Hot tears spilled from fair-coloured eyes onto the hard floor of a bedroom; the only sound, two sleeping boys - and one girl on a very personal mission.
Wendy sat on her bedroom floor, in the corner under the window, knees huddled up to her chest, and head resting on her knees with her arms hugging herself tight.
"Why won't you come back?" she whispered almost inaudibly, sobbing, her voice breaking with every word, tears falling more and more as she spoke aloud. "Why did you have to leave? I miss you... Come back to me..."
Her brothers didn't wake up - they couldn't hear her crying. John and Michael were both heavy sleepers, and Wendy was a quiet crier.
And her parents certainly couldn't hear, as their bedroom was all the way at the end of the hallway, and if they did find Wendy sobbing her young heart out, she didn't know what she could tell them.
Sorry, Momma, but the love of my life lives in the jungle of a far-away land in the sky? And the chances of them not sending her to a doctor if she tried to convince them of that would be... very slim.
So Wendy curled up on the floor of the room she shared with her siblings, her long hair spilling over her thin shoulders, sobbing her adolescent heart out, wishing that Peter could come back to her.
But he wouldn't. He was back in NeverLand, having a good time with pirates and mermaids and would have forgotten all about her.
Trying to collect herself, she got to her feet, turned to the desk beside her. There were four drawers in the desk - one for each child, then one that they shared.
Opening the top right-hand drawer, she dug through until she found a certain scrap of paper, markings all over it. It was a calendar, and it counted the days that had passed since she'd last seen Peter. That number was fifty-six; she'd dreamed about him thirty-six times and thought he'd appeared at her window seventeen times. Why she recorded this, she didn't know. Somehow she thought it might make her feel better. Instead, she was dwelling, and it made it all worse; knowing exactly how many times things had happened.
And when Wendy was sad, she suffered. She cried almost every night, which meant she was tired, which meant she was doing poorly in school, which was a very uncommon thing for her, to fail at anything.She managed to keep her marks up just enough so that no one from the school would tell her parents.
She ate less nowadays; when she did eat, she found that nearly half the time she would throw it up from being so stressed. Recently, she'd begun excusing herself from the dinner table as quickly as she could just so she could get the purging over and done with. Her weight dropped dangerously low, and she felt weak and tired, not to mention extremely fragile; she wore long sleeves to cover the bruises she acquired mysteriously.
Wendy's drawer also held a collection of sketches of Peter and places in NeverLand; she found her drawing ability had improved in the couple of months.
Dropping the crude calendar, she dug through to the bottom of the drawer, past pencils and papers, under feathers and stones and scraps of fabric, bits of string and buttons, and a drawing from Michael of himself as a pirate. He'd drawn it for her exactly twelve days after they came back from NeverLand. That wasmarked on the calendar, too.Carefully tucked into one corner, wrapped in layers of fabric from an old shirt ofone of her brother'sthat they'd destroyed in one of their games, was a tiny, sharp metal blade - a razor blade, acquired from her father's shaving kit.
The tears on her face were drying and she was silent. She felt cold on the inside. She felt that she wasn't acting of her own accord, but moving as if in a dream. A nightmare. A cold and lonely, heartbrokennightmare.
She grabbed the tiny bundle, returned to her bed and sat cross-legged, unwrapped the blade. She glanced at her brothers, not sure if she wanted one of them to wake up and catch her before she could go through with this. Why was nighttime such a lonely time?
Her attention went back to herself. Taking a deep breath, she held the blade in her right hand, gathered her courage and swiped at her left wrist quickly.
She gasped but scarcely felt it, so she did it again, biting her lip to stifle any cry she might make.. And again. And again. Until a thin trickle of blood was making its way down her arm.
Wendy began to cry again, not for the fact that there was no turning back, but because she would never see Peter again. Nor would she see her mother or father or John or Michael.
How depressing the thought was, that a young girl was killing herself to escape the pain, but she was just going to die sad and alone. Wendy couldn't tell which was worse - the agony she felt, or the conflict itself.
Either way, she was slowly becoming colder, and her arm had lost its feeling. She dropped the razor and it was lost somewhere in her thick blankets; let her arm fall into her lap, soaking blood onto her nightgown.
She leaned back against her pillows, and a sad smile crept across her face as her eyes became heavy and her vision began going dark.
"I'll always love you, Peter Pan..." she mumbled half-heartedly, and she could have sworn she saw the window open, and a certain boy rush to her side.
But now she was numb and almost gone; she was fading with no hope of return. She had already crossed that line.
"I hope you forget the pain soon..." she whispered once more to the imaginary-figure beside her, holding her in his bare arms, sobbing against her. "Now it's eighteen." If she could have, she would have giggled, but then she stopped breathing and the blood stopped flowing.
The Darling household was awakened by Peter Pan's anguished screams.