“Certain of that?” she asked.
“Yes, I told you so. Do you think I’m a liar?”
She didn’t flinch. She didn’t seem even a little bit intimidated by my temper. “I just wondered if you remembered really, but didn’t want to say because it would make Peter angry.”
I started to say that I didn’t care what Peter thought about it, that I did as I pleased.
But that wasn’t really true, was it? I didn’t do as I pleased. I did what I thought was best and tried to keep Peter happy so he wouldn’t destroy everything.
I’d made myself a hostage to him for three weeks just so he wouldn’t drag any more boys here to his island, and to keep Charlie and Sal safe from his jealousy.
And I did remember some things from the Other Place.
The song.
Wide blue eyes staring, and a red mouth carved in a smile where there should be none.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” I said.
I finished up changing the bandage and collected the dirty things to take outside to wash.
“You’re a good father to these boys,” Sal said. “I thought maybe you learned from someone who cared about you.”
“I’m not their father,” I said, my voice harsh. “I don’t think of myself that way. We’re not playing families here on the island. We just work together.”
“You look out for them. You take care of them. That’s what a father does—or at least, what he’s supposed to do. Mine only beat me and my mother until I ran away. After that he only had my mother to hit,” Sal said.
She didn’t sound sad about this, or like she wanted me to feel sorry for her. It was just a statement of fact, but it arrested my anger.
“Did you love your mother?” I asked curiously.
“When I was small I did,” she said. “When I was older I hated her for letting him hurt me.”
“Maybe she was scared to try to make him stop.” I had a strange impulse to defend Sal’s mother.
“I wasn’t scared,” she said. “I shouted at him. I stood up to him. I hit him with a broken bottle once, made him bleed all over. If a little child can do that, then why couldn’t my mother stand between us?”
I didn’t know what to say to this. I could see it, little Sal with her dark curls and blue eyes, fierce and small with a bruise on her face and a jagged bottle in her hand.
“That’s what you do for the boys,” Sal continued. “You stand between them and Peter. You keep them safe. Because it isn’t safe, this island. It isn’t at all what Peter promised it would be, what I thought it would be.”
“What did you think it would be?”
She shrugged, and her hands moved restlessly in her lap. “Like a paradise, I suppose. A happy place that was clean and bright and where everyone was lovely to each other and there was lots and lots of food to eat. I’ve spent three years eating rats, or moldy bread that I stole off the end of a cart. If ever I had anything—a penny earned from shining shoes, or an apple that wasn’t half rotten—some bigger boy would come along and try to take it from me. I always had to fight, every day, just to stay alive. I was fighting when Peter found me, beating an older boy who wanted my cap.”
“That’s why he wanted you,” I said. “If he saw you fighting and thought you were good at it, he would want you here.”
“I thought,” she said, and she took a deep breath. “I thought that Peter respected me because I wouldn’t let the other boy bully me. He said I looked like a boy that deserved an adventure. I didn’t believe him at first, about the island, though.”
“I didn’t either,” I said. “I don’t know that anyone does. It sounds like a fantastic lie.”
“It is a fantastic lie,” Sal said, and her face was very earnest. “This isn’t a wonderful place for boys to play and have adventures and stay young for always. It’s a killing place, and we’re all just soldiers in Peter’s war.”
I shuffled my feet, not sure what to say to this. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought all of these things before, or even said some of them to Peter. I had. But I was his first choice, his best, his right hand.
And I couldn’t, not yet anyway, say out loud to the other boys that Peter was a monster.
“It wasn’t always like this,” I said. “With the pirates, I mean. We used to just raid them but they never came looking for us after.”
“And what changed?” Sal said, her eyes narrow and sharp. She knew the answer as well I did.
“Isn’t this place better than eating rats and getting beaten every day?” I shouted, suddenly angry again. “Do you want to go back to that? Because Peter will send you there. I was going to look out for you, and say that he should let you stay, but if you don’t like it here, then I should let you go back to that life.”
I stomped out of the tree, not waiting to hear what she answered. What did she know about the island or Peter, anyway? She hadn’t been here that long, and she wasn’t even a boy, even if she pretended to be one. Peter said there weren’t to be any girls on the island. He made the rules and I ought to take her back to the Other Place myself.
And while I was at it, I should take Charlie too. He was learning to like it on the island—too much. He’d never seemed so happy as when it was just the five of us, no Peter to growl at him, no Nip to scowl at him. His mother would be missing him. She would be crying every night. I ought to bring him home.
Except that he was part of my heart now, and I didn’t want to let him go. And I didn’t want to let Sal go either.
Did that make me selfish? Did that make me like Peter?
Maybe it did, just a little.
But I had to believe that I was better than Peter. I wouldn’t sacrifice the others for my own amusement. I wouldn’t forget about them the moment they were gone.
That made me better, didn’t it? I only wanted them near me because I loved them.
Though, of course, it was because I loved them that Peter had to take them from me.
• • •
Nine days after the pirate assault on the mountain, Peter reappeared in camp. Nobody jumped up and surrounded him when he strode in like a returning hero. We were playing a game with sticks that Sal had thought up and we didn’t notice him at first.
Sal made some boxes on the ground with the sticks, and set them apart at different lengths, some closer and some farther apart. Each boy would take it in turns to try to jump through all the boxes without missing one or breaking the sticks apart. I was the tallest and had the longest legs, so I was winning easily, though Crow seemed to take it personally that he was shorter and was trying to make up for it by jumping higher.
Charlie struggled the most, being the smallest, and we all cheered when he managed to jump through two boxes in a row.
There were three rabbits on the fire for lunch and the smell of meat cooking mingled with everyone’s happy laughter and it felt like home.
And then Peter came, and it was like a cloud settled over the clearing, and that home feeling went away. Smiles faded, even from Nod, who used to worship Peter.
But that was when Fog was still alive, and Peter hadn’t helped Nod bury his brother. He hadn’t seemed to care at all that Nod’s twin was dead, though they’d been on the island the second longest. That took a lot of the shine off Peter for Nod, and Crow did what Nod did, more or less.
The shine had come off Peter for Sal and Charlie long before then.
So when he looked all around and said, “What’s the matter with all of you? Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?” everyone just stared back at him in silence.