Lost in the Never Woods(23)

But when she moved next to him, her shadow followed, and his was still nowhere to be found. “I— What the—” Wendy stammered unintelligibly as she stared at him, bewildered.

“It got away somehow,” Peter told her. All traces of a smile quickly fell from his face.

Wendy felt like she was in a very strange dream. One time, she’d had a dream where everything was normal, except there were three suns. This felt exactly like that.

But she was awake, not dreaming. She could feel the stinging of the scrapes on her leg, and she could see Peter in front of her, clear as day. Not an apparition, not a daydream, not make-believe.

And yet Peter himself radiated the fantastical. A boy plucked from her dreams and her mother’s stories, and set before her. He was something else altogether. He was stardust and the smell of summer.

“I get glimpses of it now and then,” Peter continued to explain as if Wendy weren’t about to have an existential crisis. “In corners, under beds.” He glanced at the cot and his shoulders crept up to his ears. “But I haven’t been able to catch it. The longer it’s gone, the worse it gets.” The firelight caught the worry lines on his forehead. He looked so tired. “I figured since you helped me find it before, you would be able to help me find it again.” Peter chewed on his bottom lip, his eyes large and hopeful.

Wendy pushed back. “What do you mean, ‘before’?” she asked, feeling all the more frustrated. “We’d never met before last night!”

Peter frowned as he inched a step closer. “Do you really not remember?”

She felt the urge to shout at him. To tell him no, there was no way she could remember him, because this was all impossible and Peter Pan wasn’t real. But then, he was standing in front of her, as if he’d leapt from the pages and pages of drawings hidden in her truck. A few years older than she’d imagined, but still. He was flesh and bone, and he didn’t have a shadow.

When she didn’t respond, Peter pressed on. “I used to visit and listen to you tell stories about me, just outside your window.” Wendy’s eyes bulged and Peter was quick to continue. “I know, I know! That sounds weird, but—” He shrugged his shoulders, sheepish and at a loss for words and unable explain himself. “We didn’t officially meet until one night, when I’d come to listen, but you guys were asleep already.” Peter twisted his fingers together. “But before I could take off, somehow my shadow got loose in your room, and I had to chase it around—”

The slightest spark of a memory flickered in Wendy’s mind.

“You woke me up,” she heard herself say before she could stop herself. It felt more like a dream than a memory, but Wendy could perfectly picture it—waking up in her bed to a strange sound and finding Peter Pan, the young boy, probably about eleven years old, just like her, wrestling on the floor with something dark but translucent.

Peter looked just as surprised, but his face, instead of echoing the dread that Wendy felt, lit up with excitement. “Yes! I caught it, but I couldn’t get it to stick back on—”

“So I sewed it…” she murmured to herself. Like with most dreams, she couldn’t remember the details, just faded, splotchy images.

The large smile splitting Peter’s face did little to make her feel better. “That’s right! You helped me get it back on!” A relieved laugh shook his shoulders. “John and Michael slept right through it somehow—”

A sharp pang struck Wendy. She sucked in a breath.

Peter didn’t notice and continued on. “But they’re always heavy sleepers.”

He knew Wendy. He remembered things she couldn’t—things she’d thought were just dreams, because they were impossible, weren’t they? But so was not having a shadow. And he did know her brothers. What else did he know? What else did he remember that Wendy didn’t?

Wendy felt like she’d been dropped into freezing-cold water. Her skin tingled and she was dangerously lightheaded.

“Wendy?” Peter’s voice called her back and she forced herself to focus on it, to ground herself back in reality. At some point, he’d moved closer. Peter watched her warily, his eyebrows pulled together and hands held out like he was readying himself to catch her. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good…”

Wendy dragged her hand across her sweaty forehead. The shack suddenly felt uncomfortably hot, suffocating. This was too much to process at once. “Please take me home now.”

“But—”

“Please?” She hated how pathetic she sounded and how her eyes were starting to prickle. She needed to get out of the woods. She needed to go home. “We can sort all this out—this shadow stuff or whatever—but I really need to go home first.” Wendy knew she wasn’t being very truthful, but right now she’d have said anything to get out of that shack.

Peter paused and for a second she feared he would object. She could see him thinking and watched as the muscle in his jaw worked anxiously. But then he nodded. “Yeah, okay.” He crossed the room and opened the warped wooden door.

Outside, Wendy saw a small clearing in the light that spilled from the shack. Beyond that, everything was swallowed up by the darkness of the woods.

Wendy’s body stiffened in the doorway.

“Are you all right?” Peter asked.