How much worse would it be if he were not only trapped in Peter’s endless games, but caught in a cycle of being killed and brought back to life again, all at a young boy’s whim?
Tiger Lily moves to sit on one of the logs surrounding the dead fire. She draws her legs up, wrapping her arms around them, melancholy taking over her expression. Tiger Lily’s hunched shoulders, the thinness of her body, all of it makes Wendy think of bundled sticks, ready to burn. Tiger Lily rests her cheek on her knees and looks at Wendy.
“I wish I understood how he did it so I could leave too.”
Wendy moves away from the wall to sit at Tiger Lily’s side. After a moment, she puts her arm around her friend’s shoulders and draws her close. It’s easier to touch her now without feeling that shudder of fear. Tiger Lily rests her head against Wendy; it weighs almost nothing.
“Before the pirates, I used to think nothing could ever die in Neverland, but…” Tiger Lily holds her arms out in front of her, letting her cracked skin speak for her.
“You’re not…” Wendy starts, but she swallows the words, a painful lump in her throat. Whatever she could say would be a lie. Tiger Lily isn’t dead, but she isn’t alive either. They were the same age when Wendy first came here. Tiger Lily isn’t the girl Wendy left behind, but she isn’t a full-grown woman either. She’s something else.
“What about the mermaids?” Wendy asks instead.
“Peter.”
Tiger Lily tenses, and Wendy hears the shift in her already pained voice, as if Peter’s name hurts her more than other words. What were he and Tiger Lily to each other before Wendy arrived? After she left? For Peter to wound Tiger Lily like this, he must have cared for her once very much.
“Peter forgot the mermaids, so they wasted away,” Tiger Lily says, lifting her head from Wendy’s shoulder.
“He forgot?” Wendy can’t fathom it, but at the same time, she can.
It wasn’t even malice, just simple neglect. A boy leaving his toys out in the rain, not caring if they rot or spoil. Callous too, changing so any gust of the wind might carry him off in another direction, never once looking back at what he left behind.
Despite Tiger Lily’s words, Wendy’s mind circles back to guilt. If she’d stayed, could she have kept Peter from getting wrathful and bored? Could she have gathered the fraying threads of Neverland and kept them together, their colors bright? And even if she could have, should Peter’s whims be her burden? He’d wanted her to be his mother, abdicating responsibility so he didn’t have to care, trusting her to catch him if he ever fell.
Mothers are meant to keep their children safe, but also to prepare them for life. Help them grow. What can a mother be to a boy determined to remain perpetually young? Only a shadow, forever chained to him and trailing in his wake, bearing all his hurts so he doesn’t have to.
Wendy draws her legs up too, mirroring Tiger Lily’s posture. She rests her cheek on her knees, and all at once, she feels every moment of her journey here, the years separating her from when she was last in Neverland. She feels her age, the little injuries of time and the big ones. The fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the strands of gray in her hair, the extra weight on her bones. They’re all earned. Since she was here last, she survived an asylum, her body bore a child. But Peter hasn’t changed at all.
He’s earned nothing, so he takes what isn’t given.
She thinks of him standing at the foot of Jane’s bed, his hands on his hips, his cocksure smile. He hadn’t even seen her—a grown woman, a mother in truth now. She imagines in his mind it had been mere moments since he left her, as though he’d only put her aside briefly, rather than forgetting about her for years. He had assumed Jane was her; he hadn’t aged, so why should she? And when she hadn’t fit Peter’s story anymore, he simply refused to see her at all. In a whole world built to fit his whims, Wendy is the fractured piece slipped out of place.
“What about you?” Wendy asks.
She glances at Tiger Lily again. The question hurts. Tiger Lily’s eyes change, dark and light at once. They make Wendy think of guttering candles.
“He got angry,” Tiger Lily says. Her voice raw and distant at once in a way that makes Wendy think of Mary in the asylum, talking about the man who married her mother.
“When the pirates left. He punished us. He made us burn, but we didn’t die. He changed us. He made me into the worst thing he could imagine, someone grown up. He wanted to prove—” Tiger Lily’s voice breaks, and when it comes back, it’s softer, diminished somehow. Embers, logs cracking into the last of the fire and going out.
“He wanted to prove that we belonged to him. That he could make us and unmake us just like the mermaids, and we could never leave him.”
“No. You’re not…”
Wendy’s throat is too full to speak. Tiger Lily’s words echo in her head—He made me into the worst thing he could imagine, someone grown up. Wendy brushes at her cheeks, furious with herself. She should be focused on Tiger Lily, but all she can picture is Peter’s face as he stood at the end of Jane’s bed, seeing her daughter and not her. No wonder Peter couldn’t see her. She has become everything he hates.
She looks at Tiger Lily again. Is this what Peter thinks growing up means? Becoming a shell with the ghost of the child you once were trapped inside?
Despair shines in Tiger Lily’s eyes. Her expression begs Wendy to disprove her, tell her that her words are wrong. They are wrong. Anger sweeps through Wendy, sudden and
