Never (Never, #1)
Jessa Hastings
CHAPTER
ONE
There is a boy of legend in the tales passed down in my family. He glides on the coattails of the sun, rides the wind, and freedom runs through his veins. His heart, they say, is wild, but in every version of any story I’ve ever been told about him, never did I hear that his heart was untamable.
A captor of the imagination and a liberator of the soul, they say about him. My grandmother, she knew him, and her mother before her. My own mother as well. Our family’s legacy is laced with tales of him and who he is and the adventures they had with him…some terrifying, others exhilarating, but always, always beautiful.
Beauty is funny though, don’t you think? Because beautiful doesn’t necessarily always mean good, and just because something doesn’t make you happy doesn’t preclude it from being beautiful either. An impertinent lesson I won’t realise for quite some time though.
My grandmother, Wendy, she would tell me stories of her and this boy, how he came to her one quiet night in 1910 when her little brothers were being particularly boisterous. He tapped on her window—as she always knew he would because her mother’s mother said so and she believed her—he sprinkled gold dust on her, and away they went. Happy thoughts and all that.
You know the story.
The boy, he took her to a faraway land tucked behind a star, where pirates were still true, mermaids didn’t hide, and fairies flew through the air like autumn leaves on a windy day. He took my mother there, just like he took my grandmother and my great-grandmother.
Just as he would come for me.
I’ve been told these stories since before I could remember. They were embedded into my brain without my consent, actually. Magic was all around me whether I liked it or not, and I did not. Like my mother before me, I consider myself a learned woman and far too old for bedtime stories.
That boy, the one from their stories, they say he came for my great-grandmother Mary when she was twelve; he came for Wendy when she was thirteen, my mother when she was thirteen. I should be the same, so they thought.
And that was the story they’d tell me as they tucked me in at night all through my younger youth.
Sometimes my grandmother, sometimes my great-grandmother (but never my mother, because she said the stories would rot my mind).
“He’ll be on his way for you soon, I imagine, Daphne.” My grandmother would smile at me every night of my childhood as she’d leave the window unlatched for me so that he could enter.
But see, the boy never came.
Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen—the years trickled by like rain on windows, and yet my windows, which remained unlatched, also remained unfilled.
The older I grew, the more I began to wonder if the legend in my family was just a strange bedtime story. A weird practical joke, perhaps, that everyone got carried away with and took too far for too many years.
By the time I was fifteen, I could see it on the faces of my grandmothers—this fear that maybe something had happened. Maybe that man with the hook had gotten the better of the boy finally. Or the great battle he’d always spoken of, maybe he died in it. I’d watch that thought fly across their faces the same way they said he’d fly across the sky, but eventually they’d always resolve he could never. It was impossible for him to die because he was the Never Boy, and he might say that death would be an awfully big adventure but it was also absolutely not his lot, or so they reasoned.
If you were to bring him up to my grandmothers to this day, still arriving on their faces would be a tickling blush and a dreamy, far-off look in their eyes. All youth and sunsets, adventures and wonder, mistakes and a magic that I’m quite sure I don’t think really exists, but it does, for them at least. It’s as though the boy lives in their memories and so do they, young and immortal, the clock hand rolling backwards, unwinding time and loosing its chains on them, and they are, once again, unbound by the cages of age.
Not my mother, it’s worth noting, though she too lives in a certain past. However, it’s the ancient kind, somehow much harder to reach.
Wendy said my mother had visited Peter. Mary, my great-grandmother, said my mother stayed a long while. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not about my mother’s past and her alleged life in Neverland. I do know that these days, she spends most of her time in the Yucatán Peninsula on a “very important dig”—those are her words. She’s an archaeologist, see? A “matter of life and death,” she calls this dig of hers. I doubt that that’s true though. I can’t fathom possibly how it could be, seeing as everything she’s digging up hasn’t been alive for quite some time now. I suspect quietly within myself that the death of which she speaks might more be her own. That she wasn’t made to be a mother and that being one, were she to act like it—even just once in her lifetime—that it might kill her.
By the time I was fourteen, I was well done with the entire facade. I had started by then at Roedean and—with good reason—my dorm mate* was uncomfortable with my tendency to leave the windows unlocked at nighttime. That aside, I was past the age of bedtime stories, and I was tired of the fairy tales. The mystical boy I’d been told my entire life was truth had morphed into myth, though Nanna Wendy and Grandma Mary still swore up and down and inside out that he was real and on his way to find me from some corner in the universe.
The truth is I don’t need him to come and find me anymore.
It’s 1967, and I’m seventeen (soon to be eighteen) years old. I don’t want to spend my summer with a strange thirteen-year-old boy. Aside from the concept of the aforementioned residing within a status of questionable legality, it also just happens to sound rather terrible. I’ve far more pressing matters on my mind than an imaginary boy who crows at himself and all the things he does.
This summer is all that’s standing between myself and the start of my real life.
I was always young for my year at school. My mother enrolled me early. She said once it was because I was smart, but I think it was because she wanted to be in Belize. But it’s worked rather well for me because I’m quite ready to grow up. I’ve been a grown-up all my life, I think. I’ve had to be.
The most responsible adult I know is obsessed entirely with ninth century Mesoamerica, and my grandmothers are completely off with the fairies,* though not literally (much to their dismay).
They are lovely though. Please don’t for a second think that they aren’t.
Wendy and Mary are my favourite people in the world, bereft of reality though they may be.