“So I could win the fights I have to.”
“And which fights are those?” I ask nosily.
Peter Pan glances at me with a look in his eyes that ought to alarm me but doesn’t.
“All of them,” he tells me, then breathes out his nose. “You’ll see.”
“Perhaps I don’t want to see,” I tell him for no real reason at all.
He floats down to me, and his eyes lock with mine. “You want to see.” he tells me, and I do. Then Peter claps his hands, eyes brightening. “Should we go?”
“Go where?” I blink.
Peter and my great-grandmother laugh.
“To Neverland, dear,” Mary tells me, like I’m the silly one.
My brow furrows, and I look at her like she’s mad. Which she is. I’m seventeen! God willing, I start university in a few months. I have my life planned. I can’t run away with a boy I don’t know.
I shake my head at her, and Peter rolls his eyes, impatient.
“Darling.” Mary touches my arm gently. “You must go with him.”
“Why must I?” I ask her quietly.
“You know why,” she tells me, and then she gives me this strange smile. It’s one I’ll think on for days and years and hours to come. When all time blends together into nothingness and the memories of my old life start to morph and fade like clouds being blown away across the sky, I will still think of that smile.
A blessing? Permission? A warning? The edges of her smile that may have told me which of the aforementioned it truly was will fade eventually, and I will wonder forever whether she was implying this is nothing more than a rite of passage or, actually, a birthright.
I glance over at him, and a sliver of me is relieved, I don’t know why. Like going with him is a pull towards destiny. And I don’t even believe in destiny! I believe in science and facts, not boys who are supposedly some peculiar part of my fate.
But here he is. Like they always said he’d be…
“What about my education?” I ask in a small voice.
“Your education will always be here.” She gives me a small smile.
I reach out and touch her. “And what about you?”
She gives me a sad, tired smile. “Soon I’ll be gone.”
“Where?” asks Peter.
Mary looks over at him solemnly and then back at me. I don’t think he understands, but probably it’s better this way—there are just some things you don’t want the sunshine to know.
“You must go, Daphne,” she tells me, her hand on my face. “Like I went and my mother before me…and Wendy after me and your mother after her. This”—and then she lowers his voice so that he cannot hear this part—“he is your fate, darling. That he’s here for you now, like this.” She gives me a strange and weighty look. “It is fate.”
My shoulders slump under the weight of it all, and she laughs.
She glances between Peter Pan and I. “Sweetheart,” she sighs. “There’s a universe waiting for you out there.”
“Yeah, girl.” Peter gives me a proud little smirk. “Come on.”
He grabs my hand, and I want to be able to say that it annoys me—I pretend that it does—but it feels like static electricity. Our eyes catch, and the way he’s looking at me, I know that he feels it too, because rather suddenly, he looks a bit frightened, and then he snatches his hand back.
“Do you even know my name?” I ask, eyebrows high.
“Course I know your name.”
“Go on then.” I shrug, petulant. “What is it?”
“D…D…r…agon.”
“Dragon.” I blink once. “You think my name is Dragon?”
He scoffs. “No. It’s…D…ais…Daphne! Daphne. Ha! I was right. I knew it.”
I look at Mary. “Absolutely not.”
Mary smiles, amused. “Darling, you are too old here already.”
“No, I’m not. I’m only seventeen!”
“Ever so barely.” She gives me a look. “Soon you will be eighteen, and even now, you already need to grow down. You always have.”
“I’ve only just finished school. What would people say, me disappearing in the middle of the night with a strange boy?”
“It doesn’t matter what they say, Daphne. It matters that you’re happy and that you’re free.”
“It’s 1967!” I throw my hands in the air, exasperated. “We live in London, not Benghazi! I’m very free, and I’m very happy!”
She touches my face with a maternal tenderness.
“My pet, that is because you’re yet to truly know either.” She gives me a small smile that looks edged with sadness, and a thought I hate rustles through the air of me that maybe I’ll never see her again. “Go,” she tells me. She takes my face in her hands and kisses my cheek.
She reaches for Peter’s hand. He looks scared at first to be touched by an old person, as though it’s something that perhaps you might catch if you weren’t to wash your hands thoroughly straight after, but then he gives her a smile, and I watch pass between them a moment that feels like I shouldn’t have witnessed it, but I do: a silent goodbye. The last time they’ll see each other. The end of the road for their great adventure.
“I’ll fly you to the stars when it happens,” he tells her quite solemnly.
“I’ll be young again when you do.” She smiles ever so sadly. “Remember me as I was, Peter,” she tells him, and he nods obediently. “And you…” She turns to me, smiling gently at the door. “Remember me as you will be.”
And then she slips out of my room, closing the door behind her. I stare after her, and I don’t know when I started crying, but I am.
Peter looks down at me and takes a step closer. He tilts his head again, and with his giant paws he has for hands he wipes my face clean with the heels of them.
“Just happy thoughts now, okay, girl?” he tells me.
I nod.
“Are you ready?”
And the question is perhaps more loaded than I want it to be. Am I ready to never see Mary Evangeline Darling again in this lifetime? Am I ready to leave everything I’ve ever known for a magical boy? Am I ready to have my heart completely shattered? Everyone’s stories with him are filled to the brim with adventures too wonderful to explain on paper, but there’s always a common thread, and that thread is something about which we do not speak. It’s something I’ve watched them skirt around all my life and never look directly in the eye. A strange dance the women of my family seem to innately know the steps to, and soon I’d see that I’d join them. Without much time or conscious thought or effort, I too would fall in step and also skirt the edge of the common thread.
So then, the answer is no, actually, I’m not ready for any of that, and even still, my heart begins to float away, like a kite trapped in the sky that is his eyes, and I can feel that none of that matters. It’s not a choice, is it? It’s what Mary said it was. It’s the fate of my family; we’re tied to him. “And thus, it will go on,” Wendy always said. It is our burden to love him. Which I don’t, and I shan’t. But I could see how one might.
“Right.” I clear my throat. “Well, what do I need?” I glance around the room.
He gives me a playful look. “Me.”
I roll my eyes. “No, but what do I actually need, in a practical sense?”