Sister Emily's Lightship (15 page)

“Everything parents won't let you have,” Peter answered. “Sticky buns and tipsy cake and Butterfingers and brownies and…”

The boys gathered around them, chanting the names as if they were the lyrics to some kind of song, adding, “…apple tarts and gingerbread and chocolate mousse and trifle and…”

“And stomachaches and sugar highs,” Darla said stubbornly. “My dad's a nutritionist. I'm only allowed healthy food.”

Peter turned his practiced dimpled smile on her again. “Forget your father. You're in Neverland now, and no one need ever go back home from here.”

At that Darla burst into tears, half in frustration and half in fear. She actually liked her dad, as well as loved him, despite the fact that he'd left her for his new wife, and despite the fact of the twins, who were actually adorable as long as she didn't have to live with them. The thought that she'd been caught in Neverland with no way to return was so awful, she couldn't help crying.

Peter shrugged and turned to the boys.
“Girls!”
he said with real disgust.

“All Wendys!” they shouted back at him.

Darla wiped her eyes, and spoke right to Peter. “My name is
not
Wendy,” she said clearly. “It's Darla.”

Peter looked at her, and there was nothing nice or laughing or young about his eyes. They were dark and cold and very very old.

Darla shivered.

“
Here
you're a Wendy,” he said.

“And with that, the dark place where Tink had disappeared grew increasingly light, as a door opened and fifteen girls carrying trays piled high with cakes, cookies, biscuits, buns, and other kinds of goodies marched single file into the hall. They were led by a tall, slender, pretty girl with brown hair that fell straight to her shoulders.

The room suddenly smelled overpoweringly of that sickly sweetness of children's birthday parties at school, when their mothers brought in sloppy cupcakes greasy with icing. Darla shuddered.

“Welcome Feast!” shouted the boy who was closest to the door. He made a deep bow.

“Welcome Feast!” they all shouted, laughing and gathering around a great center table.

Only Darla seemed to notice that not one of the Wendys was smiling.

The Feast went on for ages, because each of the boys had to stand up and give a little speech. Of course, most of them only said, “Welcome, Wendy!” and “Glad to meet you!” before sitting down again. A few elaborated a little bit more. But Peter more than made up for it with a long, rambling talk about duty and dessert and how no one loved them out in the World Above as much as he did here in Neverland, and how the cakes proved that.

The boys cheered and clapped at each of Peter's pronouncements, and threw buns and scones across the table at one another as a kind of punctuation. Tink circled Peter's head continuously like a crown of stars, though she never really settled.

But the girls, standing behind the boys like banquet waitresses, did not applaud. Rather they shifted from foot to foot, looking alternately apprehensive and bored. One, no more than four years old, kept yawning behind a chubby hand.

After a polite bite of an apple tart, which she couldn't swallow but spit into her napkin, Darla didn't even try to pretend. The little pie had been much too sweet, not tart at all. And even though Peter kept urging her between the welcomes to eat something, she just couldn't. That small rebellion seemed to annoy him enormously and he stood up once again, this time on the tabletop, to rant on about how some people lacked gratitude, and how difficult it was to provide for many, especially with
Him
about.

Peter never actually looked at Darla as he spoke, but she knew—and everyone else knew—that he meant
she
was the ungrateful one. That bothered her some, but not as much as it might have. She even found herself enjoying the fact that he was annoyed, and that realization almost made her smile.

When Peter ended with “No more Feasts for them with Bad Attitudes!” the boys leaped from their benches and overturned the big table, mashing the remaining food into the floor. Then they all disappeared, diving down a variety of bolt-holes, with Tink after them, leaving the girls alone in the big candlelit room.

“Now see what you've done,” said the oldest girl, the pretty one with the straight brown hair. Obviously the leader of the Wendys, she wore a simple dark dress—
like a uniform,
Darla thought,
a school uniform that's badly stained.
“It's going to take forever to get that stuff off the floor. Ages and ages. Mops and buckets. And nothing left for us to eat.”

The other girls agreed loudly.

“They
made the mess,” Darla said sensibly. “Let
them
clean it up! That's how it's done at my house.”

There was a horrified silence. For a long moment none of the girls said a word, but their mouths opened and shut like fish on beaches. Finally the littlest one spoke.

“Peter won't 'ike it.”

“Well, I don't '
ike
Peter!” Darla answered quickly. “He's nothing but a long-winded bully.”

“But,” said the little Wendy, “you gave him a thimble.” She actually said “simble.”

“No,” Darla said. “Peter lied. I didn't.”

The girls all seemed dumbstruck by that revelation. Without a word more, they began to clean the room, first righting the table and then laboriously picking up what they could with their fingers before resorting, at last, to the dreaded buckets and mops. Soon the place smelled like any institution after a cleaning, like a school bathroom or a hospital corridor, Lysol-fresh with an overcast of pine.

Shaking her head, Darla just watched them until the littlest Wendy handed her a mop.

Darla flung the mop to the floor. “I won't do it,” she said. “It's not fair.”

The oldest Wendy came over to her and put her hand on Darla's shoulder. “Who ever told you that life is fair?” she asked. “Certainly not a navvy, nor an upstairs maid, nor a poor man trying to feed his family.”

“Nor my da,” put in one of the girls. She was pale skinned, sharp nosed, gap toothed, homely to a fault. “He allas said life was a crapshoot and all usn's got was snake-eyes.”

“And not my father,” said another, a whey-faced, doughy-looking eight-year-old. “He used to always say that the world didn't treat him right.”

“What I mean is that it's not fair that
they
get to have adventures and you get to clean the house,” Darla explained carefully.

“Who will clean it if we don't?” Wendy asked. She picked up the mop and handed it back to Darla. “Not
them.
Not ever. So if we want it done, we do it. Fair is not the matter here.” She went back to her place in the line of girls mopping the floor.

With a sigh that was less a capitulation and more a show of solidarity with the Wendys, Darla picked up her own mop and followed.

When the room was set to rights again, the Wendys—with Darla following close behind—tromped into the kitchen, a cheerless, windowless room they had obviously tried to make homey. There were little stick dollies stuck in every possible niche and hand-painted birch bark signs on the wall.
SMILE
, one sign said,
YOU ARE ON CANDIED CAMERA
. And another:
WENDYS ARE WONDERFUL
. A third, in very childish script, read:
WENDYS ARE WINERS
. Darla wondered idly if that was meant to be
WINNERS
or
WHINERS
, but she decided not to ask.

Depressing as the kitchen was, it was redolent with bakery smells that seemed to dissipate the effect of a prison. Darla sighed, remembering her own kitchen at home, with the windows overlooking her mother's herb garden and the rockery where four kinds of heather flowered till the first snows of winter.

The girls all sat down—on the floor, on the table, in little bumpy, woody niches. There were only two chairs in the kitchen, a tatty overstuffed chair whose gold brocaded covering had seen much better days, and a rocker. The rocker was taken by the oldest Wendy; the other chair remained empty.

At last, seeing that no one else was going to claim the stuffed chair, Darla sat down on it, and a collective gasp went up from the girls.

“At's Peter's chair,” the littlest one finally volunteered.

“Well, Peter's not here to sit in it,” Darla said. But she did not relax back against the cushion, just in case he should suddenly appear.

“I'm hungry, Wendy,” said one of the girls, who had two gold braids down to her waist. “Isn't there
anything
left to eat?” She addressed the girl in the rocker.

“You are always hungry, Madja,” Wendy said. But she smiled, and it was a smile of such sweetness, Darla was immediately reminded of her mom, in the days before the divorce and her dad's new wife.

“So you
do
have names, and not just Wendy,” Darla said.

They looked at her as if she were stupid.

“Of course we have names,” said the girl in the rocker. “I'm the only one
truly
named Wendy. But I've been here from the first. So that's what Peter calls us all. That's Madja,” she said, pointing to the girl with the braids. “And that's Lizzy,” the youngest girl. “And that's Martha, Pansy, Nina, Nancy, Heidi, Betsy, Maddy, JoAnne, Shula, Connie, Corrie, Barbara…” She went around the circle of girls.

Darla interrupted. “Then why doesn't Peter—”

“Because he can't be bothered remembering,” said Wendy. “And we can't be bothered reminding him.”

“And it's all right,” said Madja. “Really. He has so much else to worry about. Like—”

“Him!”
They all breathed the word together quietly, as if saying it aloud would summon the horror to them.

“Him? You mean Hook, don't you?” asked Darla. “Captain Hook.”

The look they gave her was compounded of anger and alarm. Little Lizzy put her hands over her mouth as if she had said the name herself.

“Well, isn't it?”

“You are an extremely stupid girl,” said Wendy. “As well as a dangerous one.” Then she smiled again—that luminous smile—at all the other girls, excluding Darla, as if Wendy had not just said something that was both rude and horrible. “Now, darlings, how many of you are as hungry as Madja?”

One by one, the hands went up, Lizzy's first. Only Darla kept her hand down and her eyes down as well.

“Not hungry in the slightest?” Wendy asked, and everyone went silent.

Darla felt forced to look up and saw that Wendy's eyes were staring at her, glittering strangely in the candlelight.

It was too much. Darla shivered and then, all of a sudden, she wanted to get back at Wendy, who seemed as much of a bully as Peter, only in a softer, sneakier way.
But how to do it?
And then she recalled how her mom said that telling a story in a very quiet voice always made a jury lean forward to concentrate that much more.
Maybe,
Darla thought,
I could try that.

“I remember…” Darla began quietly. “…I remember a story my mom read to me about a Greek girl who was stolen away by the king of the underworld. He tricked her into eating six seeds and so she had to remain in the underworld six months of every year because of them.”

The girls had all gone quiet and were clearly listening. It
works!
Darla thought.

“Don't be daft,” Wendy said, her voice loud with authority.

“But Wendy, I remember that story, too,” said the whey-faced girl, Nancy, in a kind of whisper, as if by speaking quietly she could later deny having said anything at all.

“And I,” put in Madja, in a similarly whispery voice.

“And the fairies,” said Lizzy. She was much too young to worry about loud or soft, so she spoke in her normal tone of voice. “If you eat anything in their hall, my mum allas said…you never
get
to go home again. Not ever. I miss my mum.” Quite suddenly she began to cry.

“Now see what you've done,” said Wendy, standing and stamping her foot. Darla was shocked. She'd never seen anyone over four years old do such a thing. “They'll all be blubbing now, remembering their folks, even the ones who'd been badly beaten at home or worse. And not a sticky bun left to comfort them with. You—girl—ought to be ashamed!”

“Well, it isn't
my
fault!” said Darla, loudly, but she stood, too. The thought of Wendy towering over her just now made her feel edgy and even a bit afraid. “And my name isn't
girl.
It's Darla!”

They glared at one another.

Just then there was a brilliant whistle. A flash of light circled the kitchen like a demented firefly.

“It's Tink!” Lizzy cried, clapping her hands together. “Oh! Oh! It's the signal. 'Larm! 'Larm!”

“Come on, you lot,” Wendy cried. “Places, all.” She turned her back to Darla, grabbed up a soup ladle, and ran out of the room.

Each of the girls picked up one of the kitchen implements and followed. Not to be left behind, Darla pounced on the only thing left, a pair of silver sugar tongs, and pounded out after them.

They didn't go far, just to the main room again. There they stood silent guard over the bolt-holes. After a while—not quite fifteen minutes, Darla guessed—Tink fluttered in with a more melodic
all clear
and the boys slowly slid back down into the room.

Peter was the last to arrive.

“Oh, Peter, we were so worried,” Wendy said.

The other girls crowded around. “We were scared silly,” Madja added.

“Weepers!” cried Nancy.

“Knees all knocking,” added JoAnne.

“Oh, this is really
too
stupid for words!” Darla said. “All we did was stand around with kitchen tools. Was I supposed to brain a pirate with these?” She held out the sugar tongs as she spoke.