Christina Henry
Lost Boy
For Henry and Jared and Dylan
For Xander and Sam and Jake and Logan
For all the boys I’ve known
May you never be lost
May you always find your way home
prologue
Once I was young, and young forever and always, until I wasn’t. Once I loved a boy called Peter Pan.
Peter will tell you that this story isn’t the truth, but Peter lies. I loved him, we all loved him, but he lies, for Peter wants always to be that shining sun that we all revolve around. He’ll do anything to be that sun.
Peter will say I’m a villain, that I wronged him, that I never was his friend.
But I told you already. Peter lies.
This is what really happened.
PART I CHARLIE
chapter 1
Sometimes I dreamed of blood. The blood on my hands and the empty eyes in a white-and-grey face. It wasn’t my blood, or blood I’d spilled—though there was plenty of that to go around. It was her blood, and I didn’t know who she was.
Her eyes were dead and blue and her hands were thrown out, like she was reaching for someone, like she was reaching for me before that great slash was put in her throat. I didn’t know why. I didn’t even rightly know whether it was a dream, or something that happened in the Other Place, before I went away with Peter.
If that girl was real it must have happened there, because there were no girls on the island except the mermaids, and they didn’t really count, being half fish.
Still, every night I dreamed of flashing silver and flowing red, and sometimes it startled me out of sleep and sometimes it didn’t. That night I had the dream same as usual, but something else woke me.
I’d heard a sound, a sound that was maybe a cry or moan or a bird squawking out in the night of the forest. It was hard to tell when you heard something while you were sleeping. It was like the noise came from a far-off mountain.
I wasn’t sorry to leave the dream. No matter how many times Peter told me to forget it, my mind returned over and over again to the same place: to the place where she was dead and her eyes asked something of me, though I didn’t know what that something might be.
I came awake all at once the way I usually did, for if you don’t sleep light in the forest you might open your eyes to find something sharp-jawed biting your legs off. Our tree was hidden and protected, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t danger. There was always danger on the island.
The piles of sleeping boys huddled under their animal skins on the dirt floor. Light filtered in from the moon through the holes we’d cut like windows in the tree hollow—me and Peter had done it, long ago. Outside there was a steady buzz, the hum of the Many-Eyed in the plains carrying across the forest.
“It’s just Charlie,” Peter said dismissively from above.
He was curved into one of the holes, his body loose-limbed and careless, looking out over the forest. In his hands he held a small knife and a piece of wood that he was whittling. The blade flashed in the moonlight, dancing over the surface of the wood. His skin was all silver in that light and his eyes deep pools of shadow, and he seemed to be part of the tree and the moon and the wind that whispered through the tall grass outside.
Peter didn’t sleep much, and when he did it was just a quick nap. He would not waste a bit of his life in slumber, even though his life was already longer than most, and he hated the way the rest of us succumbed, dropping like biting flies in the summer heat while he pestered us for one more game.
I rose and tiptoed carefully over the other boys until I found Charlie. He was balled up in a knotted tree root like a baby in a cradle, and he was barely older than a baby at that. His face was covered in sweat that glittered like jewels, like a pirate’s treasure in the moonlight. He moaned, shifting restlessly in his sleep.
Young ones sometimes had a hard time adjusting when they first came over. Charlie was five, much younger than I had been when Peter had taken me, much younger than any boy he’d ever brought to the island before.
I bent and scooped the smaller boy from the tree root, holding him to my heart. Charlie kicked out once, then settled.
“You’re no help to him, you know,” Peter warned, watching me shuffle to and fro with Charlie in my arms. “Stop babying.”
“He’s too little,” I hissed. “I told you he was.”
I don’t know why I bothered, because there isn’t a point in saying things Peter won’t listen to anyhow.
Peter usually chose boys who were about the same age I was when he picked me—around eight or nine. Peter liked that age, for boys were old enough to have the spirit of rebellion and the will to follow it. By then a boy would have gotten a good taste of adulthood—through work or schooling, depending on his class—enough to know that he didn’t want to spend his days toiling at figures or in the fields or fetching water for some rich man.
The last time we went looking for new boys, Peter had spied this tiny one wandering through the piles of filth in the alleys. He declared that the child would be a splendid little playmate, and I argued that he would have been much better off in a home for orphans. Naturally, Peter won. He wanted the boy and Peter got what he wanted—always.
And now that he’d got him, Peter had no use for him. It wasn’t any fun to play with someone too small to fight and roughhouse with the bigger boys. Charlie couldn’t keep up when Peter trekked us through the forest on an adventure, either. More than once I’d suspected Peter of trying to leave Charlie somewhere so the little boy might get eaten, and then Peter would be free of the trouble of him. But I kept one eye on Charlie (though Peter didn’t like it), and as long as I watched out for him and carried him home there wasn’t much Peter could do about it but complain. Which he did.
“You should have left him by the crocodile pool,” Peter said. “Then his crying wouldn’t wake you up.”
I said nothing, because it wasn’t worth my breath. Peter never lost an argument—and not because he wasn’t wrong; he was, and pretty often too—but because he never got tired. He’d keep coming back at you no matter how right you were until you threw up your hands and let him win just so you’d have some peace.
Peter didn’t say anything else and I went on walking Charlie until his breathing told me he was properly asleep again. I tried to replace the boy in the pile of skins he’d been sleeping in, but he whimpered as soon as I tried to put him down. Peter sniggered.
“You’ll be up all night with him, walking him like a mama with her babe,” Peter said.
“What would you know about it?” I said, as I rubbed Charlie’s back again to get him to settle. “There’s never been a mama here, and you don’t remember yours.”