? Marin, beautiful olive skin, golden hair, purple eyes; Crystal, beautiful white skin, blue hair, blue eyes; Pania, beautiful dark skin, brown hair, golden eyes; Delphine, beautiful brown skin, blonde hair, green eyes.
* A lie.
? Or at least it would appear.
* I dare say that’s on purpose too.
* And I suppose he might just be.
? But rather messy.
* We being womankind.
? Evidently immunity runs in the Hook family line.
* I place my hand over my mouth and swallow. Oh, to die right now.
* Sorry, Charlotte!
? Thanks, Charlotte!
? Ever so much more than those stupid pecks on the back of one’s hand.
§ But for how many years was he twelve?
CHAPTER
FOUR
I suppose I probably should have seen this coming or at least toyed with the idea of it, that there are other people here who Peter spends significant sorts of time with, but it wasn’t until Peter Pan came right out and said, “I should go visit Calla, because I’m big now, and she will want to see.”
And then I said, “Who’s Calla?”
And then no one said anything, and they didn’t have to, because Peter’s thimbled a lot of girls, if you recall, but the small flick of Brodie’s eyebrows confirmed it for me.
Peter didn’t answer either, by the way. He just took flight straight out the window like he’d forgotten all about me at the mere mention of her.
I’ve been there a few days by now, I think? It’s hard to tell. You know the strange few days between Christmas and New Year’s on Earth, where real life feels suspended and you sort of drift through the days without any real notion of time? It’s like that here, only always. Time is incredibly slippery here. I think it has only been a few days, and I think that because I can count in my head how many times I’ve left out porridge for the Hobb, which is three,* not including today, and how many times we’ve had to take our medicine, which is also three,? I think.
First thing in the morning, no matter what.
Peter said it’s my job to make the littlest ones take it, so I take mine first to prove to the boys that it’s takable. Which it is. It’s mostly sweet, sickly almost. Like agave syrup. But there’s a bitterness that cuts through at the end.
“Come on.” Brodie nods his head towards the window. “I’ll take you.”
“Take me where?” I frown.
“To the Stj?rna.”
It’s not a terrible far walk to the Old Valley—as they call it—just maybe thirty or so minutes on foot. It’s where the Stj?rna people live. It borders Zomertierra. Most of their land is found in the springtime land, and it’s all lakes and pine trees and boulders and wildflowers, and I might have been lost to the beauty of it all if I wasn’t staring down the barrel of my worst nightmare realised.
Peter Pan diving off a rock and playing in the water with the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my whole entire terrible life.
Dark brown skin, chocolate eyes, raven hair. Beautiful jagua flowers crawling up her arm.? The biggest, whitest, widest smile I’ve ever seen—
The wonder of him dims a little as I watch them, and I remind myself that I’ve known him perhaps not even five days§ （dimming wonder can help you to remember things here）， and then the wonder pipes back up again and reminds me that sometimes abstract things such as affections exist outside the pocket of regular space-time and actually dwell in the special corner of the universe reserved exclusively for the fated hearts.
The girl’s very presence around him is—and this is the best I could describe it—akin to watching a stranger deface a family heirloom.
Every time she touches his hair or jumps on his shoulders, I feel a sharpness in my breath as my heels dig in to him a little deeper, and all of me feels on edge the same way it would if I were watching an incredibly expensive crystal vase wobbling on the edge of a shelf.
“Don’t worry about them,” says a boy.
I glance over at him.
Dark skin, long dark hair, dark eyes, same wide smile as the girl though—obviously her brother. Also shirtless. My god—the shirts! Where are the shirts?
“I wasn’t worried,” I tell him, my nose in the air.
“Oh.” He gives me a look. “Does your face always look that strained then?”
I flick him a look and Brodie laughs.
“Brodie.” The shirtless boy smiles over at him, whacking him in the arm playfully. “Filling out.”
Brodie smiles but the edges of it are tucked strangely, as though him filling out maybe isn’t the great thing it would be to a teenager on Earth. He points back behind us. “I should go find the little ones,” he says to me before he looks at the shirtless boy. “If Peter forgets about her again, will you bring her back to the tree?”