2. Peter
2
Peter
“ P eter, 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 seemed to glare at all teenage boys like they might cause trouble. Or most teenage boys got that narrow-eyed look.
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 fancy paper 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.
With a heavy sigh, I dropped into the rusty, creaky swing in the side yard where Everett and I used to play, and I swayed this way and that. It was too much work to stretch out my legs, to try and get higher and higher.
Nope, my feet were stuck on the ground.
I didn’t look up at the sound of a car driving over damp pavement. There were so many cars now, their wheels all fat and black. I liked the old kinds with thinner wheels, how they bumped and jostled over the roads, how high and funny their horns were.
“Thank you,” a man said.
Something about the voice?—
I looked up, and a man was waving off the driver, looking down at an illuminated brick phone thing in his hand.
Then he raised his head, and those eyes?—
I knew those eyes. Blue as cornflower and a clear day’s sky.
Everett.
Oh god, he was even more different now, with his hair neatly brushed back and a hard jaw and—and he was tall.
He was grown up.
My stomach dropped. I froze, staring, because?—
Because Everett .
He looked up at the house, and something came over his face. “Jesus,” he whispered.
I flinched. My feet scrambled through the muddy earth, but I couldn’t stop myself moving fast enough. The chains of the swing squeaked, and Everett looked my way.
For one split second, our eyes met.
Then, I disappeared, racing back to the woods on a rush of magic.
No, I was not going to throw myself into his path and greet him like an old friend. The last time Everett was here, things started changing. I started changing.
And I couldn’t imagine anything worse in the world than that.