Page 33 of Losing Wendy

“Don’t be stupid, Freckles. He doesn’t remember.”

“Nettle says he remembers.”

“Nettle is an attention-seeking idiot.”

The blond, spindly boy in the corner, whose nose looks like it’s been punched enough to be permanently crooked in the upward direction, sneers.

So that one’s Nettle.

I mark him to question later.

“I can’t answer a dozen questions at once,” says John, whose face grows paler with each word. He’s clutching Michael’s shoulder with his uninjured hand.

“It’s a shame you had to slice that off just to get in,” says a boy with dark brown skin and coiled black hair cut close to his scalp. He points at John’s stump of a finger.

“I think it’s pretty diehard,” says Smalls.

“Yeah, all of us are missing something already,” says Freckles, before flicking his neighbor on the skull. “Up here.”

“If you idiots don’t shut up, the new guy is going to pass out from that wound of his before we get any answers,” says Simon, who appears very much to be the head of the group, all dashing smiles and charisma.

John glances at me from behind the swarm of adolescent boys, exasperation written all over his face. It would be humorous if we hadn’t been dealt so much tragedy today. If I couldn’t read the pain of loss on my brother’s face so easily, in the weariness that sits like stagnant water behind his glassy eyes.

He looks so, so tired. And John has never been one to enjoy crowds.

I take a step forward, making sure to step on a twig this time. It snaps, and slowly the host of boys crane their necks over to me.

Honestly, the way the teenage boys look at me, you would have thought none of them had ever seen a girl before. John seems to notice it too, because he clears his throat to redirect the boys’ attention. It’s to no avail.

Only Victor, the boy with shadows underneath his eyes, seems uninterested in my presence.

Simon’s face lights up in a smile, and he crosses the room, bowing low before me, taking my hand and kissing my knuckles with a sparkle in his eyes. “My lady.”

“You don’t know she’s a lady.”

“Yeah, she could very well be a peasant.”

“Nah, Peter wouldn’t bother bringing back a peasant.”

“You’ll have to forgive us. We’re motherless orphans, after all,” says Simon. “Welcome to the Lost Boys.”

“The Lost Boys?” I ask, slightly endeared by the nickname this group of outcasts has come up with for themselves, though I have plenty of questions for them.

Simon’s grin is dazzling, the type that instantly makes you want to be his friend. “Yep, I’m Simon, but I’m assuming you already figured that out.” He winks, amused by his own presumptuousness. “This”—he points to the boy with dark brown skin who expressed lament over John’s injury—“is Benjamin. Nettle’s the one in the corner with his nose glued to the ceiling. Smalls is the baby. This is Joel”—I note a handsome boy with lightly tanned skin and shrewd green eyes—“Victor over here’s the one who looks like he’s been infected with vampirism. And these are the Twins.” Simon gestures to two boys in the corner, both with shaved ivory heads.

“And what are your names?” I ask.

Neither of them answer.

“Don’t bother trying to figure out their names. We’ve lived with them for years and can’t tell them apart, anyway.”

“What are their names, just in case I figure it out?” I ask.

Simon shrugs. “Not sure. We’ve called them the Twins for so long, we’ve all forgotten by this point. I’m fairly sure even they can’t remember.”

Again, something twists in my stomach. “How did you all end up here? And…what is this place?”

The boys let out amused laughs, but the noise dies down when they witness the confusion on my face.

---