Never (Never, #1) (9)

“Now, you’re going to need to hold tight, girl. The sun’s rising, and we need to catch it to the universe next door.”

And that is all the warning I get.

His grip on me fastens a little but nowhere near enough for what is about to happen.

I don’t know whether I quite have the words to fully describe how it feels to be flung through the cosmos.

A few years before, I’d gone to SeaWorld in San Diego with my great-uncle and aunt. Their children are abysmal, and they like me much better and say that I class up the whole holiday experience, so they bring me on most of them.

At SeaWorld, they have waterslides, and though this is an imperfect comparison, it is the best way I think I could describe it.

A rushing sensation, almost wet, very dark. At once smooth but also dippy in its turns and corners. A whooshing sound and you go faster at the end and then light! Everywhere, light.

And I don’t know how I managed to do it, but I’m still holding on to Peter Pan.

Or with how he’s looking at me, my hand still in his, his face now lit up with the light of three rather close suns and I can see his cheeks are the slightest bit pink, perhaps actually it’s him who’s still holding on to me.

We ride the rising sun like a Ferris wheel, and my hand is still in his and I wonder if he’s forgotten it’s there, and is that a good thing or a bad thing? I can’t tell.

“This is us,” he tells me, standing up and pulling me with him.

We fall a few feet and land on a cloud.

“Do you know on Earth they tell us that clouds are just made of water vapor? You can’t stand on them.”

Peter looks at me, outraged. “Liars.”

Then he pulls me down the cloud on what looks like a path that leads somewhere I can’t yet see.

It’s around now that he lets go of my hand, and I don’t want to sound needy, but as soon as he’s not touching me anymore, I kind of wish that he were again.

He leads me down the cloud path, bounding ahead like a puppy off its leash until we arrive at a small shack in the middle of a cloudy field that’s sitting above a great big mountain.

I look around, confused. “What’s this?”

“Bag check,” says a man sitting in front of the shack who I hadn’t noticed till now. He’s reclined on a wooden chair with a fishing pole cast off into a faraway cloud. His skin is leathery, a bit tan like yours would be too if you spent your days on a chair in a cloud. I can’t see his hair colour because he’s wearing a red fisherman’s beanie, but I suspect whatever colour it once was, it now is greying. His eyes, however, are incredibly blue. He looks in his sixties. Seventies perhaps?

He stands, extending his hand to me. “I’m John.”

I shake his hand. “Daphne.”

“All right then, Peter?” John nods over at him.

“All right.” Peter shrugs back.

“You’re a good bit taller.” John nods his chin at him. “You’ll give that Hook a run for his money.”

Peter glares at John a little, as though he resents the insinuation that he didn’t already. He shoves his hand through his hair, then looks at me a little gruffly. “Be back in a minute.”

I nod once.

John smiles at me and leans in, whispering, “You have your mother’s eyes.”

I falter. “How do you know who my mother is?”

He smiles a tiny bit, but it might be a sad one. “I never lose baggage.”

And before I even have a chance to wonder what he means, Peter strolls on out of the shack looking lighter than he did just a moment ago.

He skims the clouds, not quite walking on them, like nothing in the world is weighing him down anymore.

“Your turn, girl.” Peter nods his head in the direction of the shack.

“Don’t be scared now,” John says, putting a guiding arm around me.

“What am I doing?” I ask, blinking a lot.

“Checking your baggage.”

“But I didn’t bring anything.” I shrug, showing him my empty hands.

He gives me a small smile, then whispers, “Not that kind of baggage. You’ll see. Straight to the mirror, if you don’t mind.” Then he walks away, closing the door behind him.

It’s quite dark, dimly lit by silver light, and the room is bigger and deeper and wider than the shack looks from the outside.

In the middle of the room is a mirror. Quite plain, nothing ornate about it.

There’s a big X on the floor a foot or so in front of it, so logic has me stand on it.

I stare at myself. Long brown hair. Eyes blue, like my mother’s apparently. “Surprisingly swarthy skin,” as my dorm mistress would say, with arms and legs a little too long in my personal opinion, but I do hope that Peter likes them.

I look down at myself, wondering how to find the baggage of which they speak, and then I catch in my peripheral vision a glimpse—

There’s my reflection, thwarted with and by fifty bags.

Bags of all shapes and all sizes. Different colours, different materials. Tiny ones, giant ones. Each bag has a label on it, but I’m scared to read them. It would be horrifically confronting to find out what exactly has been weighing me down these seventeen long years, but evidently here I stand, dreadfully bogged down and not even remotely as carefree as I thought I was.