by Aiden Thomas
Wendy only needed to dip her head a bit to clear the same branch.
She scowled at him. Her sense of pride tried to bubble its way to the surface through the sour fear in her belly. “I’m not afraid of the dark,” Wendy said, correcting her previous statement. “I’m cautious of what’s in the dark that I can’t see.” She lifted the lantern a bit higher in an attempt to get a better view of the woods ahead. Her shadow caught her eye as it walked along the tree to their right, unaccompanied. Peter’s shadow was still nowhere in sight. It was just so … odd. “Something that could hurt me,” she mumbled, more to herself than Peter. The cut on her leg ached, and it was hard to keep branches and leaves in the underbrush from slapping it.
Peter stopped walking and stared at her for a moment, his head tilted to the side. It reminded her of her old dog, Nana, when Wendy used to speak to her—confused and trying to understand. It was an innocent and kind of stupid expression. Despite present circumstances, Wendy felt a laugh rise in her throat.
But then Peter started walking again. “I think people are more frightening than the dark,” he said. “A person can stand right in front of you and be dangerous without you even knowing it.”
His back continued to retreat into the darkness, but Wendy remained where she stood. That was … surprisingly insightful.
Jogging a bit to catch up, Wendy fell into step next to Peter. Against all logic, she felt better being in the woods with him by her side. It was almost like he emitted his own light that kept the darkness of the woods at bay.
“So that’s what you’re afraid of?” Wendy asked. “People?”
“What?” Peter snorted and gave a fierce shake of his head. “No. I’m not afraid of anything.”
Wendy rolled her eyes. What a childish response. “Everyone’s afraid of something,” she insisted.
“Everyone but me,” Peter corrected.
She fought the urge to give him a shove.
Wendy concentrated on his face, trying to read his expression as the light danced across his features. She wetted her lips, tasting the questions that were demanding to be asked.
“How old are you?” she finally asked.
“How old are you?” he countered evasively, lifting an eyebrow.
Wendy had to bite back a petulant reply of I asked you first.
“I’m eighteen,” Wendy told him.
Peter looked like he’d just been slapped. He jerked back with a blink before scrunching up his face. “You’re eighteen?”
Wendy felt very exposed as he blatantly looked her up and down. Indignant, even. She knew she was short, but she thought she at least looked her age.
Wendy smoothed a hand through her short hair and cleared her throat. “It was actually my birthday when we—when…” When I almost hit you with my car? When you freaked me and half the hospital out? When you came crashing into my life? “Yesterday. My birthday was yesterday.”
“Oh.” His stare was unfocused as he looked ahead, lost in thought. Still, he walked through the woods with ease while Wendy tripped along behind him. “I’m nineteen,” Peter said, coming out of his daze and tilting his chin up. Even the smallest grin pulled deep dimples into his cheeks.
Wendy was starting to get a headache from frowning so much. “Nineteen? There’s no way you’re nineteen,” she said flatly. “You look like you’re fifteen.”
His face still had a childlike roundness to it—his nose turned up at the end and was a little too small for his face. Even though he had muscles, they were still lean and sinewy. He could easily fit in with the crowds of lanky freshmen at her school.
He was looking smug now, his hands clasped behind his back as he grinned at her. “I’m taller than you,” Peter pointed out, as if that was cold hard evidence for his case.
Okay, he was a tall fifteen-year-old, but still a fifteen- year-old.
“Barely!” she shot back. “And that doesn’t mean anything, anyway.”
Snap.
A twig cracked in the distance.
The lantern clanked loudly as a violent jump ripped through her. Wendy tripped, her back colliding with Peter’s shoulder. He stumbled but caught her upper arms, steadying them both.
“What was that?” Wendy asked, the words tumbling from her lips. Was there something hiding in the trees? A person? Were they being watched? Wendy swallowed hard. She just wanted to get out of these damn woods.
“I was going to ask you the same thing.” He loosened his hold on her, but Wendy backed up again, pressing into him.
“I heard something in the trees.” Even though her whole body shook, she could feel his warmth radiating through his shirt.
“It’s okay,” Peter said. His tone was gentle. She wanted to believe him. “Here.” He took the lantern from her and she automatically wrapped her arms around her middle. Peter raised the light above her head to get a better look. “There’s nothing there,” he told her. “Probably just an owl or something.”
As if on cue, a faint hoot echoed from the trees.
Wendy let out a heavy sigh of relief.
But then a much louder hooting came from just behind her and Wendy jumped away from Peter. She whirled around to see his lips pressed into a small O. The owl in the woods hooted again and Peter responded.
Wendy pressed her fingers to her chest and felt her heart fluttering under them. “How did you do that?” she asked. He matched the owl’s call perfectly. Jordan could whistle pretty decently to match the pitch and tune of a bird, but Peter sounded exactly like a real owl.
Peter grinned and rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “Practice, I guess.” He started to walk again and Wendy stayed close to his side. Her arm brushed against his with each step.
“You must’ve had a lot of practice, then,” Wendy said, lacking her usual sarcastic tone.
“I’m just good at imitating things,” Peter said. “Animals. People.”
“People?” Did he imitate their voices like stand-up comedians did sometimes, or walk around pretending to be a pirate? She was about to ask when Peter knocked the lantern into a branch, producing a clatter of glass and metal. Wendy jumped again, wincing at the sound.
“Oops. Sorry,” said Peter.
She didn’t know how much more of this she could take. “Are we almost to my house?” she asked, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. Every nerve in her body was on edge, rippling anxiously under her skin.
“I think so.”
“You think so?” Wendy groaned. “If we—”
“Want to hear what else I can do?” he asked.
No, she didn’t. She wanted to get out of here and back to her house.
But before Wendy could say anything, Peter handed back the lantern and cupped his hands around his mouth, producing a light, warbling tune. It was another birdcall. Wendy knew she’d heard it before, but she couldn’t place it. A swallow? Or maybe a nightingale? She didn’t really know anything about birds.
Peter dropped his hands, tucked his bottom lip under his front teeth, and produced the quiet thrum of cricket chirps.
It sounded just like the crickets that lived outside her window. Wendy fell asleep to that sound every night during the summer. The edges of his lips quirked up and the lantern’s light sparked in his eyes. Peter continued to make the gentle chirps. The sound melted the knotted muscles in her shoulders.
Memories of catching crickets at night with her brothers danced in the back of her mind. John quietly waiting in one spot with a paper cup in his hand, listening hard to find one of the musical insects. Michael careening through the bushes when he caught one, scaring the rest off. John always threw a fit. They were never able to catch more than one at a time. They would put it in a jar, turn off the lights in their bedroom, and sit in silence—after Wendy told Michael to shut up at least three times—until the cricket felt safe enough to start singing for them. Even in the dark, she could always tell that John and Michael were smiling just as much as she was.
It was one of her favorite sounds.
“You’re really good at that,” she said softly as she stared up at Peter. They weren’t walking anymore.
He gazed down at her, no longer chirping. The way his eyes searched hers made her want to look away, but it seemed impossible to manage right now.
“You really don’t remember me?” he asked quietly, tension caught in the lines of his face.
“How could I remember you? We just met…” She lied because the truth just didn’t make any sense, no matter how much she wanted to believe it.
“What about your dreams? Do you not dream about me anymore?” he pressed.
Wendy squinted. “My dreams?”
Sadness, almost a sort of hurt, fell across his face.
“You can’t dream about someone you don’t know…” Could you? The sound of the crickets floated back to her even though Peter’s lips were completely still.
Peter’s chest rose and fell in a sigh. “It’s me, Wendy. Peter. Peter Pan.” His blue eyes bored earnestly into hers. He closed his hands around both of hers. “I know you remember me, you have to…”
Wendy felt like she wanted to cry, laugh, and run away all at the same time. She shook her head quickly. “That’s not possible. Peter Pan isn’t real,” she told him. Even as she said it, she felt herself doubting her own words. A part of her wanted to believe, as silly as it felt.
One thing was certain: He knew who Peter Pan was. So, even though she fought against it, the truth was that he’d heard the stories before. At some point, she had told him.
“Wendy Moira Angela Darling!”
Her father’s voice cut through the night. Wendy looked around. They were at the edge of the woods. The crooked white fence of her backyard was no more than twenty feet ahead.
She could see the back door to her house through the sparse trees. The kitchen lit up her father’s bulky silhouette.
“Where have you been? It’s the middle of the night! I’ve been calling you for hours!”
Wendy knew her phone was in her pocket and on silent, as always. The ringer always made her jump, and she found the vibration setting just as jarring.
“I—” Wendy turned, but Peter was gone, leaving her to stand alone at the edge of the woods, her hands cold, the lantern gone with him. “Peter?” she hissed into the darkness. She stood on her tiptoes and tried to peer deeper into the trees. “Where are you?”
But no one was there.
Wendy swallowed and faced the house. Behind her, the breeze through the woods tickled the back of her neck. They were only slightly more terrifying than her father waiting for her at the door.
She half ran to the fence, clumsily climbed over, and steeled herself against her father’s angry glares and shouts as she crossed the backyard.
He stood there, red-faced, his large fingers gripping the doorframe. Wendy wouldn’t have been surprised if he ripped it right off. “Were you in the woods?!” he demanded. Spittle flew from his lips as he yelled.
Wendy tried to think up some reasonable excuse, but her mind was back in the woods with Peter. “No, I thought I saw something, so I was just looking—”
“Don’t you dare lie to me, Wendy!” he said.
Wendy’s face turned red. She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t tell him the truth. If he knew she had been in the woods with the boy from the hospital—who the police thought might be connected to her and her brothers’ disappearance—well, Wendy had no idea what he would do, but it wouldn’t be good.
She felt guilty and, to her surprise, scared for Peter. He was out there alone with only the hunting shack as shelter. For the second time in the past twenty-four hours, she wondered if she would ever see him again.
“I—”
“And what happened to you?” His chest swelled and his face darkened from red to purple.
Wendy looked down at her torn pant leg, felt the throb of her head. Luckily, the pain had subsided to a dull ache. “I was sitting on the fence and fell off by accident,” she said.
“I forbid you from going into those woods.” His eyes glared into hers, but they had a glassy sheen. “I thought you were smart enough to know better after what happened!”
Wendy winced.
No, she couldn’t tell him the truth. Not until she figured out what to do about Peter. But this also wasn’t a situation she could lie her way out of.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said quietly.
Her father breathed heavily through flared nostrils. Wendy braced herself for more shouting, but his shoulders sank. “Just go to bed,” he told her, his voice now a low rumble. She almost preferred the yelling. The defeated tone just made her feel worse.
He moved out of the doorway to let her pass. As she did, he lifted his hand. Wendy thought he was going to place it on her shoulder, but he hesitated and let it drop back to his side. “Stay out of there,” he repeated.
Wendy nodded and crossed her arms over her chest. “I will.” She didn’t blame him for being mad at her.
She wasn’t the only one who’d lost something in those woods.
CHAPTER 8
Memories
Wendy listened at her bedroom door to the sounds of her father’s frustration. She noticed that he only did chores when he was using them to announce his anger, even in the middle of the night. Wendy knew too well what it was like to have someone furiously fold a sock at you, or resentfully wash a dish in your direction.
When things grew quiet and she was pretty sure her father wouldn’t come barging in to say, And another thing! Wendy went into her bathroom. She turned on the bathtub faucet and peeled off her jeans. They had two jagged tears, but it wasn’t a big deal since they were old anyway. She sat on the edge of the tub and scooped up handfuls of water to pour over the cuts in her leg. They weren’t very deep and stung only a little now. She’d gotten far worse scrapes from the edge of the pool during swim practice.
She dipped a facecloth into the water and watched her shadow mirror her movements against the wall. As Wendy let her leg soak, she dabbed at the dried blood caked to the angry bump on her head. She was a mess. The last twenty-four hours had been a mess. Everything was a mess!
As her leg soaked in the warm water, Wendy stretched for the cabinet under the sink and dug out her sewing kit. She did her best to mend the pant leg. To save money, she’d spent many afternoons patching holes and resewing the hems on her parents’ clothes. Her father’s suits weren’t cheap, so it made more sense for her to reattach a button or fix a pleat than to buy a new jacket. Her mother was petite, which meant standard scrub pants were always too long. The bottom hems wore out too fast from dragging on the ground, so Wendy would hem them whenever they got too worn. Wendy inspected her work, giving a tug to see if her stitches held up. They were a little askew, but the jeans were perfectly fine as junk pants if she only wore them around the house.
With a sigh, she tossed them in the hamper.
What was she supposed to do now? How was she supposed to explain any of this—Peter, his shadow—to anyone?
Oh, yes, I almost ran a boy over with my truck last night. Turns out, he claims to be a character from stories my mom made up! Did I mention he doesn’t have a shadow? Like, literally. And he needs my help to find it!
Wendy scowled. Logically, it didn’t make any sense, but she had seen with her own eyes that his shadow was missing. There was no denying who he was any longer.
Wendy tried to organize her thoughts. What did she know?
She knew he was the boy she had been subconsciously drawing. He was her daydreams come to life, even if he was a bit older than the Peter in her mother’s stories. He’d definitely heard her tell stories before, but more important, he knew her brothers. In the middle of all the wild coincidences and impossible things like missing shadows, Peter knowing John and Michael was the most unsettling.
Wendy dried off and changed into an oversized sleep shirt. She crept to her dresser and pulled out of the small jewelry box the one thing she had always associated with her lo
st memory: the acorn. She sat in the middle of her bed and stared at the acorn, balancing it in the center of her palm.
Peter knew things that she couldn’t remember. He was the key. If he could fill in the chunks of memories that had been ripped from her mind, then she could figure out what happened. She could find her brothers and get them back. It felt like an invasion of privacy—the idea that Peter knew something about what had happened to her. That he held the secret to those missing months. That this could mean Wendy finding the answer to the questions that had been eating her alive for years.
And at the center of all this was the question: Was he really Peter Pan?
Wendy dug into her small trash can and uncrumpled one of the many drawings she’d made of Peter Pan’s face. She lay on top of the blankets because it was still too hot to sleep under them, then sighed and tried to force herself to calm down. Counting the fairy lights around her window and rolling the acorn between her thumb and index finger, Wendy drifted off to sleep.
Wendy sat on a fallen log in the middle of a mass of trees, but not like the woods behind her house back home. The log was covered in vines as thick as rope. The bark under her hands was wet and smooth. Dark green giants with shiny leaves shot up into the sky. Sunlight filtered through a covering of palm fronds. Palm trees rose from white sand, bowed with coconuts. She was under a lush canopy of gleaming leaves.
Even though Wendy had never been away from the Pacific Northwest, she knew this had to be a jungle. Colorful parrots with vibrant red, blue, and yellow feathers called from nearby branches. In the distance, there was a soft thump of overripe fruit dropping to the ground. There must have been a beach nearby. Wendy could recognize the rhythmic song of waves crashing on the shore as it filtered through the jungle. The air was warm and heavy. Her skin felt sticky and she could taste salt on her lips.
Wendy looked down at herself. She wasn’t in the same bulky swimmer’s body she’d grown into over the last several years. This one was small, skinny, that of a child. She wore a pair of white leggings with lace hems and a white buttoned blouse with flowy sleeves. Even though they were smudged with dirt, she instantly recognized them as the clothes she had gone missing in.
