Wendy’s eyes went from narrowed and furious to wide and shocked. “I- I can’t believe you just said that, John,” she whispered. Wendy shook her head, looked at her hands in desperation, and then shot her gaze back up at him. “I’ve seen you try to throw away your experience and ‘agree’ with the doctors, but I don’t understand it. I don’t!” Her tone took on desperation, as did her expression, her eyes once more reflecting a building storm. How - how – can you honestly think that Neverland never happened? You. . . .” She pointed an accusatory finger at him. “You, who used to fly higher than the rest of us with your thoughts of quantum physics and – and – macro biology! John, you actually kissed Princess Tiger Lily, even though her father threatened to-”
John closed the distance between them in two quick strides and his hand was over her mouth, his face red, his blue eyes flashing angrily. “Don’t you dare drag me back into your pretend abyss again, Wendy!” He spat the words at her, his hand forcing her head to jerk with every syllable. “I had to claw my way out of it, fighting tooth and nail to regain reality and face what really happened to us! I will not play puppet to your string pulling again! Not now – not ever! Never!”
Never is a terribly long time, Wendy’s thoughts whispered.
But the stinging wasp-nest-like numbness that had encased her forbade her from further speech, even after John removed his hand from her mouth. He towered over her, a year younger than her, but half a foot taller. Wendy looked away, refusing to meet his gaze. She knew that if she did, she would either hit him or cry. And she had the strength for neither one just then. The sound of his words had attacked her like a million supernatural mosquitoes, leaving her drained of much more than blood.
“I’ll leave you with your thoughts, Wendy,” John straightened, his tone lower now and his demeanor one of a man who believes he has just won a very smart argument. “Maybe they can talk some sense into you.” He adjusted his V-neck vest sweater over the long-sleeved shirt beneath it, then spun on the squeaky heel of his new black loafers and strode out of the kitchen.
Wendy gently, distractedly, touched her face with shaking hands, and turned toward the sink.
*****
Outside the window, Tinkerbell stood straight and blinked. No, she thought. No, no, no, no, no, no! Not her! Not now! Oh! In frustration, she lifted off of the window sill and spun around wildly, thrashing her arms and legs out at nothing but thin air. This was horrible! But, of course, it made so much sense. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before? Because. That’s why. Because she didn’t want it to because she hated Wendy Darling and because Peter Pan was hers – Tinkerbell’s – not Wendy’s, and because there was no way in Neverland that Tink was going to let that Wendy bird interfere in their lives again!
Tinkerbell flew in mad circles, her tiny body containing so much anger that if she didn’t get it out, she knew she might explode. Her path through the night sky looked like a miniscule shooting star, streaking from here to there and back again with wild abandon.
Finally, many minutes later, Tinkerbell had spent a good deal of her fury and the fairy blew out a sigh and landed, in a puff of ash and dust, on the edge of a warm chimney. Autumn smoke lifted in weak fumes from the chimney’s recesses. The weather had turned colder these last few nights. Halloween was just around the corner. Winter was on its way.
Tinkerbell sank down to her bottom and folded her elbows on her knees. She couldn’t believe what she’d just witnessed. She wouldn’t even know where to begin with which part was worse.
It was all too obvious to the fairy, now, that Wendy and her brothers were most likely the other “children” of Neverland – the ones who hadn’t yet been taken care of. It was the Darling children who were not okay and it was this fact which was holding Peter to his promise and trapping him in the human, mortal world. Tinkerbell was smart enough to have figured that little bit out on her own.
The Darling children had been to Neverland and any child who visited Neverland became a part of it forever. In fact, Tinkerbell was so certain that it was the Darling children that Peter needed to tend to now, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before.
And that was bad enough. But that John Darling was forgetting – or disbelieving – in Neverland was… Well, it was… It was unspeakable.
Tinkerbell shook her head, once more, in absolute horror and wondered what she should do. She didn’t want to tell Peter. Of course, she didn’t want to tell Peter. Having Wendy Darling back in their lives was the last thing Tinkerbell wanted. But. . . Peter was aging. He wasn’t a little boy anymore, which was strange, in and of itself. If they remained in the human world, would he become an actual - adult?
Tinkerbell shuddered. And then she shuddered again, just for good measure. She had to get Peter back to Neverland. And Peter’s promise wouldn’t allow him to return until all of Neverland’s children were okay. And, as much as Tink hated to admit it, that meant Wendy too.
So, with a heart that was especially heavy in such a tiny body, Tinkerbell accepted the fact that she had to tell Peter what she had just seen. And the sooner, the better. She lifted off of the chimney with a flourish of pixie dust and fluttering wings and then dove down in between the two houses below, once more flying through the alley way. She would return to their home in the hidden woods and fill Peter in on the news. But first, she wanted to take one last peak at the Darlings. A little more information never hurt. Maybe it would help her figure out exactly what she and Peter needed to do for Wendy and her brothers in order to make things right again. Besides, pixies were naturally a curious lot. And the truth was, Tink really couldn’t help herself.
She flew from window to window of the Darling house, looking for one that was still lit, but every window was dark save one. It was the same living room window that she had watched from earlier. Tink gracefully landed once more and peeked through the curtains.
*****
“Wendy, I asked you to stay up because I wanted to talk to you about something else.”
Wendy Darling sat across from her mother, her hands folded in her lap, her fingers fiddling nervously with the long ties from her gray zip-up hoodie jacket. “Okay,” she said. Silently, she asked herself what else she was going to get into trouble for that evening. But because it was her mother speaking to her – her calm, logical and supportive mother – and not her father, she was a little less nervous than she would otherwise have been.
“Wendy,” her mother began again, slowly, as if searching for just the right words. “Mrs. Price called me today. She told me about the pages you wrote in class.”
Wendy stopped breathing. Somehow, she knew, as an animal can feel an earthquake coming, that whatever was coming next would not at all be good. Inexplicably, she knew, even before her mother went on, that whatever was coming next would be the worst thing to happen that night. It would be the worst thing to happen in a very long time. Perhaps, five whole years. And it would hurt.
“I also spoke with your doctor,” Mary Darling continued. “He told me about your session today.” She paused, took a deep breath, and went on. “He believes that it may be time to take your therapy to a new level, Wendy.” Mary pulled open the small drawer in the side table next to the sofa. “He prescribed these.” She reached in and pulled a brown bottle of pills from the drawer and then closed it. The white contents of the plastic prescription case jiggled.
The sound echoed in Wendy’s ears. She stared at the bottle as her mother held it out. She found no words on her numb tongue worth speaking. Medicine, she thought. And not the sweet pink kind that I’d always thought was the worst.
“They’ll help you, Wendy. They’ll help stop your dreams. You’ll sleep again. You’ll be able to concentrate on your studies and forget the past. . . .” Mary’s lovely face wore a desperate expression. “Take them, Wendy. Help yourself forget, dear. You’ve earned the right to let go.” She whispered to her daughter, stretching her arm and holding the bottle aloft before Wendy’s impassive face.
“That’s it, sweetheart. I have water here.”
Wendy tipped the prescription bottle until a single white cylinder appeared in her hand. She stared down at the capsule. It sat still, waiting and insipid, in her palm and, at that moment, Wendy could almost imagine that it stared back at her.
Mary Darling took a tall glass of clear, cool water from atop the side table and held it out toward her daughter. Wendy glanced up. She kept the single pill that she had dispensed and handed the bottle back to her mother as she, in turn, took the glass of water.
Then, without a single hopeful thought left in her tired mind, Wendy popped the white pill into her mouth and swallowed it down.
*****
At the window, a tiny pixie straightened, her green eyes wide with shock. “Bad,” she whispered, unaware that she’d even spoken aloud. “Bad. Very bad.” She took to the skies, streaking pixie dust behind her. “Bad, bad, bad, bad . . . .” Tinkerbell dashed back toward her secret place in the woods just as lightning fast as a fast fairy could fly.
*****
In Neverland, Hook dreamed. Except, because no one in Neverland had ever dreamed before, he didn’t know it for what it was. As far as Hook was concerned, he had suddenly become a piece of paper. Two-dimensional and covered with scrolling, cursive-written words.
He was facing a young girl, who was also constructed of two-dimensional, written-on paper. “Come away with me, Wendy,” he found himself saying. “Sail the high seas.” He motioned to the blue ocean around them with a flourish of his paper hand. “There is no place on this world that a wave, and a ship to ride it, cannot take you.” He smiled a charming smile.
The paper girl across from him smiled a gentle smile in return and curtsied. And then she straightened suddenly, and her lovely smile was gone.
Hook found his paper self moving forward. “No,” he muttered. But in the next instant, he was frozen in space and time and could only watch as the paper Wendy began to smolder, to smoke and curl in at the edges.
As the paper girl suddenly went up in flame, Captain James Hook lay in his bed in his dark, quiet ship, on the dark and quiet sea of Neverland and whispered the first word spoken in Neverland in one thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-five years. . . .
“Wendy.”
Chapter Four
Tinkerbell soared in through the open shutters and then took her human form. Peter was curled at the edge of his bed, nearly falling off, his fist clenching and unclenching in his sleep. He had kicked off all of his covers and Tink could see that he still wore all of his clothes. Which meant that he’d fallen asleep drunk. Again.
She pursed her lips and put her hands on her hips, sauntering to the bed with dark purpose. “Oh, Pe-ter,” she called quietly, her tone low and dangerous in the manner that only a fairy’s tone can be.
Peter twitched in his sleep, his brow furrowing and then smoothing again. He did not wake. Tinkerbell leaned over and, with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, she covered Peter’s nostrils, cutting off his air supply. It took a moment for this to have real effect, but when it did, Peter’s mouth opened in a hoarse gasp for breath and he jolted awake, coughing and moaning.
“Wakey, wakey, Peter Pan,” Tink said, her tone still low and unpleasant. “We’ve got trouble. And you need to be half-way conscious to deal with it.”
Peter Pan was not fond of the human world. While it was true that, since his arrival, five years ago, he had done many things and even, inadvertently had fun doing them – he had also been bombarded by the bad news that humans seemed to thrive on. He was not used to these things, having spent so much time in Neverland.
War, murder, disease. . . . It had all very quickly become too grown up for the boy who would never grow up, and since he could not return to Neverland, Peter Pan had hurriedly and desperately taken to the things in the human world that could make a person forget that he was in the human world, all together.
His favorite was wine. Sweet and chilled through fairy magic.
Unfortunately, it had become his favorite nearly every day of late, and so now, Peter Pan gazed up at Tinkerbell through what was most likely a haze of hang-over pain and very blurred vision. His green eyes were bloodshot and the stubble of hair that Tink had noticed on his chin and cheeks ever more regularly these days was back again.
“I suppose you want me to heal you, don’t you.” Tink cocked her head to one side and flipped a lock of blonde hair over her shoulder. “What would you do if you didn’t have me around to clean up your messes, Peter?”
“Get some sleep, for one,” Peter grumbled, running a hand through his dirty blonde locks and slowly sitting up. He looked around absently and then blinked. “Speaking of which - why did you wake me?”
“We have a problem.” Tinkerbell blew out a sigh and then sat down on Peter’s bed beside him. “A big one.” With that, she gently touched his forehead, and in a shower of pixie dust and wind chime breeze, Peter’s bloodshot eyes cleared, becoming sea green once more.
The shadows on Peter’s face receded and he sat up a little straighter. “Thanks Tink,” he said softly. She nodded and gave him a small smile.
“Now, what’s the problem?” he asked.
Tinkerbell hesitated for a relatively short but heavy moment before she finally said, “It’s Wendy, Peter.” She sighed and seemed to slump beside him on the bed. “She’s the Neverland child.”
Peter stopped moving. He stopped breathing.
Tink continued. “And she’s definitely not okay.”
John Darling closed his locker, turned the dial on his combination lock, and swung his book bag over his shoulder.
“Johnny, check this out.”
John turned to face his school friend, Adam, a much shorter blonde boy with glasses and clothes that always seemed to have come directly from a mannequin; not a wrinkle to be found from head to toe.
“It’s an article about dream interpretation using fMRI techniques,” Adam continued, his rather high pitched voice tinged with excitement.
“Let me see.” John took the magazine from him and started to look it over when a third boy approached.
“Johnny, is your sister coming to the game tomorrow night?”
John looked up. “Oh, hi Nick. Yeah, probably.” John blinked, recalling the fight he and his sister had had the night before and the medication bottle that he’d spied in the side table with Dr. Coffer’s name on the label. “Actually. . . I’m not sure,” he added, uncertainly.
“Oh? Is she okay?” Nick cocked his head to one side, studying John. Nick’s eyes were a hazel color so light that they contrasted starkly with the tanned complexion of his handsome face. He was at the Morrison School for the Gifted through a soccer scholarship and, because he practiced every day, before and after school, he rarely wore anything but his soccer jersey. Lately, due to the changing weather, he had begun wearing jeans during class and had gotten into the habit of pulling a denim jacket on over his jersey. The easily tossed-on wardrobe managed to flatter Nickolas enough that he had the yearning, if quiet, attentions of most of the genius girls in the school. And for some reason that utterly befuddled him, this truly irritated John Darling.
Still, although Nickolas Noble wasn’t as bright, by John’s standards, as he considered himself and his closer friends to be, he had to admit that Nick was a nice enough guy once you got to know him. All soccer aside, that is. Soccer, after all, was simply the Americanization of foot ball, which John had always considered a huge waste of time anyway, and-
“John?” Nick prompted again, his eyes searching his friend’s face.
“Oh. Sorry. Yes, she’s fine. Just busy is all,” John replied.
Nick nodded and the three boys walked out together, speaking in this manner for several minutes. But, once outside, John glanced up to peer past the stud
ent cars and busses. Something had caught his attention. Nick was speaking with Adam about something having to do with there being different kinds of genius, but John was no longer listening to the discussion.
Their voices droned out and seemed to fade away, as if he were in a bubble, and his vision honed in, tunneling toward an alley across the street. There, the dark outline of a figure, perhaps two, on what appeared to be a motorcycle, piqued his curiosity. He gazed at the outline for a long moment. He squinted against the late day setting sun, trying to make it out more clearly.
And then blinked.
Was that a spark of light he’d seen?
A flash of something like glitter?
He closed his eyes and shook his head as if to clear it.
“You okay, man?” Nick asked suddenly.
“Umm. . . . ” John opened his eyes again and refocused them on the alley. Whatever he had seen before was gone. No dark figures. No motorcycle. No pixie dust.
His breath caught and his mind reeled.
What had he just thought?
“D-man, you don’t look so good,” Adam said, looking up at his friend from behind huge, bug-eyed spectacles. His expression was one of genuine concern.
John ran his hand over his face and then felt his forehead. He wasn’t particularly warm. Though, it was rather chilly outside, so that could legitimately affect his skin’s temperature-
“John, take a seat,” Nick’s voice was a command. As tall as John was, Nick was the same height, and he possessed enough of an athletic build to support whatever authority he wished to claim. He placed a gentle, but firm hand on John’s shoulder and forced him to sit down on the low wall that ran along the bus drive in front of the Morrison School. “You look like you’re about to lose your lunch.”
“I didn’t eat lunch,” John replied absently.
“Well, that’s your problem then,” Adam said, pushing his glasses back up from where they’d slid down his nose. “You’ve got low blood sugar again. You know how you get when you don’t eat. Why didn’t you eat? I told you that you should buy those bars I showed you and start carrying them around-”
Forever Neverland Page 3