"Wait up Peter!" I yelled as I chased my best friend out of the school building. All of a sudden he stopped and turned around. Unable to stop myself in time, I ran right into him. We both fell to the ground and Peter cracked up laughing. I started to laugh but I felt a pain in my head from hitting the pavement. As soon as it came, I felt it vanish almost immediately. Peter stopped laughing and looked at me with sudden concern.

"Are you okay, Claire?" he asked. I smiled at him and told him that I was fine. His concern disappeared and was replaced by his silly 11-year-old grin. It was moments like these when I thought that he would never grow up. That thought was absurd, though. Everyone grows up; I just wished sometimes that we didn't. I liked being an eleven year old kid.

We walked the rest of the way back to our apartment building laughing about the funny things that happened in our classes that day. We said good bye and went into our respective apartments across from each other.

As soon as I walked through the door, I regretted it. If my mother's screaming wasn't enough, the stench of alcohol sealed the deal. My mother was drunk and in a bad mood. Deciding not to face my mom like this, I stepped back out into the hallway and perched myself on the bench against the wall.

I eventually slunk down and laid across the bench on my back facing the ceiling. It was a good opportunity for me to think.

I knew that I was coming to see things differently now. In one of her more sober moments my mother had told me that I was "changing". I understood; I had read enough books about how girls become women. I knew it was all a part of the one thing I feared: growing up. For example, I found myself thinking about Peter a lot. I noticed, recently, how good looking he was. I was hard not to notice. I'd never tell him that though. It didn't all seem normal though. I found that I couldn't injure myself. If I got hurt I would feel a pull deep in my stomach and then the pain was gone. Cuts vanished and bruises disappeared. I thought about when I had hit my head on the pavement earlier. I felt the impact but it was gone as soon as it had come.

The sound of Peter yelling broke me out of my revere.

"No!" he screamed. "I won't grow up! I don't want to start thinking about older people things! I want to be a kid forever!" It was a typical argument with the Pans. Peter loved being wild and free but his parents only wanted another business man like his brother.

"This is unfair! I'm not going to work with you and I'm not leaving school!" he yelled. His door flung open and I could see that he had been crying. I got up silently and walked towards the stairs. I motioned for him to follow me which he did after slamming the door to his apartment.

We walked up three flights of rustic stairs until we reached the roof. When the door to the roof had closed, he wrapped his arms around me. We embraced for several minutes and I couldn't help but notice how good it felt to hug him. He pulled away and walked over to sit on the edge of the roof. I sat next to him and waited for him to tell me what happened. We sat in silence for a long time before he finally looked at me.

"They want me to grow up." He said.

"I know." Was all I could think of to say.

"I don't want to. Why can't we just stay like this forever?" he asked. It seemed like an innocent enough question but I had no answer.

After a moment, I said "I guess that's how life works. We are born and we have to grow up and then we die. That's the way it goes." He seemed to ponder this for a moment.

"What if it wasn't? What if there was a place that we never grew up. We could live there forever, you and me." I shook my head, sometimes his imagination was wild. "I'm not crazy." He said more to himself than to me. He stood up and walked a short distance away. I waited a beat and then walked up behind him.

"Not crazy, just really hopeful." I replied.

"She's drunk, isn't she?" Peter turned around and said, changing the subject.

"Yea. I can handle it though." I said to reassure him. I knew he was thinking of the past encounters I'd had with my drunk mother. Once I'd walked in on her and a few of her "friends" having a "party". She tried to knock me out of the window. I had to crawl across the side of the building to Peter's room. Sometimes, when she was really drunk, she would use me as target practice for her bottle throwing skills. If I could dodge them all she might let me sleep in my own bed. If not, the floor was empty… and wet. Needless to say, I was planning to hide until she fell asleep.

"You can stay in my apartment." Peter offered, looking out into the city.

"I know but I will manage. There isn't much more she can do to hurt me."

"You sure?" he asked. I looked him in the eye.

"I promise that she will never hurt me, just like I promise that I will never hurt you." I brushed his shoulder and he pulled me into another hug.

"I promise too."

A flash of yellow light whizzed by. I was sure I had imagined it when Peter asked:

"Did you see that?" I nodded. It flew by again but this time it stopped in front of Peter.

"So you wanna stay young forever, huh?" it asked. Peter looked confused as if he hadn't heard it.

"He'd like that." I replied almost laughing at the irony. Peter looked at me.

"You understood her?" he asked.

"Of course I did. She spoke English." I said.

"No. All I heard were tiny bells." He told me.

"Well, that's what fairies sound like to mortals." She said. "But maybe not all mortals." She added as she looked at me and winked. The confused look on Peter's face almost cracked me up. I knew I was going crazy now.

"She's a 'fairy.'" I told Peter as I rolled my eyes.

"Hey I saw that." My hallucination said. "I'm not in your imagination! My name is Tinker Bell. I heard your friend say that he wanted to stay young forever and I can help."

"How so?" I asked

"Simple. Do you see that star over there?" she indicated the second star to the right. "That is how we are going to get to Neverland."

"And how do you expect that we are going to get to a star?"

"Faith, trust and pixie dust of course. Come on!" She tugged at Peter's hand and he stood. I followed suit. Tinker Bell flew around the both of us. Please work, I thought as I closed my eyes. I took Peter's hand and felt my feet leave the ground.

Crazy as it seems, when I opened my eyes, I was flying over London straight to a star in the sky. We reached the star and suddenly it was morning.