“Why do you always wear the same thing?” Peter asks, staring at me with his head tilted.
My head pulls back. “I beg your pardon?”
“The same clothes.” Peter squints at me. “You’re always in them.”
I wave my hand at him. “So are you.”
“Tiger Lily never wears the same thing,” he says loudly over me and looks back at his apple before he takes another bite from it.
“There is no Tiger Lily, Peter,” I tell him, straightening up. “Her name is Calla.”
He turns and faces me again. “Calla never wears the same thing.”
“Well.” I give him a curt smile. “I suppose someone told her to pack appropriately then.”
Peter rolls his eyes and pushes back from the table. “This again!”
I shake my head at him, incredulous. “You told me I didn’t need anything! Do you know what that implies?”
He glares at me. “Of course I know what it implies.”
“And yet—” I lift one eyebrow, pointedly.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” he says, walking away from the table. “It’s boring.”
I frown after him. “Where are you going?”
“Just somewhere not with you,” he says before he takes off out the window.
I stare after him, my cheeks a bit pink, mildly mortified, and the silence from the Lost Boys makes it worse.
They all stare at their plates, not daring to say anything in case Peter’s spying. He would spy too, to listen to see if someone said anything that went against what he thinks.
It’s the closest I’ve come to crying this whole time I’ve been here, so suddenly and strangely stripped of confidence, I might as well be sitting here naked in front of them.
They don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. They just sit there in this horrible silence, sad for me, looking at their hands, their plates, their toes, the wall, anything but me, and it’s awful.
“Well, that was a lovely meal,” Percival says. “I’ll just be right—” And then he scurries away.
Kinley goes after him.
Brodie stands up, chin low, and his eyes flick up at me. They’re weighted and they’re saying something, but I don’t know what, and then he leaves.
It’s my turn to go then. As I get up, I hear the scurrying sound of little feet. I turn and I think I see the wisp of tattered clothing, and I’m about to say something when I see a little choux pastry bun by my feet. Just one. On a little pink plate.
I stare at it for a few seconds, then smile a tiny bit.
“Hobb?” I call, then wait for a second—nothing. “Thank you, whoever you are.”
I fold it up in a napkin and tuck it away.
I can’t fly on my own （I’ve tried before, but it appears gravity won’t allow it）， and I haven’t walked to town by myself yet, but the latter seems more my speed anyway.
From where the tree house is to the town is just one big crescent shape, so it’s hard to get wrong.
I walk along the water’s edge. It’s not a terribly long walk. Maybe an hour? A bit less.
You know how sand on Earth is made of crushed-up sandstone and quartz and bits of shells and skeletons from marine life? The sand here kind of looks a bit like ours—grainier, bigger, the shells are more obvious—but the most jarring thing is that I think a great deal of the sand is made up of crushed-up gemstones.
I can’t be sure because I don’t have a microscope with me, but when the suns hit the sand, it could nearly take your eyes out with the shine. And when I pick it up and run it through my fingers, I see specks of what looks like rubies and topazes and tourmalines and tsavorites. They’re tiny, just specks of glitter, really. Except they’re not specks of glitter; they’re jewels, and the sight is dazzling.
I concentrate on the sand for a great deal of the walk and try my hardest for what Peter said to me not to knock around inside my brain like a bird trapped in a cage, flapping everywhere, hurting its own wings in the process.
Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about how I looked for weeks, but after what Peter said this morning, it’s become one of my more consuming thoughts. It’s horrible to be made to feel small, and while he is good at nearly most things, he is ever so good at that in particular.
There’s this running thought in my mind that’s like, I’ll buy some new dresses and I’ll show him! But what will I show him? That he can say unkind things to me and I’ll bend like a reed in the wind to gain his approval? Or the alternative: I ignore what he said and then just feel uneasy and quietly embarrassed until it passes?