Page 121 of Losing Wendy

His tone is about as casual as my laugh just now. All effort. Each note meticulously placed.

“Just found it stuffed in a dresser. He sure did leave his artwork all over the place, didn’t he?” I say.

What a Darling little liar, I hear the captain’s voice taunt.

Peter stares at me for half a moment, then breaks out into a gentle smile. The kind that melts my heart and pinches it with guilt for lying to him. I don’t particularly want to tell him about the events of last night. If I explain how I was attacked by Tink and ended up at the dead man’s grave, I’ll have to explain why I snuckout at night, and I still haven’t gotten the information I need out of the captain.

Or you don’twanthim dead, a voice—a very stupid, foolish voice— whispers in my ear.

As Peter rises to go, I ask him, “What were you going to say earlier?”

Peter’s ears flick as he spins back around. “When I was going to say what?”

“When…” I let out a laugh. “You trailed off earlier. You said you haven’t seen one like this since…?” I circle my hands around each other in question.

Peter scratches at the back of his head. “I was going to say since before…” He peeks out into the hallway to check none of the Lost Boys are around. “Before Neverland. That looks like one of the sketches Thomas drew in his early days at the orphanage.”

My blood runs cold. “That wouldn’t make any sense, though.”

Peter shrugs. “He probably had it in his pocket when the Sister brought him to Neverland.”

“Right. I suppose that’s a reasonable explanation.”

Peter just smiles, and it’s the type that would typically melt me. “Can you think of a more reasonable explanation? Actually,” he laughs, “can you think of another explanation at all?”

I shake my head, and it’s the grandest lie I’ve ever told.

At breakfast,I can’t keep my eyes off Victor.

Off the structure of his cheekbones, the slight curve of his nose. My morbid mind takes his face and flashes it upon the skull of the dead man’s corpse, trying to make any of the features match, begging them not to.

The more I stare, the more my mind plays tricks on me, lures me into the worst possibility imaginable. But I can’t think of a more rational explanation for why the man I killed had a sketch in his pocket that predates Neverland.

I tell myself Peter’s right, that Thomas just happened to have it inhis pocket when he came to Neverland. It’s easier to believe he kept it with him at all times—his only memory of a life before. The life that was snatched from him.

That’s the simplest explanation.

But it’s not the one my mind grasps onto.

It takes a morsel of evidence, and instead of drawing logical conclusions, it crafts a story. One where it wasn’t Thomas who brought this sketch of his into Neverland. One where it traveled to Neverland in the same pocket from which I plucked it last night.

Meaning the man came here looking for Thomas and Victor. Meaning he knew them before, and was motivated enough to traverse realms to find them.

Even down that path of logic, there’s a place the signs lead. One where I could put all this to rest and remain somewhat innocent.

Peter’s made comments about the warden of the orphanage that make me question the type of relationship he had with the children. Perhaps the warden was obsessed with the boys he lost, and his own wicked inclination drove him to seek them out.

Perhaps he killed Thomas and Freckles, angry that they’d escaped his control. If he already had Thomas’s sketch, he could have hired a seer to use it to track him to Neverland, much like Captain Astor had done with my pocket watch.

In this version of the story, I get to be the hero.

I get to be the one who saved not only Peter’s life, but Victor’s and Simon’s and Nettle’s and Benjamin’s and Smalls’s and the Twins’.

But the man wasn’t going after Victor when I killed him.

He was going after Peter.

Perhaps that’s why my mind fixates on a single moment. Victor, in sheer hatred, spitting upon the corpse of the man, who now that my mind has run off with me, shared Victor’s forehead, his cheekbones, his nose.

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