The Neverland Wars Read online

  “Rose, go to bed. I’m in enough trouble with Mom already.”

  “That’s okay. I just wanted to say goodnight,” she explained. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Why? Did Mom and Dad tell you I’m not?”

  “No,” Rosemary answered. She was quiet for a minute, staring up at the vast collection of books and stuffed animals on bright blue bookshelf Gwen had painted years ago. It seemed most of the things that came into Gwen’s room never left. Finally, trying not to arouse suspicion, Rosemary asked, “Gwen, what are hormones?”

  Gwen set her laptop aside on the nightstand. She smirked, but she resented the implication that all of her behavior and feelings had been dismissed as an inevitable, impersonal product of her adolescence. “They’re little things that get inside of you once you start growing up. They’re like tiny bugs that start changing how you feel about everything. They bite at every part of your insides, infecting you with grownupness before you even know you’ve caught them.”

  Rosemary stared at her, almost as horror-stricken as she was curious. “How do they do that?”

  “Very slowly,” Gwen told her. “They change everything inside of you, filling you up with seriousness, replacing all the parts of you that remember how to play with your toys and how to dress up. They make it so you hate when things don’t make sense. Then they make you so incredibly silly and irrational that you hate it when you realize nothing inside of you makes any sense. Finally, when you hate it enough, things start making sense again, and that’s when you’re an adult.”

  Rosemary stoically took in her explanation. “So they’re like cooties?”

  “Pretty much,” Gwen admitted. “Only you don’t realize you’ve caught them until it’s already too late.”

  Tootles mewed, and then bounded onto the bed. Gwen welcomed him into her lap, and the orange cat purred as she petted him. The more she thought about it in Rosemary’s logical framework, the more her own life made sense. Nothing was fundamentally wrong with her—she was just trying to stave off a terrible case of cooties that left her nostalgia-prone and quick to fight with her mother. It made so much sense.

  Rosemary pensively stared out the dark window. Finally, she asked, “Should I be scared?”

  Tootles sashayed to Rosemary, but the younger girl was too engrossed in her concerns to pay attention to him. “No,” Gwen assured her. “It happens whether you’re scared or not… and everybody goes through it, so it can’t be that bad, right? And grown-up things are fun… right?”

  Rosemary didn’t have an answer.

  Gwen sighed and repositioned herself on her bed. “You should go to bed, Rose.”

  “But you get to stay up! It’s not fair!”

  Gwen smiled, remembering when that had been her view of the world as well. She wished she could break the vicious cycle for Rosemary, but the inevitability of adulthood hung before both of them. “I’ve got to stay up and write this paper.”

  “But you have to wake up before I do! When do you sleep?”

  “After the hormones, I think.” Gwen rubbed her eyes. “I’ve got to get back to work, and you’ve got to sleep.”

  Reluctantly, Rosemary wandered back into the bathroom and toward her room, taking Tootles to her room as a consolation.

  “Goodnight, Gwen.”

  “Goodnight, Rosemary.”

  The little girl hung back in the bathroom doorway, swaying as she held onto their tabby cat. Gwen pulled her computer back onto her lap, but looked up when she noticed Rosemary still at the door.

  “Gwen?” she finally asked. “Is it worth it? To grow up, I mean?”

  Gwen took a deep breath, remembering how often she had wondered the same thing when she was Rosemary’s age. She had reached all the wrong conclusions about it on her own. Everyone she knew had lied to her about it, and now halfway to adulthood herself, she knew why everyone always lied to children. She knew what she was supposed to tell Rosemary, but Gwen couldn’t bring herself to fill her little sister with all the same delusions she had grown into—that staying up late would be glamorous, and that dress shopping and homecoming were somehow better than raven trees.

  “No,” she answered. “I don’t think it is.”

  The following morning, Gwen woke up three times in snooze-button intervals. Half an hour after the initial alarm, she drudged out of bed, the covers hopelessly mangled and slipping off the bed altogether. She did not remember her dream, but a deep sense of ennui clung to her, proving that she was still a teenager. Sloughing her pajamas onto the floor where they would not be lonely among so many other wrinkled clothes, she pulled on a blue sundress from her closet.

  When she crept into the bathroom to comb her ash-brown hair and brush her teeth, Gwen was surprised to see Rosemary’s door shut. The bathroom light was on as always, but usually, Rosemary slept with her door open so the light could shine into her room. It was more dignified than a night-light, and the only disadvantage was that Gwen needed to be a little quieter getting up in the morning. Gwen had thought she heard a door slam sometime in the night, but had dismissed it groggily as part of some frustrating dream.

  Over the hum of her electric toothbrush, she heard a scratching noise at the door. She would have ignored it, but Tootles yowled so miserably that Gwen quietly opened the door to Rosemary’s bedroom, allowing a frantic Tootles to leap into the bathroom.

  A distinct chill struck Gwen when she opened the door, and she caught the door before it blew shut again. Rosemary’s bedroom window was open, and an autumn wind was barreling in from outside. The sudden breeze blew in a crisp smell—like cinnamon and clover. The girls weren’t supposed to leave their windows open; it caused the doors to slam shut during the night and raised the heating bill. She didn’t want Rosemary to get in trouble for the open window though, so Gwen snuck quietly past the heap of blankets Rosemary was somewhere buried under. Very slowly, very silently, she shut the window. There was no stir or sigh from under the blankets as Gwen left.

  Pulling her half-dried hair into a sloppy French braid, Gwen went quickly through her morning routine. She never bothered with makeup, or worried about straightening her hair. She knew better than to try to appease the self-consciousness that perpetually plagued her teenage mind. She tromped downstairs moments after she heard her father leave for the office. He was so much more mechanical in his routine, and always out the door on time. Gwen was equal parts in awe and disgusted by the meticulous punctuality expected of financial advisors. When she whirlwinded out of the house three minutes behind schedule, she still had toast in her hand, which she devoured as she got into her car. Gwen had inherited the old Honda Civic when her mother bought a new car last winter. The red paint was chipping off the car door, and there were spots of gluey residue on the windows where Gwen and Rosemary had long ago plastered stickers, but Gwen had happily accepted the hand-me-down vehicle and took a vicious satisfaction in not worrying about toast crumbs on the seat.

  She turned on the radio as she backed out of the driveway. Driving with the radio on was the only time she familiarized herself with popular music, and she was generally unimpressed. It was important though, if only so she would know what she was dancing to at homecoming. She was looking forward to going dress shopping this weekend, even though she knew it would be a disappointing experience. Sorting through Vanna White costumes at the mall would get old quickly, and Gwen knew the Cinderella-esque gown she still secretly dreamed of would be nowhere in the racks.

  She bobbed her head along with the synthesized instrumentation of a Katy Perry song she had heard everywhere and nowhere before. Gwen did not begrudge the world its catchy pop hits, but the more she listened to the song, the more alienated she felt. “Teenage Dream” played on, but Gwen found herself wondering if skin-tight jeans and sex on the beach really were supposed to be the height of teenage ambition. If that was what teenage dreams were, then what kind of dreams did Gwen have? Before she even made it to school, she turned off the music, tired of listening
to a woman ten years older than her sing about what it was to be young forever.

  Gwen was usually attentive during math, but there was something about this particular Wednesday morning, in conjunction with her sleep-deprivation, that kept her mind far off and away from algebra. As was so often the case, she felt trapped without purpose in a room of twenty other teenagers with whom she shared nothing in common but her age.

  Gwen’s tired apathy would have been bearable, if only she’d had more practice in not caring. The futility of sitting through an unnecessary math lesson sat poorly with her. So much of the fulfillment she derived from life was predicated on the idea that school was somehow worth the time she committed to it.

  Her eraser had lost almost all of its flavor. Gwen would have rather chewed gum, but that was strictly prohibited in Ms. Whitman’s class. She had settled, unconsciously, for the end of her pencil instead. She was finally getting used to the taste of the nebulous pink rubber when Wesley made an almost inaudible snoring noise beside her. He slouched in his seat, his arms folded over his chest. With his hoodie pulled tight over his head, he made a half-hearted attempt to hide that he had only shown up to this class to sleep through it. Gwen had been chemistry partners with Wesley Green last year. The banality of alphabetical seating meant Hoffman was never far from sleep-deprived Green. Of course, alphabetical seating did have its perks.

  Gwen was certain that Jay would not have elected to sit next to her. If the students were given free rein over their seating assignments, Gwen would no doubt be up front where she could easily see the board and escape the slight snores and disgruntled sighs of her bored classmates. It didn’t help that she was the only junior in the class. Pushed academically by her economist father, Gwen didn’t have any friends to sit by among these seniors. Jay, on the other hand, would have his pick of friends. He’d be surrounded by gamer geeks, art students, and football players. He could slink away with cool posture, lounge in the back of the classroom, and follow the course loosely while effortlessly comprehending it. But Jay was tethered to his name, so Gwen happily knew that Hoek and Hoffman belonged together, if only alphabetically.

  There had been rumors circulating in the halls earlier this morning that Jay would be on the homecoming ballot at lunch. It might have only been locker gossip though. While Jay was on the football team, he was not the glistening gem of popularity that their quarterback was, and Troy was certain to be on the ballot. Gwen was pretty sure that Polk High’s entire athletic department, save for one or two heartbroken cheerleaders, would help elect Troy to the status of homecoming royalty. Still, she couldn’t help but imagine Jay in a golden crown and herself in her Cinderella ball gown…

  Staring at the whiteboard and blue equations, Gwen gave the impression that she was focusing on the lesson as she propped her head up and uninterestedly boxed in her answers a little darker in her composition book. She tried to think of something else, something less foolish. Before she could though, Jay caught her eye as he leaned over and began writing on the left page of her composition book. Gwen watched the chicken-scratch scribblings of his charcoal-smudged hands, but she could not read his message until he reclined back into his chair.

  Haikus are awesome,

  But they don’t always make sense;

  Hippopotamus.

  A stunning cartoon of a hippo accompanied his poor penmanship. She looked over at him and smiled. Gwen had long ago given up trying to determine whether Jay’s jokes were funny. She was too biased to judge. Gwen couldn’t have cared less what he wrote in her composition book; he had written in her book. He had put his charcoal-covered hands on her pages, leaving a dusty reminder of his ashy, arty smell.

  While Jay smirked, Gwen was seized by a tremendous pressure to seem funny. Her little brain suddenly alert, she struggled to think of an amusing response. It occurred to her after just a moment, and she jotted it down beneath Jay’s poem.

  There once was a man from Peru,

  Who dreamed he was eating his shoe.

  He awoke with a fright

  In the middle of the night

  To find his dream had come true.

  Jay, still smiling, leaned forward to read it. As his eyes panned over the words, his nonchalant smile turned into a teeth-baring grin. He laughed silently and responded with another line and illustration:

  You got that from SpongeBob.

  Gwen nodded, acknowledging her source, and she and Jay continued to smile. Reliving a cartoon episode together, they secured themselves against the dullness of the classroom around them. His eyes—bright and blue—gleamed with pervasive playfulness, and his short hair stood on end. Troy had convinced the entire football team to shave their heads at the start of the school year, and Jay’s dark hair had finally grown out enough to be cute again.

  Gwen was distracted by a vibration in her sweater pocket. Her cell phone buzzed silently, alerting her to a new text message. It surprised her; she couldn’t think of anyone who would text her in the middle of third period.

  Against her better judgment, Gwen reached into her pocket and drew out her smartphone. It couldn’t be important. No matter what it was, it would have to wait another thirty-five minutes until school got out. Still, Gwen had cultured a bad habit of always indulging her curiosity. Clicking the phone on, she unlocked the screen and opened her messages app. If she had attempted to articulate her excitement, it would have sounded irrational, yet Gwen clung to a half-formed and unrealized hope that, someday, a less-than-140-character SMS message would bring her an adventure.

  In reality, it was only a buzz to notify her of a new voice mail. Somehow, she’d missed two calls from her mother already. Baffled by this and trying to figure out why her mother would call her during school hours, Gwen didn’t notice Ms. Whitman until she asked, “Miss Hoffman, have you received a communication you want to share with the class?”

  A pang of embarrassment grabbed her; she hated to be called out in front of her peers. Ms. Whitman approached, her matronly skirt rustling as she walked. “No, Ms. Whitman.” Even still, Gwen was forced to hand over her phone for the rest of the period. Ms. Whitman set the phone on her desk and returned to lecturing. Gwen resolved to pay attention and copy down the example problems in her composition book, but when she looked back down, a caricature of a girl behind jail bars was scribbled with the caption BUSTED.

  She laughed with an unflattering snort. When Ms. Whitman shot her a look of academic disdain, Gwen tried to pass it off as a coughing fit. Gwen was acutely aware of how much more subtle Jay was as he silently laughed alongside her.

  Class continued at a snail’s pace once Jay had returned to his work. She distracted herself making notes in her margins about how to end the story of Margaret May and the raven tree. That kept her moderately entertained for the rest of class, imagining Rosemary’s animated reaction to various plot twists. Class still dragged on though, and not just for Gwen. Five minutes before class was out, the students unanimously slipped away from their assignments and into sociable conversation. By the time Ms. Whitman noticed the class had abandoned their math entirely, it was too late to bully them back to work.

  “I take it you have all finished your assignments, or are otherwise eager to do them on your own time,” she announced. “Consequently, I’m assigning problems fifteen and seventeen as additional homework.”

  A unified groan gurgled up from the tired students. Gwen watched as Jay rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Ms. W.”

  “Since everyone is already packed up, you are dismissed so you can hurry to lunch and get started on that additional work.”

  “Okay, this is cool,” Jay said, slinging his backpack onto one shoulder as he stood up, his massive sketch pad poking out of the bag. Gwen didn’t even bother packing, throwing her backpack on and carrying her books instead. “It’s such a bitch getting through the cafeteria lines. A head start is almost worth the extra homework.”

  “Funny how much difference a minute or two can make.”

  �
��Yeah. It helps to be one step ahead of the masses. That’s why I’m heading to Montana at the first sign of a zombie outbreak.”

  Gwen laughed, stalling as she tried to think of something to add. Before she had a chance, Jay called out, “Hey, Jenny, wait up!” and dashed to catch up to the captain of the girls’ swim team. They walked out together, and Gwen trudged to the front of the classroom to see Ms. Whitman.

  She got her phone back, leaving right as the bell rang and released everyone else for lunch. She didn’t bother checking the voice mail—she’d forgotten all about it. Her thoughts were lost in the commotion and clatter of slamming lockers and swarming students. Gwen pushed through the crowds, weaving gracefully with and against the conflicting flows of human traffic. Still holding her books tight to her chest, she made her way down the hall feeling very alone now that she was surrounded by people.

  Gwen braved the cafeteria as she did every day, and for the same underwhelming food she always encountered. With a rubbery pizza slice and a lackluster salad, she beelined for her friends and trusted their conversation to numb her to the reality of cafeteria food.

  Claire and Katie were jittery with excitement, having just returned from the homecoming voting table.

  “It’s Troy, Jay, Marcus,” Claire announced, using her celery stick as a gesticulation prop. “Jenny Malloy and Rebecca Harrison are the only real contenders for queen.”

  “Rebecca’s got it, for sure. And Jay and Marcus don’t stand a chance against the quarterback.” Katie was furiously devouring her salad, as if that was an acceptable outlet for her manic social energy.

  “I don’t know about that.” Claire seemed to take a superficial offense to the statement. “I voted for Jay. Everybody likes Jay… not just the football team. You know how he is.”

  “You just say that because Michael likes him,” Katie accused. “You would vote a rock homecoming king if Michael Kooseman thought it was a cool rock.”