There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too.
She tucked her letter and her picture in alongside it, and she ran her hands over those too. It made her feel closer to many things that were far away, that made her smile.
And though, truly, she sometimes felt like something inside her had disappeared, it seemed that must be a natural part of growing up. Standing out too much made one feel too alone to do it forever.
May was used to strange things like this. Her mom always said all sorts of quirks came with a house as old as theirs. May used to insist it was ghosts. But Mrs. Bird had long ago given her one too many stern looks on the topic. So May simply sank beneath the water and let bubbles drift out of her nose.
And age was just a trait, like the color of your hair, or the amount of freckles on your skin.
She hated his need to always win and he hated her coldness during their arguments. They fought about the exact color of the sky and which path they should take on a hunt. They disagreed passionately about whose fish was the best tasting. They could work up extreme hatred for each other at a moment’s notice.
When Peter made mistakes, Wendy cheered for him anyway. One afternoon he beat her and everyone else in a race organized by Slightly. She only laughed and squeezed his wrist with easy affection and told him how fast he was. She was so undeterred by losing that it made the boys wonder if winning was exactly what they’d thought it was or if in England it was different.
Just for a moment, she could hear the muffled tick tick from inside its mouth before it disappeared underneath the murky surface, and curled away.
I knew them almost as well as she did, because watching him love Tiger Lily was better than not watching him at all.
But you are the only person I can show myself to. You always made my rough edges feel real.
Peter sank. “I’d give anything to see time.
A breeze wafted through the trees and settled like a fog. It did’t smell like peaches at all. It smelled, strangely, like cinnamon and cayenne pepper. It smelled like far away.
I think God might be the dust and the jackrabbits and the rain, that God might be Teddy and the bullet that killed him, the beautiful and exquisite moon and the terrible zeppelins, all spread out and everywhere. I’ve begun to think that maybe we are god’s fingers rubbing against each other to see how it feels. Do you think that it is a sacrilegious thought – that God might be everything and its opposite?
She had the stabbing, prickly feeling she had gotten in the third grade when she’d cheated on a math test. It was throbbing, gut-pounding feeling that she was a big fake about to be caught.
May fell onto her back, watching the zipping stars, which tonight were covered lightly in clouds, and feeling the darkest despair.
No one seemed to notice that Pine Sap had taken his life into his hands by holding hers.
Hook’s fingers always twitched when he spoke of Pan. It turned him dark and antsy, and his jaw clenched and unclenched. It was an old grudge, and Smee still didn’t understand where it had begun. All he knew was that Hook was stuck on it: he sometimes repeated a conversation over and over again, that he imagined he was having with Peter.
Actually, May have been thinking of something her mom had said. About how you didn’t make friends, but let them happen.
It tasted somehow like orange and green and dizzyingly sweet, but like Birdie had said, not too sweet. The taste was so rich it made her lips pulse. It was different on different parts of her tongue – the tartness hit the tip, the sweetness tingled at the sides and at the back.
Still, the flowers were growing right along with them, miniature roses and hydrangea, lavender and peonies, magenta and red and pink and purple flowers. And not just in the garden, but all around, the orchard was bursting with green, and smells, and birds singing until long after dark.
We’ll be fine,” Adri said. “If you want to vomit on someone, you can vomit on me.