Tiger Lily (26 page)

When he saw who it was, his body relaxed, but his face went cold and blank.

“Oh, Wendy, it’s our friend. Tiger Lily.”

The girl’s eyes appeared above his shoulder, then she slid out from behind him, gathering herself. She stepped forward and shook Tiger Lily’s hand.

“I’m Wendy, pleased to meet you,” she said.

She retreated back to her rock, climbed onto it again carefully, slipping many times as she did so, though it was only a small rock, and turned to eye her warily. Peter made no move to greet Tiger Lily.

Tiger Lily’s eyes went to the stranger’s neck. She was awed to see that the foreigner wore a necklace full of pearls just like her precious one, though Wendy’s necklace must have held twenty of them.

The boys were all too shy around the visitor to say much of anything.

Finally, Nibs spoke up.

“This is the Wendy bird. We saw her up in a tree and thought she was a bird.”

“One of the shipmates was showing me how to climb. We don’t have many trees in the city. It was terrifying!”

“She fell on me,” Curly said, in a voice near ecstasy.

I had always marveled at the femininity of some of the girls in Tiger Lily’s village, but Wendy was a shocking contrast. Wendy bird was dainty in every way. Her arms and legs tapered into tiny wrists and ankles. Her chin was small and had a sweet little point to it. Her down-turned lower lip pulled her mouth into a soft, delicate frown, which she corrected by smiling often and at everything the boys said.

“I have to get back to the ship soon,” she said. “They’ll be worried.”

“But you won’t tell them about us,” Peter said sharply.

“No, of course not. I’ll say I got lost looking for shells.”

Peter looked at Tiger Lily darkly, then absently threw a rock at a target behind her head, and it hit true.

Wendy gasped. “That’s wonderful! How did you do that?” Peter looked surprised, smiled, then threw another one at the same target.

“Amazing!”

“You try, Wendy bird,” Tootles said. And Peter nodded.

“Yes, your try.”

Tiger Lily stepped out of the way. Wendy threw with a fragile, half-intended motion, and the pebble went flying far to the right of the tree. She laughed.

“Oh, I’m terrible.” She looked over at Peter, and for the first time something stirred in Tiger Lily. It was a feeling she didn’t recognize.

Peter smiled and laughed and looked delighted. “I can teach you, next time you come.”

Wendy lingered, though she kept saying she had to go. She laughed at everything the boys said that was even vaguely funny. She punctuated their stories with exclamations of support and admiration. And Peter looked like he didn’t have a care in the world, so delighted did he seem with his visitor.

As the time wore on, Tiger Lily began to notice she was merely part of a rapt audience. Finally, she moved to leave.

When she said good-bye, the boys only muttered at her out of the sides of their faces, and I could see that many blushed as they looked at Wendy, and couldn’t take their eyes off of her.

Well, she was one of the only girls they’d ever seen, Tiger Lily thought. Though they had never looked at her that way.

On the way home Tiger Lily talked with herself. The Wendy bird was beautiful, but she was not for Peter. She was a strange creature, another species—it was understandable that they were all fascinated. But Peter belonged to her.

She reassured herself in this way. And her noble nature wouldn’t let her really believe Peter could ever betray her. But no matter what she said to herself, in the pit of her soul she feared the Wendy bird. From that first moment when she set eyes on her, the English girl scared her more than any other creature in the forest.

H
ere is where I become more than an observer, and enter the story in my own right. Because I decided to return, to get another look at the Wendy bird and possibly regurgitate something on her head. And the moment I arrived back at the burrow, I felt the world go black a moment before I was pressed between two strong hands. It was Peter who’d caught me. How he’d memorized my flight habits, which of course were so fast I was virtually uncatchable, I never knew. “I want you to stay here,” was all he said.

I’ve been called jealous. Vain. Cruel. Devious. Malicious. But let me say this: when Peter captured me and claimed me for his own, I stayed for one right reason, and one wrong one. The wrong one was that I was in love, and it was hard to say no to Peter. The right, and honestly, the bigger, reason was that I wanted to keep an eye on the Wendy bird for Tiger Lily’s sake.

Peter started talking to me, where he had only ignored me before. He seemed to like my company, even though—or maybe because—I couldn’t speak back. But I knew, by listening to his blood, that it was Tiger Lily swirling through his heart. He thought of her every time he looked at me. He waited for her, and I couldn’t tell him why she didn’t come. I’ll admit, I hoped from time to time that her absence would turn his affections to me, now that he noticed I was alive. But in the end, it was neither Tiger Lily nor I who won Peter. Things don’t work out as neatly as that.

I spent most of my time right next to Peter in those days. And so did Wendy. Her visits from the ship were an increasingly unwelcome part of my days.

She loved to sing on her visits, and she had a voice like a bird’s. Whenever Peter was around, she straightened up and fidgeted with her face, moving her palms along her cheeks as if she could smooth her skin, toying with her blond, wavy bangs. Wendy’s heart beat for Peter immediately—there was no slow growing, no dark distrustfulness like Tiger Lily had had, no hesitation. Wendy didn’t believe in situations she couldn’t bend to fit her, so there was no need to be distrustful. She had the blissful confidence of someone who had never been put in a pot of turkey broth to die.

Immediately, she loved Peter, just from looking at him. His wildness, his broken edges, were just things to be absorbed and loved, too.

I hated her, of course. And I had ways of letting her know. I tried to sting her at least once a day: no small feat, considering stinging can be quite painful and exhausting for a faerie. But it wasn’t for lack of her merits that I detested her. For a girl who’d never known the woods, who’d grown up being comforted and pampered, she fearlessly threw herself into life at the burrow and caring for the boys. Where Tiger Lily saw the boys’ boundaries and backed down, Wendy liked to brush them aside with a simple sweep of the hand. She assumed I was Peter’s pet and that, because I didn’t like her, I was jealous.

How Wendy made her way back to the burrow, time and again, through a forest that many found to be deadly, I have to chalk up to a matter of luck and blissful ignorance.

She had a certainty about her that was intoxicating. It was like she took the world and everything in it and compared it to her own rule book, and anything that was out of place was quickly dismissed, and anything that fit was more proof that her system was the right one. Her smile was never brighter than when she was being observed and found pretty.

As the boys were still in the process of putting the new burrow together, Wendy threw in her hat, assuming they’d be lost without her. The boys labored under her confident guidance. They placed doors where she insisted they should go. Tootles slapped his forehead as if seeing the light at times like this, and the twins fell over themselves with how smart her ideas were, and everyone pretended they couldn’t have thought of any of it themselves.

Only Nibs seemed to be dubious of her, and I could see he was the only one who felt there might be a conflict of loyalty between exhausting themselves to please Wendy, and being true to Tiger Lily. But the other boys loved being bossed. For a group of boys who’d always taken pride in their independence, they seemed to love that Wendy wanted to mother them. And Peter, shockingly, loved it most of all.

He often turned to her, confused. “Where should I put this? What should I do here?”

Wendy flicked her finger here and there. And Peter smiled and obliged. It was like someone had figured out the answers for him to questions that had confused him for so long. The nights after Wendy visited, he slept like a log and didn’t seem to dream at all.

For her own part, Wendy had read someone named Jane Austen. She knew romance. As she worked next to the boys, she liked to imagine herself in a novel. Peter was one of the brooding heroes, and she was the heroine, better than all other girls he had ever seen. That was how she got through the days of dirt and mud and bugs. And, of course, by knowing that it wouldn’t be forever.

She wanted everyone asleep at the same time she was, two hours after sundown, because she was a morning person and liked to visit early, so the boys gave up their late nights. They loved to be muddy and messy; she forced them to swim in the river. She carried them soap from her ship, preciously cupped in the hem of her dresses.

“I have brothers on the ship, and they hate getting clean too, but it’s a necessary evil.”

She loved to be looked at, and groomed herself constantly. The woods didn’t allow for her to ever be perfectly clean, but to the boys, she was pristine as springwater.

Peter liked to watch her, her curls and her lily-white skin. She interested and fascinated him. And the truth was, he wanted to forget Tiger Lily, and Wendy was a welcome thing to think about. But when he was in his bed, restless and howling inside, he thought only of Tiger Lily.

As you may have guessed already, Peter had a soul that was always telling itself lies. When he was frightened, his soul told itself, “I’m not frightened.” And when something mattered that he couldn’t control, Peter’s soul told itself, “It doesn’t matter.” So while I trained my ears and tried to listen hard to him, I couldn’t always make out where he was, or what he felt. And so each time he let Wendy come a little closer, I didn’t see what it meant, or how it would end.

By the time I returned to the village for a visit, to see what was happening with Tiger Lily, a hoard of Englanders had returned with Phillip. To my surprise, rather than pulling him away, they had come trundling in … with their exotic gifts and their maps and their curiosity. The village was a flurry of activity.

Though Tiger Lily anticipated the day that they would turn around and leave, and take Phillip and all of his ideas with them, the Englanders appeared to have other intentions—and they’d taken to the village as if it were home. From the looks of the villagers—walking around trussed up in hats and scarves and beads—the Sky Eaters had greeted this idea with open arms. A few of the older women, including Aunt Sticky Feet, muttered and took to their houses distrustfully. But all in all, it was a celebration.

The talk, on the first few days, had been about departures. And now the talk was about how many people they planned to leave behind, to continue Phillip’s work and learn more about the plants and the people, and what they could gain from them, and when they would send more ships back, and what a beautiful and exotic spot it would make for travelers and explorers.

I found Tiger Lily sitting by Tik Tok’s side, in a haze of confusion and disappointment. She wondered if that day behind the waterfall, where all people were forbidden to go, she had angered the gods so much that they had left the village for good.

Tik Tok didn’t seem to notice. But later, when everything had changed beyond repair, she wondered if he must have thought, like she did, that it was the end of their ways forever.