...Um. THis is a writing exercise I did to get back into the groove of things - not too much structure, just two girls, Peter Pan, and a lifetime. Lemme know what you think!
A Life, Furnished in Early Heartbreak
Alice is sixteen and Sara is four when he first shows up.
They have lived in the flat that used to be a very large house for less than a month, and Alice smiles and pretends to like it even though she's afraid of heights and the flat is on the top floor. Sara loves being so high up and pretends she's a bird, and Alice lets Sara climb up her like she is a tree. Alice tries to focus on her homework and distract Sara from their father shouting at Mom over the phone in the other room.
The boy appears in the window that makes Alice so nervous in the middle of the night, and she nearly screams, but stops herself. He looks at her for a second before flying away, and Alice, after checking her own forehead and deciding she doesn't have a fever, chooses to think she imagined it.
Alice is eighteen when they move the furniture around and she ends up stuck in the room with the window that makes her nervous. She is less scared of heights now after jumping off a diving board and doing a perfect cannon ball last summer, but she still eyes it warily, and Sara often laughs that it's haunted while Alice looks over papers their father taught her to understand while she does her homework.
She glances at the window and tries to ignore the sound of her father belching and dropping an empty glass bottle while she finishes her maths, and she doesn't scream this time at the boy staring at her. He looks fourteen, maybe thirteen, and has pointy ears and red hair, and he's flying.
Alice blinks, and stares at him for a minute, trying to decide if her father is asleep. She hears him snore and walks over, and swings the windows open wide. Sara is asleep on a beanbag chair near the desk as the boy peers in, and Alice adjusts her glasses to make sure she's seeing right.
Yes, he is flying.
She says hello, and he frowns.
He tells her he is Peter Pan, and that she sounds like a grown-up. Alice laughs and promises she isn't one just yet, and she doesn't want to be, either. She tells him she remembers hearing stories about him, and he seems pleased that he is still known. Alice hears her father start to wake up and tells Peter he should get away. Peter asks if he can come back.
Alice says of course.
Sara is six when she first meets Peter Pan, and Alice is working on English homework and only looks up in time to see Sara fall out the window.
She runs over and looks down, but Sara is flying and Peter and Tinker Bell are laughing and all Alice can do is sigh in relief.
Peter laughs, and Alice just sighs as Sara flies and hugs Alice's head. Alice lets Sara play with her long black hair for a few minutes before she flies up to where Peter is.
She calls after Sara asking if she will come back, and Sara nods and shouts a promise before following Peter Pan, and for a second, Alice wonders if she can fly, too. She closes her eyes and tries to think about the days before her parents got split up.
Alice cannot fly.
Sara goes to Neverland on and off until she is twelve and Alice is twenty-four. Peter insists when Alice shows up that she is a grown-up, and Alice insists that she does not feel like one, does not know how you're supposed to feel when you're a grown-up.
Sara is in Neverland when Alice gets the call that the car crashed and her father was very, very drunk, because she definitely knows what drunk means now and has for a long time, and Alice can't do anything but sit there and say "yes" and cry, and she feels so selfish because even though she's finished college by now she knows that she will have to focus on Sara, because their mother is married with new kids and will not take them back.
Sara is thirteen when she shouts at Alice to stop crying, because Alice is twenty-five and hates her job and wants so badly to be a writer and tell stories, but Sara needs books and bags and supplies for school that cost more than Alice can make being happy.
Alice finds herself reading the books her name came from between shifts and while waiting for Sara to get out from school, burying herself in Wonderland and looking glasses and thinking about Neverland. She burns herself on accident on a Saturday, imagining fighting Captain Hook while she was cooking and getting frying oil on her arm. She puts water on it but it leaves a large mark. Sara doesn't say anything about it.
Peter doesn't take Sara to Neverland any more – but he visits, on the odd weekend night, and Alice tells him stories. Peter sometimes says that Alice would have been fun as a kid, and Alice laughs because she can't remember what she was like. It's a strange friendship – she admits now that she is a grown-up but swears she doesn't like it, and Peter, for the most part, seems to believe her – but Alice enjoys talking to the boy who is everything she never got to be. Sara occasionally says hello but focuses more on her schoolwork. Alice does not tell Peter she has been talking more about boys.
Tinker Bell does not try to get Alice to fly, but does not seem to dislike her. Alice makes her a tiny dress at one point, and Tink seems to love it. She makes Peter a cape out of a brown curtain that used to hang in the window. He likes it very much. She eventually collects a whole trunk of costumes over the year, coats and hats and other things, and he is happy to bring it to the Lost Boys.
He does not invite her to Neverland. She does not ask.
Alice is thirty-three when Sara gets married to a man named Jake and they go to live in the country. Alice writes to her and calls her on the phone, and Sara, who is twenty-one and so excited to be a grown-up, tells her all about his smile and his voice and his nice house and car. She invites Alice to visit, but Alice finally has time, time to write her books and stories, time to do things, because Sara does not want to get a job and does not have to, and Alice is so happy that Sara is happy.
Nobody has ever fallen in love with Alice. It is not because she isn't pretty, but because she is so busy and so lonely, and nobody at work knows how to talk to a lonely person.
Peter Pan has not visited in a long time.
Sara calls her once a month, and Alice calls once a week. Sara talks all about Jake and picking a family car and what kind of paint they'll use on their walls. Alice smiles and listens, and assures Sara she'll find somebody nice.
She sells stories now. She rents out part of the near-empty flat and she sells stories, makes enough to get by. Sometimes people tell her the stories are too whimsical or too childish even though her writing style is good, but she sells stories anyway, because she loves writing them. She wonders if she could move out to the country and help Sara, because falling in love must be hard, from what she's heard, and she really does love her sister, even if they don't get to see each other that much.
There's a bit of pixie dust sometimes on the windowsill. Alice still cannot fly.
Sara is forty-five when she gets a call from the city that Alice has been hit by a car. Alice is almost sixty and she is badly hurt and completely alone, because Sara has three children and is fighting a custody battle with Jake over them.
Alice's mother doesn't answer the phone.
Alice is in the hospital and thinks about how she can't pay the bills and why the magazine hasn't emailed her back and how much she's hurting when she realizes she's never had a best friend.
She cries.
Alice realizes at some point that this may be the last night of her life. She is in so much pain and doctors look at her with sorry eyes, and she can barely see a black-cloaked figure standing in the doorway, only out of the corner of her eye.
She does not notice the boy sitting in her window until he whistles, and she turns to see Peter Pan and stares, and almost cries again.
Her eyes close, and Peter Pan flies towards the figure.
Alice dreams she is thirteen when she wakes up in a small leaf hammock like the one Sara told her about, and she sees the old trunk full of costumes she said goodbye to long ago across the room. She sits up.
Peter Pan says her name, and she smiles.