Page 3 of Never Landing

Without waiting for him to respond, I hung up. Then I turned my phone off. I wasn’t required to answer my phone. I was on vacation.

I threw casual clothes into a duffel bag, then thinking about three entire weeks away from my apartment, filled another as well. One bag in my left hand and another slung over my shoulder, I paused on my way to the door, and looked at where my computer was still sitting on the couch.

My computer, with every bit of work I’d done for Crosslife on it, and not backed up on a company server or in the cloud, because Warren didn’t approve of clouds of information he couldn’t see and control. A grin on my face that probably would have gotten me shoved in a straitjacket and padded cell in some places, I snatched the thing up and stuffed it into one of my bags.

If James Warren wanted Crosslife ads, he could make new ones himself.

Fuck that guy.

I was on my way to my grandmother’s old house in Cider Landing, and no one could stop me. No one was there to step on me, and I was fucking done being stepped on.

2

Peter

“Peter, Peter,” Will sang, “gangly, awkward Peter.”

I stalked through the trees, my fists clenched at my sides. I couldn’t roughhouse with the kids anymore—not now that I was bigger than them. What could I do when they came for me? I didn’t want to hurt them, even if I sometimes thought about strangling them and chucking them out of the highest parts of a tree.

Wasn’t like they’d get hurt. We could all fly.

It just didn’t look right. I was bigger than they were. Hadn’t always been, but I was now, and it’d made everything...worse.

The lost kids weren’t supposed to grow up. We weren’t supposed to change at all.

“Tall as a tree trunk, stinks like a real skunk, Peter’s halfway grown.”

The other kids broke down in peals of laughter. I spun on them, glaring.

“Shut up.”

“Whatcha gonna do if I don’t, Peter?” Will asked, brandishing his wooden sword above his head.

I wasn’t in the mood to play.

“Leave me alone.” I marched through the woods, leaves wet and cold underfoot. Weird, how the cold only bothered me at times like this, when I was angry and lost in the wrong kind of way. Not the fun, adventurous sort of lost, but the sad kind that hurt and made you want to cry.

It was a stupid kind of lost. I hadn’t even realized it was a thing until Everett’s grandma’s dog, Bandit, got lost and he’d been sad about it. He’d cried, and we’d gone to find him.

But before that? Lost was good. Lost was the way we were supposed to be.

I’d never thought it’d make anybody cry.

Maybe people only cried over dogs.

At times like this, when the ground was wet and cold and the sky turned bleak and my body felt too heavy to fly, I went off on my own.

Sometimes, I went into town.

I didn’t know what to do with myself in Cider Landing, not really. The people there weren’t my friends, weren’t my family. Not like the lost kids were. Not like Aurora.

But it was nice to go into town and not see friends or family. Nobody knew me, so they didn’t realize that I was different than I should’ve been. Different than everybody else.

Sure, sometimes shopkeepers looked at me strangely, their eyes narrowed like I was going to steal something. Honestly? Seemed fair enough. Sometimes I would steal something—a ball, a toy. I’d bring it back with me into the woods, and I’d tuck it away in the knot of an old, hollow tree and keep it to myself.

We had toys in the woods, wooden swords and pirate hats and swings and adventures, but I wanted a piece of the town. Hadn’t always, but some things were harder to let go of than others.

The suspicion the people of Cider Landing cast on me wasn’t all that bad, either. Thing was, the shopkeepers in town seemedto glare at all teenage boys like they might cause trouble. Or most teenage boys got that narrow-eyed look.

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