Tiger Lily (15 page)

Only Nibs seemed to notice there was something off about the way Peter greeted her. The others gathered around Tiger Lily happily.

She had brought a sack of dried meat. Now she handed it to Curly. All the boys gathered around the sack, growling with excitement. Curly tried to get them to trade him compliments for the meat. “Tell me I am the supreme master,” he said, dangling a piece between a thumb and forefinger, or, “Say you are sorry for anything obnoxious you ever did to me.” But one look from Peter put an end to that. Still, it didn’t stop Curly from tucking into his pockets a few pieces that he would later hide in little cracks in the walls of the burrow, to be retrieved at some unknown future moment.

Peter remained turned to his work.

“Everyone’s going crazy tonight,” Slightly said through a mouthful of meat. “The place is too small.”

Nibs gave him a look. “We’re fine,” he said to Tiger Lily brightly. But Tiger Lily knew Slightly was right. Cramped together in one room, the boys all looked oversized, like giants.

After devouring the meat, they sat down to what they’d been doing, which wasn’t much of anything. Tiger Lily sat next to Tootles on the dirt, and glanced sideways at Peter every few minutes, confused by his coldness.

“Can you bring some other girls sometime?” Tootles asked. One of the twins kicked his toe.

“Girls aren’t like chickens, Tootles. She can’t just
bring
girls.”

Slightly began singing a wistful song under his breath, in a language I didn’t recognize.

“French,” one of the twins explained to Tiger Lily. “He’s singing about a home in the hills. It’s about a shepherd, sleeping the night with his sheep and thinking about his family in the village. At least, that’s what he said it was about.” The boys all listened quietly, though it was clear they’d heard the song many times before. And suddenly they seemed like very old souls.

One of the twins lobbed a handful of dirt at Tootles halfway through the song and, angry at the disruption, Slightly gouged up a handful and threw it back, but all the boys in the line of fire ducked, and the dirt landed smack across Tiger Lily’s chest, splattering her neck, her chin, and her clothes.

“Enough!” Peter growled, turning from his work, though no one had thought he was paying attention.

He stood and took in Tiger Lily’s dirt-spattered torso. Then he turned a dark look on the boys. “Sometimes …,” he began, and didn’t finish. Then he turned to Tiger Lily. His eyes on her made her nervous. “Let’s go in the water. You need to clean up before you get home.” With the boys trailing behind them, Peter and Tiger Lily emerged into the sounds of the darkness, all the trilling, rustling night noises. They walked down to the lagoon and then turned northward, following the shore to where the land widened into a sandy beach, marking where the lagoon ended and the ocean began.

Tiger Lily was too proud to show her confusion and hurt at Peter’s coldness. “The mermaids will come,” she said evenly.

“Not if I’m here,” Peter said, as if it was obvious. Tiger Lily didn’t want to let him be brave without her, so she followed him in. He was so bold as he waded deeper into the water, it was hard to imagine he didn’t swim. But then, he must have had the certainty the mermaids would rescue him if ever he needed them. She had never seen someone so fearless. And she had always thought she was the fearless one.

The boys caught up and followed them in. All shirtless, they stood like statues in the low waves. They hollered to each other over the sounds of the waves, frolicked in the surf for a while, until finally and inevitably the tide moved them inland, into the mouth of the lagoon, where the water got warmer.

It was quieter now, and Tiger Lily and Peter fell behind. Up ahead in the darkness, the boys could be heard talking about their favorite pirate stories, afraid and pretending not to be. Their bodies were gangly in the shadows, mostly grown, but still growing.

They stayed close to shore, Tiger Lily swimming and Peter walking beside her, pulling himself forward with his hands like tortoise fins. The water droplets hung from his wet hair like diamonds. They passed the Never bird’s nest, ingeniously built to float despite its heavy load of sticks and limbs and, eventually, enormous eggs. Some mermaids perched on a nearby shore, watching them with curiosity, but as Peter had promised, they stayed away.

As they moved through the water, the silence stretched between them. Tiger Lily didn’t look at him directly, but I studied him from her shoulder.

Where on land Peter was a jackrabbit, in the water he was slow. Uncertainly, Tiger Lily slowed her pace to wait for him. She was thinking that she had never known anyone like him, and that he had kissed her neck and decided he hadn’t liked it, or forgotten. She wanted to forget too. The water smelled muddy and thick, and they could still dimly hear the ocean crashing behind them. Tiger Lily rose and submerged, over and over, relishing the quiet of the darkness underwater. Only I could hear her heart beat fast in the dark. I floated on a lily pad whenever she went under, and rested on her shoulder when she surfaced again. Passing the time, Peter reached into the air and scooped me into his left palm, as if he were catching a firefly. I blushed.

Up ahead, Slightly talked as the boys swam close by.

And then, the crashing.

It all happened in seconds. A beast—enormous and covered in tough skin, like a rhino’s—appeared through the undergrowth, just behind the beach where the two mermaids lay watching the swimmers. It snatched one of the mermaids into the air with its massive teeth as the other shot into the water to safety. The captured creature let out a loud, piercing screech. She flipped and struggled, but it wasn’t enough. The beast charged back into the woods, carrying her in its mouth. Her screams continued for a few more moments, then went silent. Peter dropped me, and my wings hit the water.

And here is when something extraordinary occurred.

For a faerie, falling into water means you are as good as dead. I tried to lift myself up, but my wings were waterlogged and glued to the lagoon’s surface. I could feel my legs dragging under.

Faeries have ways of telling each other things, but all of these involve the slapping together of our wings. I slapped mine feebly against the water, and I knew no one would hear me; to Tiger Lily and Peter it would just be a tiny noise, unimportant. But just as they were retreating, I saw Tiger Lily pause, and turn around, and swim back. I didn’t even hope she was coming for me, so impossible was the idea to fathom. But suddenly I felt the water change underneath me, and her hands scooped me up as I caught my breath. She looked at me directly and without a change of expression, then quickly laid me against her shoulder, careful to spread my wings flatly against her. She waded up toward the muddy beach. Peter was still staring at the opposite shore.

The boys were all frozen, in shock over what had just happened.

“Did you see that?” Tootles asked ridiculously.

“It was horrible,” Slightly said.

They all chattered about what they’d seen, amazed and thrilled at the power of nature. They didn’t notice Peter was silent, or when he slipped out of the water and walked back to the burrow.

Tiger Lily watched him go, and then slid out to follow him. I tested my wings. The water had mostly slid off of them, but I stayed where I was, resting as she walked.

When Tiger Lily found him in the kitchen, Peter was sitting in a corner, holding Baby and singing to him just under his breath, so I couldn’t hear the tune.

“Did you know her?” she asked. He shook his head.

He tousled Baby’s hair, then looked up at Tiger Lily. “The woods have rules.” He put Baby down gingerly in his trough with his bottle. “But the rules are ugly.”

“It’s nature,” she said thoughtfully.

“I have a lot of disagreements with nature,” he said, looking confused, and his downy brows wrinkled over his eyes.

She walked up to him and put a hand on his forehead, as if he had a fever. It was an impulsive movement. She didn’t understand him, or herself.

He moved his arm around her waist and pulled her close and placed his head on her stomach, as if there was something to listen to there. His concentrated, worried look softened.

She let her hand rest on top of his head.

He gazed up at her, every trace of the vicious hunter gone, his eyes wide and unsure.

“You didn’t come back.”

“No,” she said. “I couldn’t,” she stammered. “A man arrived.”

Peter looked at her. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” he finally said.

“I’m sorry,” she replied reluctantly. I had never heard her apologize for anything. Even now, it came out in a murmur.

“We’re together, right? You are with me. You’ll come back again now, for sure, right?”

She nodded, her body softening in relief. She felt suddenly, violently thankful. He held himself against her tighter, and breathed into her suede tunic. She didn’t think of Giant right then. When she thought of it later, she wondered how he hadn’t come into her mind at all.

“I’ve never seen anything like you,” Peter said.

I was too absorbed by my own thoughts to feel envious of Peter’s arms around her waist, and the way he clung to her. It’s not that I was angry at him. He was a scattered, distracted boy, and I knew he hadn’t meant to drop me.

Really, I was thinking about Tiger Lily pulling me out of the water.

You think you know that someone sees you one way, and barely at all, and then you realize that they see you in another. That was the night I realized Tiger Lily had seen—really seen—me all along.

T
he oldest people in Neverland had banded together and lived in a remote corner of the island inhabited only by dinosaurs. They were called the ancients. They were those Neverlanders who had survived beasts, floods, river crossings, and the heat and diseases of the island so that now they were centuries old.

Peter asked Tiger Lily if she would like to go see them, and she said she would. He explained that Slightly had told him that he should take her to do something alone together, and that that was the first thing you were supposed to do if you wanted to be with someone. “It doesn’t mean we’re together forever or anything,” he’d added, blushing. This particular outing would take three days, which Slightly said was exactly the right amount of time. There was envy in the eyes of the boys as Peter explained it all to Tiger Lily.

And so Tiger Lily told Giant she was going off on a woman’s journey, and she simply asked Tik Tok if she could have three days to herself, no explanation. Because he trusted her, he consented. They set off one morning before dawn, with sacks of food attached to their belts.

Their path cut a big swath across the island, near the forests where the cannibals lived and below the pine-covered mountain homes of the Cliff Dwellers—as far as Tiger Lily had ever gone (on shaman trips with Tik Tok). Beyond that, the forest was so dead and dusty that people rarely traveled there.

As they walked, they each kept a secretive eye on the other. Tiger Lily watched Peter’s hands as they traveled from leaf to leaf of the trees they passed. Peter’s eyes, I saw, continually touched her two crow feathers as they swayed, the long thin line of her back pouring up to her neck, the graceful swiftness of her legs.

They kept apart from each other, but it was as if a string attached their fingers, because they could each feel each other’s hands even though they carefully kept their hands apart. I knew because I could almost see that invisible string, could practically swing from it. And the more Tiger Lily’s fingers tingled in his direction, the closer she kept them to her body, away from him. For miles, Peter asked if she wanted or needed to slow down. But Tiger Lily couldn’t have been less tired. She was too awake.