Page 39 of The Never Queen

Exhausted and a little tipsy from the whisky, the twins and I go to bed somewhere around five a.m. but both Kas and Bash are quickly out leaving me staring up at the ceiling.

There is a tiny little flame of anxiety burning in my chest, unwilling to gutter out.

It’s not enough to send me spiraling, but just enough to keep me up.

I toss. I turn. I can’t stop wondering about Hansel.

Even setting aside the fact that he is a Witch Killer who not only helped us escape the others, but killed them on our behalf, the way he said my mother’s name…

Almost like he knew her. Like he had said her name a hundred times before and knew the shape of it, every syllable.

But I don’t want to think about Hansel or the Witch Killers. What I want, is to sleep.

I curl into Kas’s side and bury my face in his hair. It smells like Neverland. A little sweet, a little salty from the ocean air. I can smell cloudberries, too.

I’ve never felt homesick before. I was never given the chance to fall in love with a home before we were moving again, always trying to cover our tracks and hide from Peter Pan.

But I am suddenly, achingly desperate to return to Neverland.

Shifting to my back, tucked between Kas and Bash, I let myself drift up from the mattress, weightless by Shadow and magic.

I hang there for a moment, halfway between the bed and the ceiling.

A few years back, before Pan and Neverland, when I was just an ordinary girl, I came down with an ordinary case of the flu. I have this clear memory from the middle of the night, of floating on the ceiling and looking down at myself.

Sometimes I think about that and wonder if I was dying, only to be yanked back into my frail, mortal body.

Righting myself, I clear the side of the bed and float back down until my bare feet hit the hardwood.

Sunlight is breaking through the trees and shining through a crack in the curtains. Looking out, mist is burning off the dewy grass and turning the sleepy street into a daydream.

I make a cup of instant coffee and go out to the front porch, curling into one of the wicker chairs with a knit blanket wound around my shoulders. When Mom and I first moved into this house, I thought it was possible it would change everything.

The street was cozy, lived in. The kind of street I’d always wanted to have as a kid growing up without all the things that mattered.

Looking at it now, having spent enough months on Neverland, it no longer stacks up.

Across the street, a girl comes out of her house with a guy wrapped around her. They’re kissing each other shamelessly as they make their way down the overgrown lawn to the SUV parked at the curb.

I pull the blanket further up, shielding my face. I went to school with the girl who lived in that house. Ella Sorenson. I wouldn’t call us friends. Casual acquaintances, maybe.

Ella presses the guy into the front fender, kissing him deeper.

When he comes up for air, his gaze flicks to me, and I turn away, trying to remain inconspicuous.

No such luck.

“Winnie?” he calls. “Winnie Darling?”

Oh god.

He extracts himself from Ella’s arms and jogs over, taking the porch steps two at a time. “Winnie fucking Darling. Where the fuck did you come from? Everyone thought you were dead!”

“Hi, Tad,” I say.

The night Peter Pan showed up and stole me away, I had just been hooking up with Anthony hours earlier and the day before that, I had been hooking up with Tad. It wasn’t a coincidence that they were best friends and also not a coincidence that I was hooking up with both of them, not-so-secretly. They were constantly in competition with each other to the point I questioned whether or not they were actually best friends or just best rivals.

Towards the end, as my birthday approached and my mom got more and more neurotic, and I buried my terror deeper and deeper at the thought of turning out just like her, I know I used Tad and Anthony as a distraction.