She was peering into a dark hole. Tiger Lily stood, looking around the empty woods for signs of someone watching her. But the woods were eerily quiet.
After a moment’s hesitation, she lowered herself inside in one fluid, silent movement. I followed just behind her. The entry dropped us into a wide, dimly lit, earth-walled tunnel, where Tiger Lily landed with her dagger drawn, keeping her back to the low dirt wall.
The place was filled with skulls—skulls hanging from the roots jutting from the dirt above us, identified by badly spelled pirate names, like Crucked Tow and Baldy, painted on pieces of bark.
The cave narrowed into a small doorway, then opened out into a wide room, lit by a few candles melted onto rocks.
In this room, in various states of disarray, figures lay curled in heaps. They were under blankets or not, some with legs splayed, some crooked and curled up, all asleep. There were empty bottles littering the floor and a clay pot had been knocked over and broken—it looked like they’d been celebrating something. Snores abbreviated the silence.
But for one figure, they were all lying directly on the dirt. There was one comfortable spot, a mattress of hay flush against a wall, and there Pan slept, curled onto his side, the pearl dangling from his neck. The others spiraled out around him in piles as if guarding him in sleep. Up ahead of her, I was already at Pan’s face, and could see the three thin long lines of finger-shaped bruises Tiger Lily had left on his neck. She picked her way across the sleeping bodies, held the necklace gently away from his chest, and lifted her knife to slice it from him, his breath landing against her wrists. In sleep, he had a strangely beautiful face.
When I looked up, his eyes were open, and he was staring at me. I saw a moment before she did.
His arm moved fast as a viper, and she jerked, but it was too fast and he had her by her braid. He smiled.
The bodies began to stir.
Peter scurried down beside her, squatting. I don’t know how he moved so quickly.
“You’re here,” he said. And let go of her. The boys were wide-awake now, crowding toward her. One boy held half of the clay pot poised in the air, ready to hit her. They all looked to be about Pan’s age, maybe fifteen or sixteen, lanky for the most part, muscularly and yet awkwardly built.
“Here.” Pan reached up to his neck and held out the necklace. “You want this.” He untied it, and handed it to her. The boys, deflating, lowered their arms, but still stood on the alert and looked at Pan for his next move.
He was silent for several moments, his hair crooked from sleep, his face soft and vulnerable because he wasn’t yet fully awake. Finally, he cleared his throat. “I never introduced myself. I’m Peter.” He looked around at the others, and his mouth tilted in a rueful, ironic smile. “We’ve never had a girl here. We’re in bad shape. I’m sorry. Thank you for coming.”
Tiger Lily looked around at them. As she turned, one of the boys ducked up behind her and rubbed his hand along her braid.
She startled.
“Sorry,” he said.
“She’ll tell someone,” a burly boy said. “We should kill her.”
Peter kept his eyes on Tiger Lily as he replied, “She won’t tell anyone.”
“She probably knows the pirates,” the boy said.
“She hates pirates. I caught her trying to kill one.”
“Still I don’t see why we should change everything now, just because …” Suddenly, he got quiet. Peter was giving him a look that shut him up.
Peter turned and stared at Tiger Lily awkwardly for a moment, and there was a heavy, uncomfortable silence. Then another boy stepped forward and held out his hand. When she only stared at it, he took her hand in his. He was a well-proportioned boy, with sloppy, wavy brown hair and an open, confident face. He had the twinkly-eyed look of someone who’d never been nervous or self-doubtful a day in his life. “I’m Nibs. The one who tried to molest your hair is Tootles.” The boy called Tootles looked abashed. He was skinny and frail, like he’d grown too fast for his skeleton to catch up. He seemed to be stretched out like taffy, with big grayish circles around his eyes, pale cheeks, all shoulders that hunched to compensate for his height, and a timid air. “And we wouldn’t kill you. I mean, maybe Slightly would, but he’s a monster.” He gestured toward the burly boy who’d spoken earlier—despite his name, Slightly was anything but slight. Hefty, solid, with a wooden whistle hanging around his neck, he was just a bit shorter than Tiger Lily, but filled out and the most adult looking of all of them.
“Is he really a girl?” Slightly asked. Peter hit him hard in the bicep, then looked at Tiger Lily, embarrassed.
“Ignore him,” Nibs said. “He’s cranky because he didn’t get enough sleep. Plus he thinks he remembers England, and it makes him annoying. I’m sure many people would say you’re a prettyish girl.” He leaned his hand on the shoulder of a boy with long, straight hair. “This is Curly. Watch him. He’s practically diabolical. Just because he’s quiet doesn’t mean he’s nice.” Curly stared at her with half-crazed green eyes and a mischievous smile.
“I don’t see why, if a girl was going to visit, she couldn’t be a girl with some curves,” Slightly said, and this time Nibs hit him. Slightly got a mock-offended look on his face and pointed to Tootles. “He said it!”
Tootles clearly hadn’t said it, and upon being accused, he just looked depressed. He let out a sigh. “Leave me out of it,” he muttered.
Tiger Lily took it all in silently. These were the lost boys. They didn’t look like killers. They looked like disheveled and half-starved teenage boys.
“Those over there”—Nibs nodded at two identical boys standing by a wooden mermaid clearly pilfered or scavenged from a ship, whispering to each other—“are the twins.” He dropped his voice to a murmur. “We never know which is which. Don’t bother trying to figure it out. One of them said it makes him feel like he doesn’t have an identity. Couldn’t be bothered telling which one it was.”
The twins scowled at him, and one pretended to laugh and then went suddenly serious-faced.
“Stay the afternoon,” Peter said, interrupting impatiently.
As they all stood staring at each other, Peter shifted from one foot to the other restlessly, as if the whole thing was too buttoned-down and agonizing for him, and he couldn’t wait for it to be over. He looked only at her. She stood rodlike next to the litheness of him. Curly was the only one who seemed to notice me, and he reached up to try to swat me. I circled back and bit him on the shoulder, then perched up in a depression of rock and glared at him.
Peter seemed to cast about for something to say. “Do you want to see the place?” he asked. Tiger Lily considered. She had what she’d come for, and now the smart thing would be to leave. She had never seen any creatures quite like the lost boys, and it was possible they were more dangerous than she thought. But Peter walked, and without really choosing to, she followed. I watched Tiger Lily’s eyes drift to the bruises she’d left on Peter’s neck. But if he remembered them, he didn’t let on.
The boys did indeed look underfed. But the hunger with which they gazed at Tiger Lily was something different. It was like a desperate need to be near someone new.
“We’ve built it all from scratch,” Peter threw over his shoulder. Behind him, Tootles bumped his head on the ceiling and winced, glancing back at her, embarrassed. Curly snorted. “When we built this place, we never thought we’d get so tall,” Peter said. “I didn’t think ahead,” he said sheepishly. Nibs patted him on the back as if to say he was being too hard on himself.
The long narrow hall they’d entered gave way to a door that had been left unlatched, and which opened onto an ingeniously finished network of rooms. The floors had been covered with rough wooden planks; the walls had been carved straight and even dotted with nails, from which hung decorations: pieces of braided rope, elaborate animal skulls, shells. Also knives, arrows, a couple of swords, ropes, and loose spikes.
The years of intricate work and artistry tha
t must have gone into the rooms contrasted with the crude weapons, and especially with the boys’ slovenly appearance. They were all dressed in clothes that were too small and falling apart. They clearly hadn’t bathed in weeks. Admittedly, the place was also a mess. Mummified apple cores. Blankets strewn everywhere. Clothes dropped where they’d been taken off. It had a thick masculine smell that was part dirt and part something deeper. Some things looked to be sitting in the same places they’d been left years ago.
“We made a room just for belly fighting,” Nibs said, “and rolling down an incline in our blankets, but we’re over that, obviously.”
Peter looked embarrassed, so he went on to qualify his words: “We’re too old.” As if he had to explain.
“Especially Tootles,” one of the twins said.
“I’m the same age as you,” Tootles muttered, but no one paid attention. Nibs gave Tootles an affectionate rub on top of his head.
“Ignore them, buddy.”
There was a joyfulness and—at the same time—a fragility about each of them. They were sloppy and uncared for and wildly alert and full of energy. Though they looked to be about the same age as some of the teenage warriors of Tiger Lily’s tribe, they moved and spoke like they were of a different species altogether. In her tribe, the boys were very determined to act like men. They stood straight, didn’t talk much to girls, and followed a strict code. These boys were more like animals than boys, even in the way they pushed and muttered at each other as they moved in a gaggle behind Peter. There were weapons perched in nooks and crannies—some of the blades with old browned bloodstains—next to decks of cards, dreamy drawings in charcoal, and little exquisite but half-finished carvings of beasts and faeries. Straw beds had been separated haphazardly into different areas of the burrow, as if the boys hadn’t counted on wanting to live separately when they’d first built it, and only recently pushed themselves as far apart from each other as possible. Still, on one of the beds there was a worn home-sewn toy in the shape of a rabbit, and lying on a pillow, as if it had just been played with, a model of a ship.
Peter moved as if he couldn’t get to each place quickly enough. He chopped his words off at the last consonant, as if it took too long to get the whole word out. And he had a habit of rubbing his index and middle finger back and forth across his bottom lip, which constantly drew my attention there and made me slightly giddy. The others clearly felt it too, because as they walked he was completely surrounded—the boys gravitated wherever he moved. He let out several loud rough laughs at their jokes, then turned to Tiger Lily to see if she was upset by the laughter.
I had heard rumors all my life that the lost boys could fly, and that they kept and tortured prisoners, but so far, I saw no evidence of either. They kept their feet on the ground, and they seemed only too happy to show every corner of the burrow, which looked to be prisonerless.
In the room where, Nibs explained, they prepared their meals, we suddenly came upon a baby, just lying on a lump of blankets in a trough.
“Oh”—Nibs’s eyes widened—“I forgot. Sorry, Baby.” He picked up the baby, then held it out to Tiger Lily. “This is Baby. Our baby. It seemed too much of a commitment to name him anything else.”
He reached toward her, and Tiger Lily immediately crossed her arms to avoid having the bundle put into her hands. She was terrified of holding babies. She didn’t like the way they squirmed, like holding a worm.
“Why do you have a baby?” she asked. Her voice was almost as low and deep as the boys’.
“She speaks,” one of the twins said to the other.
“Peter found him after a pirate raid,” Nibs said. “He’s softhearted. Couldn’t let him starve to death. We love him, but it’s hard. Sometimes we forget him someplace and have to go back for him. Curly loves to dress him up. Today he’s supposed to be a maggot.” I had run into my share of maggots burrowing through rotten logs. Other than wearing brown, the baby looked nothing like a maggot, but Curly grinned with pride.
Suddenly, while Tiger Lily was unguarded, Nibs thrust Baby into her arms. He squirmed, blinked up at her sleepily, then began to scream. The boys all watched, waiting for her to do something, but she stood stiff. “Don’t cry,” she said finally, holding the baby out at arm’s length. “Don’t cry, Baby.” Her words only seemed to make him scream louder. Finally, Tiger Lily lunged toward the trough and put the baby back into it and backed away, trying to pretend like he didn’t exist. One of the twins appeared with a bottle and leaned over him, and soon he was quiet.
Pan didn’t seem to notice any of it—he was studying a hangnail on his thumb and chewing on it. Finally he looked up and walked on, in his half-graceful, half-ungainly walk, and we came to his room.
It was separate from the others, with a piece of cloth over the entranceway and candles stuck into nooks in the walls. It was stuffed with things he’d obviously collected. Drawings. Feathers and shells. Another half carving of a mermaid that looked like it had come from the stern of one of the Englanders’ ships. Beside his bedroll, a little clay hand-fashioned cup. Scratchy spun blankets were piled at one corner. A flute. And lots of tiny carvings lying all over the place, whittled out of wood. They were all of birds. There must have been thirty or forty of them, but none quite done.
“I hate sitting still. I can’t sit still long enough to come close to finishing anything.” He looked around the room self-consciously. “The boys want to sleep here too, but I can’t stand anyone sleeping next to me. It makes me itch,” he said.
I flitted over to a carving of a seagull, and rested against its wing.
A book of some sort, perhaps stolen from the stone house, sat in a place of honor on a rough-hewn bench by the door as a decoration.
“Where are your families?” Tiger Lily asked.
Peter smiled, ran a hand through his bed-smushed hair so that it spiked to the left, then shrugged and slouched. “We don’t have them. We don’t want them.”
Tiger Lily studied him evenly. He was a mystery to both of us. His thoughts were still a dark jumble, and I had a feeling they were always that way, even when he felt peaceful. “Where did you come from?” she asked.
“Some of the boys were brought from England,” Peter said, and a shadow came and went across his pale face as he looked over at Slightly. Then he brightened. “My parents died in a sinking and I floated to shore on a luggage trunk. Nibs and I have been here for years.” He seemed to remember something, and disappeared from the room.
“We hide from the pirates here,” Slightly said, speaking low, clearly so that Peter wouldn’t hear.
“If they found us,” Tootles murmured, “we’d all be dead.”
Slightly thwacked him on the shoulder, and Tootles winced.
“They hate us,” one of the twins said. “They want us exterminated.”
I heard now the fear in their brightness. It trickled along underneath them like a secret spring.
They all got quiet. Tiger Lily wondered why the pirates hated them, but didn’t find her voice to ask. Then Peter returned and they all brightened. Curly’s eyes drifted to me, and I could tell that he was never happy unless he was fiddling with something or smushing something or breaking something. Nibs reached up and touched the feather in Tiger’s Lily hair. She jerked away.
“Did you find that feather yourself?” Nibs asked, undeterred. She nodded.
“You should keep it.” He smiled. “It suits you.” She softened.
“You have hairy arms,” Tootles said. “Girls aren’t supposed to.”
“She’s hairier than you,” Slightly said to Tootles.
A blush ran across Tiger Lily’s face, though she kept her gaze even. She thought of the photos of the English ladies she’d seen, smooth and white, and for a moment, it made her sad.
“Quiet!” Peter said, glancing at her expression. The boys looked abashed. “Get out of here. Go find something to do.” The boys shuffled off forlornly. “I’m sorry,” Peter said, his shoulders slumped self-consc
iously. “Don’t leave. They don’t know any girls. That’s why I invited you.”
“I don’t care what they say,” she said, though she did care.
“I think your arms are lovely, Tiger Lily,” Nibs said loudly over his shoulder on his way out, making it worse.
“I have to go,” she said. Through a tiny smoke hole in the room, she could see that the sky was darkening with the afternoon rain on the way. And she had what she’d come for. And she was still alive. She didn’t know why she felt suddenly sad.
Peter looked regretful. He peered around the room, seemed to be thinking of how he could change her mind. But finally he said, “I’ll walk you.”
I considered trying to regurgitate that morning’s gnat breakfast on Curly’s head before we left, but I followed Peter and Tiger Lily out without incident. Peter walked her all the way to an old bridge, about half a mile from the burrow. Flying behind them, I could smell the same scent from Peter that had been in his room, musky, leafy, and boyish. As the two walked ahead of me, there was a rustle above us and one of the twins came rappelling down a tree. For the first time, I noticed ropes hidden up among the limbs, woven carefully through the lushest areas of leaves. Tiger Lily gasped. This, I realized, was how they had spread the rumor that they could fly. It was an elaborate network of ladders and tightropes that they probably retreated to when they didn’t want to leave tracks. And it had all been hidden so well that I hadn’t noticed. “Good-bye, native girl,” the twin said. “It was nice to see you.”
Then he turned and hurried back toward the burrow.
The bridge had been hand built, probably before any of them had been born. It was half rotten, and spanned a swampy trickle that came off the lagoon. Several crocodiles lay below, their mouths open and waiting. Peter chewed on his nails.
“They’re always here because the boys like to feed them. They think I don’t know. But it entertains them. One of the twins once threw a rat in for them, but I had to put an end to that.”
“Why?” she asked.