Page 4 of Never Landing

Never Everett. They’d all smiled at Everett and asked after his grandma, and when we went to the candy store, they let him take an extra scoop of chocolates, and I’d stood there in awe of him.

Point was, it was normal for me to get those looks from people in Cider Landing, and normal was...I didn’t know. I didn’t know if it was nice or terrible or both, but it was different, like me.

Sometimes, I just shoved my hands in my pockets and scuffed my feet down the sidewalk to be around people. Families. Moms and dads and kids and?—

Well, they all reminded me of stuff I’d had once. Stuff I’d really thought was worth changing for while I had it, but then it was gone, and now I was stuck.

Going into town made it feel less like I’d made a huge mistake. People in town changed all the time—every day. It seemed exhausting. If these people weren’t doomed, maybe I wasn’t either.

Well, except when they looked at me, really looked, sometimes the kinder ones would ask if I was all right. They’d wonder where my shoes were, where my parents were.

I told them I didn’t have parents, and they’d go pale and blink a lot. They’d look for a police officer, promise to help, and the second they turned around, I’d disappear.

Magic came in handy sometimes.

All I could ever do in Cider Landing was stand at the fringes and look in. I wasn’t a part of town, but I wasn’t sure I was part of the lost kids anymore either.

Somebody had found me. I’d had a friend here once: Everett.

I’d found him in the woods, sitting in the sun, drawing. We didn’t have colored pencils in the woods like he did. No fancypaper and notebooks and stuff. We had sticks to draw in the dirt, but Everett? He made magic on paper.

I’d been running away from the other kids, crying because, well—I didn’t remember anymore. Didn’t want to think about it. Definitely didn’t like crying.

But there Everett had been, and he hadn’t been like the others. He’d looked up at me, calm and in a kind of daze. Then he’d smiled and said, “Hey.”

I could’ve watched him draw for hours, for days, but that wasn’t everything he did. He had pizza. He watched movies with his mom and dad and grandma. He ate popcorn on the couch and licked the butter off his fingers. He had toys made of plastic that were robots and trains and cars that zipped across the pavement when you pulled them back.

Most of all, he grew up, and for the first time in my life, I hadn’t wanted to get left behind.

Inch by inch, little by little, I’d grown up with him. As long as I had Everett, I didn’t care that the lost kids thought I was getting even weirder.

Everett hadn’t. He’d liked me as I was, no matter if I grew an inch or ten.

And then, he’d left.

His parents were moving back to the city and he was going with them. I’d told him to stay, begged, even shouted. He had to stay. Didn’t he understand I—I’d given up so much for him? Wasn’t it enough?

But he had to go, and he gave me a stupid picture of Bandit folded in half and then again, and he told me he’d come visit his grandma the next summer and we could play then.

Only...he hadn’t. Or he had and I’d missed him because I didn’t want to come out of the woods and change even more. I didn’t want him not to show up and leave me feeling like a fool for nothing.

What I wanted was my friend, and I couldn’t have him, so what was the point?

When I got to town, I didn’t know where I was going. My thoughts were all swirly and dark, and I wanted them to go away. Far away. Fly farther than any of me or the other kids ever had and just disappear.

But they were stuck in my head, and my feet carried me toward Everett’s gran’s house.

I hated him. Every single day, I hated him for leaving me. But at times like this...well, I missed him too. I had to, or my heart wouldn’t squeeze like this, all hard and hurting.

The house was different than it’d been when Everett lived there. Quiet.

I didn’t know how long it’d been since Everett’s gran had left. A while, probably. I’d walked out here half a dozen times, but she was never there.

The dog had gone away a long time before that.

Now, the paint was peeling. The shutters hung at odd angles. The roof had a strange sag in the middle.

It felt like Cider Landing had forgotten this place, just like it’d forgotten me. And, well, the house was mine then.

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