Page 21 of Never Landing

But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to make it up to Peter.

So I smiled at him. “Sure. Sounds good. I also got a tub of rocky road for later.”

He cocked his head in confusion, and that was when it hit me, the enormity of what we had ahead of us. Even if Peter was an adult in age and mannerisms, which I wasn’t sure about at all, he was from the fucking eighteen hundreds. He’d lived his whole life in the woods, playing with children.

The lost kids, he’d called them, and I was sure as shit going to lose sleep about that until we had a long talk about it, and maybedid something about it too. Lost children were not something I could learn to live with. Were they all kidnapped and replaced, like Peter had been?

Nope, that wasn’t a conversation for today. Soon, definitely, but not right then.

“Rocky road is a kind of ice cream. You...remember ice cream?” Surely we’d had ice cream together sometime in our four years. That was a normal thing to do, especially in the summertime. I distinctly remembered Cider Landing’s drugstore selling ice cream.

He perked up. “Like the cold sandwiches you used to bring sometimes? With the sweet black bread and cold drippy white insides?”

Ice cream sandwiches.

This was the problem. The man didn’t even know what ice cream sandwiches were called. It was going to take time to integrate him into society because he didn’t know simple, basic things any five-year-old modern kid would know. And at the same time, he remembered a woman who had died before the turn of the twentieth century.

“Those would be ice cream sandwiches,” I agreed, then considered for a moment. “Rocky road is similar, but...different. You’ll see.”

He grinned in response, but accepted his plate of pizza and didn’t demand to know now, now, now, which struck me as a good sign. Maybe it didn’t mean he was definitely an adult, but it was the adult way to react to a promised treat—pleasure, but also patience.

It was going to take time and work and lots of patience for both of us, but...we could do this, me and Peter. We wereusagain, and together, we’d always been able to do anything.

I had to explain some things about the movie to him, like why the woman was embarrassed by, oh, anything, and what “blacktie” meant, but in the end, he loved it. He finished the movie leaning against me as the couple kissed, and smiling sweetly.

“That was nice. I’m glad they stopped fighting and she caught him before he left.”

I squeezed him tight against me, nodding. “Me too. They deserve to be happy. Now how about that ice cream?”

He hopped up off the couch, so light on his feet it was a wonder they even touched the ground, and then held a hand out to me. “I thought you’d never offer.”

I accepted his help and leaned into him, kissing him on the cheek instead of the lips, but still, it was warm and hopeful and felt so right. I’d been away from my best friend for too damned long. Never again. “I promised you ice cream, and I always keep my promises. Especially to you.”

He grinned that sweet grin of his and nodded. “Best friends?”

“Best friends,” I agreed. “Forever.”

I wrapped an arm around his shoulders and led him into the kitchen, where I proceeded to teach him the joys of rocky road. Marshmallow, it turned out, was his new favorite thing. I couldn’t wait to make him s’mores.

14

Peter

Rocky road was basically the best thing ever, with fluffy marshmallow and chunks of chocolate that melted on my tongue. Notquitethe best thing—that was having Everett back—but pretty darn good.

That first day, we spent kind of quiet and sleepy, watching movies and snacking. For one reason or another, we were both exhausted, but for the first time maybe ever, I didn’t feel like I needed to shove that feeling down and pretend that everything was great. Itwasgreat, but it was also okay for us to just be exhausted together, to do nothing more than flop around and talk and put on another movie when we didn’t feel like talking anymore.

There wasa lotto talk about. It turned out Everett had gone to school for a long time. Now, he worked in marketing, and I’d thought of that as, well, selling wares at a stall at a local market or something, but when I said that he’d laughed—not at me, the way Will often did, though.

He’d shaken his head and said he’d never really thought about it like that, but I wasn’t wrong. It was just on a bigger scale. He tried to get people to see the value in things, to want to buy them, but it wasn’t just a market stall. It was everyoneeverywhere, and from the way cities looked in movies, there were alotof people out there to convince.

I loved the idea of it, Everett out there swaying the masses with his creativity, but I was weirdly jealous too. They’d gotten to keep him all those years and?—

And, well, he’d gotten to be out there in the whole world. What was I, against hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people? My life was small. I’d never influenced anybody, unless you counted making the lost kids feel better when something bad happened, which was hardly ever.

All of this was so, so great, and also, I was so scared that it couldn’t last. I didn’t know what to do with the whole big world, and Everett moved masses of people just by sharing his art with them.

They’d all gotten to see it, and I hadn’t, and that made me want to cry again except that I’d cried way too much in the past couple days and I couldn’t anymore. So in the late afternoon, I’d asked him to show me some of his work.

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