Lost Boi (10 page)

I curled up in her lap, across her frayed pink sundress, the mint-green apron under my head. I don't know what was wrong with me; I'm Pan's boi, I flag black, but here I was, sitting in Wendi's lap, my eyes filled with tears as she kissed away the sting. I'd never noticed before that moment how dark her eyes were. Looking at Wendi, I felt like I was drowning. Unlike Pan, she hated to see me in pain, and having caused me discomfort with the alcohol made her own eyes glisten with unshed tears. I almost came when she put little car-and-wild-animal-print bandages across my scrapes. It was the strangest realization for me that I had no interest in having sex with Wendi, yet I wanted to be with her more than anything. I staggered out of the bathroom, confused about who I had become.

In Neverland, any failure to adhere to the protocol of imagination was punished severely and physically. Slightly,
who was a sweet boi, struggled the most with remembering this. She would use scare quotes to talk about a battle, insinuating that it wasn't real, and as I've said, she talked way too much about how sweet her birth family must had been. Her knuckles were always bloody, but she struggled to remember this very simple lesson, one of Pan's most important rules: the world we created and the way that we related to each other was real, more real than anything else, and grownups could never be trusted. I'm proud that Pan never had to beat me for the infraction of forgetting that rule. In some ways, I guess you could say that I'm a simple sort of boi. I wanted Pan and everything about his world that came with him. There wasn't anything worth remembering about where I come from.

I was surprised to see how well Wendi adjusted to our world, not just to being a Mommy to us bois, but to everything about our lives. One morning, right after when she came, she snuck out of Neverland. I first thought that she'd gotten tired of being our Mommy and had decided to leave us, so I started to cry, but she had just gone to the diner around the corner and came back with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. I guess that's part of my trust issues … don't know if that will ever change. Another morning, Wendi left before we awoke but didn't go to the diner. She headed down the tracks to the river and went to the Lagoon. She actually had the guts to walk into the Mermaids' house and try to make friends. It was morning, so they were all home. I suspected that Kelpie felt some type of way about this grrrl, and it would have been
within her right to keep Wendi out of the Lagoon, but she didn't. When I asked Siren about it later, she said that Kelpie loved grrrls too much to let any boi get in the way. “Femmes stick together,” was one of her mottos. That and “Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.” Kelpie didn't take shit from anyone, especially bois.

Wendi had brought cookies to share with the Mermaids and spent all day with Kelpie. She began to spend a couple days a week with the Mermaids, who fixed her up with some new outfits and taught her how to do her makeup. Soon Wendi traded in all her pink dresses and nail polish for red, “a more appropriate colour for a Mommy of so many bois,” she responded when one of the Twins asked about it.

I wondered if Wendi was going to be homesick and drive us all to throw her out of Neverland. I was shocked that she didn't seem to be preoccupied with the life that she'd left behind. It's a thing; when folks have just fallen out of a pram, they often struggle with the adjustment. But Wendi didn't seem worried about anything from her previous life, and for someone who seemed to have everything figured out before Pan found her, that seemed odd. I assumed that she loved us so much that none of that mattered anymore. But I later figured out that she hadn't changed that much. Despite every single fucked-up thing that happened in her short life, it hadn't killed Wendi's ability to trust. Somehow, in spite of every broken promise and crappy system that touched her, she remained confident that all the opportunities she'd built
for herself—college, scholarships, everything—would always be there like an open window, waiting for her. I've never met anyone so convinced that things would just work out. I hoped, for her sake, that the world worked the way that Wendi thought it would.

I suspected that Wendi would probably leave us all eventually. That's just the way I am—I expect everyone to leave me. I was just relieved that the Darlings didn't come looking for the children. For the first few days, we were careful to keep the two of them hidden inside. Pan sent me down to check out the stroll where the cops would circle, harassing some of the Mermaids, occasionally ticketing the grownup men. Sometimes they posted missing-persons flyers when they were searching for runaways, but none were for Wendi. I hated talking to the cops, and even though I'd already hit the magic eighteenth birthday, I still flinched when I saw police cars. I don't think you ever really forget how it feels to be hunted. Wendi and John Michael never understood how lucky they were to have escaped out the window without having to live, for years, in hiding.

Wendi turned out to be a tricky one. While she seemed content with her decision to live in Neverland with us, she was also able to hold onto a sense of where she came from: the manners, the education, and her inexplicable trust in grownups. She didn't talk about it with me or any of the bois or even with Kelpie or Undine. Even though Wendi spent a lot of time at the Lagoon, Siren remained aloof from her. It's
not a good feeling to know that you're partially responsible for drowning someone. I should know. It's a dirty truth that Siren and I share, and in a sick way it brought us closer. I am still afraid that one day I'll hear Wendi talk about the Crocodile. Somehow, though, it seems like she's been lucky, and it isn't chasing her.

At first, I really didn't think that John Michael would last a day with us—she was such a preppy baby dyke. I guess our world was more interesting to her than algebra or chemistry classes had been. John Michael might have studied kink in books and tied up a grrrlfriend or two, but that was just baby queer sex. Life at Neverland, on the other hand, was serious, and she had to learn that. I think John Michael was in it to be Pan's, and she was going along with the Mommy/boi thing because it was a package deal, but the hardest thing for her was that she had to listen to Wendi, that she had to call her Mommy.

John Michael did get real close to her pigeon, Bear, and spent most of her time climbing into the rafters to visit with him. And right away, it seemed like John Michael didn't remember much about the life she left behind either. I liked that; it made me feel like maybe I could trust her, at least some day. She started to really understand how if you lived here, if you swore your allegiance, then everything was about Neverland. It didn't take long for her to translate all her reading into practice, and soon John Michael became a battle opponent we could have fun with. In time, we all began to
respect John Michael as one of the bois. Everything is about all of us bois together, as a pack.

I guess it began to bother Wendi that John Michael was either forgetting or not caring about the world that they had left, and she started their conversations with remember-whens and don't-forget-hows. I wanted to get up the nerve to ask if it meant Mommy was thinking about leaving, but I didn't have the guts. To ask, to question the realness of our family, would be disrespectful not only to Mommy but to Pan. I couldn't do that.

Wendi liked structure and rules, and she came up with a way to help John Michael remember that there were other choices for her. Wendi insisted that every day after lunch, there would be lessons. I didn't realize it when she started, but she was schooling us on options, on possibilities, on worlds that we had completely removed ourselves from, experiences that Mommy wanted her bois to know about. Had I thought about it that way then, I would have been angry and rebelled, because it was almost like she was schooling us for more than Neverland could give us. I would have rejected that, fought it hard, and I would have confided my suspicions to Pan. If he'd heard it that way, he wouldn't have liked it. Who knows, maybe it would have changed everything. Or maybe he wouldn't have believed me, would have accused me of mutiny and threatened to throw me out of Neverland. Pan's right; second-guessing the past is a fool's game. It's far better to just forget.

After lunch, as I said, we did “lessons.” Mommy would ask us to write about the outside. She didn't permit the essays to have anything to do with sex or kink or even queerness most of the time. We had to write about memories of where we came from. I think Pan let her get away with it because, to him, she was still that innocent spoken-word poetry grrrl he had spent months admiring. Mommy had us write our stories, even the ugly stuff that made us punch back tears, and the slivers of broken memories that weren't so ugly. Mostly, I made things up. Neverland was my world. I'd given up everything for it, and I saw no reason to dwell in some little grrrl's fantasy of what could have been. I became most distrustful and disrespectful of Mommy after lunch.

But Curly loved our writing lessons. He always tried to beat John Michael by writing better poems about where he'd been, what he'd done. He wrote about childhood vacations and houses with pretty yards. He was careful not to write about the future, lest Pan think he was making plans. Curly wrote detailed accounts of his life before he was lost, except the details always changed, and John Michael would laugh when the pieces didn't align. I thought it was disgusting, and tried to get out of these exercises whenever I could, but it was a contest, and Pan insisted that not one of his bois back down from a challenge.

We played Wendi's family writing game every day. There was always time for us to write, and then we had to read/perform for Wendi and the rest of the bois. The goal was to
slam the best poem based on the prompts and questions that Wendi would give us, like about how we had spent Christmas and other holidays, or what our mothers had looked like. Many of us were just pretending and making things up, but John Michael was a little embarrassed about how much she knew about these grownup fancy worlds. It must have been confusing for her; she knew our world was where she truly belonged, yet Mommy kept pulling up memories of who John Michael had been before and maybe still could be.

When we did our lessons, Pan busied himself with other business. At first, he would stay close to us and play with the pigeons, but after a few days, Wendi asked him to find something else to do, because it riled the birds up and we'd be covered in shit and feathers. Wendi later told me that she thought he didn't participate simply out of spite and hatred for mothers, grownups, and families. This was partly true, but I was the only boi who knew that Pan couldn't read or write very well. He once made me vow I wouldn't ever tell another boi, and most of all that I wouldn't tell Mommy. Pan was so young when he ran away that he'd not had much school. While he could write well enough to send a simple pigeon message, mostly he used me like a service dog to help him navigate a literate world. He probably feared that Mommy, who was so educated, could never have understood. It was an honour for me to be of such service to Pan.

Wendi was trying to tame Pan, that I knew for certain. I first thought she had slipped him something to get him to
play along, but he was so committed to pleasing Mommy that he didn't make a fuss when she made us bois sit on little stools and practice polite conversation or walk in neat little lines. When we went out with Wendi, we would come back to Neverland with our clothes clean and not torn; we wouldn't have battles when we were with Mommy. Wendi liked it that way, but I could see it grated on Pan. I think he was more disillusioned with the idea of having a Mommy than he would admit. He wanted to want Wendi, and yet this clearly was not what he thought it would be like. Maybe he was starting to smell the grownup on Wendi; she'd been so close to turning into one right from the start.

He started to go out alone more often. Sometimes I would try to trail him, but he always managed to sneak away. I knew he was going to the Jolly Roger—he'd often tell me about it when he got back to Neverland. Domesticity has never sat well with Pan. It's like trying to keep a dinosaur in an apartment. Every time he came back from his solo outings, I noticed his body was covered with new bruises. It was clear that he was out having adventures and battles with Hook. It seemed to me like the more confused and unhappy he was with having Mommy take over Neverland, the deeper the cuts, the darker the bruises. Wendi would clean and bandage his wounds, but he was bored with her attentions and, words slurring, racing, flying, would create complicated magical stories about being jumped on the street or beaten by the cops, then later he might let slip to me a battle detail. It was
not in my nature to doubt Pan, but I've been around a long time, and I know how Pan races on pixie dust. The cuts that lined his shoulders and the boot-shaped bruises on his thighs had Hook written all over them. It confused me that all of a sudden, Pan felt the need to lie. Hook and Pan always battled. They were not lovers and there was no formally negotiated D/s dynamic between them, and yet there was no denying the charge that sparked whenever they were in each other's company. There is a kind of romance that exists between two good-natured enemies, a dance of well-matched battle.

The more Mommy took care of me, the more that she became enmeshed in our world, the less she seemed like the little grrrl who had stumbled in; she became a powerful femme who knew what she wanted. It wasn't that she was more important than Pan, but I began to care very much about what she thought of me. I was angry to see Pan tell her lies, if not explicitly, then implied. Even though Pan was one of us bois, it became clear that Wendi wanted him as a lover. Yet, although she never admitted it, perhaps Wendi knew already that Pan was lost, to her most of all.