Lost Boi (8 page)

Us bois spent the day following Wendi around Neverland. Just as I'd known she would, Wendi turned bright red when she looked into our sleeping room; the pile of cocks was the first thing to go. Pan found them a new home in a few crates. Wendi did all the dishes and filled up half the dumpster with old takeout containers, bottles, and broken things that Wendi felt we shouldn't hold onto. It was a long day as Wendi set us up with different tasks: scrubbing floors, doing dishes, or folding the clothes in the clothing pile. Us bois weren't used to working like that; normally, we were in charge of our own days. The Twins kept whining about having to spend so much time cleaning. Curly told them to shut up and stop complaining. I reminded them that this is what it meant to be good bois for Mommy, and that was what we said we wanted.

In the late afternoon, Wendi said she needed to go out to get supplies for our first family dinner. I worried that she was
just making excuses to chase the Crocodile—I was worried and guilty about having shot her. All us bois watched as she pulled sneakers over her pink chipped toenail polish. The cut on her ankle looked angry, but Wendi was calm and smiling. I turned to Nibs and whispered, “Do you think she's really going to the grocery store?” We mostly ate from free boxes and food pantries that sold dented cans for pennies. The thought of an actual grocery store was so foreign. “She keeps talking about cooking dinner,” I continued. “Do you think Wendi really means that? Maybe I should trail her to see if she's going to find Crocodile?”

Nibs laughed. “She wouldn't know how to find her way down to the river. Besides, grrrls like that don't try to drown.”

I started to protest that he was wrong, that once the croc gets a taste for blood, it won't let go, and how he should know
that
better than any of us. But Nibs cut me off. “I don't know what that grrrl is up to. Maybe she's going home to her parents. Or maybe she really does want to be a Mommy and play kinky housewife to Pan. I don't know. I don't care. I'm no little, and I don't give a shit what this girl does so long as I don't have to be involved.”

There was no fighting with Nibs when he was like this. I left him sulking in the corner, mocking the mirror shine on John Michael's boots and trying to get the Twins to side with him about both Wendi and John Michael.

Wendi walked out of Neverland into the downtown, and I slipped out behind her. She wasn't used to living on the run,
hadn't mastered paranoid focus, and so didn't sense me walking behind her. She hurried along the sidewalk. Next to the grocery store was a flea market, a mix of antiques and trash. The vendors were in a gentrification battle for booth space.

Wendi stopped to look at something on a table, and I hid myself behind a rack of faded dresses someone labelled “vintage.” I was pretty sure I had seen them in the thrift store dumpster last week, but now they had sixty-dollar price tags. I could only imagine what Siren would say about that. She'd have been pissed off about the price. I don't make a habit of looking at dresses, and I thought for sure the lady working the booth was going to kick me out, but she didn't.

Wendi was at a booth that looked like a yard sale, with everything from baseball cards and old postcards to toys and shoes. It also had a wide table filled with jewellery and was run by an old man who smiled at Wendi. She fingered a tray of charms, picking through them and putting the ones she wanted into her other hand. I was too far away to see what she had chosen. Wendi paid with a couple of crumpled bills she pulled from her bra. The last of her babysitting money, she would later tell me.

Wendi walked back toward the street but stopped at another booth that sold gourmet doughnuts and fancy buttons and ribbons. The booth was staffed by a straight girl who flipped through a fashion magazine and didn't bother to look up as Wendi helped herself to a spool of light green ribbon. She stuffed it into her hoodie and left the market. I wished that
Nibs had been there to see that Wendi wasn't so innocent. I was beginning to see why Pan had liked her.

Next, Wendi went into the grocery store, and I turned back toward Neverland. I felt bad about spying. Clearly, she really did want to cook for us! I left her there and ran back to Neverland, bursting in and shouting, “Mommy Wendi is making us dinner tonight! We need to finish cleaning everything!” Nibs had gone out, but Curly, the Twins, and I kept cleaning things until Pan came over and said he needed me to go out with him.

We walked quickly toward the Interstate, and he explained that a leather cuff was not the proper way to mark a grrrl, that our Mommy needed something fancier. We stopped at the Pawn Shop and peered in the streaked windows. Pan saw a grrrl he knew who worked there and we walked in, the bells on the door announcing our arrival. He looked carefully at everything in the cases and then spotted it, a birthstone ring, the kind that suburban mothers are given on Mother's Day by husbands who are sent to the mall with toddlers clinging to the seams of their jeans. It had a plain silver band and little gemstones representing each child's birth month. By luck, there were eight cut-glass “stones” on the ring. No wonder some poor mother had had to pawn the thing; she was probably broke, with all those mouths to feed. It made the perfect pervertable gift because, with the addition of John Michael and if you counted Pan, there were eight of us bois whom Wendi would be Mommy to.

“She'd like this wouldn't she?” Pan asked me.

“Oh, yes, Sir! I think Mommy will like it very much,” I assured him.

The grrrl working in the shop offered to cut Pan a deal if he'd meet her out back, on her smoke break. Somehow, by the time we joined her in the back, where she sat with a lit cigarette, the ring had been “lost.” Pan leaned in with a lighter and a filthy hand to shield her cigarette from the wind, and when the cigarette lit, the ring had slipped into his palm and was quickly pocketed.

On the walk back home, I tried to tell him that not one of us had been born in May as he admired the shining green fake emerald right in the middle. He turned and, with a look that reminded me how inappropriate it was for me to be questioning my Sir, said, “Green is my favourite colour. That stone is for me.”

When we got back to Neverland, Wendi was unloading sacks of food into our cupboards. Curly rudely asked how she'd paid for it all, but Wendi just winked. Later, I heard her tell Pan that she'd taken the Darlings' food stamp card when she ran away and maxed it out. Pan had been panicked that they would trace the card, but Wendi said not to worry, and that she'd thrown the card into a dumpster on her way back to Neverland. “Besides, they got that food money to feed me and John Michael, I was only helping myself to what I was entitled to.” Pan then laughed and kissed her.

We ate so well that night. Wendi cooked us spaghetti. It
was the best spaghetti that I'd ever tasted. She cooked it in a big pot that I didn't even remember we had. Before the water was boiling enough for the noodles, Wendi let Pan remove the leather cuff from her wrist and tie a lacy mint-green apron tight and naughty around her waist. Wendi poured blood-red sauce over the noodles and served it to us with French bread to mop up the extra sauce. As she did, us bois noticed that around her neck, swinging against her breasts, she wore eight key-shaped charms that hung from eights pieces of mint-green ribbon, which I recognized immediately from the flea market. The top part of the keys were heart-shaped.

“Do you think they're for us?” Slightly whispered.

“I hope not,” replied Nibs.

We ate dinner out of chipped coffee cups. Even Nibs, who returned that evening, got one. The little Formica table didn't have enough room for us, so Wendi had us sit in a circle on the floor. She got all excited when she finally served up her own cup of pasta and joined us. Wendi seemed so proud of herself when she gave us permission to begin eating. She explained that this was our first family dinner, and this was how she expected us to eat each night. After dinner, we actually had to do the dishes. Wendi told us that never again would there be stacks of crusted, moldy plates like the ones she'd cleaned that afternoon. Nibs rolled his eyes and Pan stood up, about to punch Nibs right in his disrespectful face, but Wendi reached up and grabbed Pan's arm, shaking her head. I couldn't believe that Pan sat down, that he took orders from Mommy.

Nibs stood up and chucked his cup in the sink. Bits of pasta sauce hit the wall. I thought for sure Pan would go after him then, but he didn't. He obeyed Mommy and continued eating his supper. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Mommy heaped seconds into our cups.

That was the night she stopped being Pan's fantasy story and became our real Mommy. After the dinner dishes were done, we all sat together. Pan kept wiping his sweaty palms against the knees of his jeans. Finally, he stood and walked to Wendi, then got down on his knees and held out the birthstone ring to her.

“Wendi, this is for you, as a token of our family.”

Wendi later told me that she mistook Pan going down on his knees in submission as a marriage proposal. But he did kneel before her, and Wendi covered her face with her hands, tears filling her eyes.

“Oh sweet, sweet boi, “she said. “Yes, of course, I shall take and wear your ring.” She held out the fourth finger on her left hand for him to place the ring on. Pan hadn't given any thought to what finger she would wear the ring on; for him, a finger was a finger.

Then, so as not to make the rest of us bois feel left out, she called us to her. We fell to our knees next to Pan. Even Nibs knelt, and I saw a smile cross Pan's face. Wendi untied the eight ribbons from around her neck and said: “Bois, I am so proud to call you mine. I promise to care for you always. A Mommy's heart will always be your home. These are the
keys to my heart. You will each wear them, the same way you wear Pan's cuff.” She gave the first to Pan, tying the ribbon around his neck, and then moved on to Slightly, Curly, John Michael, and the Twins. When she got to me, I felt my face flush, realizing the magnitude of what I was about to consent to. No longer would I be just Pan's boi; now I would also be Mommy Wendi's. I felt the weight of the charm as she finished knotting the ribbon.

As Wendi stood before Nibs, ready to tie the key around his neck, he looked her in the eyes without speaking, then turned and walked out of Neverland. Pan started to chase after him, but Wendi sighed and tucked the charm into her apron pocket saying, “No, Pan, this is a big change for a boi. My feelings aren't hurt, and a Mommy knows how to be patient. Give him time.”

All us bois were fingering the heart-shaped key charms that now hung around our necks, and Wendi turned her attentions to her new ring. She looked at the eight stones: red, purple, white, green, orange, pink, yellow, and light blue. Pan proudly explained that each marked the birthday of one of her bois. “See, this one right here is for Curly, and that green one is for me, of course, and the purple one is Tootles, and the white and orange ones are the Twins.” No one dared point out how the Twins' stones should have been the same colour, them being twins and all. Pan said it was true, and so it was. That was the way of Neverland.

Us lost bois, we needed Wendi, which was to be our
greatest weakness. We needed a Mommy; Pan told us so. He needed her too, which made our hunger stronger. We were starving, and finally she came for us. As I've told you, time in Neverland is strange; there is no past for Pan, and as his bois, we too strive to live in the now, so we couldn't remember when he first started to talk about us needing a Mommy, about his desire. He wanted to submit, but more than that, he wanted to be tucked in. And maybe Pan didn't want to lose us. Maybe he saw sharing us with a Mommy as a way to keep us from growing up, as some of his other bois had done. I think, in his own way, Pan knew that he needed more than D/s protocol, more than the high-fantasy-come-true of the life we lived in Neverland, the way of life he has committed himself to always upholding. But Pan couldn't see the future, and he'd never had a mother. He didn't know that even here, where it was all queer and leather, Mommy's job was to grow us up, queer as we were, queer as we would become.

Later, Pan sent me out in search of Nibs to straighten him out. It felt good to still be trusted, to still be the boi Pan turned to when he needed something done. It wasn't hard to find Nibs. He was at the all-night diner, making a cup of coffee last as long as possible. He didn't look surprised when the bells on the door jingled as I walked in. I ordered a cup and sat down, uninvited, at his table.

“Pan wants you home,” I said when it was clear he wasn't going to start a conversation.

“Pan does? Or Wendi does?” he replied.

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Of course it matters! Fuck, I can't believe you're just going along with this! I know you'll do anything for Pan, but—”

“As should you! As we both swore that we would! And not that you should be questioning, but it was Pan who sent me looking for you.”

“Lay off it. Fuck, you're the best boi, okay? I'm not trying to compete with you for that, I just was trying to say it's weird, isn't it? All of a sudden, Pan brings home this little grrrl and we're all expected to jump, to obey her orders? That's not what I signed up for, and that's not what I gave my blood for. I'm too old for this shit. I thought Pan was different, I thought I could depend on him, but I can't trust or respect someone who's willing to give away his bois to fulfill some hot fantasy.”