She wove past the excavated room where Pear, Plum, and Peach slept in their triple-decker bunk bed and into one of the boys' messy rooms, which contained nothing but dirty sleeping bags, miniature mining equipment, and a micro hot spring consistently burbling in the corner. Grabbing a tin cup from one of the mess kits hanging on the wall, Gwen dipped it into the hot water and then threw in a handful of dirt. She swirled it around until it had transformed into a frothy cup of hot chocolate. She sipped her hot chocolate with a vague sense of satisfaction. She felt she was finally getting the knack of living in Neverland.
She drank her hot chocolate as she wandered down the tunnel to the room she shared with her little sister. Rocky shelves full of unearthed books and scented candles protruded from the stony wall of the room. They had put a bucket under the one steady leak in the earthy ceiling, but the bucket never filled up, never needed to be changed. They had four posters and a canopy, but no bed frame. A fluffy mattress and its mismatched blankets rested on the ground beneath the regal curtains and posts growing out of the ground. The bed was big, and whenever any lost children had nightmares they knew to climb into it with the Hoffman sisters. There were no nightmares in Neverland, of course, but sometimes the lost children pretended for fun.
Gwen's satchel hung on one of the four posters, and she fished a key out of it. Bard had given her the magic skeleton key before she was captured at the Anomalous Activity laboratory, and Gwen had kept it safe ever since. She went to the stone wall.
Embedded high in the rock, where only Gwen could see and reach, was a tiny dark hole, just big enough for a key. She pushed Bard's bronze skeleton key in, twisted, and seamlessly pulled open her hidden drawer. Gwen kept only one thing inside: a large sketchpad full of charcoal drawings.
She pulled out the art pad and sat down on her fluffy lump of bed. Setting her hot chocolate on the floor, she turned the pad over and looked at the the tallies on its cardboard back. She didn't count them—she never counted them—but there were well over a hundred now. She added one more.
One more day in Neverland.
As soon as she did, she began to second-guess herself. Had she already made a mark, before she left to meet with the mermaids this morning? Or did she pre-emptively tally today last night, knowing she would forget in the morning while pursuing mermaids? She had a memory of doing two tallies yesterday, although it could have been the day before. Then again, she might have been making up for a forgotten tally the day before that.
What made it worse was that Gwen had only started keeping tallies once she realized she was losing track of time. She had thought she was old enough to be immune to Neverland's amnesiac effects. Now she knew it just took longer for her forgetfulness to set in.
Some days, Gwen caught herself making three or four tallies on the pad, and other days she realized with sudden anxiety that she hadn't marked the book in at least five days. She couldn't even say which of these miscalculations she more often perpetrated. She wanted to think it balanced out and she had somewhat accurate tallies, but she didn't know.
Gwen was not a child. She no longer expected her days to all bleed together the way they had during her grade school years. She understood, viscerally, how long a year lasted and how a week could have rhythm. She never understood how much security she derived from time until Neverland pulled it out from underneath her.
She turned the sketchpad over, putting the tallies out of sight and opening the art book to a charcoal sketch of several people gathered around a piano. She focused on the drawing, substituting it for security. The night of Piper's raid, Jay had pushed his precious sketchpad into her arms and asked just one thing of her.
She had promised him she would come back someday.
How long had it been? Was he in college now, off at some military academy hundreds of miles away? Had he already graduated and returned home? She didn't know when he was, or when she even hoped to reappear in his life.
Gwen paged through the first few sheets of the sketchbook—she hadn't even looked at all the drawings yet. She wanted to pace herself. When she ran out of new sketches to look at, she felt she would have to go home again.
She drank a hot chocolate made of mud and sat through a morning made of anything but time.
Chapter 3
The next day—or the day after, Gwen couldn't know for certain—the lost children had to catch up on chores. Only so much time could be spent making bracelets and capturing flags. The children needed to wash dishes and swim in the river, sweep dirt out of their tunnels and discover new passageways, and tidy until they had rediscovered all their favorite toys and more.
Rosemary volunteered for scouting duty. Then she volunteered Twill and Gwen for scouting duty, too. “You'll like the Never Bird!” she told Twill. “You haven't even met her yet!”
So the three of them floated up the steep trail to the mountainous peak of
