Title: Gwendolyn
Chapter: Chapter One; Wendy Darling
Rating: PG… currently =)
Disclaimer: J.M. Barrie owns the Wendy-Bird, Peter, Tinkerbell, the pirates, and any other pretty characters I may have missed that are mentioned in this chapter. The Headmistress is mine, although she is quite generic. Otherwise, hands off.
Wendy is seventeen and has been at Bertram's for two years.
** * **
Wendy Darling, as usual, paid no attention to the teacher in the front of the classroom. Her face was dreamlike, lips slightly parted, putti-curls framing her delightfully turned up nose and faraway eyes. She held a pencil in one slender hand, and out of it would flow the most wonderful drawings. Mermaids and pirates and, oh, one pirate in particular who was horrid, with a sinister curved hook for a hand. She drew little boys who wore naught but leaves and pelts for clothes, and tiny faeries darting about in a flourishing forest.
Wendy drew one little boy more than the others. Sometimes, she would draw a little girl in a nightgown next to him. These were the pictures she kept secret, under her bed, with her secret journal and pages and pages of her clever stories. There were pictures of the little girl and little boy flying, hand in hand, across a sky dotted with cotton candy clouds. Pictures of the little boy giving the little girl a tiny acorn, in a familiar nursery. Pictures of a kiss…
The girls at school laughed at Wendy, with her head always in the clouds. They laughed when she ran into doors and trees because she was too busy reading a book or daydreaming. The girls in her dormitory complained to the headmistress when Wendy opened the window every night. She was scolded at least once a week for her "complete disregard for others' health! Don't you realize, Gwendolyn, that these girls will freeze to death?" When the girls told the headmistress that Wendy Darling still opened the window every night, Wendy was given detention.
It was people like the headmistress and the girls in Wendy's dormitory that made Wendy wish to be back in the nursery, with her little brothers, John and Michael, her adopted brothers, the "Lost Boys", and her toys and dress-up clothes. What a care-free life that was, making up stories and playing all day! But Wendy became decidedly too old for the nursery on her fifteenth birthday, and George Darling sent her to boarding school many miles away. It was there that she grew into a beautiful young woman of seventeen, but while she was quite grown up, she still acted like a child.
It was much to her teachers' miseries that she always drew in class, never paid any attention to them, and spoke of a life that she could never have really experienced. She pretended many things about the people in her pictures. She claimed that she had been there when the menacing Captain Hook was eaten by an enormous crocodile, and then Peter Pan had taken his faerie, Tinkerbell and dusted the entire pirate ship with faerie dust to make it fly high into the air to take Wendy and her brothers back to London…
Truthfully, the girls at her school did love to hear Wendy's stories about Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. And they still let her tell a story every so often. But Wendy was an outcast to them, and they teased her about being the "girl who never grew up! Baby Wendy, baby Wendy!"
Wendy hated them.
** * **
She wasn't, exactly, a bad student. She was quite bright. It was just that she never realized she was in class and not in her silly dreams of Neverland. It made the teachers furious that she clung to the childish dreams and make-believe. She was supposed to be a woman now.
Still, she drew the pirates, the boys, Peter Pan, and Tinkerbell every chance she had, these story-book characters, the ones she knew were real –
"Gwendolyn Darling!" A piercing, but feminine, voice broke her artistic silence, and Wendy sat up, guilty, papers rustling noisily and dropping to the floor. She grabbed for them, flushing furiously at the muffled giggles around her. She awkwardly reached for her pencil as it rolled away from her, while trying to put her mock-notes on top of the torn drawings. Wendy forced a sheepish smile.
"I'm sorry, Professor…" Too late for apology, the Professor already had Wendy's ear pinched, using the painful hold to pull Wendy from her desk.
"Miss Darling, this is positively the last straw. You shall not attend my class if you insist on distracting yourself and others by these –" the teacher picked up Wendy's crumpled drawings and held them up to show the class, who couldn't keep their giggles quite so muffled by this point. "These foolish fantasies of yours!" Wendy winced and watched her sketches of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys be tossed carelessly into the waste basket.
** * **
"Gwendolyn Moira Angela Darling," the Headmistress looked down her nose at the young girl in front of her. She was not what one would expect from a Headmistress. She was young, and quite pretty, with the kind of hair that can only be described as "raven-black" and eyes that were nearly the same color. One could almost imagine she wasn't a Headmistress, but a real woman, with a first name and a beau who sent her love letters once a week. And while Wendy was quite pretty herself, she always felt silly compared to the Headmistress. Especially now, with one ear burning fiercely red and both eyes uncomfortably cast down, staring at the floor. "Your behavior these past two years has been… trying, to say the least. You are seventeen now, you should know how to behave in a classroom! We have tried to train you to be a proper young lady, and yet you insist on – "
"Please, Headmistress, I will try to be better this time." Wendy's eyes shot up into the woman's displeased features. "I… I know I've promised that before, but you can't send me home! Mother and Father would be so disappointed, and I've already…" Wendy paused. "Please, Headmistress."
The Headmistress rubbed her temples. "I don't need this, Gwendolyn. I have girls who cause real problems, and still, the teachers send you to me. You will be reprimanded, but not sent home." Wendy jumped up to thank her, but the Headmistress waved her hand and Wendy sat down again. "Two weekends of weeding in the garden, and I do not want you wandering into the woods as you did last time."
"Of course not, Headmistress! I learned my lesson." Wendy smiled at the memory, anyway. She'd had a very pleasant afternoon running about the woods, tearing her dress and getting leaves in her hair. She must have written ten short stories that day, on the papers she always kept ready in her book bag. There was one she enjoyed more than the rest, about a certain part of the woods that felt decidedly Neverland-ish. Peter Pan had found a path in the forests of Neverland that led straight to the woods of Jeanne Bertram's Boarding School for Girls. Wendy and her classmates had just happened to be on walk when the enchanting boy had sprung out from the trees and shouted,
"Gwendolyn!"
"Oh, no, Headmistress, he didn't shout out my name, for he hadn't recognized me yet! He shouted, 'Oh, the cleverness of me!' For, you see, he was very pleased with himself for finding a way to England that was quicker than flying the whole. Besides, the littlest star had lost its voice, and could no longer shout to Peter when the window had been opened and Mother and Father had gone away. But he was also very worried, for if he could get to England without flying the entire way, then the horrible pirates could most definitely escape and wreak havoc on the girls at this very school! Peter is fond of girls, you know," she took a breath and glanced up, blushing severely at the Headmistress's incredulous expression.
"Gwendolyn, I will not even inquire as to what the absurdness you just spouted off to me was. I will, however, insist that you return to your dormitory and dress for supper. You have wasted altogether to much time babbling about pirates and will make us both late unless you hurry." The Headmistress stood up and motioned Wendy out of the room. Wendy bowed her head quickly, then ran out, slipping in the hallway and falling plum on her behind before making it to her room.
The Headmistress put her head in her hands and groaned.
** * **
Author's Note: Ah. To be young again...
O.o Wait, I am young. Never mind. Thank-you to my reviewers. ^_^ You guys are Darlings. [Ahahaha. I should have avoided bad puns. Don't hate me.]