Chapter Text

Chapter One

            In my house, if you sit very still in the nursery, you can hear through walls. You can hear celebrations, mourning, you can hear breakfast conversations, announcements meant to be saved.

            Now, of course, you can’t hear anything when you’re sleeping, and my brothers sleep often. This is why boys hardly know anything at all. They go about the place, asking here and there what’s for dinner and where our mother and father are going. But I am not a boy, and I quite like the nighttime, so I don’t sleep. At least, not until I know everyone else is. That’s why I know everything in this house. I pretend to yawn and toss and turn like my brothers do, but when I close my eyes, my ears are wide open.

            This means I can also tell when everyone falls asleep. I first know when my brothers are asleep when they stop hitting each other with pillows, or when Michael stops crying and starts drawing in long, even breaths.

            My father, while he’s sleeping, snores. My mother shifts in her bed. Their room, sharing the same wall that I sleep on, is big and loud, and sound bounces around the walls like a bug in a jar. I can hear every movement.

As the oldest, it is my job to be Mother when she is asleep, and Nana, our dog (and governess), is utterly useless when it comes to being alert in the nighttime. She snores too, almost louder than Father. So, I take on the job for them. I am the silent protector of this house, though no one would know it.

            Which is why it startles me when I hear a bump in the hallway in the middle of the night with no warning, just as I start to lull myself into sleeping.

            Immediately panic sets into my stomach. I’ve heard girls at school speaking of midnight burglars and robbers that would steal your most precious things and leave you with nothing. They always gossiped about them during lunchtime, and it made me lose my appetite thinking about it happening to us. Nobody would be awake but me, and I have absolutely no clue how to fight.

            I hear the bump and immediately sit up in my bed. I’ve grabbed my blanket by instinct, as if it were better to hide from the robber than to go out and fight. The only thing I can hear now is my heart pounding in my ears.

            I don’t get scared very easily. In fact, it’s almost impossible to make me jump. But every sound I hear right now is making me feel like my heart is melting and sinking into my toes. With tingling hands, I push myself carefully off the bed, deciding it would be better to crawl than to walk, as the robber won’t be expecting a child. But truly, how would I know? I’ve never seen a robber before. I don’t know what they expect. Maybe he’s a child too, and I’m going to have to tackle down an infant. I brush off the thought as I sneakily take the ribbon off my side table and draw my hair back out of my face.

            The floor creaks as I crawl across it, and I hope that the walls aren’t so thin that Mother and Father realize I’m awake. It takes great effort to quietly open the door, and I have to fight the urge to parade around the room when I get it open at last.

            When you live in a home that always has people running around, there can never be an absence of light. If there is, someone will get hurt, and then Father will stomp around the house about the medicine we’ll need so much that he will stomp holes into the ground. Our room is also lit up each night by the stars and the moon, so when I lie awake at night there is hardly an inch of true darkness in the room. As a result of this, I have grown to be horrified of the dark. Utterly horrified.

            Coincidentally, this hallway is black as pitch.

            I start to feel the tremor in my hands again that I felt when I first heard the robber meddling about the house. The creaking in the floors somehow floods my ears along with the sound of my heart, thumping so loud my head almost starts to ache. I take a deep breath, a good swallow, grit my teeth until they feel like they’ll break, and I charge forth into the darkness.

            After a while of feeling my way around, I’m able to imagine where I am in the hallway by feeling the corners of the walls. I finally make it towards a source of light, an open window through which the moon is shining directly. Normally, I’d be cross with whoever let it stay open, but I let out the slightest bit of breath in relief for the light. My breath immediately is held again as I hear another sound. Closer. Thump.

            Then it happens again.

            Thump.

            It sounds like it’s close to me, just down the hall. Or, rather, above me. Whatever I’m looking for, a robber or a bird or some kind of thing, is walking on top of the house.

            I push my back up to the wall and listen, too frozen and scared to look through the window. For a while I don’t hear anything, but then something crosses the window, like a shooting star. I swear for a moment I can hear a small bell jingling, just like the one on Nana’s collar. But Nana’s still in the nursery, sleeping soundly in her own bed, so it can’t be her. Besides, she’s much too large to climb around on the roof.

            Before I can imagine any further what the light was, or, more importantly, what is stomping around above our house, there’s another thump. And another. And another. Suddenly, there’s a crash directly above me, and a figure leaps through the window like they’ve just been thrown in.

            I start holding my breath, ready to scream at any moment.

            But the figure doesn’t see me. It almost looks like they’re… hurt from when they leapt in. After all, they did crash straight into the wall. I’m surprised Mother and Father aren’t already rushing down the hall. I cock my head to the side, unable to hide my curiosity for this figure. At first I think it could be an animal, some feral cat that somehow jumped across the windows, or a large owl…

            Then the shape starts to unfurl.

            Soon enough, he’s standing in front of me.

            Pan. Peter Pan.

            I bring my hand to my mouth before I scream from excitement. I have been telling my brothers, John and Michael, stories of Peter Pan, the boy that never grows old, who fights pirates and meets with mermaids and flies all around, leading his Lost Boys on their adventures around Neverland. At first, I told them as warnings. I told them that if they did not act like proper boys as Mother and Father told them to, they would become Lost Boys as well. But they, like many boys do, took it in the complete opposite direction, fantasizing about swordfights and coral reefs. I found myself starting to fantasize too, about what it would be like to live in a place where nobody had to act like they were grown. After all that time, I almost started to believe Neverland could be real. I started to fall asleep at night and dream about him, despite my reluctance, about his pixies, about the ships and the swords and the mountain peaks.

            I had never imagined, though, that he’d be standing right in front of me, in my own house.

            I start to stand, slowly, quietly, so as not to startle him. He’s half-lit by the moon, so I can’t quite see his face, but I’m sure he looks exactly how I dreamed him. I summon the courage to speak, taking several shallow breaths before doing so.

            “What is your name?” I ask, despite knowing the answer. Part of me still thinks it could be a robber, but from the light flashing outside, and the fact that he truly flew in through the window, I highly doubt now that it’s a possibility.

            He shifts his weight, turning to look at me. “Why do you need to know?” His voice is childish but tinted with the same depth and gravel as the boys I know from school. I see him cross his arms, or, at least, I think I do in this light. I cross mine in response.

            “My name is Wendy Darling. I am the mother of this house,” I reply haughtily. It’s only a half-truth, but I’m sure he doesn’t know that. He seems to be evaluating me, deciding if I’m lying or not.

            “You don’t look like a mother,” he says. He’s being much louder than I am, and if he keeps going like this, I’m sure Mother and Father will wake up. I let out an impatient huff at him, trying my best to mirror the way Mother does it when John and Michael start their fights. He takes a moment again. It’s so quiet, I can hear him breathing. Suddenly, he puts his hands on his hips, and though I can’t see him, I can hear his smug smile spread across his face as he speaks. “My name is Peter.”

            I try not to smile as well as he confirms what I know to be true. “Peter Pan?”

            There’s a pause.

            “How do you know that?” he questions. The smile has disappeared. Now I’m the one shifting my weight, uncomfortable under the sudden shift of mood.

            “I tell stories about you to my brothers–”

            “I know. Who told you those stories about me?” he questions, getting louder.

            “You… No one. I dreamt them, but I…”

            He takes a step closer to me.

“I promise, I don’t know where they came from–” I start, reaching my hands out in front of me in an attempt to soothe him. He takes it as an invitation to fight, as would be instinctive for a boy who spends his days terrorizing pirates. He suddenly thrashes towards me, biting my wrist as a distraction for him to fly back out the window. I bite my lip, suppressing my cry, and grab out towards him as he tries to get away, trying to drag him back down. I end up grabbing the lower half of his leg, and he looks behind him as if I’ve just done a great disservice to him. I guess I have, considering this is how he gets around. He kicks my hands off his leg, and my hands slip down onto something that I’m still holding, but that is much lighter. He flies off and I hear a slight tear, like how a dress might rip after being stuck on something sharp. The door slams behind him as he exits through the window.

            I fall back and sit against the wall again, feeling smaller than I felt a few seconds ago. I stay there, listening for a while to make sure nobody’s awake. Somehow, the crashing and banging and yelling wasn’t enough to disturb anyone, and my gratefulness weighs over my confusion at that fact. I take a few deep breaths, startled and restless and full of thoughts I didn’t have before.

            I wonder about what he was doing here. At this house, in this hallway. I think of what I’m going to tell my brothers when they wake up, the stories I could tell while they’re trying to go to sleep at night.

            I wonder most of all how Peter knows I tell stories about him. And why he seems so concerned with the fact that I know them.

            I walk quietly back to the nursery, careful not to let the floor creak too loudly. For the first time in a while, I feel very excited to sleep, so that maybe I can dream up an even better story about Peter now that I’ve met him. I crack the door open to the nursery, and light from our bay window flies into the hallway. John and Michael haven’t stirred a bit. Typical, but still lucky with all of the noise. I shut the door behind me and climb into bed. As I do, I finally see what is in my hand.

            Wrapped around my wrist, tugging at my sleeve, is a slender, black figure that doesn’t take up any real space unless it’s atop the surfaces that it falls on. It seems to be intertwined within my fingers, yet it’s not my own. It almost looks like the moonlit silhouette that I just spoke to but a moment ago. That is when I realize.

            I am holding his shadow.

            I have just stolen Peter Pan’s shadow.

Chapter Text

Chapter Two

            I wake up from what I could only call a fitful sleep. After seeing Peter in the hallway, I haven’t been able to stop my mind from running around in circles about him. With all of the confusion it’s brought me, I almost regret discovering him.

            This morning, I told the boys that I had met him. They, predictably, did not believe me. Michael wanted to, but, as always, he followed John like a miniature version of him in everything.

            “What did he want with a family like ours? Why would he be climbing on the roof if he could fly? Why would you have been awake at that hour? Seriously, Wendy, you have to at least try harder if you’re going to lie to us,” John had pouted at me this morning. Michael, though he was quite young and obviously did not understand any of the questions John was asking, nodded swiftly.

            “Yes, Wendy! You mustn’t lie to us,” Michael agreed. He almost looked silly when he had said it, acting so grown yet sitting in the smallest body of all three of us.

            Even our mother and father thought I was going mad. I heard them talking through the window just before falling asleep, mumbling about how living with the boys are becoming dangerous to my education and manners, that they were creating a wild imagination within me.

            “This is why she must stop sleeping in the nursery,” my father grunted before getting ready for bed. My mother didn’t verbalize her agreement, but I could see the look on her face.

            My parents have never seen me as the perfect daughter. They’ve never seen me as much of anything other than a sister to the brothers, as my mother has always joked that if I had been a boy, my education might be easier. Still, she always helped me tell my stories when we were younger, and when Father goes on meetings or trips for his company, she’ll even play with us if we beg enough. She makes for an amazing pixie.

I had hoped at least she would be able to believe me. She didn’t.

            It didn’t matter then. It still doesn’t. No matter what they believe or disbelieve, I know who I saw.

            I know who I stole from.

            And I’m going to prove it to them. To all of them, somehow.

            I shift slightly in my bed to sit up on its frame. I stubbornly tie my hair up again, ready to do whatever I need to. Now that I know he’s real, I can use everything I know about Peter to get him back.

            The first thing I know about Peter is that he’s stubborn. He always wants to be a leader and doesn’t like it when someone tells him anything on the contrary. The second is that he is always ready to fight, even if it doesn’t look like it. I know that from the small red spot he left on my arm after biting me. The third was perhaps the most important: he is entirely and utterly incomplete without his shadow.

            The only complication to this knowledge was that I had no clue where the shadow had gotten to.

            After realizing last night that I had become entangled with Peter’s shadow, I tried at once to tighten my hold on him in order to keep him, knowing Peter would be back for him. But shadows always have a way of slipping from you in ways that you don’t expect, and so I lost the shadow to the walls and floors of this house, and possibly beyond.

            And now I need to find him.

            Finding a shadow has never been in any of my dreams. Nobody tells you how to find it when it’s lost, simply because we are bound to them forever. But Peter’s shadow is smart. He knows what he is, almost as if he is his own person entirely. I can’t think about where Peter would have flown in the house, but where his shadow would fly.

            For your information, it is a completely different process.

            Finding Peter would be easy. Boys are attracted to danger and toys and strange magic and terror. If this whole thing was about finding Peter in the house, he would not have even left my side in the first place. He would have stayed in the nursery, romping around with my brothers, and the problem would be trying to get him out. But a shadow has different wants, different needs.

            A shadow searches for light, but not just any light. It searches for the light it can sneak around in, the light it can dance across and make you think someone’s there. It wants just enough wind so that when it dances, the candles flicker. It wants a place with creaky floors. It wants what have essentially become my biggest fears in a dark house full of sleeping people.

            Our house has many creaky floors, but the only light we seem to be able to embrace in the nighttime is the moonlight. My father is incredibly stingy with buying us oil or even candles, so we don’t typically leave any fires burning. We also don’t have much wind inside our home, which I’m thankful for on particularly chilly days, but disappointed with in this situation.

            Still, knowing all of this, I scurry back into the hallway, my lamp in hand. If I can’t find the perfect spot, I’m going to create it.

            My adventure last night, in all honesty, did not make being in the dark any better. Even with my lamp, I look all around me at every sound, checking to see if something’s following me. I finally make it to the creakiest part of the floor, shifting my weight just lightly enough to not disturb anyone.

            Creak.

            Perfect.

            I set the lamp right in the middle of the floor, the flame inside flickering just the right amount. I sit cross-legged on the floor and wait for something to happen. For anything to happen.

            It takes a while, but I hear what sounds like the ocean rushing towards the shore. It tightens my muscles, and I suddenly feel cold. I convince myself not to worry, that this is the way shadows let you know they are there. They don’t speak, but they are made of wind themselves, and they will make you shiver until you can’t speak either.

            The light flickers more violently. It’s not enough. I sigh in frustration, air shooting out of my nose. The light flickers more. This is what I need to do. I lie down and take the glass cover off of the candle, cradling my head with my arms as I set it down. I blow gently.

            The sound of waves takes me over again, and my head almost aches as I try to lead this untethered shadow to me. It isn’t an entirely foolproof plan. It could have already traveled to some other girl’s house, and she could be doing the same thing as I am, looking like an absolute fool on the floor of the hall. But I need to have faith. This is my only chance at seeing that strange boy again.

            I suddenly feel extremely cold as a darkened figure rides across the wall. Found it. I blow once more, hoping to make it go back and forth a few times to see if it’s the right shadow. I don’t want to grab any other boy’s shadow by accident, of course.

            I feel a hand on my back, tapping me on the shoulder.

            I practically jump out of my skin, whipping my head around. There’s no one there. My breath gets shallow as I turn back to the candle, and I don’t realize the fervor of it until it blows out. Darkness. My breath stops short.

            I feel many things within the next few seconds. Hands crawling down my legs, someone walking on top of me like I’m a tightrope. A tap on the nose, a pinch of my cheeks. This shadow is making fun of me. It is definitely Peter’s.

            I feel a shiver down my spine as I sit up and feel around for both the glass cover and the candle and hold them to my chest. I back myself up against the wall again. The floors creak as I walk all the way back to the window I sat beside last night. I stand in the light now, basking in it after the shock of dark. I catch my breath and collect my thoughts.

            As I’m doing so, I see it.

            Up above the window, trying to reach for the latch in the middle.

            The shadow looks frantic. I have to stop myself from laughing. Something that made me so scared just a moment ago now seems to need my help. I make a mental note that it doesn’t seem to be able to leave or enter places as it pleases. It still must obey the laws of doors and windows. I reach up towards the latch, its hand reaching along with mine. I reach instead for his hand and pull him off the wall and into the world.

            He is flat, like you would expect a shadow to be. Taller than Peter was. Although he’s just a shadow, he looks older, like all of the age Peter has evaded has instead funneled into his shadow somehow. Still, he seems childish, as any grown up would be if he spent his life around Lost Boys. He is unstable too, and it truly feels like holding water in my hands as I tug him down the hall. Despite this, he doesn’t seem to be able to move as freely now that I have him. I try to remember all of this, just in case I need to use it when the time comes. I follow the walls and lead the shadow back to my room.

            As I climb into my bed once more, I make sure not to let go of the shadow. I ponder where to put him. In the closet he would make far too much noise, and he could get stuck inside the clothes. In Nana’s bed he would find himself bitten to death when she wakes. Underneath my bed would be too quiet, the toy box too easy to push open. I look around the room and see the perfect place.

            I take the shadow to the dresser drawer and unlock it, pushing the shadow into the back of the drawer. At first, it was made with a lock because it held my knitting needles, which the boys started to use as swords, but now it will have a different way of protecting something.

            For a while, the shadow bangs around in there, trapped in a way he’s not used to being trapped. But this is what I have to do, no matter how much he likes it. I wait for him to quiet down before I lie down in bed.

            I wait. I am always waiting now, waiting for sounds, waiting for creaks, waiting for Peter. But he does not come. Instead, my mind fills with thoughts of where he could be. He could have gone back to Neverland, forgotten all about us. He could have found a new shadow and therefore is not tied to this one anymore. How sad, to find a new shadow when you abandon your first.

            I decide that I must sleep, or else he will not enter the home. He is most likely scared of me now, as I literally ripped his shadow off by the legs. My mind wanders, thinking about the possibility of your shadow hurting when it pulls from you. I’ve never had my shadow pulled from me…

            Sleep. I need to sleep. I take a deep breath and lay my head down on my pillow, facing away from the window so I have no light for my mind to wander in. My eyes start to droop.

            All that I can do now is pray that Peter does come.

Chapter Text

Chapter Three

            For three more nights, Peter does not show up at the window, on the roof, or anywhere around the house. I think of him at breakfast, a puzzled look on my face as I try to eat at the table. I think of him at school, trying to draw his faerie in the margins of my schoolwork. I hope with all of the might in my body that he will come to my window and I can invite him in nicely. That he will ask me questions, and I can ask him a few as well, to prove if his stories are real. I half hope it is not that peaceful, just so my brothers can wake up and I can stick it to their face. The other half is selfish, and wants me to keep him like a secret, or maybe an oath.

            “Wendy, dear. You must eat your dinner before going to bed,” my mother orders softly, snapping me out of thought at the dinner table. The shadow has grown restless in my bedroom. I can hear the small knocks on the wall from the dresser, though nobody else seems to notice, and I worry that he is starting to lose hope. This is the fourth night with no sighting of Peter, and I’m starting to lose hope, too. Hope as well as my appetite.

            “Yes, mother,” I reply, though I know I don’t have the stomach right now to eat anything, even my favorite dinners. I secretly feed some of it to Nana when she passes by.

            I tune out the rest of the dinner conversation in favor of listening to the rhythm of the shadow banging against the wall. I hope that it stops before bedtime. I “finish” my dinner, taking a few bites to pretend that I’ve actually eaten it all and not given half of it to the dog, and excuse myself from the table just to be safe.

            I enter the nursery and walk straight to where the shadow is being held.

            “Shadow? Shadow, you must stay quiet. I’m sure he’ll come for you tonight. I can feel it,” I whisper, as I’ve said to him every night for three nights.

            A rush of water again. I don’t understand the language of the sea or the wind, but I can tell that he’s upset.

            “Alright. If I let you out for just a moment, do you promise you’ll come back in and be silent?” I ask reluctantly.

            A rush that sounds like agreement.

            “You swear?”

            A violent rush that sounds like agreement.

            I peek outside the bedroom, sticking my ear out first to try and tell if everyone is still eating. When I’m sure nobody will walk to this room, I block the crack in the door with my pillow, so he can’t get out through the floor. Then, I head back to the banging drawer, hushing him and asking him to be still so I can open it. He jerks a few more times but slowly calms down. I click the lock open, and he shoots out, dancing upon the walls.

            After a while of letting him move about, I hear footsteps coming towards the room. I quickly snap my head to where the shadow has been prancing and walk quietly over to it.

            “Quickly, you need to be back in the drawer before they get in,” I whisper urgently. The shadow hesitates. “Please.”

            A rush of wind, almost like a hurricane, washes over. A tantrum.

            “Get back in that dresser before I take you off the wall and place you there myself!” I demand, still hushed by my fear of someone finding him. The shadow reluctantly follows orders and walks stubbornly over to the drawer. I neatly fold him and shut the drawer once more, locking it before the boys come into the room.

            “What are you doing?” I hear a small voice ask behind me. I turn to see Michael, who is trying to push the pillow back onto my bed. “Pillows are not for the floor, silly!”

            I sigh, relieved that he didn’t see the shadow. The boys know more than anything how to talk about things they should not, and if either of them knew I stole a shadow, they would immediately tattle on me. I smooth out my sheets and sit down on the bed, pulling him up to sit with me.

            “I was planning out my story for tonight,” I tell him warmly, touching my finger to his nose. “How would you like to hear a new one?”

            He scrunches his nose and laughs as he pulls off my finger. His laugh is something I wish I could bottle up forever, before he gets mean and bossy like John. Michael is full of sweetness, and I wish I could hold it all in my hands to protect it from the world. My hands would not be enough. John still has hope, but only in slivers. Being around boys your age will cut up your sweetness, if you aren’t careful.

Each time that I plan out my stories, I long to teach them to keep their sweetness and softness. I have seen so many boys, in school and out, that have let it slip from their grasp. They find stories, especially mine, as threats, for whatever reason. They don’t believe in pirates or magic or pixies. They’d rather pull my hair until tears fall. Mother says that they are jealous of my mind, and Father says that it is just their way. John says it’s because when they were younger, their mothers dropped them before their brains could become nice.

            Sometimes I enjoy that he is not as sweet as his brother.

            John climbs up onto the bed next to Michael. “Will we be pirates?”

            “Oh, could we please be pirates?” Michael begs, clasping his hands together like a prayer.

            “Are you not tired of being pirates already?” I laugh.

            “I could never be tired of pirates,” John says plainly as he plops his back onto the bed. He rolls down and sneaks to the toy box, grabbing a wooden sword and squaring up to fight. “I want to be Hook tonight!” he shouts, charging toward us.

            Though he is not much younger than me, I still have a little bit of height over John, so I can simply grab the sword from his hand before he gets us into any messes. He pouts as I put it back in the toy box.

            “Wendy, you can’t do that! It’s my sword!”

            “Might I remind you, John, that you did not use your money to buy the sword. It is Mother and Father’s, and because I’m the next oldest in the family, I am in charge of telling whose sword it is. Now, go sit on the bed,” I say, shooing him back onto the bed.

            “If we’re not playing pirates, then what will we play?” Michael questions.

            “I’m going to tell you the story of how Peter found his shadow.”

            Their eyes light up when they hear the word Peter. They love stories about Captain Hook, about swashbuckling swordfights and crocodiles, but Peter has always been and will always be their favorite. They sit patiently as they wait for me to begin.

            “It happened after he ran away. You know that part already, don’t you? He flew out of his nursery window one night, when no one was looking.” They nod, as I’ve probably told them the story a thousand times by now. It’s one of their favorites.

            “Well, after he left his nursery, he found Neverland, like I told you. But when he found it, Neverland wasn’t like it is in the stories. At least, not yet. There were no Lost Boys, no fairies, no pirates.”

            The boys gasp at this. “No pirates?” Michael whines. I shake my head.

            “No pirates. But Peter played anyway. He raced with the tides, flew through the clouds. He even called out to the birds. But the birds didn’t call back. It was completely silent, every day and every night he was there. One night, he climbed to the top of a hill that looked out over the whole island and shouted, ‘Is anyone there?’”

            “Did anyone answer?” John asks, flipping onto his stomach and kicking his legs into the air. Michael copies.

            “No one did. He sat down in the grass, pulled his knees to his chest, and stared at the sky for a long time. I think, for the very first time, Peter felt...” I hesitate. Peter somehow knows that I tell stories about him, so if he’s listening, I don’t want to offend him. I choose my words carefully. “Lonely.”

            “Then why did he run from home? Didn’t he have a family?” John questions. He always asks me the most questions. I let him, though, mostly because it makes him sleepy. I shrug at his question, thinking of how to answer in a way that won’t be too upsetting for he and Michael.

            “Sometimes… Sometimes certain people realize that their real home is beyond what their parents or siblings can give them. Perhaps Peter realized it at a younger age than most. Or maybe the stars were calling to him. Maybe we’ll be able to ask him one day,” I suggest, with more true hope for that opportunity than they might think.

            “I want the stars to call to me!” Michael pouts. John elbows him to tell him to quiet down. He looks at me expectantly, as if the story I’m telling is the most important thing in the world.

            “Now, Peter felt very lonely on this island,” I continue, “and went many, many days without a friend to join him in Neverland. All he could do all day was sit and stare at the clouds, as they were the only thing that changed. And then, one day, something rustled beside him. He thought it was the wind at first, or a trick of the moonlight. But when he turned, he saw it clearly.”

            The boys lean in close.

            “It was a shadow. His shadow.” The boys go wild in response, as if they had no idea that’s what I was going to say.

            “Didn’t he have one before?” John asked breathlessly.

            “Where did it come from?” Michael shouted.

            “Well, Michael, it wasn’t a normal shadow. This one was born alongside him, not with him, so it had been wandering the island since the day he was born. And, to answer your question, John, his little boy shadow was left in his nursery when he left.” They quiet back down. “His shadow wasn’t like ours. His shadow could dance and run, apart from Peter himself entirely. But he always came back.”

            I glance to the dresser, suddenly full of guilt that Peter’s shadow has been away from him for so long. He’s stopped his constant banging now, whether that be because he’s tired or because he’s realizing Peter might not come back to him. I turn back to the boys, looking into their eyes. They’re eager for more, even though I know telling anything beyond what I already have will deepen the pit in my stomach. I continue.

            “The shadow now walks beside him wherever he goes. They’re best friends, of course. And even when one is without the other, they always know how to come back.” I take a deep breath and try to believe what I’m saying. “Always.” It’s more to the shadow than it is to the boys.

            Michael yawns, and, though he denies it as soon as I notice, John’s eyes start to flutter. I shake my head at the two of them, knowing they’ll be cross if I try to put them to bed now.

            “It sat right beside him where he sat on the beach. It tilted its head in that funny way Peter does when he's thinking. And then it stood up and spun in a circle, just to make him laugh.” I poke Michael right on the nose. “And he did laugh. Not like before, not to fill the silence. This one was smaller, realer. From that moment on, the shadow stayed. Even when the fairies came. Even when the Lost Boys found him. Even when the whole island filled up with noise and magic and mayhem, the shadow never left. Because before all of that, before anyone else thought to love him, Peter’s shadow was the one who saw him first. He was the first one, the only one, to stay with him forever.”

            I’ve talked so much now at this point that the boys have no energy to listen. Michael’s already asleep now. John’s pretending not to be, but he’s blinking too slowly to be awake.

            That’s all right. That story isn’t for them anyway. It’s for someone else.

            And if he’s listening tonight, I hope he remembers.

            “You weren’t alone,” I whisper towards the window as John lulls himself to sleep. “But if you don’t come back, he will be.”

            I let out a huff of air. Michael and John look so comfortable in my bed, but I know Father will throw a fit if they don’t learn to sleep alone. I grab John first. I’d prefer to get the harder one over with. I heave his arms up onto my neck, getting him as high up as I can before carrying him over to his bed. After finally laying him down safely, I go back for Michael, who is light as a feather in comparison.

            When I go to pick him up, Michael stirs a little, and I start to rub his back to get him to go back to sleep. He doesn’t quiet open his eyes, but I can tell he’s at least half awake.

            “Wendy?” he says groggily, rubbing one of his eyes.

            “Yes, my darling?” I reply, still patting his back gently.

            “I believe you.”

            “About what, Michael?” I ask. Michael, like any little boy, says many things I don’t understand, so I often have to ask half as many questions to him as he does to me.

            “Peter,” he yawns before falling back asleep again. I can’t help but smile at him. I gently take Michael into my arms and carry him to his bed.

            As I step back and look at the two of them, snuggling into their pillows, I selfishly find myself hoping they can stay this gentle forever. There are so many boys that I know, in school or the men Father works with. They have lost every inch of magic they might have grown up with, every part of themselves that feels loudly and deeply. I hope that through my stories they can believe for a little while that they will never have to grow up.

            But we all must. We can’t all be like Peter.