Everything I lost swelled up inside me then, the life that I might have had without Peter. Yes, my father was a drunken ass who beat us. But we were saving, my mama and me. We were going to leave him and find a quiet place away from the city where we would be safe.
And I would have grown up and my mama would have grown old but there would have been grandchildren for her to kiss and hug and hold so tight. There would have been a life, a boring, ordinary life to Peter but a full life, one that followed the natural order of things.
It was not natural for boys to stay boys forever. We were supposed to grow up, and have boys of our own, and teach them how to be men.
I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my side, and then in my hands and legs and feet, and something scratchy and prickly at my chin.
Charlie’s eyes widened. “Jamie, you’ve got a beard!”
I rubbed my face, and it wasn’t quite a beard, but there was fuzzy hair that hadn’t been there before.
Sal hit my shoulder then. “I told you not to grow up too fast! We’re supposed to grow up together!”
“I don’t think I have a choice, Sal,” I said, and there was a little grief there too. What if I kept growing and I was too old for Sal? What then? “It’s not something I can stop.”
I stood, and stretched, and realized everything hurt—my lungs and eyes, burned by smoke; my legs from trying to outrun the fire; my arms, from clinging to Charlie so tight.
The smaller boy was avoiding my eyes, staring at the mass of dead Many-Eyed on the beach. Behind them the plains smoked still, though all the grass and flowers were gone now and there was nothing except a blackened field as far as the eye could see.
“Peter,” Charlie said, and a sob caught in his throat.
Sal reached for him but I shook my head at her. He didn’t need to be comforted yet. He needed to say what was in his heart first.
“Peter didn’t like me,” Charlie said. “He tricked me, and I believed him.”
He did look at me then, and his eyes would never be those innocent little duckling eyes again. That was what happened when you were betrayed.
“I believed him, and then he tried to kill me,” Charlie said. “You never hurt me, Jamie. You always watched out for me. I shouldn’t have believed him.”
“We all believe him, at first,” I said. “Even me. That’s how he lures us here with his promises.”
“And then he rips us all to pieces,” Sally said.
“He won’t bring any more here,” I said, and took a deep breath, for now I had to tell her the thing I didn’t want to say. “The path to the Other Place is gone.”
“Gone?” she said.
I explained what I’d found, that the tree was cut down and the hole to the tunnel covered in grass.
She wilted as I spoke, and for a moment I was afraid she would faint, for she’d gone very pale.
“How did he know? We’ll never escape him,” she whispered. “Oh, why, oh, why did I ever come here?”
“Because you thought it would be better than what you had,” I said. “You thought that you would be happier here.”
“I would be happy here,” she said fiercely. “If not for him. If it was just us, you and me and Charlie and Nod and Crow, and we could grow up as we should, then I would be happy here.”
“But he is here,” I said. “And I don’t want to stay on the island any longer. I’ve been here for too many seasons already.”
“What do we do?” Charlie asked.
He came to my side then, and wound his fist in my coat the way he used to do, but he didn’t put his thumb in his mouth. He wasn’t a baby anymore.
“We’ll have to sail away,” I said. “It’s our only hope.”
“Not with the pirates?” Sal asked. “Because I don’t think they’ll be very welcoming to us, not after all that’s happened between us.”
“That’s all Peter’s doing, and Nip’s,” I said sharply. “If Peter hadn’t burned down their camp, and Nip hadn’t told them where to find us, then we wouldn’t have had to kill any of them. Or at least not so many of them. There might have been a raid, but it wouldn’t have been the same.”
Everything was Peter’s fault. My mother was killed by Peter. The boys he brought here died because of Peter. The pirates came looking for a war because of Peter, and were massacred by us because of Peter. Charlie had nearly been fed to the Many-Eyed because of Peter. It was all down to Peter.
“It doesn’t matter now if it’s our doing or Peter’s,” Sally said, and she shook her head at the look on my face. “It doesn’t. The pirates think all of us are the same now. If we go to them for help, if we ask them to take us away in their ship, then they’ll hurt us.”
She added then, in a small voice, “They’ll hurt me more than you if they know I’m a girl.”
I didn’t really understand this then, but I remembered that the pirates sometimes brought girls back to camp with them after they’d been away from the island, and that the girls spent all their time screaming and crying.
So I took Sal’s word. After all, she’d found it so unsafe to be a girl that she’d pretended to be a boy, which was how she’d ended up on the island in the first place.
“We’ll have to build a boat,” I said. “Build it in a secret place, where Peter won’t find it.”
“He can find everything,” Charlie said. “Because he can fly. He told me how he flies all over the island and he sees everything. It was nice to fly, even if it did end when Peter threw me on the ground. It was scary then. This big Many-Eyed made all this noise and then Peter told the fairy what to say and the fairy told the Many-Eyed that Peter brought me as a present for them to eat.”
His eyes welled up then. “I thought he was my friend and he tried to feed me to monsters.”
Again, Sally wanted to pick him up and comfort him, but I stopped her.
“Charlie,” I said. “What fairy are you talking about? The toy that Peter gave you?”
Charlie shook his head. “No, silly, a toy’s a toy. This is a real fairy, a fairy that lives on the island. She can talk to the Many-Eyed and she showed Peter how to fly.”
“There are no fairies here,” I said. “I’ve never seen one.”
“There are,” Charlie said. “But they only like Peter and not the other boys, so they don’t come out where we can see them. Only Tink does because she’s Peter’s special friend.”
“Tink?”
“That’s what he calls her, because she makes a kind of tinkling noise when she talks.”
I gave Sally a significant look. “I heard a tinkling noise that day when we were on the path talking about leaving for the Other Place.”
“Do you think she was spying on us for Peter?” Sally said.
“She always spies for Peter,” Charlie said. “And it’s easy for her, because she seems just like a firefly unless you get a close look.”
“And she taught Peter how to fly?” I said.
“Well,” Charlie said. “She didn’t really teach him. She shakes her dust on him and the dust makes him fly.”
“So if we had some of that fairy dust, then we would be able to fly away from the island,” I said slowly.
“It doesn’t last very long,” Charlie said. “That’s what Peter said. You have to keep a fairy with you so she can keep dusting you. I don’t think Tink would do it anyway. She doesn’t like anyone except Peter, and I don’t think it would be very nice to catch her.”
“What about the other fairies? Where do they live?” I asked.