Before long, it was night. Jess was laying on the soft green grass, reading her worn book with the leaf clad boy on the cover to the flowers and birds, to avoid the feeling of loneliness. It would have been easy to avoid that very feeling if she knew the captivated audience of one boy, almost near manhood, with brown ruffled hair kissed by the sun with blonde streaks, and wearing a strange outfit of green skeleton leaves, was hiding amongst the biggest willow tree, smiling and sighing and laughing softly at all the right times while Jess read on ;

'Occasionally in her travels through her children's minds Mrs.Darling found things she could not understand, and of these quitethe most perplexing was the word Peter. She knew of no Peter,and yet he was here and there in John and Michael's minds, while Wendy's began to be scrawled all over with him. The name stood

out in bolder letters than any of the other words, and as Mrs.

Darling gazed she felt that it had an oddly cocky appearance.

"Yes, he is rather cocky" Wendy admitted with regret. Her

mother had been questioning her.

"But who is he, my pet"

"He is Peter Pan, you know, mother."

At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back

into her childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said

to live with the fairies. There were odd stories about him, as

that when children died he went part of the way with them, so

that they should not be frightened. She had believed in him at

the time, but now that she was married and full of sense she

quite doubted whether there was any such person.'

Jessica sighed and closed the book. The boy sat up straight and still, careful not to reveal his hiding place, and tuned in to what Jess was saying.

"If only the story was true, I could finally escape this world of pain. And meet he who has visited me in my dreams so often."

Jess laughed at herself and how she spoke, so poetically and proper.

"Grow up Jess, just get over it already, nothing nor no one can rescue you from this world or the next."

Letting a single tear escape, she ran in the house and up the steps, and rushed over to her piano, pounding a powerful yet quiet song full of sorrow and dreams that still had yet to come alive. She let the tears fall freely now, while she poured out the emotion that exploded inside her heavily beating heart out onto the ivory keys. After she finished the song, she found herself tired, and turned off the lights, curling up on top of her bed with the worn copy of Peter Pan in one hand next to her.