Nod had gotten taller. I noticed it because he and Crow had been more or less the same size, and then one day they just weren’t anymore. He had grown.
And so had I.
In fact, it had gotten so that I woke up in the morning and didn’t recognize my body most days. All my limbs were longer, and my hands and feet seemed like foreign things.
When I walked, my ankles got tangled up, and I felt big and slow, though in truth I wasn’t that much bigger than I’d been before Battle. It was perhaps a thumb length, maybe more, but that length felt like miles when Peter was around, who seemed smaller than ever to me. Had I never really seen how young he was until then?
Sal didn’t speak as I led her away from the tree. After several minutes where we both determinedly tried not to look right at each other she said, “Where are we going?”
“To the tunnel that leads to the Other Place,” I said.
She tilted her head to one side, like she was disappointed in me. “Sending me back, then? No girls allowed on Peter’s island?”
“No, no,” I said hastily. “Not a bit of it. I just remembered what you said on Battle day—about not knowing the way back. And I want you to know it.”
Sal was silent for a minute. “So I can escape, if I need to.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
She stopped then, and hit me hard in the shoulder. “And what about you, you fool? Do you think I’ll run off and save myself and leave you here with him?”
I stared at her, rubbing my shoulder. “You hit hard,” I said.
“For a girl, you mean?” she said angrily. “I told you, Jamie, I lived on the streets with boys for three years. I can look after myself. I’m not helpless just because I’m a girl. I won’t have you treating me like I am. And I don’t think you should ask me to run away while you stand and fight. I’m here now, and I’ll stand beside you. I won’t run.”
Nobody had said this to me before. Nobody.
If I told the others to run, they ran. If I said I would be a shield between them and the world, then I was. None of them volunteered to stand with me, to take the knocks that I thought were my duty to take.
“Well?” she said.
“All right,” I said slowly. “All right. You won’t run, and I won’t ask you to. But I still want you to know how to get back to the Other Place. It’s not just about you.”
She wilted a little then. “Of course. Charlie.”
“I know he doesn’t mean as much to you as he does to me . . .” I started.
“Don’t think you can decide for me what’s in my heart,” she snapped. “I love Charlie as much as you do.”
“All right,” I said again, not knowing what else to say.
I felt as though I were navigating some strange and undiscovered country, one where perils lurked around every bend.
Girls might not be trouble the way Peter thought, but they certainly were confusing.
I took Sally off the main path and into a patch of forest tucked in the border between the swamp and the mountains. It wasn’t that far from the tree, but the course was confusing if you didn’t know where you were going. I showed her all the things I used to stay on track—a tree marked with an “X” in the bark, a knife mark scratched on a boulder, a little stream that bubbled near the entry to the tunnel to the Other Place.
It looked just like a rabbit hole, as it did on the other side. It was tucked underneath a tree between two knotted tree roots. There was nothing to show that it was magic, or that it would take you away from the island entirely.
For the first time I wondered what would happen if the tunnel was blocked. Would you be able to dig out all the way to the Other Place at the end, or would the magic be broken forever? Strange that we had never thought of this, or worried about it. We could have been trapped in the Other Place if that happened.
There was something about Peter, his complete surety that things would always work the way he wanted them to. When he said we could go to the Other Place and return to the island, we believed him. I’d never troubled myself thinking that the magic might go away.
Now I worried about exactly such a thing. What if I told Sally and Charlie to run for the tunnel, and when they got there the tunnel wouldn’t take them back because it was blocked or broken?
Worse, what if the tunnel only took you to the Other Place if Peter was with you? I’d never tried to go through on my own, and I was certain none of the boys ever had either.
What if it was Peter who made the magic?
She shook her head. “I never would have found this again. It was dark and I was so excited, and also the tunnel seemed so long.”
“It does, that first time,” I said. “After that it goes quicker.”
Peter’s head popped out like a jack-in-the-box, telling me to come on, come on, there were adventures to be had. He disappeared again, and I was afraid to stand out in the dark on my own, out under this tree. I didn’t know how to get back home, and the tree seemed huge and frightening, like a dangerous thing that would reach down with its branches and grab me and hold me too tight.
I ran to the hole and peered in, and didn’t see Peter. So I called his name and heard him answer, “Come on, Jamie!” though the answer seemed far away.
He was going away from me, and then I would be all alone.
I put my feet into the opening, and after a second I pushed off and followed Peter down into the hole. There was a long drop that I didn’t expect and I tumbled to the bottom, getting dirt in my eyes and mouth and nose.
Peter laughed, but it wasn’t a mean laugh, and he picked me up and dusted me off and his eyes seemed to glow in the darkness.
“It’s not far now,” he said, and he took my hand.
It was farther than I thought it would be, so long in the dark, and I would have been afraid except that Peter never let go of my hand.
“Did you ever wonder, Jamie, how Peter found this island in the first place?”
Sal’s words startled me out of the memory. I shrugged. “I never asked. I suppose I always thought that he found the hole by accident, when he was just exploring in the Other Place.”
I didn’t mention my worry that the path only worked because of Peter. I decided that I would explore on my own another day, when Peter was away somewhere, and make sure that you could cross to the Other Place if he wasn’t with you.
“I wonder,” Sal said, and she looked thoughtful.
“Wonder what?” I asked.
“I wonder if he’s not actually from the Other Place,” Sal said. “If he’s from the island, and he found the path to the Other Place from here.”
“How could he be from the island?” I asked. “Did he sprout out of the ground like a mushroom? Where are his parents?”
Sal shook her head. “I don’t know. But he’s not like other boys. There’s something different about him.”
I didn’t say anything to this. There was something different about Peter—the way he knew things about the island, the way that he sometimes seemed like he was of the island.
And he could fly. None of the rest of us could fly.
I thought that this was because he’d been there for so long, but maybe Sal was right. Maybe the reason why Peter was so dismissive of mothers was because he’d never had one. Maybe he just appeared on the island one day, unfolding out of the grass just as he was, an eleven-year-old boy forever.
But no. That was silly. Even Peter couldn’t have come from nothing. He had to have been born somewhere.
I asked Sal to point out all the markers to me on the way back to the tree, so I could be sure that she understood where she was to go.
She huffed out a sigh. “I told you I’m not stupid, Jamie. There’s no need to test me.”
“I just want to make sure you won’t get lost,” I said. “It’s easy to get lost here.”
> If she and Charlie were on their own and got turned around in the dark, they could very easily end up near the crocodile pond. Sal might think I was being ridiculous, but then, she hadn’t been on the island when Peter told the story of the crocodile and the duckling.
She didn’t worry about Charlie being dragged underneath the water of the pond by sharp, sharp teeth.
Still, she passed my “test,” as she called it, and found the way back to the main path without any prompting from me. When we reached it she crossed her arms and looked up at me.
“Happy now?” Then she frowned. “Are you taller? I thought I was nearly as tall as you.”
“You did well,” I said, avoiding her question. I glanced back over my shoulder in the direction of the tunnel. “Perhaps we should practice again from this side, just to make sure—”
“I’m not doing it again. You’ll simply have to trust me,” she said impatiently. “Jamie, you didn’t answer me. Are you taller?”
This was the other quality that made Sal different from all the boys. She couldn’t be distracted by anything. If she asked you a question and you didn’t answer, then she would ask that question again and again until you did.
“Yes,” I said, and hoped that would be enough.
Sal would never take a one-word answer.
“Are you—” she began.
Then she swallowed before going on, her voice hushed like she was afraid the island itself would hear, and tell Peter.
“Are you growing up?”
Her words seemed to hang between us on the shimmering air, insects flying between them without any notion of how dangerous that question could be.
“I—”
It crashed over me all at once, the truth I’d been pretending wasn’t there. I was growing up.
I was growing up, and I was so afraid.
I turned away from Sally, choking on the answer.
She wouldn’t let me turn, wouldn’t let me cry alone in shame, wouldn’t leave me.
Sally would never leave me alone.
She put her arms around me and I covered my face in my hands and sobbed, because I was afraid.
For so long I’d run free with the knowledge that I would never grow up, that I would only die if I got on the wrong end of a pirate’s sword.
Even then that sort of death had seemed another adventure at first, when everything on the island was new. It was heroic and also somehow not real, that I might be slashed by a pirate and fall to the ground but Peter would find me and wake me up later.
There were many years when the death of the other boys that we brought here didn’t trouble me, because I knew that at least I would always go on. Peter had promised me, and so I would live forever. It was a very long time before I stopped believing in Peter’s promises.
Now the island was fading for me, losing its magic, and I would grow old, and one day I would die for certain.
And I thought it wasn’t just because Peter didn’t care about the boys, or that he kept secrets. It was because I didn’t love him anymore the way that I used to do, when we were both small and he was my best friend in all the world.
“I’m glad,” she said fiercely. “I’m glad, because I’m going to grow up and I want you to grow up with me.”
I scrubbed at my eyes then and looked at her. Her face was so close to mine. I could smell her hair, flowery and sweet, because Sal took baths even when the rest of us did not. Her eyes were bluer than they’d ever been, dark and full of some promise that I didn’t really understand.
“Only, Jamie, you have to not grow up too fast,” she said primly. “Because I’m thirteen and I think right now you’re about the size of a fourteen-year-old, and that’s happened very fast. So you can’t get much bigger now, for if you do, then you’ll be too far ahead of me.”
I knew then that when I stopped loving Peter my heart looked for other things, and Sal was filling up all the space that Peter used to take there.
She pressed her lips against my cheek, something I’d seen now and then in the Other Place. It was called a kiss, I remembered.
A kiss can be made of magic too. I’d never known that.
She blushed again when I stared as she pulled back, but she didn’t look away. Sal didn’t hide. She always looked at you directly, and made you meet her.
“I’ll grow up with you,” I said, and took her hand.
It was different from holding Charlie’s hand, or Peter pulling me along to a new adventure. Her fingers twined into mine and I held it over my heart, so I could show her all the things that I didn’t know how to say.
Then I kissed her cheek very fast and let go of her hand and ran away, and she ran after me, laughing, and all of the world seemed to rise up laughing with her. She had the most wonderful laugh you’ve ever heard, like silver music that coursed through your blood.
We were still children, for all that we thought we weren’t. We were in that in-between place, the twilight between childish things and grown-up things.
Childhood still held out a friendly hand to us, if we wanted to go back to it, while the unexplored country was ahead, beckoning us to come there and see what new pleasures were to be found.
I didn’t really understand what that country meant, not really. It had been so long since I’d been near a grown-up who wasn’t a pirate. To me pirates were not unlike children themselves, only in bigger bodies. They did as they pleased (or so it seemed to me) and they spent as much time on the island as we boys did. And their lives had just as much blood and adventuring as ours.
The country that called to me now was one I barely remembered, one in which well-dressed husbands and wives talked quietly over supper tables. I remembered, suddenly, seeing just such a pair when I pressed my face against the window of a public house.
I didn’t remember why I was there, or how old I might have been, or where my own parents were. I only remembered being cold and hungry and seeing them there, warm and clean and well-fed.
“Sal,” I said. “When we grow up we will have a very large house.”
“Of course,” she said. “For all the boys.”
I nodded, pleased that she understood. For when Sal and I left the island to grow up, of course we would take Charlie and Nod and Crow with us. I could never leave them behind with Peter.
The thought of Peter all alone on the island, with no companions to play with, didn’t make me as sad as it ought to. I felt a little thrill of pleasure that he would have no one to push or pull or feed to the maw of the island when he was bored.
“When will we leave?” Sal asked.
I explained to her that I wanted to test the tunnel before we tried to cross it without Peter. She agreed that it was a possibility that the crossing might only be there if he was.
She pursed her lips. “I don’t like the idea of you trying on your own.”
“It will be safer and quicker with just one,” I said. “And once I’m sure we can make it through to the Other Place, then we can leave as soon as Peter’s gone off on one of his trips.”
“Why not just leave when he’s there?” she asked. “You should look him in the eye and tell him that you’re going, not sneak away like a coward.”
That stung. I wasn’t a coward. I’d never been a coward.
“It’s not about cowardice,” I said. “It’s about safety. You don’t know Peter. You think that you know him, but I’ve been his companion for longer than you can understand. Peter might let all of you go, though I can’t be certain of that. But he won’t let me go. I think Peter would rather kill me himself than see me leave.”
More than that, he’d try to kill the others if he thought it would make me stay. In his Peter-boy-logic he would think that if only he got rid of what distracted me, then I would be happy to be with him instead.
But if I said that out loud, Sal would only tell me t
hat I was trying to protect her when she didn’t need protecting.
“You’re afraid to fight him?” she asked, peering at me closely. “I can’t believe that.”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Then this is about me or Charlie or some other such thing,” Sal said.
It cut me, it really did, the way she just seemed to know everything.
“Can’t you let me look after you?” I said. “If we’re together, then that means we take care of each other.”
“Yes, that means I look after you, too, and not allow you to act foolish.”
“It’s not foolish to keep you away from Peter’s anger,” I said. “You’ve never seen it.”
“I saw him at the Battle arena,” she said.
“That’s not anger,” I said. Why would she not comprehend? Everything about this plan was much more dangerous than she thought it was.
If Peter caught us . . .
“Please,” I said. “Please, don’t make me put you or Charlie or Nod or Crow at risk just because it offends your sense of honesty. You can be as honest and forthright as you like, Sal, but you should know that Peter won’t be. This is his island. He’ll do anything to keep it exactly as he wants it.”
There must have, finally, been something in my face or voice that convinced her, for she gave a reluctant nod.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll do it your way.”
“And don’t mention anything to the others yet,” I said. “Not until it’s time to go.”
“Yes,” she said, and then her hand came up suddenly, blocking her eyes.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“Something bright,” she said, lowering her hand and pointing behind me. “Like a flash.”
I twisted around, looking for what had startled her, but I didn’t see anything. I thought I heard a faint tinkling sound on the wind.
“Where did it come from?” I asked, suddenly worried that pirates might be roaming the forest searching for us. The flash might have been the sun off a blade, and the tinkling the sound of buckles jingling as they walked.
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