“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.
Care-filled, you might even say.
I tilt my head left, just to double-check that it’s not a trick and the reflection is mine, and it follows me. It does.
I take a step closer. So does it.
There’s a plum-round shoulder bag draped right around the neck of my reflection, so slowly, watching myself in the mirror, I reach for it, then peel it off of me. And though I can’t see it in my hands, I can feel it in my hands and I can feel the difference in me when I drop it to the floor, and when I do, I become quietly quite sure that that bag in particular has something to do with my mother.
Whatever it was, to no longer be carrying it feels incredible.
So I do it again with another.
And then another.
And then it’s like the penny drops and I shed it all. All of it. All my baggage.
They fall off me like scales, and I feel like I could float, and maybe for the smallest second, I do.
I walk back out, but it feels more like gliding now, a bit like ice-skating, and I glide—smack!—right into John, to whom I give an apologetic look.
“I didn’t know where to put them. I’m sorry.”
He swats his hand. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Thank you.” I reach for his arm, smiling at him.
“I’ll be seeing ya.” He gives me a look, and I don’t know what he means by that, but do you ever sometimes get a feeling that someone knows the future? And you maybe?
“You look lighter.” Peter Pan smiles at me as I float over.
“Did I look heavy before?” I frown, glancing down at myself.
“Very.” He nods and gives me a look, and I feel annoyed at the rudeness of him.
Peter kicks up some cloud and stands at the edge, looking down, and it’s all horrifically unfair because there are so many suns here that he’s illuminated from all angles, and it makes him look like he’s encased in a halo.
His shoulders are dusted with freckles, and I wonder under what circumstance he might be still enough for me to count them one day. Asleep, probably. If I were to give him a cup of chamomile, perhaps.*
“What are you looking at?” Peter frowns, glancing at his shoulder, then up at me.
“What?” I blink, clearing my throat. “Nothing.”
Peter gives me a distrusting look and then gasps happily. He pulls out a monocular from his back pocket, flashing it at me.
“Stole this from Captain Hook.” He grins as he stretches it open and peers through. “The mermaids are lying out on Skull Rock! I need to show them that I’m big now.” He looks over at me, smug. “And a dish.”
I falter, and before I can even say anything in response, he winds up for a running start.
“Follow me!” he tells me, and then he bounds forwards.
“Wait!” I call after him, running to the edge. “Where are you—”
And then he nosedives off the clouds. “Jump, Wendy! Just make sure you don’t—”
And that’s it.
He’s gone.
I can’t hear him after that.
Now, listen. I don’t know why I do it. It’s a crazy thing to do, and in retrospect, I too would find this plan to be as shabby and ill-formed as I’m sure you will, hearing it the first time, but with very little thought towards my chances of survival and with minimal consideration for my own personal well-being, I fling myself from the cloud just as Peter had done.