Out in the coastal countryside sat a tiny cottage, not three miles from the ocean shore. Nestled between two green hills, it rested at the edge of a forest that was neither too dark nor too deep. Light and laughter streamed out into the night, illuminating the tiger lilies in the window planters. Inside, four old friends began to wind down after a long and enjoyable evening of catching up.
Gwendolyn Hoffman offered to put on a pot of coffee, and cleared the dishes off the table as her guests ambled into her living room and sat down beside the little house's smoldering hearth. The fire had almost dwindled away, but James Hoek pulled another log out of the wood pile beside the fireplace. He threw it into the hearth before the fire could dissolve into embers. She listened to her guests' conversation from the kitchen.
“I spend six months at a time deployed in the Pacific,” James announced, “dreaming of the comforts of home, and what do I do when I get back to the states? Drive all the way out to the coast to spend my evening in a little house barely bigger than the berthing quarters, and without so much as central heating.”
“Oh hush. Don't you dare whine about that beautiful ocean. If you spent any time in it instead of just skirting over it, you wouldn't complain.”
“If it's so marvelous, why did you leave it, Andrea?”
“Believe me, I find myself asking that question more often every year…” Lasiandra Meyers answered.
“No, the ocean's no good,” James joked. “I think Peter's got the right idea. Where do I sign up to spend my days finger painting and feeding kids graham crackers?”
Peter Sweet continued fiddling with the wooden puzzle box he'd picked up off Gwen's coffee table, barely glancing up at James as he informed him, “Oh I got fired from that job weeks ago.”
“What?” James asked. “Why? Don't try to tell me the school found someone they thought would be better for the job.”
“No, no,” Peter answered peacefully uninterested as he fixated on the painted puzzle box amusing him. “Apparently I wasn't authorized to take the kids into the forest to track animals, and it's against school rules to eat wild blackberries. I wasn't sticking to the curriculum, which is all kinds of nonsense if you ask me. The kids know it's nonsense, too. If you give them finger paints and graham crackers, half of them try to eat the paint and build houses out of the crackers.”
James laughed, his smile spreading wide beneath his dark beard. Peter getting fired was neither surprising nor unusual; he lost jobs like he lost girlfriends, cars, and everything else in life. Nothing lasted long in the happy flux of Peter's life, except for his friends. Gwen didn't worry about him—he'd already gone to the Anomalous Activity Department last week so they could set him up with a new job and keep him out of trouble.
“Let me give you a hand with the dishes,” Lasiandra offered, following Gwen into the kitchen while Peter and James continued to talk about the enjoyable misadventures leading to Peter's dismissal.
It seemed odd, at times, that the four of them still met like this. Fifteen years ago in the thick of their turmoils it would have been unimaginable—but the grief they had caused each other had melted away like so much high school drama and teenage angst. It was Neverland's final kindness that it receded in their memories, diminishing its own importance as time took it away and ushered them into adulthood. The younger ones like Barbara hardly even remembered their time in Neverland—and it was Peter's theory that all the time they now spent in college only washed it further from their minds.
So Peter, Gwen, Lasiandra, and James gathered every so often for the comfort of company that remembered Neverland, its strange seas, and the marvelous adventures it had contained… even if those adventures had pitted them against each other at the time.
“I'll have to run in a bit,” Lasiandra told her, helping load plates and cutlery into the dishwasher. “Phil is absolutely useless with the girls—they never go to sleep until I get home to tuck them in—and I've got to be up early for a meeting with the other partners at the firm.”
Lasiandra had won everything she ever set out to achieve in life, but it seemed her life spent more time living her than she did living it.
“How are Violet and Lavender doing these days?” Gwen asked, rinsing and scrubbing their glasses. She had been left-handed for so long, she no longer thought twice about which hand to do simple tasks with.
“The girls hate me,” Lasiandra sighed. “I have to make them go to swim lessons after school—I swear, they can't even be my children.” She rolled her eyes and stood by as Gwen loaded soap into the dishwasher. “I wanted to ask, though,” Lasiandra ventured, “I heard you and Steven split up? What happened?”
Gwen shrugged as she closed the dishwasher and started it running. Lasiandra meant well with her inquiry. She always meant well, but she had never grasped that intentions and realities did not align as nicely as stars and destinies. Gwen answered simply, “Steven was great but… there just wasn't any magic there.”
“Oh Gwen,” Lasiandra sighed. “You can't spend your life looking for magic in love. Love is just love—it doesn't have to be magic.”
Not wanting to press the point, Gwen ceded, “Maybe you're right.” She had learned early on not to take advice from those dully disappointed and mildly unhappy adults that flourished in reality. She knew better than to trust adults who couldn't get along with children.
Lasiandra knew better than to dismiss the issue so fast and she knew—maybe even better than Gwen did—what lay at the heart of it. “Neverland was magic, Gwen. You can't expect to recapture that.” When Gwen didn't answer, Lasiandra pried further, “You don't still miss being a child there, do you?”
“No, of course not.” Gwen answered, drying her hands on a dishrag, “I didn't have a clue what I was doing back then. I don't want to go back to being a teenager, and I'm glad I didn't get stuck as one. I just miss the feeling of being engulfed in magic. I'm not in love with childhood anymore.”
Gwen expected a prompt response, some judgment or commentary from Lasiandra's quick mind, but she found her friend staring off at nothing. “I guess that just goes to show everything grows up and gets old,” she sighed. “Even our ideals.”
Gwen hung the dish towel back on the oven handle. “Did the stars tell you that, Andrea?”
“No,” she answered, looking outside at the night sky, a barely visible darkness beyond the glare of the window. “They haven't talked to me in a long time.” Her melancholy shifted back to Gwen. “We should get coffee this week and talk,” Lasiandra told her, drawing her into a hug. Gwen appreciated these hugs, these moments where she and Lasiandra stood on equal footing and could look each other in the eye. Just as the stars had predicted so early on, the two of them were great friends, in the end.
They wandered back into the living room. Peter was still fiddling with the puzzle box and talking with James, but James had ambled over to the wall where Gwen had hung the old charcoal portrait he'd done for her half a lifetime ago.
“You know,” he told Gwen, “when you got that thing framed, I kept expecting you to pull a Dorian Gray with it.”
Gwen laughed. “Do you have any idea how fast the Anomalous Activity Department would confiscate it if I did?”
Gwen might have aged, but not a day had passed for her portrait. It still showed her at that brilliant moment of youth she had suspended while sixteen. Since then, her face had grown and changed in subtle little ways until her reflection reminded her more of her mother's wedding photos than how she remembered herself. Some time would pass before wrinkles came crawling onto her face, but age had already sharpened her features and pushed the pudge out of her cheeks. Her smile and eyes had not dimmed though, and Gwen counted those as the only victories she needed.
Lasiandra announced her departure and pulled on her coat before hugging everyone goodbye.
“I should get going, too,” James admitted, glancing at the clock. “It's a bit of a drive, and Ashley will be waiting up for me.”
“Tell her I said hi,” Gwen told him, giving him a hug. “Thanks for coming out all this way to see me.”
“Always, Gwen.”
They let go of each other, but Gwen's shadow still held onto James. It was an inconspicuous gesture, typical of her problematic shadow. It hadn't strayed from her since the Anomalous Activity Department reattached it, but her shadow still acted up from time to time.
Something thudded upstairs.
“What was that?” Jay asked, staring at the ceiling.
Gwen slapped her hand against her face. “I knew I shouldn't have left all those books stacked up there.”
“You need an actual bookshelf,” Peter told her. “We should go hunt one down some time.”
James and Lasiandra, unconcerned with such plans, headed out. “I think I'm blocking you in, Peter,” James told him.
“That's okay. I'm not leaving until I figure out this puzzle box.”
Gwen laughed. “You'll be here all night—I haven't even managed it yet.”
“Where'd you get this thing anyway?” he asked her.
“Drive safe,” Gwen called as Lasiandra and James got into their cars. She tapped her foot in the entryway, covertly calling her elongated shadow back as it tried to follow after their friends. Gwen closed the door on the cold night. She and Peter waited a moment, making sure Lasiandra and James got on the road and drove off before they hurried upstairs.
The warmth of the living room faded away as they opened the door to the stairwell. They climbed up to Gwen's attic bedroom where, even in the coldest months, she always left the window open at night.
The cottage's roof sloped, and so did the wooden ceiling of its bedroom. The curtains fluttered, their white lace waving like white caps on the ocean. A heavy wooden bed dominated the room. A thick and colorful quilt covered the bed, but on top of its wooden headboard sat Rosemary. She grinned at the sight of her big sister, her smile spread wide and missing a single tooth.
Covered in ivy, her hair full of flowers, Rosemary perched in patient wait while a carmel-colored fairy buzzed about the room. “Are they gone?” Rosemary asked, her voice failing in its attempt to whisper.
“Yes,” Gwen answered. “It's just us, Rose.”
“Oh yippie!” she cried, leaping into the air and zooming to her sister. She opened her arms wide so that her impact instantly became a hug.
Gwen felt Rosemary's head beside hers, almost as if they were the same height while her little sister hovered in front of her. “Oh Gwen, you won't believe everything that's happened since I saw you last week!”
“Last year, Rosemary,” Gwen reminded her softly. “It's been a year now.”
“Oh,” she answered, a little dazed. “It did seem like an awfully busy week…”
The golden brown fairy tittered on, unimpressed by and skeptical of adults on principle. Gwen had long since forgotten the fairy language, but Peter remembered it like an unused mother tongue. “Hey,” he snapped at the insolent fairy. “Watch your little twinkling mouth.”
“Chickweed,” Rosemary scolded, “this is Peter Pan.”
The fairy's gasp sounded like a small glass bead breaking. He began making copious apologies, which Peter graciously accepted.
“We stole Twill back! He's on our side now!” Rosemary told Gwen. “We needed the dragons' help, because the pirates unleashed zombies on the island. They don't go in the woods anymore because they're afraid of the raven witch. She's really scary, but all us kids can fly faster than her, so she's not so scary to us. And the fairies can talk to her birds, but only a little. We still haven't figured out how to talk to the aliens, but sometimes if you scream and kind of make pretend what you want to tell them, they understand.”
Even as Old Willow's turquoise pendant hung from Rosemary's neck, Gwen knew better than to ask about the redskins. She had seen it even in the reality around her—their myth had died out. New tall tales had taken their place, and new magical entities had begun populating the fabric of children's imaginations. After all, Rosemary did not live in Peter's Neverland, she lived in her own. Gwen smiled at the mention of the raven witch, knowing she had done her part to help craft the paradise her little sister had spent fifteen timeless years living in.
“That's wonderful,” Peter told her, grinning ear to ear as he looked at the flying girl and envisioned everything she told him. “We've got some things to tell you, too.”
“The mermaids said you would!” Rosemary exclaimed. “They looked at the planets and told me all sorts of stuff about how I should come here!”
Peter pulled a water-stained paper out of his pocket and unfolded it as Rosemary hovered over his shoulder and cooed at the hand-drawn map. “I was in the Anomalous Activity headquarters last week, and this is what I know,” Peter began. “They're focusing their resources on their teleporter, and it's starting to work pretty well.”
“You mean it doesn't swap people's hands or put their belly buttons on their backs anymore?”
“And its range is almost limitless,” Peter explained. He gave her a sketch of the device and elaborated on these points. Gwen watched the transaction, relieved that she could facilitate it. Peter and Rosemary's discussion carried great intensity, but she felt removed from the matter. This was a battle for lost children, fairies, aliens… not an ordinary adult like her.
“You should have this, too,” Peter told her, searching his deeper jacket pockets until he found a leather pouch, sealed tight. Handing it over, he told her. “There's wind inside of there, in case you ever need to make a monsoon or blow Neverland a little more nouth. It might help if they start trying to teleport onto the island.”
“Oh thank you, Peter!” Rosemary cried, embracing him. He hugged her, happy to help her and happy to help Neverland. He couldn't fight anymore, and now that he belonged to the mortal world, he would not live so long as to see the end of this ageless war. But he could still aide those who now defended everything he had always loved and believed in, because some things never got old and grew up.
Gwen knew her smile and eyes hadn't dimmed in the years since her youth, but when she looked at Rosemary she saw a glittering vitality in her features that she and Peter had lost. The moonlight no longer lingered in their eyes, their smiles no longer radiated starlight. That privilege belonged only to those who inhabited Neverland.
Rosemary's smile faltered and she sank to the ground in front of Gwen. Comprehending just how much bigger her big sister had grown, she wrapped herself around Gwen's legs and told her, “I miss you. I wish you could come back to Neverland and have more adventures with me.”
Gwen leaned down and patted Rosemary's poofy hair, startling a few fireflies that had nuzzled down in the comfortable fluff. They lit up and flew out, milling about the air in a languid dance. “Me too, Rose. I wish it more than anything else in the world.”
They had nothing more to say, nothing more to do. Rosemary took her bag of wind and intelligence information and then said her silly goodbyes, unable to comprehend that she would let months or years pass before she returned again.
“Tell Blink I said hi, and don't let Jam boss you around,” Peter told her. “And tell Newt Salazar—I mean Sal—says hi.”
“Will do!” Rosemary told him. With a quick whistle to Chickweed and her fireflies, Rosemary called her luminous entourage to her. Gwen, lost as she watched her sister scamper to the window, had no parting words. She watched her sister dive out the window and into the sky—as innocent, happy, and heartless as ever.
Gwen and Peter plodded back downstairs, slower than they had come up.
“I guess I should get going, too,” Peter announced, looking at the clock as if its numbers had any bearing on his life. Peter, at his best of times, lived a standard hour behind the rest of the world. Gwen had invited him over an hour early tonight; he'd still managed to arrive half an hour after James and Lasiandra.
Peter tended to head to bed early, though. People who didn't know him accused him of being a tired old man. They couldn't see he was just a tuckered out kid who would rise with renewed energy and joy as soon as the sun came up. Staying awake in the pointless dark of the night—that was an adult thing.
“You can stay here if it's easier,” Gwen told him. “Your toothbrush is still here from last time, and the hide-a-bed is easy enough to fold out. I'll probably be gone by the time you wake up, though.”
“I'm good,” Peter told her. “It's a long drive, but I'd rather just do it and be home.”
She walked him to the door, admiring her friend. His nose was still just a little crooked from when he'd broken it back in high school. He had refused to go to the doctor that day until they'd stopped for tacos. Gwen still remembered eating a burrito in the waiting room, listening as Peter explained to the receptionist that he'd fallen out of a tree, never admitting he'd leapt out, forgetting that he couldn't fly. His smile now was full of fillings and his car was covered in dents. Peter Sweet carried all the eclectic scars of someone who had never gotten good at being an adult. Yet he was so much happier than so many other adults Gwen knew.
Once, in a tiny cell and the depths of despair, she had promised him she would grow up with him and stay beside him for the adventure of it. They were grown up now. She had made good on that promise.
“Goodbye, Peter,” she told him.
He gave her a sad and quizzical look. “Don't say that so sad-like,” he told her. “It's a no-good word anyways. I'll see you later. Rosemary will be back. We'll get dinner with James and Lasiandra again. Everyone always comes back again if you want them to.”
She nodded, but didn't amend her words. She smiled, but didn't amend her expression. Peter said his goodbyes the only way he knew how—by promising and proposing and postulating on future adventures. So caught up in these ideas, he didn't notice the frantic distress motions Gwen's shadow made. She stepped behind the half-closed door so her shadow couldn't reach out, and waved to Peter from there as he started up his cantankerous little car and putted off joyfully into the night.
Gwen closed the door. Her shadow continued to thrash. “You know,” she announced, “I'm never going to let you loose as long as you keep trying to cause problems for me.”
The shadow crossed its arms in a temper.
Gwen didn't let it trouble her. She walked over to her coffee table where Peter had set down the unsolved puzzle box and—in perfect Peter fashion—forgotten all about it. “You don't approve of my decision, do you?”
The shadow shook its head furiously, and pointed to Gwen's portrait.
“What would she think?” Over the years, Gwen had gotten better at deciphering her shadow's intentions when they communicated. “I can't imagine it matters now that she's grown up and gone… but I don't think she'd be disappointed.”
The shadow continued to flail in a fluster, but the puzzle box occupied Gwen. With a few quick slides, twists, and latches, she unlocked the Japanese box with practiced ease. Inside, she found the postcard from Sukumo, its back covered in her instructions for tonight.
She had an hour yet before she needed to leave, if she wanted to be there by midnight. She went upstairs and packed a bag. She swept up what little fairy dust Chickweed had left behind and saved it. She had long since memorized the contents of the postcard in the puzzle box, so she bundled it with all the other postcards she'd gotten over the years—from Rio de Janeiro, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Houston…
She put them in her bag, too, but not for sentimental reasons. She just knew she couldn't leave clues behind for the Anomalous Activity Department. She pulled on a pair of good boots and surprised herself, when the time came, with how easily she walked past her high school portrait, her dwindling hearth, and everything that she had made a home with in the little cottage.
Dressed warm for the night in a raven-black coat, Gwen didn't need to walk fast to fend off the cold. She ambled along the old country road in the opposite direction as her guests had driven home. As she walked away from the life she'd spent the past fifteen years building, she felt a little lighter on her feet with every step. She wouldn't fly away—flying was for children—but she appreciated the lightness.
She took her long ash-brown hair and began braiding it to keep the wind from wreaking havoc with it. Out of her bag, she pulled out a little bit of bark that she had stripped off a dying tree a long time ago. She put it in her mouth and started to chew it like jerky.
The stars twinkled in the clear night sky above her cottage, but as she walked down to the beach and the ocean docks, an eerie fog accumulated over the sea, so thick she might as well have been floating among clouds. Despite the murky look of the night air, the sea smelled crisp, bright, and full of promise. Gwen had only fallen more in love with the ocean over the years.
A hulking shadow moved through the fog and took shape as a massive old wooden ship came to port between the docks.
The metal of the anchor rattled and howled as it dropped down into the water, and crew members heaved the ship's wooden gangway down to the dock. The ship, highlighted with gold and crimson paint, had a beautiful masthead carved like a mermaid. Without a second's thought, Gwen walked aboard the gangway. Captain Starkey was waiting for her.
“Miss Hoffman,” he greeted her, “a pleasure to see you. I didn't know if you'd accept my invitation. Does this mean you've forgiven me for trying to spare you the fate of growing-up?”
“No,” Gwen told him, still holding a playful grudge against Starkey for attempting to kidnap her during the last battle of the old Neverland. “But I think I've had my fill of growing up now.”
Starkey's tight smile broke into a wide grin. When she was a teenager, he had seemed so old to her. He had been an adult and an authority, but now he seemed, if anything, younger than her. The moonlight lingered in their eyes and his smile seemed full of starlight, for he had spent his past fifteen years sailing in and out of Neverland's glow.
“They've recaptured Twill,” Starkey told her. “I could use another clever soul on board to help regain him.”
“So I've heard,” Gwen told him, taking the hand he offered as she leapt down onto the deck of the magnificent ship. “Whatever happened to the Grammarian?”
Starkey chuckled, “After the battle, you'd have been surprised and ashamed to see how many of our captured do-gooders defected. My crew all but doubled overnight, and we overtook the first better ship we could lay our hands on. The Grammarian is still harbored in easy waters, should we ever require her again.”
Gwen strode across the deck, Starkey walking with her. She was not the conflicted and confused girl she'd been as a teenager; every step she took resounded with the confidence of all the years she'd spent living and working for a life of her own. The crew did not intimidate her in the least. “So what do you say,” Starkey asked, “are you ready to return to Neverland, Gwendolyn?”
She smiled at the wind, and the dark expanse of the open sea. “Yes, I am.”
She would go back to that island, no longer a child, to play the villain and join in the games of her sister's design. No doubt the lost children would take her captive at some point and force her to tell stories. Other times, she would hunt them down in games of hide-and-seek for the highest stakes. She would convince Twill to defect again, or conspire against aliens, or wheedle bits of information out of star-gossiping mermaids. Anything was possible, but one thing was for certain: she would be back in Neverland, having adventures with Rosemary once again.
“Are you feeling nostalgic?” Starkey asked her.
“Isn't everyone, when they head for Neverland?” Gwen responded, flicking her braid over her shoulder as she turned to look at the skull and pens flag flapping overhead. She couldn't imagine a better flag for a storyteller to sail under.
“Earwig get the sails back up!” Starkey barked. “Two Toes, heave that anchor back aboard! Mercado, take Hoffman's things to her quarters! Who's at the helm?” he squinted at the shadow, barely lit by the moon behind him.
“I am, Captain!”
“Then chart the stars and take us away, Leonard,” Starkey ordered. “Set a course—first to the right and then straight on till morning.”
The sails billowed in the wind, bathed in moonlight as they caught a favorable air and set off, right away, on their magical bearing. The pirates broke out into a sea shanty work song, but Gwen wandered to the head of ship as if in a trance. Starkey stayed beside her, looking out into the infinite unknown of the night as they set sail for a brand new adventure. Gwen smiled to feel the salty air blow against her face, for stories were started and finished as often as worlds were made and unmade, and she felt in herself the maturity and power to make and tell anything her heart so desired.
For all children grow up, and all children determine just what kind of grown-ups they will be.