He didn’t have any parents? So he was an orphan? Was he homeless?
“Are—are there other people in the woods?”
He shrugged. “Not that I’ve seen.”
“So what are you doing in the woods?” Wendy swallowed past a lump in her throat. A question was bubbling up that she needed to ask, but she was frightened of the answer. “Did someone … bring you here? Were you kidnapped?”
But Peter laughed. “What? No! Jeez, what is it with you and kidnapping?”
And the frustration was back.
“If that’s not it, then what are you doing here?” Wendy snapped. “Why were you in the middle of the road? Why did you come to my house?”
“Because…” His eyes dropped to the floor. “I need your help.”
“What do you need my help with?” Wendy asked slowly. A chill ran across her skin. The flame of the oil lantern flickered behind the dirty glass.
Peter frowned. “I need you to help me find my shadow.”
Wendy stared at him.
Again, he had said it so simply, as if this weren’t a completely bizarre thing to say to her. She forced a laugh, not knowing how else to respond.
Seriously? Was he messing with her? “Uh, did you try looking on the floor?”
Peter tipped his head to the side, an eyebrow cocked like that was a ridiculous question. “You’re kidding, right?”
Wendy let out a huff and rolled her eyes. “It’s right th—”
She pointed to the floor where his shadow was. Or rather, where his shadow was supposed to be.
The ground below him had no shadow. It was just his feet—his very dirty, bare feet—and then the weather-worn planks. It was such a small thing to be so very wrong to the point that it was unsettling. It was like a Photoshop fail, but in person.
“That’s not—” Wendy glanced up and Peter looked expectant. Her eyes went to the walls around them, searching for some indication, some smudge in the firelight that indicated Peter’s shadow, but there was nothing.
Wendy examined her own shadow. It flickered and shifted below her, mimicking her movement across the wall.
Her shadow was there, but where was his?
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Wendy fixed Peter with a glare. Surely, this was some kind of weird trick. “That’s not possible.”
“I told you so,” Peter said. He just stood there, looking infuriatingly placid.
“How did you do that?” she demanded. “You have to have a shadow—everything has a shadow!” Not in the dark, of course, but there was enough firelight in the shack for her to have one, and the cots, and the small pile of firewood in the corner.
“It must be a trick of the light or something,” Wendy tried to reason with herself. She could probably search shadow magic tricks on YouTube and find an explanation. Wendy stepped closer to him, thinking maybe he was just standing in the perfect spot for all the light to bounce off him and not create a shadow—she wasn’t entirely sure how that worked.
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!”