It Came From Neverland

Prologue

I LOVED HIM.

The boy with the ember hair and eyes the color of a forest, the green of bright moss. Or maybe the green of mold, of rot, of things left in the dark too long.

Mother once told me he was a dream, that no real child ever crept through nursery windows in the light of a London spring moon.

But he was not a dream.

He was a wish upon a star.

Something that shimmered behind a sky drowned in shadow.

Or so I thought.

Dreams do not leave scars. Dreams do not sing lullabies of love and delight in one ear while they speak of submission in the other. I argued this with him again and again. What he was giving me was not what he promised.

He didn’t listen. He refused.

And when I returned home, the ultimate mythic betrayal, no one else listened either. Because I was just a girl, one who told stories. I was too much, just never enough. Too quiet. Too loud. A girl who reveled in fantasy and story, yes, because stories are what make us human.

But the truth? My truth? They all waved it away with their hands.

That Wendy Darling, they’d say. She’s made a complicated mess this time.

Her poor mother, they’d add.

Others would interject: It was her mother’s fault, you know. She stuffed that girl’s head with stories and now look at the poor child.

Wendy Darling, with such fancies in her head.

Wendy Darling, always spinning tales when she should be learning how to embroider, sew, keep a house tidy, and speak softly while minding her manners.

Such a strange girl. That Wendy Darling, claiming she’d been chased by birds with human faces.

They’d say all of those things and more, but I remember what happened because I remember his name.

His name is the key that stirs all this up.

His name is the crack of a hardcover novel in front of a crackling fireplace.

His name is the wound in the words “Once upon a time.” It reverberates there.

Somewhere. In all of the “happily ever afters” to have ever existed, because not all “ever afters” end happily.

I remember his name, and I hold it over my heart like the cold lump of coal that it is, but it is real, and sadly, my love for him was—is—too.

His smile is stamped on my mind. As are his eyes, and how they burned brighter than the summer sun at noon.

That voice, how it rose over the sea like an anthem.

I remember how the others cheered when he arrived over the hill, as if their savior had returned home.

They hoisted him up on their shoulders, and smiled, and danced, with such fierce glee, welcoming their king back to his kingdom.

I adored him more for that, for how their love for him made him more real, more golden.

In the quietest of hours, that smile still catches me. I feel my heart tug and then ache, because what I remember most days now is not just his smile, but the snares that followed.

How easily monsters trick us to fall.

And I fell, into that dark with him. In choosing to, I lost a piece of myself, the delicate fabric of my soul, and more.

I also lost who truly loved me, and I see them there still, dying beneath an ash tree.

I’ve been running through that forest path ever since, trying to hide, trying to shrink, fearing that once again I’ll be spotted.

That I’ll be seen.

Today, I hover between the girl I was and a woman still untangling what it means to survive between fairyland and the truth.

It’s been over a decade. Twelve years. And still, I remember the height of that love. That terrible, dazzling height.

And the boy who taught me that in order to fly, one must first learn how to jump.