The Grown Ups' Crusade Read online

  Twill and Rosemary had grown inseparable as soon as he set foot on the island. He followed her like a shadow, and seemed almost as timid as one, too. No one had rechristened him with a made-up name, but his name had already sounded a bit made-up. For a pirate's son, he was surprisingly quiet and well-behaved. Gwen had finally gotten used to having him around, and had learned to ignore the twinge of guilt that twisted her spine whenever she thought about poor Mr. Starkey and the moral issue of kidnapping her teacher's son.

  Pin, her braids bouncing on her head and glasses bouncing on her nose, ran up to Gwen with the cootie catcher. Before she could burst into chatter, Gwen asked, “What are Peter and Jet fighting for?”

  “Mint, what are they fighting for?” Pin shouted.

  Mint lifted her eyes from the bed sheet sari she was wrapping around Jam, contemplating the question in a flash. “They're fighting for Gwen.”

  “I want them to fight for me!” Jam objected. Blink, also in a sari, tested to make sure she could still turn cartwheels with Goose.

  “You're not as good of a prize,” Pin replied.

  “Why not?” Jam demanded, scowling.

  Jet called out in between jabs at Peter. “Gwen's bigger. Sorry Jam.”

  “Prizes are like presents,” Pin elaborated. “Bigger ones are better.”

  Jam couldn't argue.

  Peter shot his eyes to Gwen with as much of a glance and smile as he could spare while locked in combat. “Then I shall vanquish this scoundrel in your name, Dollie-Lyn!”

  Gwen smiled and shook her head, “Some other time, Peter.” Leaving them to their battle, she headed for the grove's tallest oak tree.

  As she left, Gwen heard Jam exclaim, “Does that mean I get to be the prize now?”

  Flying to the top of the oak tree, Gwen found her hole and slipped, as usual, into the trunk and down into the underground home. Everyone had fled out into the bright new day unfolding over Neverland. Only she crept underground, alone through the main room and down one of the cavernous halls. The glow lilies from the main room had spread like weeds and rooted their vines in the ceiling. Their bright filaments illuminated the tunnels an inch above Gwen's head.

  When Gwen had last left for reality to find the Piper, Newt and Sal had only just begun the ambitious project of digging a series of secret tunnels. By the time she came back, however, they'd made unbelievable progress. They had expanded the underground home into a massive war bunker that doubled as a six-bedroom home for the score of lost children they'd recruited with Piper. With three times as many eager and dirty hands to dig, the lost children now endeavored to stretch the tunnels clear across the island for short cuts between all their favorite places. Subterranean tunnels shouldn't have been faster than flying, but strange and magical mechanics governed the earth beneath Neverland. How else could they explain the hollow pockets and fully-furnished rooms they just stumbled onto while digging?

  She wove past the excavated room where Pear, Plum, and Peach slept in their triple-decker bunk bed and into one of the boys' messy rooms, which contained nothing but dirty sleeping bags, miniature mining equipment, and a micro hot spring consistently burbling in the corner. Grabbing a tin cup from one of the mess kits hanging on the wall, Gwen dipped it into the hot water and then threw in a handful of dirt. She swirled it around until it had transformed into a frothy cup of hot chocolate. She sipped her hot chocolate with a vague sense of satisfaction. She felt she was finally getting the knack of living in Neverland.

  She drank her hot chocolate as she wandered down the tunnel to the room she shared with her little sister. Rocky shelves full of unearthed books and scented candles protruded from the stony wall of the room. They had put a bucket under the one steady leak in the earthy ceiling, but the bucket never filled up, never needed to be changed. They had four posters and a canopy, but no bed frame. A fluffy mattress and its mismatched blankets rested on the ground beneath the regal curtains and posts growing out of the ground. The bed was big, and whenever any lost children had nightmares they knew to climb into it with the Hoffman sisters. There were no nightmares in Neverland, of course, but sometimes the lost children pretended for fun.

  Gwen's satchel hung on one of the four posters, and she fished a key out of it. Bard had given her the magic skeleton key before she was captured at the Anomalous Activity laboratory, and Gwen had kept it safe ever since. She went to the stone wall.

  Embedded high in the rock, where only Gwen could see and reach, was a tiny dark hole, just big enough for a key. She pushed Bard's bronze skeleton key in, twisted, and seamlessly pulled open her hidden drawer. Gwen kept only one thing inside: a large sketchpad full of charcoal drawings.

  She pulled out the art pad and sat down on her fluffy lump of bed. Setting her hot chocolate on the floor, she turned the pad over and looked at the the tallies on its cardboard back. She didn't count them—she never counted them—but there were well over a hundred now. She added one more.

  One more day in Neverland.

  As soon as she did, she began to second-guess herself. Had she already made a mark, before she left to meet with the mermaids this morning? Or did she pre-emptively tally today last night, knowing she would forget in the morning while pursuing mermaids? She had a memory of doing two tallies yesterday, although it could have been the day before. Then again, she might have been making up for a forgotten tally the day before that.

  What made it worse was that Gwen had only started keeping tallies once she realized she was losing track of time. She had thought she was old enough to be immune to Neverland's amnesiac effects. Now she knew it just took longer for her forgetfulness to set in.

  Some days, Gwen caught herself making three or four tallies on the pad, and other days she realized with sudden anxiety that she hadn't marked the book in at least five days. She couldn't even say which of these miscalculations she more often perpetrated. She wanted to think it balanced out and she had somewhat accurate tallies, but she didn't know.

  Gwen was not a child. She no longer expected her days to all bleed together the way they had during her grade school years. She understood, viscerally, how long a year lasted and how a week could have rhythm. She never understood how much security she derived from time until Neverland pulled it out from underneath her.

  She turned the sketchpad over, putting the tallies out of sight and opening the art book to a charcoal sketch of several people gathered around a piano. She focused on the drawing, substituting it for security. The night of Piper's raid, Jay had pushed his precious sketchpad into her arms and asked just one thing of her.

  She had promised him she would come back someday.

  How long had it been? Was he in college now, off at some military academy hundreds of miles away? Had he already graduated and returned home? She didn't know when he was, or when she even hoped to reappear in his life.

  Gwen paged through the first few sheets of the sketchbook—she hadn't even looked at all the drawings yet. She wanted to pace herself. When she ran out of new sketches to look at, she felt she would have to go home again.

  She drank a hot chocolate made of mud and sat through a morning made of anything but time.

  Chapter 3

  The next day—or the day after, Gwen couldn't know for certain—the lost children had to catch up on chores. Only so much time could be spent making bracelets and capturing flags. The children needed to wash dishes and swim in the river, sweep dirt out of their tunnels and discover new passageways, and tidy until they had rediscovered all their favorite toys and more.

  Rosemary volunteered for scouting duty. Then she volunteered Twill and Gwen for scouting duty, too. “You'll like the Never Bird!” she told Twill. “You haven't even met her yet!”

  So the three of them floated up the steep trail to the mountainous peak of the island with two fairies, Bracken and Thistle, for company. Fairies from all over the island adored Rosemary and orbited her like happy satellites, drawn in part by their awe of Twill. Rumors spread quickly among
chattering fairies, and they knew Twill was the son of the infamous pirate Starkey, one of only two nefarious pirates who had survived Peter's final battle with Captain Hook.

  Fairies lived short lives, but the saga of Peter Pan and Captain Hook had survived even more generations of fairies than it had humans. It was second only to the oldest story, the story of when fairies still manipulated the little lives of humans everywhere in the world. Few fairies were left anywhere but Neverland, and they resided far away. Twill, the pirate boy, picked pebbles off the path with his dark and monkey-bar callused hands. Not older than nine, he had dirt under all his fingernails and grass stains on all his joints.

  “Do you think Neverland ever gets monsoons?” he asked, staring at the peaceful sky.

  “What's a monsoon?” Rosemary asked. “You mean one of those little wiener dog cats?”

  “No…”

  It took Gwen a moment of visualization before she wrapped her mind around Rosemary's statement. “You're thinking of a mongoose.”

  “Oh.”

  “A monsoon is a really rainy, windy storm,” Twill informed her. “Lots of tropical islands get them.”

  “That sounds like fun!” Rosemary declared, her whole smile lighting up, save for her one missing tooth. “We should ask Peter to get us one. I bet he would. It'd be fun to fly in a monsoon.”

  Bracken and Thistle begged to differ.

  As they arrived at the top of the mountain, the children returned to their feet. Rosemary took Twill's hand and they ran to the Never Bird, who already cawed in a bitter mood. Bracken and his twinkling red light followed after. Thistle, tired after the long flight up, nestled herself on Gwen's shoulder to catch her breath and recharge her pink glow.

  Rosemary and Twill confronted the noisy, nesting Never Bird. The dowdy old creature had warmed up to Gwen a little, but not much, so she had no interest in seeing the bird when it was squawking up such a noisy storm of upset.

  The older Hoffman sister took a moment to admire the panoramic view she had of the island. She wondered if anyone old enough to know the word panoramic had ever seen it. The moment would have been very pleasant, if not for the Never Bird's ceaseless fussing.

  The sky stretched over everything, beautiful and incorruptible. The sea, just as blue, was almost as uninterrupted.

  Gwen squinted at the small shape, far off and perched on the precipice of the horizon. She pawed her hand in her satchel, never taking her eyes off the ocean, as if she thought so much as a blink might erase it.

  The Never Bird continued to caw in distress, her warnings untranslatable.

  Had the view been a photograph, she would have dismissed the speck as nothing more than a minor imperfection in the film. But she was not looking at a photograph. Gwen found the spyglass in her purse and expanded it. Once the telescope magnified it, Gwen knew there was no mistaking the naval ship.

  Chapter 4

  “Peter! Peter!” Rosemary screamed as she burst into the grove, Gwen and Twill fast behind her.

  Peter didn't seem interrupted. He'd been whittling a pipe at Oat's request. When he set the project aside it seemed he set it aside entirely his own accord. He looked up, but could not distinguish between this frightened tone and the joyful excitement that children so often screamed his name with.

  “What nonsense are you about, Rosemary?” he asked, playful and chipper. He had forgotten he'd even sent the three of them on scouting duty.

  “Tell him, Gwen! Tell him!”

  Gwen was in no condition to do so. She panted, out of breath. The sight of the ship had given her such anxiety, her flight had faltered in spurts all the way back. She'd done plenty of running to keep pace with her frantic sister and poor, confused Twill.

  Hollyhock zipped over with unabashed interest in Gwen's drama. The lost children in earshot came, creeping with curiosity, toward Gwen and away from their play-work. Her eyes darted between them, and back to Peter, before she had breath enough to say, “A ship. On the horizon.”

  “A ship?” Peter repeated, the word tasting like excitement to him. “A pirate ship?”

  Gwen shook her head, lest her weak voice fail her, “No.”

  Peter gave her a distrustful gaze. “What kind of ship then? No one sails to Neverland but pirates. It must be pirates!”

  “It didn't look like any pirate ship I've ever seen, Peter,” Rosemary told him, and Bracken and Thistle chattered over each other, their red and pink glows jittering as they elaborated, in language far too fast and colorful for Gwen to follow. Hollyhock, however, comprehended it all and launched into a trilling tizzy.

  “It was a huge, metal ship. Nothing like a pirate ship. It looked modern. It looked like the military,” she explained. She tried not to let the wide-eyed expressions of the lost children unnerve her as she told him, “It looked like a warship.”

  Peter became deadly serious. “From what direction?”

  “Uhhh…”

  “Sort of the curvy bit from like if they were heading round the beachy part before Cannibal's Cove,” Rosemary explained, motioning with her hands.

  Peter seemed to understand this direction better than he would have precise degrees or standard directions. He looked to the lost children. “Get the others. Let's go.”

  Rosemary fetched Sal, Newt, and the other tunnel diggers. Twill and Yam shot into the trees and made noises like whip-o-whirls in distress, a noise which echoed halfway across the island and brought everyone else back in a hurry. Peter ducked into the underground home just long enough to fetch an ancient sword from the precarious rack he kept it mounted on.

  Together, they hiked through the jungle like a herd of skittish horses. Given the somber situation, it seemed improper to fly. The children scream-whispered their speculations to each other, and the more proactive boys and girls began working on their war chants and battle cries. As they went, they gathered a train of fairies who followed after them in reverent aprehension.

  Neverland seemed imbued with the essence of their collective energy. The draping vines and slimy ground covers hung thicker and slimier than usual. It slowed their pilgrimage down, but benevolent Neverland scrunched its land like a paper map and let them cover the distance faster.

  As they broke the treeline, the twittering children forgot themselves and leapt into the air, zooming down the grassy, hilly slope that hid Cannibal's Cove from view and led from rocky shore to sandy beach.

  A dark smudge of a large vessel soiled the horizon, and now everyone saw it.

  “Who is it?”

  “Why are they coming?”

  “Tell them to go away!”

  Peter demanded his spyglass from Gwen and she handed it over. With a little extra twisting and tugging, he expanded it to almost twice the length anyone else had ever extended it.

  “Can you see the people on board?”

  “What do they look like?”

  Questions burbled from the children like a geyser streaming into the sky. They fell quiet as Peter told them, “There's three ships, at least, and I'd wager not a single pirate sails aboard any of those ugly metal boats.”

  “Then who?” Jam demanded, rather upset with this development.

  “It'll be the black coats,” Peter replied. “The grown-ups have found us.”

  “How!” howled Spurt, terrified by the thought.

  “Stars and bones only know,” Peter answered, dismayed. “But they're coming now.”

  “They're still so far off,” Twill remarked.

  “Maybe they'll get lost before they get here,” Rosemary suggested.

  Peter shook his head, staring at the fateful ships without the aid of the spyglass. The other children passed his pocket telescope around, but could hardly hold the fully-extended shaft.

  “How long do we have?” Gwen asked.

  “Neverland will slow them down,” Peter assured her. “It takes a long time to reach Neverland on sea for those who have never been before. We'll have four days, five at most.”

  Newt turned
to Sal. “How long is five days?”

  “Not long enough,” Blink answered.

  Peter did not care for her defeated tone. He led by example, and didn't let this bother him at all. Full of confidence, he began delegating tasks at once.

  “Blink, go tell the redskins. You're the only one who knows how to track them well enough to find them. Hollyhock, I need you to gather what you need and go tell the other fairies.”

  “What about the mermaids?” Inch asked.

  “The ship is sailing over their domain—they will already know.”

  He continued issuing orders, and soon these seemed merely the parameters of a grand new game they prepared to play. Peach, Pear, and Plum returned to the grove to fetch blankets—the lost children would sleep on the sand tonight, and keep watch on the ships to make sure they did not advance any faster than Peter had predicted.

  Soon everyone was occupied. Even those without jobs went fast to work down in the damp sand, where they could sketch ideas for fortresses and great battles. Peter hung back, settling into a melancholy only Gwen could see or share in. He putted over to a driftwood log, washed high on the shore by a long-forgotten storm. She followed, and sat beside him.

  “I don't understand,” she said. She felt confused and betrayed—by what, she didn't know. “How is it even possible for adults to come to Neverland?”

  Peter stared off at the ominous blot on the horizon. “It's the Never Tree. It's weak. I've felt it in the island's magic ever since I took the root cutting and paid Piper with it. I knew the tree would suffer for it, but that alone shouldn't have enabled the grown-ups to find us… Piper's a dangerous man to make a deal with, though. Second only to mermaids.” Gwen shuddered. He had a look in his eye that, had it not been Peter, Gwen would have identified as regret. “It seems we've yet to pay the full brunt of Piper's price.”

  He fell into silence and stayed in it. Gwen didn't know what to say. She patted his back and didn't say anything.

  Peach, Pear, and Plum returned with more blankets than the three of them should have been able to carry. The boys and Yam started fishing for dinner. The girls and Twill hunted around for coconuts and bananas to accompany dinner. Wax and Dew built sand castles as scale models of their proposed fortresses. Blink returned from the redskin camp at the same time as the stars returned from their daytime slumber, but Hollyhock didn't return at all.