Page 49 of Losing Wendy

By the end of our first hour of preparation, Nettle is muttering something about regretting switching with Simon, but I flash him a smile and tell him he’ll be reconsidering that when he tastes the fruit of our labor.

Actually, I tell him we’ll be tasting the vegetables of our labor, at which point he almost boos me out of the kitchen.

As the heiress of a grand estate, it wasn’t within my training regimen to learn to prepare meals. Only to delegate them. But, same with climbing the clock tower, I found the intricacy that goes into cooking, coupled with the head chef’s outlandish stories, to be a welcome distraction from the dreadful future that plagued my mind.

After beating the boar meat until it’s dead all over again with a mallet I found in the hunting closet and teaching Nettle how to properly salt the meat, I’m rather pleased with how my—our, I suppose—labor is coming along.

“Nettle, can I ask you a question?” I ask as we work on slicing the vegetables.

“Sure. If you agree to finish the rest of this on your own,” he says.

I ignore him and ask anyway. “The other boys say you remember what your life was like before Neverland.”

“That doesn’t sound like a question to me.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. “Do you really remember?”

He looks up at me, blue eyes watery as he slices into the onions. “Sure I do. The rest of the boys claim to be orphans, and maybe they were, but I think they like the romantic notion of it. I’m not anorphan, though. My father’s a duke. Owns a massive estate out in Hestershire.”

“Hestershire?” I ask, trying to hide the way my pitch rises. Our nanny used to sing us a nursery rhyme about Hestershire, but that’s all it was. A made-up place only named as such because the lyricist needed something to rhyme with the next verse.

“Yeah, it’s at the farthest corner of the world.”

“Where the sea is blue as sapphire?” I ask, thinking of the rest of the nursery rhyme.

“You’ve heard of it?” he asks, eyes brightening. I can’t tell if it’s the heat from the stove that’s blotching his pale cheeks with color.

Sadness and guilt pinch my chest. “Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

Nettle smiles, and I feel as if I might weep. “Well, you’ll have to tell the others then. They think I made it up.”

My heart hurts when I remember then the third verse of the rhyme, the one about a rich duke who owns the city of Hestershire. I don’t know what magic wiped these boys’ memories, but obviously the nursery rhyme left something planted deep in Nettle’s mind.

I quickly change the subject. “Where do all these vegetables come from anyway?”

Nettle offers me a sidelong glance, before saying, “The ground.”

When my elbow collides with his ribcage, he lets out a startled laugh. “Joel tends to our garden. It’s in a clearing north of the Den.”

My brow curves before I can stop it. “Joelis your gardener?” It’s hard to imagine the boy I caught ushering a rat to its agonizing demise tending to any sort of life.

Nettle is careful not to look at me, his voice even as he collects a pile of sliced carrots onto the center of the cutting board. “Peter thought he’d be better suited to it than hunting,” is all he says.

My skin crawls, and because I don’t want to talk about Joel anymore, I say, “There sure are a lot of onions.”

Nettle’s nose turns up. “I hate onions. They’re not proper food for nobility”—I try to avoid cringing as I recall that verse of the rhyme—“but they’re real easy to grow here, so Peter makes us eatthem with everything. Doesn’t like us to waste anything. But I always give mine to Simon.”

“Well, I happen to love onions. Maybe you could share yours with me instead,” I laugh.

Nettle gives me a conspiratorial glance. “But then you’ll stink just like the rest.”

I tryto work up the courage to ask Nettle about the missing boy from the sketch before dinner. The entire time, I’m telling myself this would be the best time, when he and I are alone. But something’s gnawing at my gut, anxiety trapping my tongue behind my teeth. Every time I come close to asking him, my mind comes up with a reason I’m being ridiculous. That there’s some completely reasonable explanation for why I haven’t met the boy in the picture.

Perhaps he’s not real at all. He looked more distorted than the others, after all. Perhaps the artist attempted to draw the face of a boy conjured by his imagination, and this boy simply wasn’t as clear as those for which he had a visual reference. Perhaps he’s a lost memory from one of the boys’ past lives.

These explanations do little to soothe the constriction in my chest, though they do delay me from asking Nettle about them. Eventually, I lose my shot when the other boys clamber into the kitchen, claiming they’re starving and don’t see what could be taking us so long.

So Nettle and I pile the plates high with food, and my moment to question him fades into the prison of my indecision.

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