After about a year or so, Lizzie seemed to forget about her anxiety over Peter Pan and his fairyland, and I am glad to say we became close friends. She would come into my room and we would discuss everything from fashion to schoolfellows, girls we didn't like, and boys we did. I did notice that the sorts of boys Lizzie found interesting closely resembled Mother's description of Peter Pan, but I held my tongue. She had successfully left that part of her childhood behind and was shaping up to be a strong, well-balanced young lady. No sense in dredging up a thing of the past that wasn't needed or wanted for the future.
I shall never forget the topic on one particular night. That night, I was nearly eighteen and getting ready to seriously date, and Lizzie was fast nearing thirteen. We were talking about Harry, a boy in Lizzie's class whom I had heard express interest in "the little blonde chick with the big round eyes and the dimples." Who else could it be but Lizzie? My sister, though, was not so sure what to think.
"I just don't know, Maggie!" she complained, fiddling with the quilt on my bed.
I could see the color spreading over her cheeks. I seized the moment.
"What more do you need to know?" I asked. "He likes you, Liz."
"He likes how I look," Lizzie corrected me. "We've never spoken."
"Then how is he supposed to have anything else to like?" I countered. "You need to talk to him, Lizzie."
She looked up at me, a brief moment of terror in her eyes. "Really, I do?"
I rolled my eyes. "Of course! You're smart and funny; if you don't talk to him he might just go on thinking you're cute, and next semester he'll fall for another girl. You've got to show him you're worth getting to know better, and that means talking to him." I grabbed her hand and held it tight as it trembled. "You can do this, Dizzy Lizzie. It's hard, but it's worth it. Dave and I would not be where we are today if I had not spoken with him. It's the selfish guys who only care about how a girl looks; real guys will care about how she thinks."
Lizzie smiled, leaned forward, and wrapped her arms around me. "Thank you," she said, and hopped off the bed.
"Good night!" I called, and Lizzie closed the door behind her. I turned off the light and lay down in bed.
My eyelids drooped, but it seemed only a few seconds before I awoke again with the sensation of being cold. I tried curling deeper under the covers, but a steady "whap-whap-whap" alerted me that something was out of place. I peeked out of my covers. Why, the window stood wide open! How had that happened? I groaned as I tumbled out of bed and across the room to close the window. When I turned to go back to bed, I was dimly aware there was something different about the shadows in the room. I climbed into bed, scanning every inch of the room as I did so.
"Hullo, Lizzie!"
I shrieked and dove under the covers as a small body dropped down from the ceiling and landed on the end of my bed! What scared me most, though, is that I knew exactly who it was. He was real! Mother and Lizzie were right!
"Lizzie," Peter Pan persisted, "It's spring cleaning, don't you remember?"
Oh, if only this was a dream! I pushed the covers slightly off my face. "Go away!" I told him, "I'm not Lizzie!"
"You aren't?" Suddenly he was hovering in the air over me, squinting at my face. He unceremoniously yanked the covers all the way off.
"Oh," he frowned, "You're the other one."
"Excuse me!" I sat up quickly, forcing him to retreat, and pulled the covers back up. "My name is Margaret."
By now, Peter had lost interest in me, and was poking and prying into the things around my room. I called him away from it, "Get over here," I pointed to the foot of my bed. Peter obeyed. I got my first look at the boy who caused so much trouble in my family.
He was about Lizzie's size, probably not much older than she was, either. His curly golden hair still had a light sheen of fairy dust over it. He had wide eyes, full of innocence, a round nose, and a perky little mouth. The longer I looked, the more I began to see that he might even have a smattering of freckles. He wore a tunic of some of the strangest leaves I ever saw, all sewn together, and a belt around his waist, from which hung a small pouch and a short dagger. His feet were bare and dirty.
I didn't much like his looks, much less the way he looked at me; altogether too cocky. I tried to get rid of him. "Lizzie is in the next room," I told him.
"Oh," Peter said again, returning to his inspection of the room. Now he had found the measuring stick I had used growing up, with my height marked every year on it. I saw the boy smirk as he traced over the markings below his height, but the smile faded as he reached the marks far above his head. He looked back at me, and I thought I saw a wistfulness in his face.
"Is it hard?" I asked.
"Is what hard?" he retorted, dropping the stick.
I took a deep breath. "Not growing up, ever; staying young, never getting any taller. I imagine it must be dreadful, especially coming here year after year, and finding that the little girl you knew from last time is all grown up, and now she has a little girl of her own."
Peter scowled, and I knew what he was thinking. That very thing had happened to Wendy, and he hadn't quite ever recovered from that.
"Don't wanna be taller," he asserted, "And I never want to grow up and go to school and work in an office."
"Oh, you are such a little boy!" I sighed, "School is not all boring, you know, and there's more to life than working in an office."
"Is there?" Peter ceased turning somersaults around the ceiling and dropped to the end of my bed.
"Of course!" I was warming up to my subject now, "There are parties and movies and dances, and school has science classes with dead frogs and robots, cooking classes with all sorts of delicious foods, and history—"
"History?" Peter wrinkled his nose in disgust.
"Oh, history is amazing, all the inventions and daring exploits and adventures!"
"I have adventures," Peter bragged, "Just yesterday I tracked a bear with the Redskins. They could not get very close, but I went right up to it and wrestled it down to the ground and stuck it with my knife, and I ripped its heart out. Hiya!" He had picked up a sham pillow to represent the bear, and to my dismay, he took the knife from his belt and gutted the pillow with it. When Peter saw my frown, he dropped the pillow. "Does History have those kinds of adventures?"
"Of course it does!" I was none too happy about the state of my pillow. "More, too. In our history, men discovered new lands, new plants and animals no one ever knew existed."
Peter was not too happy at being surpassed. He began rifling through the room again. He discovered a picture of me and another boy—Ritchie, I think his name was—and pushed it in my face.
"Who is that?"
"I don't know," I pushed it away; that had not been the relationship I thought it was, and Ritchie ended up jilting me with another girl. "I've forgotten; that was quite a long time ago."
Peter fell silent for several minutes. When he spoke again, his voice was much smaller.
"What's it like?"
"To be in love?"
"No!" His reaction to that word was swift and vehement. "To...to forget," he said.
I shook my head, "I should think you know exactly what it feels like; you've forgotten things so many times in the sto—I mean, the past!"
"I don't forget them, though," Peter said, sitting with his back toward me, his shadow reclining on the bed behind him. "I remember them how I left them, and sometimes when I return and they have changed, and grown up, and they are so different and so terrible..." his voice broke off, but I knew better than to ask if he was crying.
I don't know what came over me then. It was a small voice, a little idea that said I could do the impossible: I could help Peter Pan grow up. If he only would, perhaps I could make him see all the things I was anticipating for my adult years. Maybe in trying to convince him I was really trying to squelch my own misgivings. I leaned forward and spoke softly.
"If you would forget about them," I told Peter, "then it would not have been as if they'd changed. Forgetting people and places means that it is the first time every time you meet them, and you're never disappointed."
Peter stayed very still for a long while, as my words took effect. I thought for sure he was thinking about what I said. Peter turned and looked straight into my eyes with a dull, blank stare as he said, "I don't believe you." And then he smiled. "Anyway, I forget everything, and I'm still a boy, so I must have the very best thing about growing up without having to grow up! Oh, clever me!" He flew about the room.
I was thoroughly disgusted at his duplicity and ignorance; whoever coined the term "innocents" for children obviously was himself innocent of their deliberateness.
"What about feelings?" I tossed at him.
That brought him around. He immediately sank to the floor. He would not look at me.
"Feelings?" his whole body quivered. "I—I don't..." he could not finish. He whirled around to face me. "What about your feelings? I suppose you would say that growing up makes you forget about feelings, too?"
I nodded. "There are many times I have felt love, but as I get older, and change, my tastes change too, and I forget about old loves when I find new ones." I smiled as I saw the glimmer of understanding on his face. I continued, "I forget the ones who make me angry, too."
His gaze dropped. Just then, a bright ball of light zipped through the room, trailing a tail of glittering dust. Peter forgot about me and our whole conversation as he directed his attention to the light.
"Tink! We must get Lizzie!" he did not even look back as he leaped out the window.
I waited for a moment, then went after him to the window. I reached it just as Lizzie and Peter flew out of sight. I sighed and returned to bed.
