And I wish that didn’t win me over, but it does in the slightest. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really known the approval of a man before.
“Fatherless girls who are left unchecked are a danger to society and themselves,” I once heard one of my grandmothers’ more judgmental friends say. I’m unsure what she meant by that, but it may have been pertaining to an instance such as this one.
The thrill of pleasing him, even if it means losing a thing I loved before.§
It’s just a poster, I tell myself as I stare down at it and sidestep anything it may imply.
“Why are you an American?” I ask him, tilting my head.
“What’s an American?” he asks suspiciously before adding quickly, “I know what it is but I just want to make sure you do.”
I give him a look. “An American is someone from the Americas.”
“Right.” He nods. “Which is…?”
“A continent?” I frown. “And a country.”
“On…?” he says, eyebrows up.
I frown more. “Earth.”
“Oh.” He nods again. “Right. No, I know—good. Do Americans know everything?”
I roll my eyes. “I mean, they think they do.”
He shrugs. “That’s probably why I am one then, because I do know everything.”
I roll my eyes again as I look up at him.
He really is rather tall.
“Is anything that they said about you true?” I look up at him as I collect the remains of my poster and fold them up, putting them into a drawer.
“Don’t know.” He leans casually against the wall, folding his arms over his barrel chest. “What’d they say?”
“Well…” I stand up, walking over to him. “For one, they said that you were a boy.”
“I am a boy,” he tells me, proud.
“Barely.” My eyes fall down him and snag.
My grandfather,* before he died, he’d spend all his time in the garden. Ours was the best garden on the street, wildly beautiful, and I loved his hands when he’d come inside. I’d make him a cup of tea and pass him a Jaffa cake, and he’d eat it without washing up first, and it made me happy. Peter’s hands remind me of them, so I suppose he makes me happy too.
We’re toe-to-toe now, and I take his hand in mine, turning it over, inspecting those giant paws of his, and I love how rough they are. Instantly, I do. I know that’s a strange thing to say—there’s dirt under the nails—but still there’s something beautiful about his hands.
“These are not boy’s hands,” I tell him, and he grips mine back, inspecting them closely.
“These look like girl’s hands to me.” His eyes peer down at me, and he doesn’t let go of my hand. “What else do they say about me, girl?”
“That you fight pirates?”
“I do.” His chin sticks out in pride.
“That you fly?”
And then he grins at me ever so dashingly. It makes my heart feel as though it’s taken flight itself.
“I do.” He nods solemnly.
“Will you show me?” I find myself batting my eyes at him.
His chest puffs up again and he nods.
And then he’s flying.
It’s not zippy, how you might think it would be. It’s…if you imagine a feather falling slowly and gracefully to the ground, play it in your mind in reverse, and that’s how it looks when he floats up.
I wish my face weren’t alive with delight, but I know it is.
“How do you do it?” I marvel up at him, and listen to me when I say this: he is a marvel.
“Happy thoughts.” Peter Pan shrugs like it’s nothing.
“What are you thinking about?”
“You.” He grins and then he reaches down, offering me his hand like a gentleman. I peer up at him, my lips pursed.
“Now, girl.” He gives me a look. “Think of me.”
As though I needed that specific instruction, as though I wasn’t already partially if not somewhat completely enamored by the golden flying boy in my room. As though I wouldn’t—from now on, for the rest of my stupid life—be in one way or another either enraptured or tortured by him. And then my head (and maybe just ever so quietly my heart) clunks the roof—without my permission, I suppose, in more ways than one—with a dull thud as I float up and away.
“Peter!” Grandma Mary cries, her tiny, frail self barely filling half the doorframe. “I thought you’d died.”
Peter floats down, eyeing her, suspicious.
“No one could kill me.” He frowns a little, tilting his head at her as he did to me, and it makes me feel unspecial. “Who are you?”
I look from him to her, and the weight of my great-grandmother’s sadness brings me back down to earth.
“You don’t remember me?” she asks him.
His eyes pinch. “I remember everyone.”
“I’m Mary,” she tells him, and Peter takes a fearful step back.
“Liar.”
“It’s true, Peter. I’m old now.” She gives him a sad smile. “Ever so much more than twenty.”
“But you promised.” He cranes his head so he can see into her eyes.
“Peter,” she says gently, stepping towards him, but he takes another step back. “We’ve had this conversation before.”
“When?” His chest looks huffy.
“A thousand times in this same room.”
Peter shakes his head, and the way he’s frowning is breaking my heart. His tender face, how he doesn’t understand how someone might break a promise they made to him. I can’t imagine that happens all too often if one could help it…
“But I was only gone for—”
“I’m ninety, Peter,” Mary tells him, and Peter Pan falls to the floor like a stone.
He looks up at us—first her, then me—and his eyes are brimmed with feelings that, as I’m staring down at him, I’m quite sure he can’t quite understand.
I don’t think to do it—it happens quite involuntarily—but I find myself dropping to my knees next to him. There’s something so desperate about him, so in need of all my focus and all my attention, and I feel him lifting out from my pocket the keys to my inhibitions.
I touch his face like I have no control of my hands anymore, as though they’re already his, as though they’re magnets to his face. “You don’t have to cry.”
He smacks my hand away and jumps up from the ground, wiping his face briskly with the bend in his elbow. “I wasn’t crying.” He glowers at me.
“Besides, Peter,” Mary says, and I know she’s trying to distract him. She does the same things to my snot-nosed little neighbour. “You too have grown.”
Peter Pan straightens himself up, and all unpleasant emotions seem to have evaporated as he grins at her.
“I know! Aren’t I so tall and handsome?”
“And insufferable,” I tack on the end.
“What’d you say?” He glances over at me, blinking and obviously not listening to me, which makes me angry and also (regrettably) a little bit more attracted to him.
“Daphne, darling.” Mary swats her hand at me. “Don’t be so piddling. He’s a dish.”
“Yes, girl.” Peter grins at me. “I’m a dish,” he tells me proudly.
Mary looks over at him, her old eyes all young again in wonder.
“Peter, why did you grow up?”
“I’m not all the way up.” He drifts up in the air, reclining back into it as though he’s on an inflatable lounger in a pool.
“But somewhat.” She eyes him the way only an old friend can.
Peter cracks his shoulders, then shrugs, conceding. “Had to.”
“Why?” I frown.