Laughter at the Academy Read online

  Cecily—who was called Wendy by all except her fellow Wendys, because they had to have some way of differentiating themselves, didn’t they? At least when they were alone together, with no sprawling families of ever-shifting children to count or mind—shook her head. “I’m sorry, Edith, but I can’t,” she said, without real regret. “The Pan might need me.”

  “She’s flying the lagoon’s edge, flirting with mermaids,” said Edith. “We lost five children tonight, Cecily. Five. Can you continue putting this off?”

  “Yes,” said Cecily flatly. “I am very good at delaying things.”

  “Angus says the apple trees have stopped bearing fruit, and no one’s found a ripe melon in days and days,” said Edith. “Can you delay that? The land is failing. We water the sea with our blood. The only ones who eat well are the mermaids, and that’s the only reason they still fight with us. Even the fairies have started to disappear! I don’t care how good you are at delaying things, Cecily. Some things refuse to be delayed.”

  Cecily hesitated, reaching for excuses, and finally offered the only one she could think of: “What about the children? Someone has to stay with them.” She had no children of her own to watch over—the Pan demanded the whole of her attention and her heart—but she knew that she was an aberration amongst her kind.

  “Angus has offered to take the youngest children while we have our conference, and the older ones have already gone to train for the Pan’s war,” said Edith. “Come.”

  Cecily sighed. The rules of the fellowship of Wendys were clear: if the other Wendys wanted her, she had to go, unless she had reason to think they were leaving their Lost Children in danger. Angus was a good mother. He would care for all the children like they were his own.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  Edith smiled.

  The places of the Wendys were safe and secret, bolt holes carved out of the fabric of Neverland to allow them the brief moments of peace their hearts required if they were going to keep loving the Lost Children like their own. Cecily had long suspected that the love the Wendys gave wasn’t really mother-love, which was selfless and strained but couldn’t be broken; Wendy-love was selfish, demanding tribute and loyalty in a way she couldn’t imagine mother-love would need to, and revoked as soon as its targets strayed too far. Mother-love was given freely and without constraint, and while Wendy-love might aspire to that great height, it could never quite achieve it.

  There were four other Wendys waiting when Edith led Cecily down the ladder and into the safe, cool space beneath the roots of the old sycamore. Belinda, Michael, Sara, and Pike sat on the narrow benches. Cecily felt suddenly as if she had walked into a snare. Those four Wendys were among the eldest of their fellowship, second only to herself…and Edith. Edith had been there long enough see five Pans come and go while she remained a Wendy under the grace of Neverland’s eternal summer sky. This was something more than just a gathering of mothers.

  Edith closed the door, turned to Cecily, and said without preamble, “The Pan is not keeping us safe. What say you, sister, who flew here first by this new Pan’s side?”

  Cecily bristled, pride and caution warring in her belly. “This ‘new’ Pan has kept Neverland safe for days and days,” she said. From talking to the new children who sought Neverland’s shores, she knew it had been more than a hundred and fifty years. Words like “decade” and “century” were forbidden, but even as the Pan had outflown her predecessor, so had Cecily outloved and outlasted all but Edith, who seemed as untouchable as the ocean tides.

  “Days without counting, yes, but days end,” said Belinda, somehow making the statement sound completely reasonable, when Cecily knew in her heart that it was anything but. “Twilight comes when night is falling. The land is failing. Our children are dying. We are suffering for this Pan’s frailties.”

  “The Pan is heartless and cruel,” said Cecily pleadingly. “She keeps us safe. She keeps these skies safe.”

  “I remember when you first came to Neverland,” said Edith. “You were a beautiful child, and you have grown into a beautiful mother.”

  “But not a woman,” said Cecily. The pleas were gone from her voice, replaced by a hard core, like steel. “I’m a child. I’m a Wendy.”

  “You were a child when you came to us, and you’re a Wendy now, but you didn’t arrive alone, did you?” Edith looked around at the blank, bewildered faces of her sisters and brother, and sighed. “I hate this part. This is a difficult part, and I hate doing it.” She stomped her foot, for a moment looking like the child she’d been when she flew away from home. “I don’t want to.”

  “Then don’t,” said Cecily. “The Pan is tired, that’s all. The tide of war will turn. It always turns, and we’ll drive those blasted pirates out to sea just like the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.”

  “But there has to be a time when Neverland loses,” said Edith. “There has to be a time when the pirates sail on valiant tides, because otherwise there would be no way of losing this game, and a game that can’t be lost isn’t worth playing anymore. Some Pans lose on their own. Some Pans lose because they can’t keep a Wendy with them long enough to learn to depend on her. And some Pans…”

  Cecily’s eyes widened. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, you can’t make me do this.”

  “You didn’t come to Neverland alone, Cecily.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, but what are you talking about?” Michael frowned, standing as he asked his question. “I know Cecily is the Pan’s Wendy, but how can she change whether or not the pirates win? Why would we want the pirates to win?”

  “So the game can go on,” said Edith. She watched Cecily as she spoke, and her eyes were sad. “The game is Neverland, and Neverland is the game. The game is the war unending, the battle unrefused, and it must be fought, or Neverland will fall.”

  “I don’t care,” spat Cecily. “I know what you want me to do, and I won’t do it, I won’t. This isn’t right. This is…” She paused, fumbling for the greatest condemnation she could think of, and finally said, “It’s against the rules.”

  “Why would Edith ask you to break the rules?” asked Sara, frowning.

  “It doesn’t break the rules, because this is in the rules. I’m sorry, but it is.” Edith shook her head. “There have been Pans before this one. None of you remember them, but I do. Franklin, Amanda, Wesley, Padraig…and Peter. He was my first Pan, although I was never his Wendy. That honor, and that burden, fell on other shoulders.”

  “What would make a Pan want to grow up?” asked Belinda, sounding shocked and slightly disgusted by the idea. The others murmured agreement.

  Cecily wanted to scream. Growing up was the only end any of them could conceive for a Pan’s tenure in Neverland, even with Edith right there, talking about losing, talking about letting the pirates win. They were Wendys to the core, and they couldn’t see the truth even when it was standing right in front of them, waving its arms in the air and screaming.

  Maybe she had never really been a Wendy after all.

  “Edith isn’t talking about Pans going home and growing up,” she said, and sighed. “She’s talking about Pans letting the pirates win.

  “She’s talking about the ones that have died.”

  Silence fell across the room, and Cecily allowed herself a brief, cruel moment of satisfaction. If they were going to put this on her, at least they could understand what they were doing—and what they were asking her to do.

  “The Pan didn’t come to Neverland alone, and she wasn’t the Pan when she came,” said Cecily. “Her name was Sheila. And she was my sister.”

  They flew to Neverland with hands clasped tight, following a boy they barely knew who said he could take them to a place where they would be children—and together—forever. What he didn’t tell them was that he was recruiting soldiers for his private war; what he didn’t tell them was that inside of a week, they would have swords in their h
ands and blood in their hair, and be fighting for their lives against a pirate crew straight out of a storybook.

  Cecily had cried and flailed with her sword, barely hitting anything, but Sheila… Sheila had laughed and flown to the highest mast, daring the pirates to follow her. Cecily remembered the look in her sister’s eyes, like she was drunk on something more powerful than brandy, more addictive than laudanum. The boy—the Pan—had seen it too, and Cecily had expected him to yell for Sheila to come down and fight properly, but he’d only smiled.

  He’d been dead by morning, and Sheila had flown away, surrounded by a chiming cloud of fairies, only to come back in a gown made of skeleton leaves, with a crow in her throat and a wild new light in her face.

  That was the first time she had called Cecily “Wendy.”

  That was the day Cecily had lost her after all.

  The Pan flew to the edge of the water and landed, her feet touching down with the familiar faint buzz that was Neverland welcoming her home. She’d felt it every time she’d touched the island’s hallowed soil, even back to the first time, when she and Cecily had flown in from—where? She didn’t really remember where they’d started their lives, but she remembered Cecily was her sister, and that seemed like enough of a past to be burdened with. Neverland wanted her. Neverland had welcomed her with open arms and a gown of skeleton leaves peeled from the body of a dead boy with too many freckles and a smile like a Tuesday morning (not that she knew what a Tuesday was; not that she knew the boy’s name, then or now or ever). Neverland would never let her go.

  Pirate ships with storm cloud sails bobbed on the horizon, waiting for the wind to pick back up and the tide to turn around, allowing them to resume their endless assault on the island’s shores. They’d been fighting this war for as long as the Pan could remember—had been fighting it when she first arrived, when the Lost Children were led by that freckle-faced boy in his vest of skeleton leaves. But it had never been like this before. It had never been so unending and so…so vicious. The pirates would attack, a few people would be injured, leaving them with interesting scars to brag about at night, when they lay in their hammocks under the trees, and that would be that; the pirates would go away again, leaving the Lost Children to more important concerns, like rabbit hunts through the thorn briars or moonlit swims with mermaids. But not this time. This time the pirates were fighting to kill, and they just kept coming and coming, like waves against the shore, and people were dying, and the Pan didn’t know what to do.

  No one was supposed to die in Neverland. That wasn’t the agreement. That wasn’t the way.

  A fairy zipped in from the side, hanging in the air in front of the Pan’s face and ringing softly. Her wings cast a soft pink glow over everything around her. The Pan had heard some of the newer Lost Children scoffing at her Wendy’s fairy, calling it too “girly” for the Wendy attached to their Pan. The Pan didn’t quite understand that; when Vinca had first attached herself to Wendy (Cecily) the Lost Children had laughed and said a proper girl would have a blue-glow fairy, leaving the pink fairies for the boys where they belonged.

  The Pan didn’t understand much about the newest wave of Lost Children, if she was being honest, which was a thing she hated to be. Pans should be liars and fliers, that’s the rule. But these Lost Children came in as wide-eyed and scarred by the adult world as all the boys and girls who came before them, and then they turned their attention to questioning everything. Some of them had even refused to accept the authority of the Wendys! They said they’d come to Neverland to escape adults and their stupid adult rules, and they weren’t going to accept a new set of guardians that they’d never asked for. The Pan had insisted they divide themselves appropriately, sending them to the Wendys who would be their caretakers, but it was strange, and it was wearying.

  The Pan was tired.

  Vinca rang again. The Pan frowned.

  “I don’t know what you want, Vinca,” she said. “I speak Pan-fairy, not Wendy-fairy.”

  “She’s telling you not to go for your sword when you hear me creeping up behind you,” said a familiar voice.

  “Wendy!” The Pan turned, beaming at the sight of the girl who made everything better just by walking into a room. She looked sad. The Pan didn’t like that—Wendys should be joyful things—and so she skipped, leaving the ground, and flew the few yards to land nose-to-nose with her Wendy. “Have you come to keep watch with me?”

  “I have,” said Wendy, with a small smile. She reached out, brushing the Pan’s hair out of her face, just like a mother should. “I also wanted to talk to you, Sheila, if that’s all right.”

  The Pan flinched, her feet touching down. “I don’t like that name. That’s a before-name. I’m the Pan.”

  “Pans have names,” said Wendy calmly. “Remember? Franklin was Pan here when we came. He came through our bedroom window, and he told us if we came with him, we could be children forever, and free forever…”

  “Pans have names, but that doesn’t mean we have to use them,” said the Pan petulantly. “The old Pan wasn’t a good Pan. He lost. Remember? He led his lieutenants against the pirates, and he lost, and he died, and I became Pan in his place. He wasn’t a good Pan. So why should I follow his example?”

  “Because you’re the Pan and I’m your Wendy, but you’re also Sheila, and I’m your sister,” said Wendy gently. She put her hand against the Pan’s cheek. “Remember? Neverland loves me too much to make you forget that.”

  “Of course I remember,” scoffed the Pan. Then she hesitated before admitting, slowly, “I’m just not sure I remember what a sister is…”

  Wendy pulled her hand away. “It’s nothing important,” she said. She straightened, looking at the Pan, and said, “I want to come with you when you attack the pirates tonight.”

  “What? Why? Wendys are only good for getting themselves kidnapped and tied to the mast.”

  “I know. Having me there will confuse the pirates and make it easier for you to win, and then we can get home in time for the feast.” Wendy smiled. “I trust you to rescue me.”

  “Of course I’ll rescue you!” said the Pan, feet leaving the ground again. “I’m the Pan! Rescue is what I do!” She turned cartwheels in the air, crowing, and Wendy watched her, and said nothing.

  There was nothing left for her to say.

  “This is how it goes. The Pan plans battles, and the Wendys win the war.”

  “It isn’t fair.”

  “Cecily.” Edith frowned at her. “Whoever told you childhood would be fair?”

  Time passed; the tide turned. Time, and tides, were dependable that way. The sails of the ships on the horizon grew pregnant with wind, and the pirates of Neverland began the trek to shore. Their decks were packed with men bristling with swords, and their cannons were loaded, ready to unleash hell on the waiting shore. At each ship’s helm was a pirate captain, grim of jaw and dead of eye, steering them inexorably toward battle.

  On the shore, the Pan flew back and forth before her gathered army, her feet pointing straight down and hanging inches above the shore. All of the Lost Children big enough to hold a knife or a spear were there, and their Wendys were with them, leaving only a few behind to keep watch over the younglings. Mermaids bobbed in the surf, their multicolored fins breaking the surface in brief flashes, like captive rainbows, and the sky overhead glowed with the captive aurora of ever-moving fairy wings.

  “The pirates have grown bold of late—too bold,” said the Pan. “They dare our waters even on the days when their passage is forbidden; they steal our stores and raid our berry bushes. Six of our newest Lost Children have been lured out to sea, forsaking play for piracy. We are gathered here today, we are players in this greatest game, because this! This ends tonight!”

  The Lost Children roared their approval. The mermaids slapped their fins against the water, and the fairies chimed as loudly as they could, a hundred bells proclaiming the need for war. Of the Wendys, only the one who looked so very much like the Pan stay
ed silent, her eyes fixed on the surf at her feet. No one paid attention to her, or to the deep sorrow in her eyes.

  “We have lost friends! Brothers and sisters! Remember them! Fly for them! Make vengeance in their names, and then do them the greatest honor that can be done in Neverland: forget them. Today, we have mourned. Today, we grew a little bit older, because you need a heart to grieve, and that which is not heartless can age. Tonight, we avenge. And tomorrow, we will be joyful and heartless once more.”

  This time the roar was louder, because all the Lost Children knew that this was the way of things: when the Pan made a stirring speech, you cheered. Only the Wendys held their silence, because to be a Wendy is to be other than heartless, and so they were already on their way to being older than everyone around them.

  “We fly for Neverland!” proclaimed the Pan, and this roar was the loudest of them all.

  They left the shore by air and by sea, those who could not fly—either because they feared falling or because they had never quite caught the knack—clustered in coracle boats towed by mermaids as they made their way unerringly toward the distant pirate ships.

  Most Wendys could fly, although Neverland etiquette dictated that as mothers, they should keep their feet on the ground as much as possible, to show that they provided the stable center for the chaos of the Lost Children. Cecily had been in Neverland for more than a hundred and fifty years, and still her flight path was shaky and uncertain as she tried to keep pace with her sister, the Pan. As she flew, she stole sidelong glances at the Pan’s face, looking for traces of her twin. Sheila had all but disappeared as the decades slipped by, blurring away into the features of a legend. They still looked exactly alike if you measured only in hair color and eye shape and height, but those were just fripperies—they didn’t matter. Cecily looked like warm fires and hot milk and bedtime stories. Sheila looked like cold winds and wild forests and stolen children coaxed out of nursery windows by the promise of something bigger and better than what they had. They didn’t look anything alike.