Page 13 of Never Landing

So what was?

Magic?

Motherfucking fairies, kidnapping Eloise Hawking’s son and replacing him with a different baby, and Peter,my Peter, spending the last hundred and sixty years playing in the woods, never aging?

It would explain why he’d been so pissed about me asking for his father. Because if I was Everett and he was Peter and I was asking for someone other than him, that was awful and hurtful. It made my heart twist just to think about it; the idea that seeingmy best friend again for the first time in so long, I might have asked for his father while looking right at him.

But also, it was ridiculous. Fairies weren’t real and magic didn’t exist and Peter was my age. He was thirty. Not still fourteen, and not a hundred and sixty-seven.

I was losing my mind. That was the problem. Peter wasn’t a fae kidnapee who hadn’t aged since before my great-grandmother was born.

Yes, mental illness was a much better explanation.

Grabbing one of the bottles of wine I’d bought at the store and uncorking it, I didn’t bother to grab a glass before heading out to the back porch and sitting there on the rickety old swing with my printed picture and my bottle.

Maybe the boy would come back, and I’d be able to get a real explanation out of him. Or maybe the boy didn’t exist, and I’d imagined him up because I missed my best friend.

Or maybe...maybe Peter had never existed, and my parents had dragged me out of Cider Landing kicking and screaming because they’d been worried I was imagining up friends who didn’t even exist. Friends who looked like doctors who’d died of old age forty years before I was born.

8

Peter

Ididn’t stop running.

Not when I ran past clearings I played in with Timothy and Will and Jessie and Aurora.

Not when I leapt away from trees where I hid my things, the roots packed tight with blankets we would sometimes nap on when the sun was high and warm on our faces.

“Peter!” Jessie called as I ran on. “Are you okay?”

“Did you see him?” I heard Will bark out a laugh. “He looks even older now. He’sancient.”

Was I? I didn’t know. There’d been a lot of sunrises and sunsets in my life, but every day went by like the one before it. Well, every day until Everett had come and things started to change.

I wanted to be alone, and I didn’t want to stop where anyone could find me. It wasn’t even the other kids that I was afraid of. It was?—

It was Everett, rushing out of his house and asking for mydad.

It was the idea that I’d ever had a dad at all, when clearly, somehow, I’d lost him. Was that a thing? There were lost kidsand we played and it was great. But were there lost dads and lost moms, just like Everett’s grandma’s lost dog?

All the sudden, sadness crashed over me. It wasagony—a branch laden with snow breaking overhead, that chill that got deep in your bones and left you gasping for air.

I hadn’t just lost Everett, I’d losteverything, and I couldn’t even remember having it. I never...I neverhad.

I’d had the kids and games andforever; why did that feel so bitter now?

I folded myself into the roots at the base of a big tree and gasped into my knees. I couldn’t breathe. Was I?—

What happened when people stopped playing? What happened when they couldn’t breathe and couldn’t breathe and couldn’t breathe and finally, it was too late and they stopped trying?

Had it happened to me? Was it happening right then?

I sobbed into my legs, shivering when small, warm fingers brushed the nape of my neck. I stayed there, like that, knowing Aurora was beside me the whole time. I couldn’t stand to lift my head, to meet her eyes, to know that things were different and no matter how hard I wished, they could never go back to what they’d been before.

Now, I knew what it was like not to be able to breathe. I—I knew what it was like, not just to be lost, but to lose...to loseeverything.

And I was losing them too! I was—I was going to be something beyond lost, and I was scared. I hadn’t ever been scared, not before Everett. Not before he said he was going away.

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