Mary smiles, amused. “Darling, you are too old here already.”
“No, I’m not. I’m only seventeen!”
“Ever so barely.” She gives me a look. “Soon you will be eighteen, and even now, you already need to grow down. You always have.”
“I’ve only just finished school. What would people say, me disappearing in the middle of the night with a strange boy?”
“It doesn’t matter what they say, Daphne. It matters that you’re happy and that you’re free.”
“It’s 1967!” I throw my hands in the air, exasperated. “We live in London, not Benghazi! I’m very free, and I’m very happy!”
She touches my face with a maternal tenderness.
“My pet, that is because you’re yet to truly know either.” She gives me a small smile that looks edged with sadness, and a thought I hate rustles through the air of me that maybe I’ll never see her again. “Go,” she tells me. She takes my face in her hands and kisses my cheek.
She reaches for Peter’s hand. He looks scared at first to be touched by an old person, as though it’s something that perhaps you might catch if you weren’t to wash your hands thoroughly straight after, but then he gives her a smile, and I watch pass between them a moment that feels like I shouldn’t have witnessed it, but I do: a silent goodbye. The last time they’ll see each other. The end of the road for their great adventure.
“I’ll fly you to the stars when it happens,” he tells her quite solemnly.
“I’ll be young again when you do.” She smiles ever so sadly. “Remember me as I was, Peter,” she tells him, and he nods obediently. “And you…” She turns to me, smiling gently at the door. “Remember me as you will be.”
And then she slips out of my room, closing the door behind her. I stare after her, and I don’t know when I started crying, but I am.
Peter looks down at me and takes a step closer. He tilts his head again, and with his giant paws he has for hands he wipes my face clean with the heels of them.
“Just happy thoughts now, okay, girl?” he tells me.
I nod.
“Are you ready?”
And the question is perhaps more loaded than I want it to be. Am I ready to never see Mary Evangeline Darling again in this lifetime? Am I ready to leave everything I’ve ever known for a magical boy? Am I ready to have my heart completely shattered? Everyone’s stories with him are filled to the brim with adventures too wonderful to explain on paper, but there’s always a common thread, and that thread is something about which we do not speak. It’s something I’ve watched them skirt around all my life and never look directly in the eye. A strange dance the women of my family seem to innately know the steps to, and soon I’d see that I’d join them. Without much time or conscious thought or effort, I too would fall in step and also skirt the edge of the common thread.
So then, the answer is no, actually, I’m not ready for any of that, and even still, my heart begins to float away, like a kite trapped in the sky that is his eyes, and I can feel that none of that matters. It’s not a choice, is it? It’s what Mary said it was. It’s the fate of my family; we’re tied to him. “And thus, it will go on,” Wendy always said. It is our burden to love him. Which I don’t, and I shan’t. But I could see how one might.
“Right.” I clear my throat. “Well, what do I need?” I glance around the room.
He gives me a playful look. “Me.”
I roll my eyes. “No, but what do I actually need, in a practical sense?”
He floats over to me and tilts my face gently so it mirrors his. “Just me.”
I smack his hand away, feeling flustered because my cheeks are pink, and they didn’t go pink for Jasper England’s Icelandic-blue eyes, and they won’t go pink for Peter’s even if they already are.
“What a ridiculous thing to say!” I shake my head at him as I rummage around my room for a rucksack.
“I’ll look after you, girl,” he tells me, his face quite serious, then he reaches for my hand. “Come away with me.” He pulls me towards the window, eyes bright like the stars that are calling us. “You’ll never have to worry about grown-up things again.”
He floats backwards, pulling me up onto the edge of the windowsill, and I eye him carefully.
“Never really is such an awfully long time…”
In that moment, teetering on the border of everything I knew and everything I could know—standing on the cliff’s edge that would ultimately be the sharp drop-off into the rest of my life—I want to be able say that you could have swayed me either way, that if you promised me a life of safety and security and happiness that it would have been enough for me to bar that stupid window closed for all my days, but there is something so sweet about the unknown and something so thrilling about tumbling into something and someplace new, and even though I haven’t yet been, I suppose a part of me could tell that one day, Neverland would be both the great landmark and landslide of my life.