“Because I know!” I say quickly and hotter than I mean to. “I’ve never been punched in the face before, and I know I don’t want to be.”
He rolls his eyes, a smirk on his mouth now. “We aren’t talking about punches, girl.”
He’s right. We aren’t. We’re talking about you shoving cake down my throat, forcing me to swallow it.
I stare up at him, breathing in and out to counts of four so I don’t look as upset as I feel. He doesn’t like it when people are upset.
Peter watches my face, looking for a crack in the door of my resolve, but it’s all sealed shut with nerves and a faraway memory of some snow dancing on my cheek or something.
“You really don’t want to find out about the more?” Peter presses.
I shake my head. “No.”
“One day?”
“Maybe.” I shrug.
“With me?” he says.
I say nothing, and till I die, I will swear that no other name sailed through my mind.
Peter eyes me. “I wouldn’t like you to find out with anyone else…”
I nod. “Okay.”
“I would kill them,” he says with a perfectly straight face.
I breathe in and out to the count of four before I give him an easy smile. “You’re being hyperbolic, of course.”
He shrugs as he looks away. “Of course.”
I stare at my hands for a couple of seconds, out of things to say.
Peter ducks down so our eyes have to catch. “Are you sure you’re not the smallest bit curious about this now, here with me?”
“Peter,” I sigh.
He shakes his head, tired. “If I bought Calla here, she would wonder with me.”
“I’m sure she would.” I cross my arms and turn my head away from him to let him know I’m a tiny bit piqued, and then I glare at him from the corner of my eye. “But you’re not seeing her anymore, you said.”
“Hm.” Peter frowns. “Did I say that?”
“Yes.”
“I remember saying it, obviously.” He flicks his eyes, and I breathe out my nose loud enough for him to hear, and it’s too much emotion for him. “Let’s go then,” he says, wiping his hands on his pants.
“We could stay?” I offer, stepping towards him. “Walk under the giant flowers again?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “They don’t have what I was looking for here.”
Those words hit me like a smack in the face,
It’s by the wrist, not my hand, when he takes me, pulling me into the air, and then he flies ahead. Hard to keep up with. He only looks back a few times on the way back. He talks to the stars, not to me. About halfway home, I think he forgets why exactly it was he’s angry at me and instead becomes vaguely indignant.
En route, he stops at baggage again, drops something off, and then I go in again after him and drop off the parts of the day I shouldn’t like to remember.
* * *
* I knew that would put him off.
* I didn’t know till this moment that my grandfather had visited Neverland.
* Much to my own point, I honestly can’t remember.
? Or be reminded with something horribly abrupt. Rye tells me that can happen too. For better and for worse. He told me a story about a missing man from his village, and his wife was so distressed for so many years that she eventually put the memory of him away so it wouldn’t haunt her all the time, and after many years, he finally returned, and it all came hurtling back. He said she went crazy, that she left the village (and him) soon after.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The morning of my birthday, I don’t initially remember it’s the day that it is until I feel the notches I’ve been making under the table and do the maths in my head.
I’d hoped he’d remember, see? All my birthdays till I was twelve were incredibly celebrated, and then every year after my twelfth marked another year where the boy in the window hadn’t come back. I’d watched my birthdays wear away my grandmothers’ hopes, watched me getting older as my age frightened them into wondering what happened to the boy they love(d) so very much. So I have mixed feelings about birthdays as it is. Around age fourteen, I started taking myself out on my birthday. I’d tell Wendy and Mary I had something I had to do for school, and then I’d make my own way to someplace I wanted to go.
Last year, I took myself to the white cliffs of Dover. That took some planning and lying and roping in Charlotte and her older cousin* to drive us there, but it was worth it not to see the worried looks on my grandmothers’ faces all day.
They never meant to say it. They didn’t say it actually. It was always tacit, never aloud, but their faces told me that getting older was a terrible thing, and it was never a conviction I’ve shared. Still don’t, I don’t think.
I did love that day too. My friends humoured me the entire day, prattling on about the formation of the cliffs, how between one hundred and sixty-six million years ago, Great Britain and really most of Europe was actually submerged under the sea, and this sea’s floor was covered in this white mud that was made from the skeletons of this very, very small algae called a coccolith, which combined with the microscopic remains of other bottom-dwelling creatures to create this white, muddy sediment. It wasn’t until the Cenozoic era during the Alpine orogeny that it was raised above sea level.
We stayed out the whole day, and when I got home, they were sitting around our dining room table with a cake and candles, and I felt guilty for not spending the day with them, but I wasn’t even two bites into my birthday cake when Mary’s face twisted like something was hurting her. She looked at me.
“Where is he?” The question—even then, even before I knew him—was asked with such a genuine agony.
All I could do was shrug.
“Did something happen to him?” she asked Wendy, both their faces old by then yet still rimmed with an old pain they had each acquired in their youth.
Nothing happened to him, so it would turn out.
He forgets what he wants to forget, remembers what he wants to remember. I think I believe that to be true now. I might drop that revelation off up in the sky later.
Peter walks into the dining area about ten minutes after me, his face tired from a heavy sleep. He sleeps through everything; I sleep through nothing. Every sound, every creak, every time he moves in the bed,? ? my eyes spring open. Never his. Not a care in the world. He sleeps so loudly too, sometimes it keeps me awake. I’ve tried sleeping elsewhere around the place, but there are no spare blankets, and now I’m used to the sound he makes, his loud breathing that isn’t quite committed enough to be a snore but certainly not soft enough to be able to ignore either. I always end up wandering back to him.
“Where’d you go?” he asks me, sleepy every time.
“Nowhere,” I always say as I cuddle into him but still feel cold anyway.
“Morning.” Peter grabs the top of my head and kisses it gruffly, sitting down next to me, arm slung around my shoulders.
He bangs the table twice—a demanding thing he does that I don’t care for—and then a plate appears in front of him, and an orange squeezes itself into a goblet.