Mere Phantasy

by Ashley Lauren

  The girl didn’t seem fazed by me, offering our group a slight roll of her eyes before heading over to the makeshift kitchen about thirty feet away. “She’s not mute, boys. She’s the one.” She snorted with sarcasm, gathering different supplies into her satchel.

  I was instantly offended, my temper replacing my confusion, but the boys in front of me didn’t give me the chance to slice something back at her. They began to crowd in around me, eyes wide and eager.

  “You don’t say? She’s her?”

  “The she her?”

  “The her her?”

  “I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

  That was the cue for all the boys to shout in alarm and back up from crowding in on me. My fear of suffocating certainly never included a wall of little boys. But I felt like my chest might be closing in on me anyway. I had no idea where I was, what these people were talking about, and how in God’s name I was going to get home.

  Home.

  The word hit my chest hard, and I doubled over to gag off the side of the bed. If not for the lack of eating in the past twenty-four hours, I might’ve spewed chunks all over the already dirty floor and my dangling necklace, which I couldn’t catch fast enough. So I was stuck with dry-heaving nothing, even as Peter stepped into the house… from the wall?

  “Whoa, what’s going on?”

  “She’s puking! What if her puke is acid?”

  “Acid puker!”

  As I finished my gagging bout, despite my panic urging me to continue, Peter was at my side instantly. Literally, as if I blinked and he was just… there. He bent down next to me about two seconds after hearing what the kids had told him and tried to hide the disgust on his face with a sympathetic look.

  “Hey, calm down. You’re working yourself up.” He was clothed in a new outfit, one made of what seemed to be leather and straight out of sixteenth century.

  Feeling lethargic and dehydrated beyond belief, I lay back on the cot with a groan.

  Peter moved to go somewhere as I closed my eyes briefly, trying to slow the spinning of my head. When I opened them again, Peter stood above me with a canteen of water. I swore I didn’t even have my eyes closed for more than a second before he was already there again, a concerned look on his face. I must’ve been seeing things.

  As I slowly took a few drinks, Peter watched my every move, and the boys around us scrambled to get away, still staying close enough to watch me.

  “Watch out! She might acid puke on you, Peter!”

  “Step away from her before she melts off your skin with her barf!”

  “Boys.” Peter spun around to face them with a stern look. Instantly, the kids stood upright at attention, but their eyes still glanced to me in anticipation, despite Peter’s orders. From what I could tell, he was their leader.

  The Lost Boy looked to the only other girl in the room, her arms crossed over her chest, her lips pursed in everything but approval, eyes passive when they landed on me. What was her problem?

  “Lox, go get Tink, would you?” Peter asked.

  “Sure,” she said with fake cheer, moving toward the far side of the house.

  Before I could see how she was going to leave, Peter’s body moved into my view, and I missed it. Frustrated, I tried to peer around him, but he pushed my shoulder down gently.

  “You should probably rest or something.”

  “I-I have to go home.” I tried to get back up again. Peter just urged my shoulder back down, only touching me with one finger, hesitant.

  “You are home.”

  My eyes shot up to him, and I sat up on my elbows so he wasn’t leaning over me like before. It was making my skin crawl how close the Lost Boy kept getting to me. “Where did you bring me? Are you a kidnapper?”

  “What?” Peter’s eyes got wide. “No, of course not.”

  “A drug dealer?”

  “Huh?”

  “A psycho killer?”

  “Well, uh, I mean…”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Lacey.”

  “Well, thanks, that’s really nice of you.”

  “You need to rest before tomorrow, so lie back down,” Peter urged, getting up again. “The boys will leave you alone after I introduce them all.”

  “This is insane.”

  Peter ignored me, pointing to the first boy as they all stood in a row. “This’s Sniffs.” He touched the kid’s curly brown hair. He grinned, his front teeth missing. “And his twin brother Snide.” An almost identical kid, just with his hair cut short, stood beside his brother. Evident pride filled him as Peter patted his shoulder. “They’re both seven, the youngest.”

  “You let seven-year-olds who carry knives in your…?” I looked for the word. “House?”

  “Hideout, actually.” Peter smirked before moving to his next kid. Before he could respond about the weapon subject, Snide, the shorter-haired kid, stepped forward, unsheathing his knife, and glared in the most terrifying way a seven-year-old could muster.

  “We gots ‘ta protect ourselves, miss. ‘Tis monst—”

  Sheepishly, Peter covered Snide’s mouth and chuckled lowly. “That’s enough, kid.”

  Snide, instead of having a bothered attitude like most kids his age would, just shrugged and stepped back into line. I didn’t breathe until he finally put away the knife at his side.

  “What exactly do you mean ‘protect ourselves?’” I asked, feeling my heart slowly sink further and further into my stomach.

  “Nothing important.”

  Suddenly, the first kid’s twin brother exploded with, “MONSTERS!”

  And then his brother joined in, ignoring Peter’s wishes. “And pirates!”

  “Oh, curse those bloody scoundrels!” another boy offered. All of them erupted in chatter then, their organized line easily forgotten in this new excitement.

  “Boys!” Peter cut them off lowly, his glare serious this time. It must’ve scared them into shape, because they instantly moved to shut their mouths and hang their heads, forming their line again.

  Running his hands through his hair, Peter let out a sigh. Seeing my alarmed expression, he smiled to cover it up. “Kids. They say the funniest things.”

  “But you’re a kid, too, right, Peter?” one boy asked.

  Another cut in. “Yeah, never growin’ up and all that. We ain’t that different from ya.”

  Peter gave them all another look of disapproval. “Would you all just clam up already?” They got silent then, which seemed to work for their leader. The Lost Boy nodded before going to introduce the rest.

  “Right.” He started, but I was struck with something as he went to name them off one by one. “Besides the twins, the age goes up. Whimsley, he’s nine. This’s Purdle, ten, and so is Feely. Then there’s Laco. He’s twelve. Mitch… Lads, where’s Mitch? Well, anyway—”

  I had to stop listening in order to keep myself from starting another “acid puke” bout.

  The Lost Boy. Little boys who listened to his every word. A large home he called the hideout.

  It was absolutely ridiculous and stupid, but it sounded a lot like…

  Peter Pan.

  I burst into laughter then, grabbing onto my stomach and interrupting Peter mid-sentence. He stopped and frowned at me, but I was lost in hysterics.

  “What’s so funny?” Peter questioned skeptically.

  The tears pooled in my eyes from the pain of the pure enjoyment at how great this was. “Oh my God, I get it now. You’re some weird guy who’s obsessed with Peter Pan, and these are your deranged little followers you call ‘Lost Boys,’ right?”

  When I got control of myself again, Peter had his arms crossed over his chest.

  I snorted. “Where did you even get these kids? Never mind. It doesn’t matter.” I shifted to my wobbly feet and, in turn, stumbled with the effort. Seeing me about to fall, Peter was there in almost a split second, catching my elbow to steady me.

  “I think you should maybe, er, sit down, Lace�
��” he urged, but I cut him off.

  “This’s just a sick joke you’re playing, and I’ve had enough of it.” I shoved him away from me lightly. “T-take me home.”

  “For Neversake, Lacey, you are home,” Peter insisted, his blue eyes silts of worry. “Now sit down before you hurt yourself.”

  But that familiar sense of panic welled inside me, and I had to get rid of it. “Whatever you drugged me with o-or whatever messed-up show you’re trying to put on, I’m not going to be in any part of it. None of this is real. Now please let me go home.”

  As I was stepping to follow the path that girl, Lox, left along before, I was only met with a twisting branch wall and sheer disappointment.

  This was it. I was imprisoned in a tree home with a boy claiming to be Peter Pan and his little deranged minions. And I couldn’t see one way out. Why was everyone trying to cage me in like an animal?

  Just as I was about to yell at Peter some more, possibly even threaten him, despite how ridiculously out of my comfort zone that was, Peter stood up tall and challenged me with his stare.

  “If none of this is real, then maybe you should explain why I’ve been in your dreams. And why those same dreams you’ve had every night for almost your entire life didn’t appear last night while you slept.”

  Sickeningly, his words hit me harder than a car door. And I hated to admit it, but he was right. I hadn’t thought of that yet.

  “How do you know about those?” I growled, but tears of fear choked me, making it hard to stay ferocious. No one had ever known about my dreams before, and I’d especially never met anyone who’d been in them. But here he was, the Lost Boy. Not just a depiction on a graffiti wall, but a real guy with, hopefully, real answers. “Who are you, really, Peter?” I begged him.

  But before he could respond, there was the sound of shuffling feet, and a boy a little younger than Peter and me, followed by that girl Lox, slid down a small opening in the tree roots with an alarmed expression.

  “Peter…” The kid huffed, chest heaving like he had run the whole way here. Wherever exactly here was.

  “What’s going on, Mitch? Where have you been?” Peter was completely distracted from our conversation now, the Lost Boys excitedly crowding around him to see what was happening.

  Mitch’s strawberry-blond hair fell into his light, excited eyes. “Him. H-he’s back.”

  The slight twist of Peter’s front tooth caught the light, and he started to grin bigger than I’d ever seen.

  And then a bright ball of light attacked me.

  Seven

  When I was younger, my father made me take a self-defense class after a daydream experience at school resulted in an altercation with a very angry bully. Long story short, I thought she was a giant with only one eye, and she thought I was a crazy girl getting people to laugh at her when I screamed and tried to run from her. This left me with a black eye, three weeks’ detention for picking the fight in the first place (but what else was I supposed to do when I thought a cyclops was trying to eat me?), and my father enrolling me in Suan Ho’s tai-chi and defense class.

  But what neither my father nor I thought of was if my training would ever help me fight something that wasn’t real in the first place. One of those somethings that bit and pulled hair really hard.

  The ball of light was fast, wrapping around me profusely while nipping and tugging at me whenever it could. At first, I thought it was maybe some exotic breed of demonic firefly. But as I gave another failed attempt at trying to swat it away, the light got very close to my face.

  Definitely not a firefly.

  The little woman fluttering in front of me was not only about three inches tall, but she was also fitted with wings the same size as her small body. Despite the almost blinding light around her, I could still make out the details of her features when she held still. It was like something out of a movie.

  Like something out of a movie.

  “Tink!” Peter jumped forward to intervene, his entire hand closing around the little woman, snuffing out the light momentarily. A string of bell sounds came from her, like angry curses, but they were too beautiful to be very threatening. What was threatening was the fact she had bitten me so hard on the inside of my wrist that I was now bleeding. I stared at the crimson stream beginning to drip off my pale skin.

  “Somebody kill it,” was the first thing I thought to say in my frazzled daze. Everyone’s eyes in the room instantly sprang to me in alarm. And then the little woman erupted from Peter’s grasp and flew straight for my face.

  I ducked in time for her to miss my nose, so she targeted the next worst option. With a yelp, my head was jerked backward by a large strand of my hair the miniature flying woman pulled at with all her might, cursing me in her bell talk.

  “Get it off of me! Get it off!” I screeched.

  Peter moved fast, instructing the boys to get something for him and stepping forward to try and grab the creature again. But she was quicker than him, darting in and out of strands of my already disarrayed hair and knotting it. And honestly, you couldn’t understand just how painful and frightening this was until your hair was almost ripped out of your scalp by a fairy.

  That’s right. A fairy.

  After I realized what, and who, she was, Snide bagged her in a piece of cloth and tightened his fist around the bottom. The fairy was still miffed apparently, because she hissed in the most angelical way possible and then continued to dart within the bag’s confinement.

  Holding my now throbbing head, I blinked up at Peter in shock. He leaned over to offer me his hand as the other boys struggled to keep the demonic firefly in her temporary incarceration. “I-I’m sorry, Lacey. She usually isn’t this aggressive. She—” He was stopped by the fit of laughter both Mitch and Lox were in.

  Feeling my ears getting red, I let Peter help me up, and when he saw I was okay, he whirled to face them. “Knock it off, both of you.”

  “But her face!” Mitch howled.

  Lox wiped her eyes. “It was like…” She mimicked someone with a wide-open mouth and eyes, startled out of their mind, and then went to squeezing her eyes shut in a fit of giggles.

  Having been on the floor, I wiped the dirt from my clothes (which didn’t do much good) and glared at them angrily.

  Just when I thought Peter was going to side with me, I saw the edge of his mouth turn up into a smirk. Not soon after, everyone was laughing at me, including the other boys. Snide was, too, but he stopped when the fairy furiously darted into his face and threw him onto the ground from her place in the bag.

  Glowering at this point, I grabbed for Peter’s sleeve. Seeing this, everyone in the room stopped, eyes on what I’d just done, and there was no more laughter. Even the stupid fairy thing stopped squirming in her bag. When I looked up at Peter, he wore a serious expression, watching me evenly. Thinking my move probably wasn’t a good idea, a new fear of Peter sparking into my throat, I let go and let my hand fall to my side.

  “That’s a fairy? A real-life fairy?” I shifted my focus toward the bag. At the mention of herself, the thing went ballistic again, with more twinkling bells. Was this some work of science? Like how a rainbow was a reflection of rain, turning it into an array of colors? There had to be some concrete explanation for the fact that a small human with dainty wings and a big attitude was able to exist in the first place and then bite me while also… existing in the first place. It didn’t make any sense.

  Peter frowned but then looked at the light. “This’s Tinkerbell, and yes, she’s a fairy. We call her Tink for short,” he said, and the light came closer. She had a small elfin face, but she was beautiful—for a fairy, I guess.

  Tinkerbell?

  I felt my head for a fever. “I’m dying. That’s it. Someone drugged me, and I’m now dying.” I chuckled like a mad person, which quickly turned to more panic. I pinched my skin. It hurt. I wasn’t dreaming.

  Wait.

  I’m not dreaming.

  Most hallucinations like this could
be fixed by a pinch or some water thrown on me, while other times, they just ended on their own. But looking at all the expectant faces in front of me, real faces, with the familiar feeling of magic at every turn, my stomach dropped again.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  Peter stepped between the sour-looking Lox and the dumbfounded Mitch thankfully, but then grabbed my shoulder to get my attention. “You need to calm down and breathe.”

  “I-I can’t.”

  His eyebrows dipped over his eyes. “Yes, you can. I know this is overwhelming, but I’ve searched too long and grown up way too much to have you bail on me just yet.”

  “What does that even mean?” Trembling with fear, I wished I could hide from them. It seemed like the best solution when I had no idea how to handle myself in a situation. I mean, it worked for me when I was a kid. Why wouldn’t it work now?

  But even if I wanted to, Peter wasn’t going to let me get away from him. I could see it in his blue eyes as he grabbed my hand and smiled happily.

  “Would you like me to show you?”

  Nodding dumbly, I tried to ignore how familiar it was to have Peter’s hand on mine. He was like a force of nature but also so full of the sensations I had in my dreams that being led by him through the hideout was overwhelming. It was so intoxicating that I had to pull away from him in order to control my own heartbeat again.

  Crazy.

  Mitch and the other boys seemed excited to be getting out of the hideout just as much as I was the moment I realized that was what Peter had suggested. They whooped and hollered like monkeys, soon disappearing into different sides of the large under-room, through the large, spindly trunks, and Snide took that dreadful little thing with him, thankfully. Breathing in deeply, I made eye contact with Lox. She just frowned in disapproval before her long, golden braids swished with her ascent into the branches, and she left Peter and me alone together.

  Seeing how confused I was at the hydraulics of just exactly how this little home of his operated (I mean, there was a kitchen in a completely dirt-filled cave), Peter gave me a reassuring smile.

  “Lacey, you didn’t suffer through those dreams your whole life for no reason.” He assured me, motioning for me to step into the branches after Lox and the others. To me, it looked impossible to climb through, and I didn’t know how careful I could be when I was A) awfully clumsy on a normal day-to-day basis and B) feeling very sick at the moment. But using what little faith I could muster, I trusted the Lost Boy for a brief second and then, using his help, climbed into the throng of branches with no light to direct me.