Pine Sap said once that he would rather die than see Tiger Lily tamed. I guess Tiger Lily felt the same about Peter, because she stayed behind. And that is how I, Tink, went to England, instead of her. Because as always, my curiosity outweighed my fear.
I arrived in London in early spring—took up residence in a bush by the docks, where I could keep an eye on the lizards and flies, which were small and unintimidating. I was dazzled and awed by the girls, the dresses, the electric lights, and the buildings made of stone. I also immediately longed for home, the woods, the river, even my swamp. I wanted to leave London almost as soon as I arrived.
As the days passed, I put off seeing Peter. I found other things to do. Weeks trickled by, and still, I steered clear of the neighborhood Wendy had talked about, which I found on maps but did not visit.
It was only toward the end of my stay, during a winter of a kind of coldness I could never have imagined, and when I knew one of the rare ships that sailed close to Neverland was slated to depart in two days, that I found my way to Finsbury Circus, and the big yellow house. I was both relieved and unnerved to find that it still stood, exactly as Wendy had described it.
That afternoon, I had seen snow for the first time. It muffled everything, and made it feel so silent and gave me a quiet feeling, just a peacefulness and a waiting for new things to grow. It was cold, and my wings moved stiffly. My breath puffed out around me, but no one in London paid attention to insects. Up on the second floor, there was a balcony. I flew up unnoticed, and looked in the window.
There was no one home. But peering through the glass, I couldn’t imagine anywhere more comfortable and safe, or more like everything Peter had always said he didn’t want. It was a room full of books, but unmistakably, it had Peter’s stamp on it. His carvings sat on various shelves, miraculously complete. An old handmade bow sat in the corner. A plant sat on the windowsill—grown from a cutting I recognized. It was a big-leafed, wild-looking plant that grew all over Neverland. It crept up the corner near the glass, and seemed to have a life of its own, branching out in all crooked directions. I wondered what had prompted Peter to keep it. As if he could keep the wilderness in a pot.
But even now, without him there, it was impossible to think of him in the comfortable room, growing older and breathing indoor air. Fifty years later, and I still didn’t understand him.
A door opened to the left, and my breath caught, because in he came. I was frozen still, peering in, unable to move, and sure he wouldn’t see me, but his eyes went to me immediately. A huge smile spread across his face and he walked to the window, and pulled it open, the warm air spilling out on me as I’m sure the cold air spilled in. Only, it wasn’t Peter. The nose was different. The teeth were bigger. There was no savage about the eyes. I realized my mistake.
He opened the window. “You can’t be real,” he said. He must have been twenty or more years old. I flapped my wings, trying to acknowledge him. He appeared utterly flustered, his cheeks bright red, puffing in amazement. He reached for me, but I zipped backward.
“Sarah, come look!” he yelled over his shoulder. He turned to me. “Are you looking for my father?” he asked, half joking.
He seemed to be speaking rhetorically, and must have considered me a dumb creature. He reached out and petted the top of my head, with Peter’s gentle touch. “He’s walking in the park, little one. Come in from the cold. You’re a treasure!” He reached out again to catch me, but I finally found my wits and flew back and away, and swooped down above the street. I was gone before he could employ a more effective tool to capture me. The Englanders, I knew, loved to study things to death.
On my way toward the house earlier, I’d flown past the park—a big oval, powdered pure white, below me. I found Peter there. He was walking in a direction away from the house, and I flew in behind him. I would have known his thin chicken-wing shoulders anywhere. I knew his animal gait, even when he moved slowly.
I’d never seen Peter in a coat. From the back, he was gray-haired. I flew closer, so that I could see the pores of skin on his neck, my tiny heart in my throat, and suddenly my courage left me. It turned out that my curiosity did not outweigh my courage after all. Sometimes love means not being able to bear seeing the one you love the way they are, when they’re not what you hoped for them. I turned and went back to the docks, and waited the two days for my ship to leave. It was the last I would ever see of Peter.
By the time I got home, a year had passed. And much had changed.
The most surprising thing, to me, was that Tiger Lily and Pine Sap were to be married.
She talked to me now. After the stone house, she hadn’t stopped. She told me they had just been walking into the river one day, getting ready for their usual swim, when she knew. She said she thought there were different ways of loving someone, and there were some she used to think were the most important, and now she had changed her mind.
For weeks, I saw it as a tragic turn of events. But when I tried to see him through Tiger Lily’s eyes, I began to see it differently. She laughed with him, more often than she had laughed with Peter. Her heart beat strong and steady around him, as if he gave it strength. I could hear that she loved every piece of his crooked face, without an ounce of fear.
Some words meant something different to Tiger Lily than they ever had before; some sentences waited years to grow full in her mind. Many people in the village wanted her to be more of a girl, and Peter had wanted her to be large and brave but a little less large and brave than him. But Pine Sap was sure enough to want her to be exactly who she was. And though there were many people who loved Tiger Lily in her tribe, and many people Tiger Lily loved, that was what she was left with. There were three people who loved her exactly as she was. Tik Tok. Pine Sap. And me.
Their marriage surprises me all the time, because it’s always changing. It looks nothing like the love Tiger Lily had with Peter, but it is as big in its own way. They go swimming in the reeds together, and she holds on to Pine Sap’s neck and wraps her legs around him and he swims like a dolphin. In the water, he can carry her. They sit in front of their home that Pine Sap built and he calls the birds to her fingers and she laughs that easy laugh. Sometimes she treks in the woods without him for days. But at home Pine Sap talks about poems and the countless things he thinks about, and Tiger Lily feels as though his mind is a forest, too, and that she is discovering a new place.
Their daughters are hungry, joyful little souls, but only one of them is half feral like her mother. The other is as girlish as any girl ever born. Moon Eye, who surprised everyone by living as long as anyone, also surprised them by marrying a Bog Dweller she met at a gathering of the shamans, after she took on Tik Tok’s role as medicine woman.
I don’t know when Tiger Lily stopped growing older; I can’t pinpoint the moment. But I do know I never saw her visibly age beyond the days when she was with Peter. I like to think her growing stopped the day they were on the plateau, watching the horses. Sometimes I can almost convince myself that on the ridge that night, I actually heard her bones grinding to a halt, her skin pause, because that simple day was the most important thing that would ever happen to her. Just an afternoon, when nothing amazing occurred, except that she felt completely happy and completely at home. But truthfully, even I couldn’t have heard these things.
Now there are days when she is content, and days when she’s restless. But there is never a day when she doesn’t see Peter everywhere. Things hurt, and don’t hurt, and hurt again. Eighty years later, and she can still feel surprised that he’s gone. And then so much of the time, she’s glad. But just as she looks for Tik Tok in everything around her, she looks for Peter in the woods, out gathering, in the lagoon, in the burrow that is now abandoned. She goes up on the cliffs from time to time and stands there for hours, continuing her long good-bye. It’s not for lack of loyalty to her husband. It is just that she was fifteen once for the first time, and Peter walked across her heart, and left his footprints there.
> For my own part, I must admit I spend more and more time thinking that I should go home. I keep wondering if it’s time to be back with my own family, and to be somewhere that feels like I belong there, even if it isn’t perfect. And I keep putting it off. I am always saying, when the moon has set thirty more times, that is when I’ll go back to the swamp. But I keep on staying.
There is one more thing I’ll give you. One more piece of their story. And Tiger Lily didn’t tell it to me. I discovered it myself.
I said I never saw Peter again. But I did hear of him, or from him in a way, one night years later, while chasing a moth that had somehow managed to wedge itself into the folds under Tiger Lily’s bedroll. That was when I found the last words I’d ever get from Peter. The envelope was covered in stamps, and wrinkled, warped from water, crinkly and wavy like the sea that countless ships had carried it across. The letter had been folded and unfolded so many times that it had gotten soft as velvet. She had managed to keep it a secret even from me, who listened to her head on a daily basis.
It wasn’t surprising that he had learned to write. But here is some of what it said:
Did you know I always thought you were braver than me? Did you ever guess that that was why I was so afraid? It wasn’t that I only loved some of you. But I wondered if you could ever love more than some of me.
I knew I’d miss you. But the surprising thing is, you never leave me. I never forget a thing. Every kind of love, it seems, is the only one. It doesn’t happen twice. And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn’t seem broken at all. I know young people look at me and think my youth seems so far away. But it’s all around me, and you’re all around me. Tiger Lily, do you think magic exists if it can be explained? I can explain why I loved you, I can explain the theory of evolution that tells me why mermaids live in Neverland and nowhere else. But it still feels magic.
The lost boys all stood at our wedding. Does it seem odd to you that they could have stood at a wedding that wasn’t yours and mine? It does to me. And I’m sorry for it, and for a lot, and I also wouldn’t change it.
It is so quiet here. Even with all the trains and the streets and the people. It’s nothing like the jungle. The boys have grown. Everything has grown. Do you think you will ever grow? I hope not. I like to think that even if I change and fade away, some other people won’t.
I like to think that one day after I die, at least one small particle of me—of all the particles that will spread everywhere—will float all the way to Neverland, and be part of a flower or something like that, like that poet said, the one that your Tik Tok loved. I like to think that nothing’s final, and that everyone gets to be together even when it looks like they don’t, that it all works out even when all the evidence seems to say something else, that you and I are always young in the woods, and that I’ll see you sometime again, even if it’s not with any kind of eyes I know of or understand. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the way things go after all—that all things end happy. Even for you and Tik Tok. And for you and me.
Always,
Your Peter
P.S. Please give my love to Tink. She was always such a funny little bug.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Sarah Landis, Kari Sutherland, and Zareen Jaffrey for being so elegantly intelligent as they nurtured this book, to Melinda Weigel for giving it her careful attention, and to all the folks at Harper for always treating me so nicely. Thank you to Tara and Misha, who were early to encourage me to keep thinking about Tiger Lily and Peter; Rosemary Stimola for always putting the important things first; Liesa and James, Ben Cawood, and Maria Bejarano for all sorts of grounding and encouragement; my family for their limitless enthusiasm; and Mark for his faith in me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JODI LYNN ANDERSON is the New York Times bestselling author of PEACHES, THE SECRETS OF PEACHES, LOVE AND PEACHES, and the popular May Bird trilogy. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and an endless parade of stray pets.
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OTHER WORKS
Also by
JODI LYNN ANDERSON
Peaches
The Secrets of Peaches
Love and Peaches
CREDITS
Cover photo © 2012 by Trevillion
Cover art and design by Oceana Garceau
COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Tiger Lily
Copyright © 2012 by Jodi Lynn Anderson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anderson, Jodi Lynn.
Tiger Lily / Jodi Lynn Anderson—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Fifteen-year-old Tiger Lily receives special protections from the spiritual forces of Neverland, but then she meets her tribe’s most dangerous enemy—Peter Pan—and falls in love with him.
ISBN 978-0-06-200325-6
EPub Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN 9780062114617
[1. Fairies—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction.] I. Barrie, J. M. (James Matthew), 1860—1937. Peter Pan. II. Title.
PZ7.A53675Ti 2012 2011032659
[Fic]—dc23 CIP
AC
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12 13 14 15 16 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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