by Thomas Hayes
Chapter Six
“Feel free to help yourself,” Peter said, motioning to the table of food. “All of this stuff is free for anyone to enjoy, so go ahead and—”
“Free for anyone to enjoy?” someone said. I looked up. Standing in front of us was a whole gaggle of filthy, homemade-clothes-wearing boys. At the head of the pack was a short kid, not much taller than four feet. He had freckles under his eyes and wore a faded red baseball cap, with jagged edges of red hair sticking out from underneath. The bill of his cap was so worn, you could see the edge of the plastic brim.
“Look at this kid, giving away our stuff,” the boy said, looking at Peter with a sneering smirk. “It’s like he thinks he actually has a say around here or something.”
Peter shook his head, annoyed. I noticed he was at least five years older than most of these kids. He was 16 or 17, while they were all around 11, with some looking like they could be kindergartners.
“I wasn’t giving away our stuff,” Peter explained. “I was just—”
“That’s what it looked like to me!” the boy said with a laugh. The boys behind him nodded, staring at Peter like he was an uninvited guest who had showed up at the party anyway. “Where the hell did you go? We weren’t sure if you were coming back this time. We never know with you.”
“I went to the World of the Grown-Ups,” Peter said. “I went to see if I could get someone to help us with—”
“Who are they?” the boy asked, turning to Tim and me. It was like he wouldn’t let Peter finish a sentence.
“They’re who I went to get from the World of the Grown-Ups. I think they can help us.”
“Them?” The boy stood in front of me, eyebrows furrowed, inspecting me. I was at least a foot taller than him. My guess was he was around 10 years old.
“You brought another girl here?” he said. “You ain’t ever gonna learn, Peter, are you? ‘Cuz that went so well the last time.”
Peter didn’t answer.
“What’s your name?” the boy in the cap asked.
“Emily.”
“Not you. I don’t care what your name is. What’s your name?”
He pointed at Tim. I could tell Tim was nervous. This little punk in a red cap acted like some kind of no-nonsense Irish mob boss. A four-foot-tall Irish mob boss, but still.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“Tim.”
“How old are you, Tim?”
“Ten.”
“You got a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“All right, you’re in.” The boy stuck out his hand. “Welcome to the Lost Boys. My name’s Mike. Help yourself to any food, games, whatever. Change out of those stupid-looking clothes, if you want.”
Tim looked up at me, as if to say, “What the heck do I do now?” I looked to Peter, since I didn’t know.
“It’s okay,” Peter said. “They’re harmless. To us, anyway. He’ll have the time of his life, and probably won’t want to ever do anything else ever again.”
“Go ahead,” I said to Tim. “Go get something to eat, I guess.”
“Want some firecrackers?” Mike asked.
“Yeah!” Tim replied.
Mike handed him four red firecrackers.
“Here, go over there and throw them at those ostrich eggs.”
Not far away, I saw a group of Lost Boys lighting firecrackers and flinging them at a pile of giant, brown eggs. Every time the eggs exploded in a burst of yellow, gooey yolk, the kids laughed and high-fived each other, before beginning another barrage of firecrackers.
Tim ran to the boys with a big smile. They greeted him like an old friend, slapping him on the back and making space for him to take the next throw. As nervous as he was, I could tell he was also excited, and wanted to run amok with the other boys.
“You,” Mike said, pointing a finger in my face. “You stay with Peter. None of us want you here, you got it? If this moron does, that’s his business. Just know that you aren’t our guest. None of this is yours unless you ask.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to give this little kid a piece of my mind, but he had about 12 other mangy-looking boys standing with him, and I didn’t know what they were capable of. I still had no idea what Tim and I had gotten into, or what was happening.
“She’s all right,” Peter said. “She’ll stick with me. She won’t even be here that long. She’s all right.”
“Of course you think she’s all right,” Mike said. “She’s a skirt. You think anything in a skirt is all right.”
“I’m not even wearing a skirt.”
“You know what I mean. It’s a figment of expression. Just stay with him and don’t talk to us. Now get out of my face.”
Mike and the other boys walked away.
“You hear that, Mike?” one of them asked. “Peter said she won’t be here that long. You think he’s telling the truth?”
“Yeah, I heard that one before. Next thing I knew we had a damn babysitter living with us.”
I watched the mini-gang of elementary school kids reach the picnic table of junk food, then turned to Peter. “Really welcoming bunch, aren’t they?”
“Sorry about that,” Peter said. At my house and on the way here, he had been so cocky and sure of himself, but now that we were in the village, it was like he was out of his element and didn’t fit in. Not because of anything he did, but because it was clear everybody here didn’t want him around. “C’mon,” he finished. “We can go up to my place. We’ll talk up there without them bothering us.”
Following Peter across the village, I started to worry about leaving Tim behind, but I couldn’t worry too much, since I had to concentrate on avoiding the masses of rampaging boys running around us, none of whom seemed capable of moving less than 20 miles an hour. After almost getting trampled by a group of them throwing an old football, I climbed up a ladder with Peter. It went up the tallest tree in the village—up and up and up—and soon I was getting dizzy. Just as I was about to ask Peter if this ladder went on for eternity, we reached the underside of a wooden floor. There was a square door in it, and after Peter pushed it open, I followed him inside.
It was like the world’s greatest treehouse—every 11-year-old boy’s dream. There were faded couches, a table of torn candy wrappers, movie posters on the wall from every decade, sports equipment on the ground, and even a 1980’s TV set, with what looked like a VHS machine and a car battery hooked up to it. It was clear this wasn’t just a treehouse—Peter lived here. This was his house.
I walked around, inspecting the space. We were in what seemed like the main room, but there were also three other rooms shooting off from it; in those rooms, I saw beds and bamboo bureaus, with framed photographs and knick-knacks on top. One of the rooms had girls’ clothes hanging in a closet—I could see black shoes and a few dresses, most of which looked like something my grandmother would have worn when she was young.
There were also several maps on the walls, and they looked old—faded and turned up at the corners. They showed a series of islands, all marked with different locations. Maybe this could give me a clue about how far away we were, and how to get home.
“Are these islands…?”
“Never Land? Yup, those maps show a little bit of Never Land. But just a little. Never Land is a massive place, and I could never have all of it on my wall at once. There isn’t a big enough map. Some areas of Never Land haven’t even been discovered yet, and some people say Never Land goes on forever, with no ending.”
I looked at the maps. None of this was making any sense. These things couldn’t happen in real life. Not in my life, not in anybody’s life.
“What kind of place is this?” I asked. From a window, I watched as a group of boys rode their bikes off a steep ramp and into a lake. They celebrated as if it was the greatest thing they had ever done in their life. “Seriously, this is where you live?”
“Yup. We all do. There’s…about 200 of us now, I guess. I forget. I’m starting to lose co
unt.”
“And there’s only boys?”
“Yup. The Lost Boys.”
“No girls?”
Peter chuckled. “Nope. That’s kinda the point. Well, there’s one girl, anyway. You’re probably only the fourth or fifth girl whose ever even stepped foot in this village.”
I looked down and watched Tim throw a firecracker at the ostrich eggs.
“And no grown-ups.”
“Nope. Not a one. That’s a very important rule. Even more important than no girls.”
“How the heck do you all live here without any adults to watch you? Take care of you? Even these little kids?”
“I don’t know. We just do. Most of us, we haven’t had anyone to watch us or take care of us our whole lives, so why start now? We get along just fine, believe me.”
Near the eggs, Tim laughed with the boy in the red baseball cap. “Where did all these boys come from?”
“Your world. Every last one of them. Orphans. Kids living on the street. Or just kids whose parents didn’t want them. They all ended up here one way or another, either from a fairy, another one of the Lost Boys finding them, whatever. Whoever they are, they’re better off here.”
I thought a moment, then turned to Peter. He stood on the other side of the room.
“And you say no one here grows up?”
“Nope. Not even you. As long as you and Tim are here, you won’t age a second. It’s bloody wonderful, isn’t it?”
I squinted. “But you look older than the rest.”
“Yeah, I am. Unfortunately.”
“All of them are, what? 10? Some even younger?”
“Yeah.”
“And they don’t like you very much.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason why I’m older than them. Because I left.”
“You left here?”
“Yes. Many years ago, when I was about eleven. I was gone for six years, and when I came back, I looked like this. And they weren’t too happy about it. Or the fact that I left them.”
I thought it over. “Where’d you go?”
“To your world, with some friends. And I stayed there. For six years. I don’t think the guys here will ever forgive me, to be honest.”
“I don’t get why you’d leave. You seem to love it here.”
“Well, that actually has a lot to do with why you’re here. Do you want me to tell you now?”
Before I could answer, an ear-splitting horn erupted. I jumped, startled, and turned to the window. One of the boys was standing on top of a hut and blowing a massive brass horn, while a herd of very large, bull-like animals stampeded through the village. The boys down below me—running for their lives—thought it was hilarious, of course. I looked to Tim, and thankfully saw he was at least somewhat safe, standing on top of the picnic table of junk food.
“Yes, why don’t you tell me now,” I said. “Before either me or my brother ends up dead.”
Peter paced, chewing his lip. “Where should I start? Hmm. I never thought about what I should start with.” A moment passed. “Did you see those rooms? The ones connected to this one?”
“Yes.”
“Those are my friends’ rooms. Wendy, John, and Michael. They live here, with me. They’re from your world. Well, I mean, they used to live on your world, before they met me. They weren’t orphans like the rest of us. They came here with me many years ago—I can’t even remember how long. We had a grand adventure. But, when it was time for them to go home, I didn’t want them to. I didn’t want them to leave. I especially didn’t want Wendy to leave. That had never happened before.”
“So what’d you do?”
“Nothing, at first. I watched them go. And I stayed here. But, after only a few months, I couldn’t take it anymore. I followed them to the World of the Grown-Ups. I left here in secret, went to your world, and I planned on never coming back.”
“You left to go find them?”
“Yes. I loved the world they talked about, in London. I loved the world they said they had with their mum and dad and their big old dog Nana. It sounded wonderful. I wanted to see what that life was like. I had never had a life like that. None of us here ever had.”
Peter walked toward the girl’s room and looked inside.
“Wendy had said that I could live with them, if I wanted, if I ever wanted to leave Never Land. So, I went to their house, knocked on the door, and asked. Her parents were pretty confused at first, but eventually—very quickly, actually—they agreed, and let me live with them.” Peter smiled. “And they were just as wonderful as Wendy had told me. Even more wonderful. And Nana, too. I loved that old dog. I had barely ever seen a dog before, and now I had one.”
Peter laughed through his nose, as if the memory had taken him back someplace.
“But then…” He stopped. The smile left his face, and he was quiet. “Then Wendy’s mum and dad died. In an automobile accident.” A silence. “They didn’t have seat belts back then.”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t expecting his story to turn out this way.
“Then all the sudden we didn’t have anything. Me, Wendy, Michael, John—now we were alone. It was just us. I was seventeen and Wendy was eighteen, and we had this big house in London that was perfectly fine, and we had Nana, but they wouldn’t let us live there. They wanted us to go live with some weird old aunt Wendy hadn’t even ever met before. We didn’t want to go there, so we came back here. All four of us. We had nothing left for us in your world, so…we came back to Never Land. Where we didn’t have to deal with the horrible things in your world like automobile accidents and rainy days and people dying just because their damn car drove through a big puddle.”
I watched Peter. He was so sad and so angry, all at once. As crazy as this whole world around him was, it was suddenly clear he was just a teenage boy, like any of my guy friends back home.
“But the Lost Boys here, they didn’t welcome you back?”
“No.” Peter laughed. “With me, looking like this? A foot taller than when I left? And with me bringing a girl back? Who was even older than me, at that. And two boys, who had also grown up. The Lost Boys hate grown-ups, but they don’t like teenagers much more, either.”
I looked around the treehouse. I thought about the old movie posters on the wall, and the way Peter had talked about automobiles. And the way he had looked at my iPad back home. I assumed he had left this place many years ago—back in the 1920’s? Maybe even the 1910’s? And he and the others had come back to Never Land not long after that. So, he had been living here, out of place and pretty much shunned by the other boys, for practically 100 years. I thought about him and the other kids he spoke about—Wendy, John, and Michael. Four teenagers, living up in this treehouse, with all those lunatic boys living down below them.
“Where are your friends?” I asked. “The girl, and the other two boys who live here?”
Peter grew angry.
“They aren’t here,” he said. “That’s why I need your help. I need your help to get them back.”
“Why? What happened to them?”
Peter looked up. I could see fire in his eyes.
“Hook. Hook got them.”