What if it was Peter who made the magic?
She shook her head. “I never would have found this again. It was dark and I was so excited, and also the tunnel seemed so long.”
“It does, that first time,” I said. “After that it goes quicker.”
Peter’s head popped out like a jack-in-the-box, telling me to come on, come on, there were adventures to be had. He disappeared again, and I was afraid to stand out in the dark on my own, out under this tree. I didn’t know how to get back home, and the tree seemed huge and frightening, like a dangerous thing that would reach down with its branches and grab me and hold me too tight.
I ran to the hole and peered in, and didn’t see Peter. So I called his name and heard him answer, “Come on, Jamie!” though the answer seemed far away.
He was going away from me, and then I would be all alone.
I put my feet into the opening, and after a second I pushed off and followed Peter down into the hole. There was a long drop that I didn’t expect and I tumbled to the bottom, getting dirt in my eyes and mouth and nose.
Peter laughed, but it wasn’t a mean laugh, and he picked me up and dusted me off and his eyes seemed to glow in the darkness.
“It’s not far now,” he said, and he took my hand.
It was farther than I thought it would be, so long in the dark, and I would have been afraid except that Peter never let go of my hand.
“Did you ever wonder, Jamie, how Peter found this island in the first place?”
Sal’s words startled me out of the memory. I shrugged. “I never asked. I suppose I always thought that he found the hole by accident, when he was just exploring in the Other Place.”
I didn’t mention my worry that the path only worked because of Peter. I decided that I would explore on my own another day, when Peter was away somewhere, and make sure that you could cross to the Other Place if he wasn’t with you.
“I wonder,” Sal said, and she looked thoughtful.
“Wonder what?” I asked.
“I wonder if he’s not actually from the Other Place,” Sal said. “If he’s from the island, and he found the path to the Other Place from here.”
“How could he be from the island?” I asked. “Did he sprout out of the ground like a mushroom? Where are his parents?”
Sal shook her head. “I don’t know. But he’s not like other boys. There’s something different about him.”
I didn’t say anything to this. There was something different about Peter—the way he knew things about the island, the way that he sometimes seemed like he was of the island.
And he could fly. None of the rest of us could fly.
I thought that this was because he’d been there for so long, but maybe Sal was right. Maybe the reason why Peter was so dismissive of mothers was because he’d never had one. Maybe he just appeared on the island one day, unfolding out of the grass just as he was, an eleven-year-old boy forever.
But no. That was silly. Even Peter couldn’t have come from nothing. He had to have been born somewhere.
I asked Sal to point out all the markers to me on the way back to the tree, so I could be sure that she understood where she was to go.
She huffed out a sigh. “I told you I’m not stupid, Jamie. There’s no need to test me.”
“I just want to make sure you won’t get lost,” I said. “It’s easy to get lost here.”
If she and Charlie were on their own and got turned around in the dark, they could very easily end up near the crocodile pond. Sal might think I was being ridiculous, but then, she hadn’t been on the island when Peter told the story of the crocodile and the duckling.
She didn’t worry about Charlie being dragged underneath the water of the pond by sharp, sharp teeth.
Still, she passed my “test,” as she called it, and found the way back to the main path without any prompting from me. When we reached it she crossed her arms and looked up at me.
“Happy now?” Then she frowned. “Are you taller? I thought I was nearly as tall as you.”
“You did well,” I said, avoiding her question. I glanced back over my shoulder in the direction of the tunnel. “Perhaps we should practice again from this side, just to make sure—”
“I’m not doing it again. You’ll simply have to trust me,” she said impatiently. “Jamie, you didn’t answer me. Are you taller?”
This was the other quality that made Sal different from all the boys. She couldn’t be distracted by anything. If she asked you a question and you didn’t answer, then she would ask that question again and again until you did.
“Yes,” I said, and hoped that would be enough.
Sal would never take a one-word answer.
“Are you—” she began.
Then she swallowed before going on, her voice hushed like she was afraid the island itself would hear, and tell Peter.
“Are you growing up?”
Her words seemed to hang between us on the shimmering air, insects flying between them without any notion of how dangerous that question could be.
“I—”
It crashed over me all at once, the truth I’d been pretending wasn’t there. I was growing up.
I was growing up, and I was so afraid.
I turned away from Sally, choking on the answer.
She wouldn’t let me turn, wouldn’t let me cry alone in shame, wouldn’t leave me.
Sally would never leave me alone.
She put her arms around me and I covered my face in my hands and sobbed, because I was afraid.
For so long I’d run free with the knowledge that I would never grow up, that I would only die if I got on the wrong end of a pirate’s sword.
Even then that sort of death had seemed another adventure at first, when everything on the island was new. It was heroic and also somehow not real, that I might be slashed by a pirate and fall to the ground but Peter would find me and wake me up later.
There were many years when the death of the other boys that we brought here didn’t trouble me, because I knew that at least I would always go on. Peter had promised me, and so I would live forever. It was a very long time before I stopped believing in Peter’s promises.
Now the island was fading for me, losing its magic, and I would grow old, and one day I would die for certain.
And I thought it wasn’t just because Peter didn’t care about the boys, or that he kept secrets. It was because I didn’t love him anymore the way that I used to do, when we were both small and he was my best friend in all the world.
“I’m glad,” she said fiercely. “I’m glad, because I’m going to grow up and I want you to grow up with me.”
I scrubbed at my eyes then and looked at her. Her face was so close to mine. I could smell her hair, flowery and sweet, because Sal took baths even when the rest of us did not. Her eyes were bluer than they’d ever been, dark and full of some promise that I didn’t really understand.
“Only, Jamie, you have to not grow up too fast,” she said primly. “Because I’m thirteen and I think right now you’re about the size of a fourteen-year-old, and that’s happened very fast. So you can’t get much bigger now, for if you do, then you’ll be too far ahead of me.”
I knew then that when I stopped loving Peter my heart looked for other things, and Sal was filling up all the space that Peter used to take there.