan came back to bed, he was upset but wouldn’t talk about it. Instead, he grabbed his knife and pulled her left hand close. He stuck the tip of his knife under the little yellow stone on her birthstone ring and easily pried it loose. The stone went flying across the room into the dust before Wendi could reach for it. “I would have saved that! He might come back.” Wendi cried. “Nibs chose to leave, he’s gone, and you must forget him,” was all Pan said to her before going back to sleep.
The following days were filled with getting to know Wendi and making Neverland the kind of place she felt was decent enough to live in. Wendi and John Michael gave their oaths in blood to Pan and Neverland. We were permitted to watch. I don’t know why he waited so long to mark them. Maybe Nibs’ departure shook him, or maybe Pan was distracted—that wasn’t for me to know. The ritual didn’t take long. First, he opened an alcohol swab and ran it across their right shoulders before swabbing the tip of his knife. He took Wendi first. She was a big grrrl, and only a couple of delicious tears ran down her cheeks, but she did not cry out. John Michael, to her credit, also took Pan’s blade honourably. When he was done cutting the stars, Pan pulled a black handkerchief from John Michael’s pocket and dipped the corners in her blood. “Now you have earned the right to wear this,” Pan said, handing it to her. It was a very Hook comment, a very Pirate-like move. Normally, Pan doesn’t put much weight in those kinds of rules, but I think he knew it would mean something to a boi like John Michael, and he was trying to connect with her. John Michael put the handkerchief into the right back pocket of her jeans, with the bloody spot proudly showing. Later that night, I caught Wendi in the bathroom twisting to see her oozing shoulder in the little cracked mirror, a smile across her face.
One day, Pan and I went out to the thrift store and, for ten dollars, bought Wendi the biggest couch that we could find. It was velvety and green with a thick, dark wooden frame. It could fit all us bois, or Wendi and three of us. You have to be more delicate when dealing with a Lady; I was working on remembering that. It felt so good to be out with Pan, almost like the old days, and I was honoured to be the boi that he trusted on this adventure to please our Mommy. At first, I was worried about Pan and I both having Wendi for a Mommy, but Pan was still everyone’s Sir. He still called all the shots. We didn’t talk about Nibs.
I think I started to fall in love with Wendi in those first few days. I’d been so skeptical about her after Nibs walked out. None of us had ever had a Mommy. When we came out as queer and, for most of us, simultaneously as leather bois, we all had gone for Sirs. I shouldn’t speak for the other bois, although I know their stories nearly as well as my own. But I can tell you that I played as hard as a Sir would let me, and as deep as I could go. I played for blood and bruises and for scars, the ones you can see and the ones you can’t. I wanted to cover up the oldest scars, the ones I got before I was brought out. I (mistakenly) thought then that only masculinity could bring me there. But it was becoming clear that Wendi wasn’t skittish, and that she could handle everything us bois laid before her.
Pan could recognize the wildness in our eyes and know how deep and far we’d let him take us in that first battle, but Pan’s not one for aftercare. Wendi cared, she cared a lot, and she wanted us to know it. It seemed like all her time was devoted to caring for us. I can only imagine how that adjustment must have been for her, going from being a little grrrl to a Mommy with all these bois for whom she was responsible. At first, it must have been a bit like playing house. I don’t mean that as disrespectfully as it sounds either, as playing and make-believe are traits Pan values as much as loyalty. Survival in Neverland is dependent upon make-believe, so in this, Pan and Wendi made a good team. Wendi was blooming in this new world, in this new life. In the early days, she didn’t speak about the Darlings or the world she came from. She appeared to be shifting and changing, becoming lost, discovering the way that broken glass sparkles under the glow of streetlights, the w
ay that you can lay hands on another person and watch them come alive under you.
We bois didn’t always make the caretaking easy. None of us knew quite what to expect from a Mommy, so the first time I came back to Neverland with skinned knees after having tried to jump a fence on the waterfront, I thought she would be mad about the rips in my pants. Mommy didn’t scold; she looked worried when she first saw me creep in, and the worry didn’t pass from her face until she’d felt me all over and was certain there were no broken bones and only a little blood. Mommy took me into our little bathroom, took my pants down, and held me tight while she poured alcohol across my knees. Before Wendi came, the bathroom was filthy, and you would have had to dare me to sit on that floor. With Wendi, the smell of chemical clean came into our lives.
I curled up in her lap, across her frayed pink sundress, the mint-green apron under my head. I don’t know what was wrong with me; I’m Pan’s boi, I flag black, but here I was, sitting in Wendi’s lap, my eyes filled with tears as she kissed away the sting. I’d never noticed before that moment how dark her eyes were. Looking at Wendi, I felt like I was drowning. Unlike Pan, she hated to see me in pain, and having caused me discomfort with the alcohol made her own eyes glisten with unshed tears. I almost came when she put little car-and-wild-animal-print bandages across my scrapes. It was the strangest realization for me that I had no interest in having sex with Wendi, yet I wanted to be with her more than anything. I staggered out of the bathroom, confused about who I had become.
In Neverland, any failure to adhere to the protocol of imagination was punished severely and physically. Slightly, who was a sweet boi, struggled the most with remembering this. She would use scare quotes to talk about a battle, insinuating that it wasn’t real, and as I’ve said, she talked way too much about how sweet her birth family must had been. Her knuckles were always bloody, but she struggled to remember this very simple lesson, one of Pan’s most important rules: the world we created and the way that we related to each other was real, more real than anything else, and grownups could never be trusted. I’m proud that Pan never had to beat me for the infraction of forgetting that rule. In some ways, I guess you could say that I’m a simple sort of boi. I wanted Pan and everything about his world that came with him. There wasn’t anything worth remembering about where I come from.
I was surprised to see how well Wendi adjusted to our world, not just to being a Mommy to us bois, but to everything about our lives. One morning, right after when she came, she snuck out of Neverland. I first thought that she’d gotten tired of being our Mommy and had decided to leave us, so I started to cry, but she had just gone to the diner around the corner and came back with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. I guess that’s part of my trust issues … don’t know if that will ever change. Another morning, Wendi left before we awoke but didn’t go to the diner. She headed down the tracks to the river and went to the Lagoon. She actually had the guts to walk into the Mermaids’ house and try to make friends. It was morning, so they were all home. I suspected that Kelpie felt some type of way about this grrrl, and it would have been within her right to keep Wendi out of the Lagoon, but she didn’t. When I asked Siren about it later, she said that Kelpie loved grrrls too much to let any boi get in the way. “Femmes stick together,” was one of her mottos. That and “Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.” Kelpie didn’t take shit from anyone, especially bois.
Wendi had brought cookies to share with the Mermaids and spent all day with Kelpie. She began to spend a couple days a week with the Mermaids, who fixed her up with some new outfits and taught her how to do her makeup. Soon Wendi traded in all her pink dresses and nail polish for red, “a more appropriate colour for a Mommy of so many bois,” she responded when one of the Twins asked about it.
I wondered if Wendi was going to be homesick and drive us all to throw her out of Neverland. I was shocked that she didn’t seem to be preoccupied with the life that she’d left behind. It’s a thing; when folks have just fallen out of a pram, they often struggle with the adjustment. But Wendi didn’t seem worried about anything from her previous life, and for someone who seemed to have everything figured out before Pan found her, that seemed odd. I assumed that she loved us so much that none of that mattered anymore. But I later figured out that she hadn’t changed that much. Despite every single fucked-up thing that happened in her short life, it hadn’t killed Wendi’s ability to trust. Somehow, in spite of every broken promise and crappy system that touched her, she remained confident that all the opportunities she’d built for herself—college, scholarships, everything—would always be there like an open window, waiting for her. I’ve never met anyone so convinced that things would just work out. I hoped, for her sake, that the world worked the way that Wendi thought it would.
I suspected that Wendi would probably leave us all eventually. That’s just the way I am—I expect everyone to leave me. I was just relieved that the Darlings didn’t come looking for the children. For the first few days, we were careful to keep the two of them hidden inside. Pan sent me down to check out the stroll where the cops would circle, harassing some of the Mermaids, occasionally ticketing the grownup men. Sometimes they posted missing-persons flyers when they were searching for runaways, but none were for Wendi. I hated talking to the cops, and even though I’d already hit the magic eighteenth birthday, I still flinched when I saw police cars. I don’t think you ever really forget how it feels to be hunted. Wendi and John Michael never understood how lucky they were to have escaped out the window without having to live, for years, in hiding.
Wendi turned out to be a tricky one. While she seemed content with her decision to live in Neverland with us, she was also able to hold onto a sense of where she came from: the manners, the education, and her inexplicable trust in grownups. She didn’t talk about it with me or any of the bois or even with Kelpie or Undine. Even though Wendi spent a lot of time at the Lagoon, Siren remained aloof from her. It’s not a good feeling to know that you’re partially responsible for drowning someone. I should know. It’s a dirty truth that Siren and I share, and in a sick way it brought us closer. I am still afraid that one day I’ll hear Wendi talk about the Crocodile. Somehow, though, it seems like she’s been lucky, and it isn’t chasing her.
At first, I really didn’t think that John Michael would last a day with us—she was such a preppy baby dyke. I guess our world was more interesting to her than algebra or chemistry classes had been. John Michael might have studied kink in books and tied up a grrrlfriend or two, but that was just baby queer sex. Life at Neverland, on the other hand, was serious, and she had to learn that. I think John Michael was in it to be Pan’s, and she was going along with the Mommy/boi thing because it was a package deal, but the hardest thing for her was that she had to listen to Wendi, that she had to call her Mommy.
John Michael did get real close to her pigeon, Bear, and spent most of her time climbing into the rafters to visit with him. And right away, it seemed like John Michael didn’t remember much about the life she left behind either. I liked that; it made me feel like maybe I could trust her, at least some day. She started to really understand how if you lived here, if you swore your allegiance, then everything was about Neverland. It didn’t take long for her to translate all her reading into practice, and soon John Michael became a battle opponent we could have fun with. In time, we all began to respect John Michael as one of the bois. Everything is about all of us bois together, as a pack.
I guess it began to bother Wendi that John Michael was either forgetting or not caring about the world that they had left, and she started their conversations with remember-whens and don’t-forget-hows. I wanted to get up the nerve to ask if it meant Mommy was thinking about leaving, but I didn’t have the guts. To ask, to question the realness of our family, would be disrespectful not only to Mommy but to Pan. I couldn’t do that.
Wendi liked structure and rules, and she came up with a way to help John Michael remember that there were other choices for her. Wendi
insisted that every day after lunch, there would be lessons. I didn’t realize it when she started, but she was schooling us on options, on possibilities, on worlds that we had completely removed ourselves from, experiences that Mommy wanted her bois to know about. Had I thought about it that way then, I would have been angry and rebelled, because it was almost like she was schooling us for more than Neverland could give us. I would have rejected that, fought it hard, and I would have confided my suspicions to Pan. If he’d heard it that way, he wouldn’t have liked it. Who knows, maybe it would have changed everything. Or maybe he wouldn’t have believed me, would have accused me of mutiny and threatened to throw me out of Neverland. Pan’s right; second-guessing the past is a fool’s game. It’s far better to just forget.
After lunch, as I said, we did “lessons.” Mommy would ask us to write about the outside. She didn’t permit the essays to have anything to do with sex or kink or even queerness most of the time. We had to write about memories of where we came from. I think Pan let her get away with it because, to him, she was still that innocent spoken-word poetry grrrl he had spent months admiring. Mommy had us write our stories, even the ugly stuff that made us punch back tears, and the slivers of broken memories that weren’t so ugly. Mostly, I made things up. Neverland was my world. I’d given up everything for it, and I saw no reason to dwell in some little grrrl’s fantasy of what could have been. I became most distrustful and disrespectful of Mommy after lunch.
But Curly loved our writing lessons. He always tried to beat John Michael by writing better poems about where he’d been, what he’d done. He wrote about childhood vacations and houses with pretty yards. He was careful not to write about the future, lest Pan think he was making plans. Curly wrote detailed accounts of his life before he was lost, except the details always changed, and John Michael would laugh when the pieces didn’t align. I thought it was disgusting, and tried to get out of these exercises whenever I could, but it was a contest, and Pan insisted that not one of his bois back down from a challenge.
Lost Boi Page 7