“I only made them angry in the first place because of you, Jamie. Don’t you remember? You killed the Many-Eyed when you weren’t supposed to, and then you wanted to make it seem as though the pirates did it. You asked me to draw the pirates out of their camp and I did, and now you’re blaming me because the pirates are mad about it. That’s not very fair of you.”
“I told you to draw them out, not to burn everything down.”
I was ready to take the blame for the Many-Eyed, but not anything else. It was Peter who’d made that choice.
But it was the boys who paid for it. Like they always did.
“None of it would have happened except for you. So if all those boys are dead, it’s because of you, Jamie.”
All those boys. Billy and Slightly and Kit and Jonathan and Ed and Terry and Sam and Harry and Del and Fog and Jack and Nip, and all the ones before them that I’d buried in the field, so many that their faces swam together and their names were one name. They all watched me, and accused me, but it wasn’t because it was my fault that they were dead.
It was because I didn’t stop Peter, because I let Peter live, because I let Peter lie to them and promise them things that could never be. All children grow up, or they die, or both.
All children, except one.
chapter 13
Peter spent more time away from us after that, coming and going as he pleased, and nobody really minded. Things were more comfortable when Peter wasn’t around, especially as he was inclined to stare resentfully at Sally when he was in camp.
He didn’t say anything more about making her go back to the Other Place. I didn’t fool myself that this meant she was allowed to stay. It simply meant that he was trying to come up with a good accident for her, so that he could pretend to boo-hoo when she was gone.
When he wanted a companion he always made me go with him, and every hour I spent with him was a misery. There was nothing on the island that we hadn’t done a thousand-thousand-thousand times before, and Peter was unaware or didn’t care that I didn’t want to do it anymore.
What I wanted was to play quiet games with the others, or tell stories, or just laze about the tree and eat fruit if that was all we wanted. I wanted, finally, for there to be some measure of peace, to not face another day where one of the boys would die just because Peter couldn’t stand to be still.
One day when Peter had gone off on some mission of his own, I asked Crow and Nod to keep an eye on Charlie, and then I asked Sally to take a walk with me.
She was drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick, and after I asked her to walk, her face reddened.
“I just want to show you something important,” I said. Her blush made me respond in kind. It was like this with Sally. Everything would be fine, with all of us treating her like one of the boys, and then she would say or do something that had me feeling like a fool.
Nod watched us curiously as we left. He hadn’t been the same since Fog died, not as quick to anger nor as quick to laugh. I’d noticed something else too.
Nod had gotten taller. I noticed it because he and Crow had been more or less the same size, and then one day they just weren’t anymore. He had grown.
And so had I.
In fact, it had gotten so that I woke up in the morning and didn’t recognize my body most days. All my limbs were longer, and my hands and feet seemed like foreign things.
When I walked, my ankles got tangled up, and I felt big and slow, though in truth I wasn’t that much bigger than I’d been before Battle. It was perhaps a thumb length, maybe more, but that length felt like miles when Peter was around, who seemed smaller than ever to me. Had I never really seen how young he was until then?
Sal didn’t speak as I led her away from the tree. After several minutes where we both determinedly tried not to look right at each other she said, “Where are we going?”
“To the tunnel that leads to the Other Place,” I said.
She tilted her head to one side, like she was disappointed in me. “Sending me back, then? No girls allowed on Peter’s island?”
“No, no,” I said hastily. “Not a bit of it. I just remembered what you said on Battle day—about not knowing the way back. And I want you to know it.”
Sal was silent for a minute. “So I can escape, if I need to.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
She stopped then, and hit me hard in the shoulder. “And what about you, you fool? Do you think I’ll run off and save myself and leave you here with him?”
I stared at her, rubbing my shoulder. “You hit hard,” I said.
“For a girl, you mean?” she said angrily. “I told you, Jamie, I lived on the streets with boys for three years. I can look after myself. I’m not helpless just because I’m a girl. I won’t have you treating me like I am. And I don’t think you should ask me to run away while you stand and fight. I’m here now, and I’ll stand beside you. I won’t run.”
Nobody had said this to me before. Nobody.
If I told the others to run, they ran. If I said I would be a shield between them and the world, then I was. None of them volunteered to stand with me, to take the knocks that I thought were my duty to take.
“Well?” she said.
“All right,” I said slowly. “All right. You won’t run, and I won’t ask you to. But I still want you to know how to get back to the Other Place. It’s not just about you.”
She wilted a little then. “Of course. Charlie.”
“I know he doesn’t mean as much to you as he does to me . . .” I started.
“Don’t think you can decide for me what’s in my heart,” she snapped. “I love Charlie as much as you do.”
“All right,” I said again, not knowing what else to say.
I felt as though I were navigating some strange and undiscovered country, one where perils lurked around every bend.
Girls might not be trouble the way Peter thought, but they certainly were confusing.
I took Sally off the main path and into a patch of forest tucked in the border between the swamp and the mountains. It wasn’t that far from the tree, but the course was confusing if you didn’t know where you were going. I showed her all the things I used to stay on track—a tree marked with an “X” in the bark, a knife mark scratched on a boulder, a little stream that bubbled near the entry to the tunnel to the Other Place.
It looked just like a rabbit hole, as it did on the other side. It was tucked underneath a tree between two knotted tree roots. There was nothing to show that it was magic, or that it would take you away from the island entirely.
For the first time I wondered what would happen if the tunnel was blocked. Would you be able to dig out all the way to the Other Place at the end, or would the magic be broken forever? Strange that we had never thought of this, or worried about it. We could have been trapped in the Other Place if that happened.
There was something about Peter, his complete surety that things would always work the way he wanted them to. When he said we could go to the Other Place and return to the island, we believed him. I’d never troubled myself thinking that the magic might go away.
Now I worried about exactly such a thing. What if I told Sally and Charlie to run for the tunnel, and when they got there the tunnel wouldn’t take them back because it was blocked or broken?
Worse, what if the tunnel only took you to the Other Place if Peter was with you? I’d never tried to go through on my own, and I was certain none of the boys ever had either.