The Neverland Wars Read online

  Before he left his daughter’s room, Mr. Hoffman ruffled her hair once more and gave her forehead a parting kiss. He had good timing. Gwen always liked how her father innately knew when to leave her alone, even if she still wasn’t feeling well.

  The room darkened as the last of the evening gave way to night. Gwen felt that all her energy for the next three or three-hundred days had been drained out of her. Crawling under her covers, she reached down to unplug her little lights. She watched the quick spark from the metal plug as it lost its connection, wondering how long it had taken little lights to stop being magic and start being electricity. She clutched her pillow, hugging it to her as she cried into it. Her stuffed lion sat beside her.

  Gwen did not set her alarm for the next morning. She slept in, enduring fitful dreams she would not remember. Her parents didn’t disturb her. Mrs. Hoffman only called the schools and told the administrators that her daughters would be absent. It wasn’t until eleven thirty that Gwen’s phone finally woke her up. She could not find the ringing phone until the call had already gone to voice mail. When she groggily dug it out of her purse, Gwen saw that she had missed what was the last in a long line of communications from Claire. Six new messages were waiting for her.

  Running late?

  Where are you?

  GWEN.

  Mom’s driving me.

  Are you cutting class?

  Srsly girl, you OK?

  She hadn’t bothered to leave a voice mail, but Gwen knew she needed to say something. She'd forgotten that she was supposed to drive to school with Claire today. She could call back now that she was at lunch, but Gwen didn’t know if she was even capable of speaking. Her throat was sore and her head cloudy from all her crying last night. She tried to imagine an appropriate text message.

  Should she tell Claire there was a family emergency? That would raise too many questions. She could say she was sick, but she didn’t want to lie to her best friend.

  Not feeling well. Sorry. We’ll talk later.

  With that minimal text, Gwen lay back down and pulled her sheets tight around her. She had been so excited to be a teenager yesterday. She had been dying to gush to Claire and Katie about Jay's party. That all seemed so remote and insignificant now. She escaped her grief in sleep.

  Even when Gwen could sleep no more, she stayed in bed. When she could no longer stand the aching futility of bed, she stayed in her room. A few times during the day, she could hear her mother crying in her own room. Both her parents came up to check on her intermittently through the day. Gwen couldn’t tell what was frustration and what was sadness. She swelled with painful emotion, too terrible to decipher. She didn’t want to talk.

  At one point, her mother brought dinner up to her. Tomato soup and grilled cheese told Gwen that her mother was too distraught to cook, so her father had taken the initiative to make sure no one starved today. Gwen ignored the food out of a twisted martyrdom, but eventually realized she wasn’t punishing anyone but herself. She ate it once the sandwich and soup were already cold.

  Her dad took emergency leave from work, and Gwen knew they were going to spend some painful time together as a family. While her parents were concerned about their youngest daughter being off in an impossible world far out of reach, Gwen struggled more with the manner in which her sister had vanished.

  The fact that she was gone became almost trivial. If Rosemary was with Peter Pan, how bad could it be? Gwen’s initial impression of the situation was that some pedophile had stolen her away. Anything was better than that, and the idea that Rosemary had willingly gone off with a familiar boy and not a strange man, well, that didn’t trouble her nearly as much.

  Gwen went to bed early that night, but couldn’t sleep a wink. Turning her string of lights on around two in the morning, she resigned herself to sleeplessness. She didn’t have to get up for school in the morning; it didn’t matter if she slept at all. Gwen only wanted to fall asleep to escape the tyranny of consciousness.

  She didn’t want to think about magic; she just wanted to sleep, but she was scared. In a dull, tired way, she was terrified. If she fell asleep, she might dream, and she couldn’t stomach the thought of dipping into fantasy. Fairies, Santa Claus, werewolves… God only knew what was real anymore. She hadn’t had the heart to grill her father and find out exactly what was fiction in this world. Gwen just wanted to find a little pocket of reality that was real and sane, if she was confined to it.

  She couldn’t help it, however. Her mind danced with unwanted fascinations as she considered what a real-life Neverland would look like. Images from her childhood imagination sprung back into her mind as if they had never left. Gwen thought of pink, cotton-candy clouds and adorable piglets that talked in Pig Latin. Were these things possible? Were they real?

  She went to her blue bookshelf and searched the bottom row of picture books and chapter books. Peter Pan was nestled snuggly between two others, and Gwen hesitantly pulled it out. Scurrying back to bed as if she’d stolen the fairy tale, she found it challenging to work up the nerve to read from the book. She opened to random pages and read passages with critical, skeptical awe. Neverbirds, pirates, hollow trees, mermaids… it felt like a crime scene report. Was this really where Rosemary was? As she paged through it, a browning daisy fell out from between the pages. Gwen put the book aside and tried to quiet her mind again. She didn’t want to think about magic.

  Midway through the night, it occurred to her again, as if for the first time, that her little sister was gone. All else aside, Rosemary had disappeared and was not coming back.

  Restless and looking for any solution, effective or otherwise, Gwen humored the downhearted impulse to get out of her room. Creeping through the bedroom, Gwen approached the bathroom.

  Blind in the darkness, Gwen felt her way through the tiny room she had memorized. Tootles stayed firmly asleep at the foot of her bed, not following her as Gwen slipped into Rosemary’s room.

  Her sister’s pale, lavender room was slightly smaller than Gwen’s and full of stuffed animals and dolls. Rosemary had half a dozen plastic dolls and a tiny tea table with plastic chairs that Gwen had mastered the art of sitting on without breaking. Picture books were stacked and strewn everywhere, along with plastic food. Gwen highly suspected that Rosemary had more pretend food in her room than the rest of the family had real food in the kitchen.

  A mobile of plastic fish spun over the bed, and Gwen collapsed on top of Rosemary’s bed, hardly aware that she was crying again. Her sister’s quilt was so much more colorful than her own trendy bedspread, and the tinier mattress had so much more give. Gwen looked out the window; Officer Kubowski had left it open after inspecting it. The stars outside were dimly shining.

  Gwen didn’t think it would help to be in Rosemary’s bed. If anything, she assumed it would keep her awake to wallow in her sadness. It didn’t occur to her to get up and close the window. The cool breeze that fluttered the drapes gave her an excuse to tuck herself under the quilt.

  “Gwen? Gwen?” Rosemary’s voice was so familiar. She had expected to find melancholy dreams, but as she listened to the voice, Gwen found herself waking up. The more she stirred herself awake, the clearer the whispering voice became. Although her dream faded, her sister whispered, “Gwen, wake up!”

  She did so with startled curiosity. Rosemary’s bright eyes were hovering inches away from her, her full waves of hair framing her round face. Her tiny hand shook Gwen’s shoulder, but Rosemary was perched over Gwen, kneeling on her own bed beside her. Gwen’s eyes took a moment to adapt to the darkness, but once she recognized her little sister, she sprung up. “Rosemary!” Gwen hissed, flinging her arms around the little girl. “Oh my God, we thought you ran away!” She didn’t know why she was whispering. Part of her realized she would have to run and wake up her parents in a minute to let them know Rosemary was home, but another part of her wanted to savor this moment where she and her sister were alone together.

  Gwen did not yet realize that she a
nd Rosemary were not alone.

  “I did,” Rosemary quietly exclaimed. “We came back for you. I missed your stories.” As Rosemary pushed out of her big sister’s hug, she turned around and looked into the darkness at her escort.

  A chill crept down Gwen’s spine, and her eyes could not refocus fast enough. She clutched fistfuls of Rosemary’s quilt, instinctively preparing to throw herself under it if there was a monster lurking in the dark. Gwen wasn’t afraid in the normal sense of the term, but her heart raced as she noticed the boy sitting on the rocking chair in the corner of the room.

  The chair rocked with a squeak as he stood up from it. Walking slowly toward the window, he came into view as he entered the moonlight. He stared at Gwen, and she stared back.

  His eyes were steady in their intensity, but impish in all other manners. They impulsively surveyed the room, never lingering on any particular aspect of it, but always coming back to Gwen. A vine of ivy was wrapped around his waist and strewn across his shoulder like a belt and sash, just barely holding his tattered shirt and shorts to him. His clothes seemed held together with bits of twine and magic. He moved fluidly in his own skin. Gwen wasn’t even conscious of how much she envied his playful motion. Even with his gangly, broad shoulders, he stood tall with a childish sense of confidence.

  Gwen wasn’t sure, but he looked like a freshman. He couldn’t have been younger than fourteen.

  He wore hemp bracelets and braided jewelry around his wrists; pine-cone chips and wooden beads were woven into his necklace. They jangled as he walked.

  “This is your sister?” he asked. His question seemed rudely incredulous. “Hollyhock, let me see her.”

  Before Gwen could make sense of this remark, an exploding light burst from an inexplicable place in the darkness. Gwen was disoriented when the light came so quickly at her. Circling around her, the golden light left a trail of fast dissolving glitter that rained down on her. What little of it touched her glowed faintly on her skin before disappearing. It felt like a pins-and-needles numbness in the best possible way.

  The bright light that radiated from Hollyhock’s little body half-blinded Gwen in the otherwise dark room, but Hollyhock flitted in front of her, and Gwen caught a glimpse of the creature. Her eyes were unusually wide, and her massive irises were an otherworldly color for which Gwen had no name. Her itty-bitty lips and nose were hardly there at all, but her sunny hair was pulled back in two long, dangling braids. Her limbs were like twigs, and she wore a leaf draped over her like a tunic. Gwen didn’t need to be told that she was looking at a fairy.

  “Huh,” he responded, sitting down on the hardwood floor of Rosemary’s room. “You said your sister was a kid.”

  “She is, Peter!” Rosemary defended. “I told you—she’s a big kid.”

  Finally addressing her properly, Peter spoke to Gwen in a condescending tone. “I expected you to be younger.”

  “As did I of you,” Gwen curtly returned.

  Peter, the young man, shrugged with his eyebrows and looked away, indicating that he was not going to bother engaging a hostile girl.

  Gwen didn’t care. She couldn’t have cared. While Hollyhock played in the fish mobile above the bed like an aquatic merry-go-round, Gwen clutched Rosemary close to her. “Rosemary, we were so worried! Thank God you came back.”

  “I had to come back, Gwenny,” Rosemary told her. “I had to come back for you.” Hollyhock, tiring of the mobile, zipped back down and buried herself in Rosemary’s hair, poking her head out of it and trying to part it like curtains. Rosemary giggled, taking Gwen’s hand. “Let’s go.”

  “Whoa, wait, no.” Gwen grabbed hold of Rosemary’s arm. “We’re not going anywhere. Mom and Dad are worried about you. The cops were here… You can’t go—where?”

  Hollyhock, on Rosemary’s shoulder, said something that sounded like a sneeze and a hum. Rosemary translated the one word she had already learned in the fairy tongue. “Neverland.”

  “No,” Gwen flatly denied.

  “This was a mistake,” Peter announced, standing up and striding toward the window. Moonlight washed over him as he stood before the open window, and Gwen’s heart raced with the surrealness of the situation. “Come on, Rose,” he said.

  “No,” Gwen again announced. She clutched her sister close. “Rosemary, we have to get Mom and Dad.”

  Peter perked up then, springing into the air and flying over to the edge of the bed in a quick panic. “You can’t do that,” he told her. “You can’t.”

  Gwen looked up at the boy who was hovering beside her, childishly daring him. “Do you want to bet?”

  “No, Gwen, don’t!” Rosemary was just as agitated by the prospect.

  Gwen threw off her covers and darted to the door, standing there with her hand on the doorknob. “I’ll wake them up right now.”

  Rosemary had flown—her little sister had flown—to Peter’s side. “We’ll be gone before you can call them,” Peter threatened.

  Gwen knew it was true. She couldn’t force Rosemary to stay, not when she had all the magic she needed to slip away to any far reach of this world or another. In a second’s time, Rosemary would be gone, and Gwen would have to finish growing up without a little sister to remind her of why she was still irrevocably in love with childhood.

  Rosemary was distraught by this turn of events. She had thought for sure that her sister would leap at the opportunity to escape the combative, hormonal world she purported to hate. “I came back for you,” Rosemary pleaded. “Come with us. Neverland is amazing; you wouldn’t believe it! Gwen, please!” She pouted and stomped silently on the air, clutching her skirt and begging Gwen.

  Hollyhock circled around Gwen once more and bobbed in front of her, trying to egg Gwen forward. Peter and Rosemary were both silhouetted against the window. In a moment, they would dive back out and into the night, regardless of what Gwen did. There was nothing she could do to circumvent that.

  “Alright,” she finally announced. “I’ll go with you, but once we’ve had your fun, we’ll both come home, okay, Rosemary?” She felt the need to rationalize. “I’m only going to go because someone needs to keep an eye on you.”

  Rosemary jumped for joy and never landed. She hung happily in the air. “Oh Gwen, you’ll never get tired of Neverland!”

  Skeptical of the older girl, Peter remarked, “With an attitude like that, I don’t know if she’ll even be able to fly.”

  “Of course I’ll be able to fly,” Gwen indignantly responded.

  Rosemary caught Hollyhock and held her in her hands. Zipping over to Gwen, she shook the fairy and covered her sister in a layer of the tickling, numbing fairy dust, all the while explaining, “Oh, she absolutely will! Gwen is the best at so many things, not just storytelling. She’s better than me at everything—except for connect-the-dots and jump rope—and I’m such a good flier that she’ll be even better.”

  When Rosemary finished shaking Hollyhock and let her go, the dizzy fairy stumbled through the air. Gwen felt tingly, as if her feet had fallen asleep and taken her whole body with them. She hardly realized she was doing it, but Gwen slowly lifted up into the air. When she was a few inches above the ground, Gwen looked down and squeaked in delighted shock when she saw that she was no longer standing on the ground. Painfully aware of how impossible this was, Gwen immediately fell back down to the ground, landing heavy on her feet.

  “Try like you’re swimming,” Rosemary suggested, paddling through the air as though she were moving through water.

  Peter said nothing, remaining quiet and cynical as he sat on the window’s edge.

  Gwen tried again, rising off her feet. The motion of swimming helped her. It made the sensation of gliding more familiar… Of course, she was lifting off and moving through the air! It was no different than swimming, and it felt perfectly natural. As Gwen took off, soaring around her little sister’s bedroom, she lost all notion of reality for a minute. It made perfect sense in that moment. Of course a heart as light and buoyant
as hers could carry her whole body like a balloon.

  When she looked back at Peter, she caught him smiling. His eyes looked, at all times, as if he were just a second away from winking. “Let’s go,” he announced.

  “Wait,” Gwen pleaded, realizing how woefully unprepared she was to embark on this trip. “Give me just a second to put a dress on.”

  As eager and excited as she now was to takeoff for an impossible paradise, Gwen did not feel as though it was in good taste to fly to Neverland in a tank top and polka-dotted pajama bottoms. Landing gracefully back on her feet, she ran through the Jack-and-Jill to her own room. Fumbling through the darkness, she found her blue sundress from yesterday and snatched it off the floor so that she could throw it on over her pajamas. She grabbed her satchel purse, but she didn’t bother to put her wallet in it. She couldn’t remember what was in the bag, but she didn’t want to leave reality unprepared. That would have been childish. She stuffed a white cardigan into the purse and hoped for the best.

  Tootles mewed, baring his pointy, white teeth from on top of Gwen’s bed. His collar jangled as he shook himself, dropping cat hair all over her sheets. Thinking of her poor parents, Gwen knew it would be cruel to vanish with as little notice or reason as Rosemary had. Gwen grabbed a sharpie and a stack of post-it notes on her desk. Jotting the words down quickly in thick, black letters, she wrote:

  Keeping Rose safe until I can bring her home.

  They wouldn’t notice it immediately, but Gwen hoped her parents’ fears would be assuaged by this little note of explanation when they eventually found it. Gwen was trying to be responsible. As she turned, she knocked her school books off her desk. She grabbed her math composition book and saw it had fallen open to an elephant cartoon captioned: This is irrelephant.