Erin, full of papaya, sat back to watch the last of the morning pink disappear as the blue and yellow of full day pushed it away, along with her uneasiness. She couldn't be afraid of the gentle turquoise waves that lapped the white-sand shore. "That was the best thing that I ever ate in my entire life, Erin." "I know.but Winston, why do you think I fell out of the cloud back there? I tried to think happy thoughts and fly, catch myself, but I just couldn't seem to get the flying thing to work. What was going on?" "I think." Winston's ears colored. "I'm sorry that I asked you about your parents. I think that when I mentioned your mother, you thought an unhappy thought. And when your flying, really unhappy thoughts are like holding a burlap sack of lead. Sometimes when you're flying, you get a little bit off-balance and unsteady if you think about something bad. You learn to control it, not to let it affect the pixie dust, the flying so much. But I never actually fell, not even so long ago when I was just learning. You must have." Winston paused and cleared his throat, suddenly entranced by the ocean. "You must really miss your mother a lot." Erin's small happiness about the beauty of the morning beach and the sweet papayas deflated like a punctured beach ball. She felt a tingling in the back of her nose and forced it away. I will not cry I will not cry I will not cry in front of Winston. Erin took a deep breath and muttered, "Yeah." "Do you want to tell me about her?" It was strange, Erin had always felt before like she should keep her mother a secret, a private memory only for herself. If she shared the fragile memories with other people, they would break them, shatter them into tiny pieces of dust that would blow away on the wind. But when Winston asked, she realized that there were cracks in the memories that she hadn't noticed before. Maybe Winston could tell her how to keep the cracks from splitting and the memories from breaking. She felt tears straining again in her throat and started talking before they could gain a hold on her. "It's not recent. I mean, I didn't just leave her when I came to Neverland. She's been out of my life for a long time. She was beautiful.classically beautiful, but not exactly in a womanly way. She was almost like a little girl sometimes. The way that she smiled made me feel like we were not mother and daughter but best friends, two little girls who wanted to tell secrets and play on the jungle gym at Central Park and buy saltwater taffy and eat it all at once, sitting on the fire escape and looking at the people passing by on the street. She would always tell me stories at night.I don't really remember any of them now, just that they were filled with perfect adventure and magic. Then she would kiss me three times on the forehead and turn out the light. That's what I remember about her the best. And as she was turning off the light, she would say, 'May fairies guard your sleep.' My dad loved her, I could tell that. I was never sure if she really loved him, though. And then she left us when I was only five years old. I don't know where she went. Dad hinted that she ran off with some other guy. I don't know. Maybe she'll come back for me someday. "But then Dad was really depressed. He put away all of the pictures of her, all of her jewelry, her clothes, her bottles of perfume in the bathroom, the special hot sauce that she liked. He started dating other women.I hated all of them. I tried to make life miserable for them and none of them ever lasted. Until.until Sharon. My dad absolutely doted on her.there was nothing I could do to make him see that she was even worse than all of the others before her. I begged him and prayed and wished on falling stars that they wouldn't get married, but he thought that I was still against, not Sharon, but just the fact that Dad had gotten over my mom's leaving and I hadn't. He thought I was just doing the same thing as I had for all of his girlfriends before Sharon. But Sharon was worse.a hundred, a thousand times worse. "They got married when I was eight. I was the flower girl and I carried a basket of orange poppy petals down the aisle. Sharon's daughter was a flower girl too. Her name is Shannon.she carried a basket of white flower petals. That's all I remember about the wedding, looking at the aisle and seeing a path of orange and white petals. I was numb. But I was right. After they got married everything changed, everything. I wasn't allowed to do anything that I ever wanted to do until I finished my chores.and when I finished those, Sharon made up more. Shannon got my room; I had to sleep in the laundry room. Shannon also got my dad. He would ask her about her day at school, take her to Long Island, tuck her in and turn out her light. He stopped seeming to care about me at all. Except for one time when he looked at me, with this face that was trying to tell me that I was right, that he had been wrong and now he was too lost and scared to do anything about it. But when he disappeared I wasn't sad. I just wanted to disappear too. "But Sharon was my legal guardian. I know she wanted to get rid of me but she had to take care of me. She took away my friends, my freedom, my entire life. I was miserable. Miserable. She would do horrible things to me." Erin paused. "I don't want to talk about that. I started telling her that my grades were slipping and I had to stay after school to have special tutoring. It wasn't true, of course, I was always a good student even when she.even then. But she thought it was funny, that I was stupid, and so she believed me. I would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sit in the Musical Instruments of the Western World. No one ever came there. Or I would go to the Egyptian Art exhibit and walk around it in circles, circles, circles. Just to be alone. Just to be away from her. And then I came to Neverland.I can't stay there. I can't stay in New York. There isn't anywhere in the world or anywhere else, for that matter, where anyone wants me."