Tiger Lily (10 page)

He reached toward her, and Tiger Lily immediately crossed her arms to avoid having the bundle put into her hands. She was terrified of holding babies. She didn’t like the way they squirmed, like holding a worm.

“Why do you have a baby?” she asked. Her voice was almost as low and deep as the boys’.

“She speaks,” one of the twins said to the other.

“Peter found him after a pirate raid,” Nibs said. “He’s softhearted. Couldn’t let him starve to death. We love him, but it’s hard. Sometimes we forget him someplace and have to go back for him. Curly loves to dress him up. Today he’s supposed to be a maggot.” I had run into my share of maggots burrowing through rotten logs. Other than wearing brown, the baby looked nothing like a maggot, but Curly grinned with pride.

Suddenly, while Tiger Lily was unguarded, Nibs thrust Baby into her arms. He squirmed, blinked up at her sleepily, then began to scream. The boys all watched, waiting for her to do something, but she stood stiff. “Don’t cry,” she said finally, holding the baby out at arm’s length. “Don’t cry, Baby.” Her words only seemed to make him scream louder. Finally, Tiger Lily lunged toward the trough and put the baby back into it and backed away, trying to pretend like he didn’t exist. One of the twins appeared with a bottle and leaned over him, and soon he was quiet.

Pan didn’t seem to notice any of it—he was studying a hangnail on his thumb and chewing on it. Finally he looked up and walked on, in his half-graceful, half-ungainly walk, and we came to his room.

It was separate from the others, with a piece of cloth over the entranceway and candles stuck into nooks in the walls. It was stuffed with things he’d obviously collected. Drawings. Feathers and shells. Another half carving of a mermaid that looked like it had come from the stern of one of the Englanders’ ships. Beside his bedroll, a little clay hand-fashioned cup. Scratchy spun blankets were piled at one corner. A flute. And lots of tiny carvings lying all over the place, whittled out of wood. They were all of birds. There must have been thirty or forty of them, but none quite done.

“I hate sitting still. I can’t sit still long enough to come close to finishing anything.” He looked around the room self-consciously. “The boys want to sleep here too, but I can’t stand anyone sleeping next to me. It makes me itch,” he said.

I flitted over to a carving of a seagull, and rested against its wing.

A book of some sort, perhaps stolen from the stone house, sat in a place of honor on a rough-hewn bench by the door as a decoration.

“Where are your families?” Tiger Lily asked.

Peter smiled, ran a hand through his bed-smushed hair so that it spiked to the left, then shrugged and slouched. “We don’t have them. We don’t want them.”

Tiger Lily studied him evenly. He was a mystery to both of us. His thoughts were still a dark jumble, and I had a feeling they were always that way, even when he felt peaceful. “Where did you come from?” she asked.

“Some of the boys were brought from England,” Peter said, and a shadow came and went across his pale face as he looked over at Slightly. Then he brightened. “My parents died in a sinking and I floated to shore on a luggage trunk. Nibs and I have been here for years.” He seemed to remember something, and disappeared from the room.

“We hide from the pirates here,” Slightly said, speaking low, clearly so that Peter wouldn’t hear.

“If they found us,” Tootles murmured, “we’d all be dead.”

Slightly thwacked him on the shoulder, and Tootles winced.

“They hate us,” one of the twins said. “They want us exterminated.”

I heard now the fear in their brightness. It trickled along underneath them like a secret spring.

They all got quiet. Tiger Lily wondered why the pirates hated them, but didn’t find her voice to ask. Then Peter returned and they all brightened. Curly’s eyes drifted to me, and I could tell that he was never happy unless he was fiddling with something or smushing something or breaking something. Nibs reached up and touched the feather in Tiger’s Lily hair. She jerked away.

“Did you find that feather yourself?” Nibs asked, undeterred. She nodded.

“You should keep it.” He smiled. “It suits you.” She softened.

“You have hairy arms,” Tootles said. “Girls aren’t supposed to.”

“She’s hairier than you,” Slightly said to Tootles.

A blush ran across Tiger Lily’s face, though she kept her gaze even. She thought of the photos of the English ladies she’d seen, smooth and white, and for a moment, it made her sad.

“Quiet!” Peter said, glancing at her expression. The boys looked abashed. “Get out of here. Go find something to do.” The boys shuffled off forlornly. “I’m sorry,” Peter said, his shoulders slumped self-consciously. “Don’t leave. They don’t know any girls. That’s why I invited you.”

“I don’t care what they say,” she said, though she did care.

“I think your arms are lovely, Tiger Lily,” Nibs said loudly over his shoulder on his way out, making it worse.

“I have to go,” she said. Through a tiny smoke hole in the room, she could see that the sky was darkening with the afternoon rain on the way. And she had what she’d come for. And she was still alive. She didn’t know why she felt suddenly sad.

Peter looked regretful. He peered around the room, seemed to be thinking of how he could change her mind. But finally he said, “I’ll walk you.”

I considered trying to regurgitate that morning’s gnat breakfast on Curly’s head before we left, but I followed Peter and Tiger Lily out without incident. Peter walked her all the way to an old bridge, about half a mile from the burrow. Flying behind them, I could smell the same scent from Peter that had been in his room, musky, leafy, and boyish. As the two walked ahead of me, there was a rustle above us and one of the twins came rappelling down a tree. For the first time, I noticed ropes hidden up among the limbs, woven carefully through the lushest areas of leaves. Tiger Lily gasped. This, I realized, was how they had spread the rumor that they could fly. It was an elaborate network of ladders and tightropes that they probably retreated to when they didn’t want to leave tracks. And it had all been hidden so well that I hadn’t noticed. “Good-bye, native girl,” the twin said. “It was nice to see you.”

Then he turned and hurried back toward the burrow.

The bridge had been hand built, probably before any of them had been born. It was half rotten, and spanned a swampy trickle that came off the lagoon. Several crocodiles lay below, their mouths open and waiting. Peter chewed on his nails.

“They’re always here because the boys like to feed them. They think I don’t know. But it entertains them. One of the twins once threw a rat in for them, but I had to put an end to that.”

“Why?” she asked.

He turned his lashy blue eyes on her; he had the kind of open, disarming gaze that could make people lose their trains of thought, even boys. “Because it’s not fair to the rat. You have to at least have a fighting chance.”

Tiger Lily took this in silently. I watched the two of them. I liked the way they stood together. They both kept one ear on each other, and one on the forest around them. And yet, there was something almost peaceful about them standing there. Maybe the way he seemed to vibrate made her stillness seem less glaring, and Peter seemed calmer.

“You don’t say much?” Peter said.

Tiger Lily shook her head. She was unsure what to say without revealing too much of herself.

Peter leaned on the railing, which was merely a long crooked stick suspended by two wooden forks. He swayed forward and back against it listlessly, pumping his arms slowly, looking for something else to say. The railing didn’t appear to be sturdy enough to hold his weight for long. There were still parts of him that hadn’t caught up to the rest of him. “We
do
know girls. It’s not like we’ve never seen a girl. I love girls. I mean, I have loved a lot of them and there are some I love now. We know lots of girls actually.” He leaned in, paused. “They say a lot more than you do. It’s nice when they laugh.”

Tiger Lily merely stared down at the water below, trying to absorb all of the information. Then suddenly, in a heartbeat, Peter’s eyes turned to me, as if he’d been noticing me all along. He reached out and lifted his hand gently underneath me, studying me. Imagine a human touching a fly this way. Most humans don’t find faeries worth studying and, if they do try to touch them, accidentally smush them or at least break a limb or two. But Peter touched me so carefully and gently that it felt like a whisper. “You’re a pretty little thing,” he said. Then, just as quickly, he set me onto a leaf and turned his attention back to Tiger Lily. He pointed across the thin swath of swamp to a tree just out of reach. A strange ball, trailing ribbons in a kind of tail, perched in the branches.

“Nibs made that ball for us when we were kids,” he said. “You can twirl it and fling it really high. Too high, I guess. Slightly lost it there ages ago. No one can get it.” He nodded down to the crocs. “I don’t know why we’d want to get it anyway. We wouldn’t play with it anymore. We’ve outgrown that kind of stuff. But still, Tootles wants it back in the worst way. Maybe it’s for the memories.”

Before he could say more, Tiger Lily was on the trunk of the tree, shinnying her way up. She moved like an eel, wriggling and quick, her strong legs carrying her higher and higher, until she was at the limb. I perched on the railing to watch and held my breath. Peter held his.

Ask a Bog Dweller about endurance. But for things requiring balance and strategy, Sky Eaters were the most graceful and accomplished people in all of Neverland. Even faeries marveled at their skill. And Tiger Lily was easily their best climber. Here was an impossibly skinny limb, but she distributed her weight expertly. And simply, so quickly that it seemed without thought or effort, she had the ball in her hands, its ribbons still wrapped in twigs and thick leaves.

She climbed down and gave the ball to Peter.

“Thank you for giving me my necklace back,” she said, with a great effort.

Peter stared at the ball in his hand and frowned. Then he looked at her as if he felt sorry for her. “We could have done that. But the hard part is unraveling the ribbons from the leaves, that’s what I meant. It’s just a pain. That’s all.”

She tilted her head, confused. “Oh,” she said.

“You looked strange climbing in the tree like that.”

Tiger Lily pulled her braids between her fingers, her sudden self-consciousness feeling foreign and strange to her. “I didn’t do it to look nice,” she said.

“But you do care.”

Tiger Lily studied the tree and decided if she did care, she would now choose not to. “I don’t,” she said.

“All girls do,” he added, pushing the point.

“You must not know many girls.”

“I know a million,” Peter said, dark and serious. There was a long awkward silence, but if Peter regretted his words, I couldn’t tell.

“Did you cry? About your friend?” he finally asked, changing the subject.

She shook her head. She couldn’t have cried if she wanted to. Other girls in her village cried a lot. Boys claimed not to cry, but she had seen Pine Sap cry harder than anyone, over a wounded bird. Then again, he had a special connection to birds. Learned all their calls. Knew their habits.

“Yeah.” Peter picked at his hangnail again. “Actually, I never get sad. It’s a waste of time, don’t you think?”

Tiger Lily didn’t answer. She was impressed by the idea of deciding not to be sad. His words made him seem very strong. Impervious.

“Why did you look after that man?” Peter asked.

Tiger Lily considered the question. “I didn’t want him to be alone,” she finally said.

Peter kept his eyes on her for a long while. She looked up at the moving gray clouds and resumed walking.

Peter followed her. We reached the edge of his territory. When she turned to say good-bye, his face was dark.

“You’ll come back?”

She shook her head. I looked into the shade. When the clouds drifted in, the forest became dark a few feet away. “No. I’ll never come back. I wouldn’t be allowed.”

Having had an eye on Tiger Lily since she was a child, I knew a few things. She had many flaws. Conceit. Stubbornness. Pride. But breaking her word wasn’t one of them. I knew, when she said it, we would not be returning to Peter and the burrow.

Peter took this in. “Well, I wish it was different,” he said sadly. He stopped short. He stuck out his hand, and she stared at it. “You shake it. Something Slightly taught us. It’s polite.”