Page 30 of Never Landing

I wrinkled my nose. “Yeah, it kind of seemed like you and your grandma were the only ones who ever got excited for it?”

One of those funny, distant looks passed over Everett’s face like he was remembering something sweet. I liked that expression; it made me feel like things weren’treallythat hard and I wasn’t the only one who had a lot of lost memories to catch up on. It wasn’t quite the same, but it made me feel less alien.

Everett laughed. “Definitely. I stopped trying after grandma died, but—well, not for any bad reason. Yeah, it’ll be fun. Do you want to maybe do small presents? Like stuff we make each other? We should have some craft stuff here.”

I blinked. “You want to make me something?”

Everett’s cheeks turned bright red. “Yeah, if that’s okay?”

My grin stretched so wide my cheeks ached. “I’d love that. Can I show you something?”

“Sure.”

He waited, sitting at the kitchen table, watching me as I disappeared down the hall to his bedroom and came back with an old piece of paper.

It’d been folded up in the pocket of the ripped pants I’d worn in the woods for years, the corners bent and edges browned. I hadn’t worn those pants since Everett had taken me in, but they were still there, folded up on top of the trunk at the end of his bed.

I scowled down at the paper. It was crinkled in a few places and looked pretty rough. That wasn’t the way I remembered it at all.

When I came back to the kitchen and sat at the table beside him, I unfolded the paper and smoothed it out flat, erasing the edges and folds that’d turned brown and thin from wear, thatthreatened to tear. By the time I was finished, the paper looked good as new, the very same as the day Everett had handed it to me.

“I carried this around forever—” I whispered. It was a picture of Everett’s grandma’s dog, Bandit. Everett had let me keep it, and I’d looked at it a lot, always smoothing it out and making it good as new again, because I didn’t ever want to lose it.

Only, when I looked up, Everett wasn’t staring at Bandit. He gripped my hand and lifted it up.

“Peter, how the hell did you?—?”

“Make it new?” I wiggled my fingers between his. “It’s magic, silly. Maybe...kind of similar to staying a kid all the time? I just feel what the thing was, or what I want it to be.” I shrugged when he stared at me, mouth hanging slightly open. “We never had a ton of stuff in the woods and, believe me, it was a big freaking deal when William broke his wooden sword. It was easier to fix it than to watch him hurt about it. It’s...weird?”

Everett was still staring, his eyes swimming with something I didn’t fully understand.

“Yes,” he breathed. “I mean, no. It’s not weird. It’s just...I’ve never seen anyone do anything like it before.”

“Really? I never did magic around you before?”

“I...guess I just thought we were playing. I’m not sure I realized?—”

“Or maybe you grew up a little too much?” I laughed, tugging on his hand so he leaned closer to me and I could kiss his cheek. “What I was going to say is I love it when you make stuff for me. I’ll come up with something awesome for you too, promise.”

Everett’s laugh was still breathy and a little distant. “It doesn’t have to be anything big.”

“I know, I know, but I still want to give you something that’ll make you happy.”

“You don’t have to give me a single thing to make me happy, Peter, I already am.”

Ugh, when he said things like that it made me want to kiss him, a lot. But we hadn’t talked about it since the last time, and even though I sometimes caught his eyes going all hazy and hooded, I didn’t think he wanted to?—

Well, Dr. Hawking said he was trying not to take advantage of me, which is what he’d said too, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that, really. If he said he didn’t want to kiss, I thought the right thing to do was respect his wishes. I just—well, it would’ve been nice if he’d wanted to kiss me too. I wouldn’t have felt so stopped up and stuck.

But I could wait, and there were a lot of things we hadn’t discussed yet. Most of them had to do with “what’s next,” and we were both so exhausted by what’d already happened that we didn’t have answers.

“Did you want to do anything other than bake cookies and put up lights?” Everett asked, still holding onto my hand on the tabletop.

“Would it be okay if we made honey cakes? They’re—” I swallowed around the sudden lump in my throat. “My mother used to make them and we’d eat them together, and the other kids—they know the smell. They’ll come out of the woods for them. So I, uh, asked Dr. Hawking if she had a family recipe. I don’t know if it’s the same, but I thought we could make some for the kids?”

“Yeah, of course.” Everett reached out and put his hand on top of mine. “Are you okay?”

I bit my lip, staring down at the table in front of us. “I think so? They’re my friends, but partly, I just don’t want them to feel like another person forgot them. Or—heh, they might not remember me at all? I know I forgot a lot of the kids who left. Like if they weren’t there, I couldn’t think about them clearly?But that’s okay. If they ever come out, they might remember me and know they have somebody they can turn to? I’d like that, I think—to be here for them if they ever need somebody.”

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