Laughter at the Academy Page 29

  But they had, once. Before Neverland, before the old Pan died and the new Pan seized his sword.

  Who will the new Pan be when you fall, Sheila? Cecily wondered, and shivered.

  Until that moment, she hadn’t been sure that she would really do it.

  “Pans aren’t like the rest of us,” said Edith, her eyes never leaving Cecily. “We live in Neverland, we play the parts Neverland asks us to play, but we’re just residents. The Pan is Neverland. The Pan is every leaf that falls and every flower that blooms. The Pan is every one of us, from the youngest Lost Child to the oldest Wendy, and without the Pan, everything would fall to pieces and be forgotten. But when the king is the land, sacrifices must be made. There are costs to keeping things in balance. Do you understand?”

  “No,” said Cecily, and yes, said Cecily’s heart, and she knew what she was going to do. Not because she loved the Pan, and not because she loved Neverland, but because she loved her sister. It had been a long, long time since two little girls followed a boy clad in skeleton leaves out their bedroom window, fleeing from adults who raised their hands too quickly and hit too hard. They had flown to Neverland, both of them expecting nothing more than to be welcomed. Instead, they had been torn apart, Cecily gone to the Wendys, and Sheila…Sheila gone to something more. Being the Pan had eaten her up, swallowing her bit by bit, like she was drowning. If she lived much longer, she wouldn’t be Sheila at all. She would just be the Pan, and Cecily would be alone.

  “She needs to lose,” said Edith.

  And Cecily nodded.

  The pirates were ready when the Lost Children arrived, notified of the oncoming attack by Edith’s message even before their sentries spotted the oncoming line of flying children, all led by a flaxen-haired little girl whose gown of skeleton leaves gleamed pale against her tan brown skin. She crowed. The pirates thrust their swords into the air, jeering, and the battle was joined.

  Even in Neverland, even in a place where bedtime stories can go on forever and no one is ever told to go to bed or wash behind their ears, there are some things that are not pretty: were not meant to be pretty, because prettiness would steal their essential power, rendering them impotent and useless. So swords clashed against swords, and steel bit into exposed flesh, and children fell out of the sky like raindrops. Pirates fired arrows up at the Lost Boys and Girls who soared overhead, or down at the mermaids who flashed through the waves, trying to break the rudders and snare the anchor lines.

  The Wendy who had been forced into the war by the Pan took a knife in the chest. He died choking on his own blood and was kicked overboard into the surf. Two of the mermaids seized his body and dragged it under, the fight forgotten in favor of a ready meal. Still the battle went on, the smell of gunpowder and blood wiping everything else away.

  Cecily hung at the edges of the battle, waiting for the sign that Edith had promised her. A hand grasped her wrist, spinning her around, and she found herself looking into the tired, bearded face of a man she almost knew, if she looked at him just right.

  “You…you were Franklin’s Wendy,” she said, her words tumbling into the space between the cannon fire. “I remember you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Are you here to pay the cost of war?”

  No, cried her heart, and “Yes,” said her mouth, and he nodded and pulled her close, flipping her around so that her back was against his broad pirate’s chest. He pressed his sword to her throat.

  “Do not be afraid,” he murmured, and bellowed, “Pan! Come and face me, girl!”

  The Pan jerked toward the sound of her name, eyes going wide as she saw her sister captive in a pirate’s arms. “Let my Wendy go!” she shouted, darting across the battlefield toward the pirate who held Cecily. “Fight me like a man!”

  “Ah, but lass, it’s never a man as kills a Pan,” said the pirate. His hand did something clever at his belt, and suddenly Cecily was holding a knife, small and sharp and wicked.

  She remembered this; remembered Franklin shouting and diving for the pirate who held his Wendy. But the pirate had stabbed him in the stomach like a coward, and Franklin had died. Wasn’t that what had happened?

  The knife’s hilt was patterned with the whispery bones of skeleton leaves. Cecily felt it with her fingers, and felt the story shift around her, finally coming clear.

  “I love you, Sheila,” she whispered, and the battle still raging all around them took her words away as her sister dove closer and closer, shouting all the while.

  In the end, Cecily didn’t even have to stab her.

  All she had to do was hold the knife.

  Sometimes a war isn’t about how many casualties can be piled up on both sides; sometimes it’s about one. One body falling as gravity suddenly remembers that it has a claim here. One body striking the deck of a pirate ship. One little girl overwhelmed with grief and rage, turning to bury a knife in the throat of a pirate captain who doesn’t resist, because he’s been where she’s standing, he’s felt what she feels, and he knows that in the moment the knife slid home, she grew a heart so big and so broken that Neverland can no longer hold her. She’ll grow up, this girl, until her feet fit perfectly in his boots and she steers the armada away from land, a pirate leading pirates, to wait for the day that Neverland needs to make a sacrifice once more. She doesn’t need to know what a Fisher King is. Neverland knows for her.

  Sometimes a war isn’t about an army. Sometimes it’s all about one person. But which one?

  Does Neverland go to war for Wendy, or the Pan?

  The death of the Pan filled the Lost Children with rage, and seeing the Pan’s Wendy kill the pirate that had killed the Pan filled them with strength. They could win this, and they would win it, for Neverland. For the Pan.

  Bit by bit they beat the pirates back, until the horizon was free of those foul sails, and the Lost Children—the ones who survived—turned their eyes toward home.

  “Where’s the Pan’s Wendy?” asked a little boy.

  No one knew the answer.

  “She must have died,” said Gantry. He’d been one of the Pan’s lieutenants, and so his words carried a certain weight; what’s more, there was a wild new light in his eye, one that spoke of flying, and lying, and never, never growing old. He was not yet dressed in skeleton leaves, but he may as well have been. “Poor Wendy.”

  “Poor Wendy,” murmured the other children.

  “Now come on—let’s race back to shore,” said Gantry, and took off like a shot, laughing. The others flew after him, the war and its costs already beginning to fade from memory. The blood on the water would take longer to disperse, but given a little time that, too, would be gone.

  It was a beautiful morning in Neverland, and it would be long and long before anyone thought that it might be fun to go to war.

  Please Accept My Most Profound Apologies for What Is About to Happen (But You Started It)

  Well.

  This happened.

  I really can’t say much about it, other than “I am reasonably sure you could hand this story to literally anyone who has ever met me, from preschool on, and they would be able to identify the author from the first couple of paragraphs.”

  To the citizens of our fine metropolis:

  Hello.

  You don’t know me, although you should: I’ve lived among you for years. You’ve sat next to me on the bus. We’ve eaten at the same McDonalds. The woman in the Ian Malcolm T-shirt at the midnight showing of Jurassic World who started sobbing when the overture began? That was me. (Although I challenge anyone who remembers what it is to be twelve years old and committed to the fantasy not to start crying when the music goes “da-da-DAH-da-DAH” and the Park gates open and they realize that they’re finally, finally going home.)

  But I digress.

  It is important you understand that I am one of you. I am no imported menace, come from some far shore to trouble your day-to-day lives. I am homegrown. I went to school with your children, enduring their taunts and endless attempts to ma
ke me conform to their surprisingly sophisticated ideas of “normal.” How lucky they were to have parents like you, who would enforce gender and social norms so stringently that a girl in blue jeans with a book about dinosaurs became an obvious target for re-education! How unfortunate I was to have an absent father and an alcoholic mother, neither of whom was in a position to make me stop distinguishing myself from the mob.

  This is where my therapist would say that I have a rare combination of Oedipal and Electra Complexes, with a dash of abandonment complex to spice the mix. I do not wish to have sexual congress with either of my parents, and never have, but their absence has shaped my life in ways I could not prevent. Maybe if they’d been there, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today.

  This is, in any rational world, an oversimplification. I think I would still be some variation on myself. I think the things about me that have brought us to this point were inborn. I was not made by Nature to be an herbivore, or even a carnivore, red of tooth and claw. No, I was made to a greater purpose.

  I was made to be a comet.

  I was twelve years old when Jurassic Park came to the theater near my house. I stole five dollars from my mother’s purse, using it to purchase a ticket (ostensibly to the bloodless, safe children’s movie playing at the other end of the building) and a box of popcorn before I slipped into a red-upholstered seat, and into the flickering splendor of my future.

  I do not need to describe the film to you. I want to. Please understand, I want to more than I want anything else in this moment. Dinosaurs are what my therapist terms my “special interest,” and I have what can only be described as a Pavlovian desire to share them with the world. I want to tell you about every second of my experience. Not just the movie itself—I could recite the movie, word for word, scene by scene, but why bother? You can stream it yourself, through any one of a number of services. You are an intelligent person, whoever you are, or you wouldn’t be the one reading this letter: I assume that, as an intelligent person, you have already sought out and devoured one of the great cinematic masterpieces of all time.

  But it’s not just about the movie. It’s about the way I reacted to it, the way my skin got tight and my breath got quick and my heart seemed simultaneously to be freezing and catching fire. It’s about the way I stopped shoveling popcorn into my mouth halfway through, forgetting to chew, forgetting to breathe, because what I was seeing was taking up so much of my attention that I could barely remember that I wasn’t there with them, running through the jungles, smelling the hot breath of raptors on my neck.

  It’s about belonging. It’s about looking into a filmmaker’s vision of what life was like millions of years ago, and suddenly, absolutely knowing what it was to belong.

  I tried to tell the other kids at school. Some of them liked to brag about how they went to the movies every weekend, how their parents always bought them candy and let them put gallons of butter on the popcorn, drowning it, preserving it like a mosquito trapped in amber. I thought that for sure they would have seen the movie, and that it would give us something in common, something we could throw between us like a rope. It would anchor me, and they would use it to pull me into the safe harbor of the norm. We would have a shared experience. I would be accepted.

  It is not pride which leads me to say that I am of immense intellect, especially when compared to the average citizen of our city. I am a genius by any measure. I have made errors in my lifetime, as have we all, but they have always been failings of ambition or of understanding, not of intellect.

  The greatest error I ever made was in believing the children who tormented me would suddenly accept me simply because we had seen the same movie. They laughed at me for even making the attempt. They called me “freak” and “nerd” and “loser,” and other words I won’t write down, not even here, in the chronicle of why I have done what I have done, why I have set in motion what I have set in motion. They can’t take back those words, almost thirty years in the past; those words are forever. So are my actions. It pleases me to know that, soon enough, only my actions will be remembered. They’ll overshadow everything else. Even the casual cruelty of children.

  So I was spurned and I was shunned and I was more alone than ever, because I had dared to attempt to be something else. Children are like bees. They have an inherent knowledge of social structure and caste systems within the hive, and the drone who deviates will be stung back into position. They forced me to the fringes. I took refuge in the library. I began reading everything I could get my hands on about dinosaurs, evolutionary biology, and the science of genetic engineering. Surely there would be answers there.

  Surely one of the books would have a map, sketched in pencil and visible only to the worthy, telling me how to reach Jurassic Park, which must exist somewhere in the world, hidden in the deepest jungle, overseen by the kindly Dr. Wu, who was already hard at work on a newer, better generation of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs that would understand that humans do not tolerate deviation. Dinosaurs that would know to behave themselves until the Park was open, until they would be standing in a target-rich environment and could better make their wishes understood. Dr. Wu was smart. He could make dinosaurs that were smarter. Children are so often smarter than their parents.

  The average person reads at a rate of 200 to 250 words per minute. Please keep this in mind.

  There was no second Park, of course: there is no Dr. Wu. If I wanted dinosaurs in this world, I needed to find a way to make them myself. I deduced this somewhere between the ages of fourteen and fifteen, during the summer I spent in a coma after a couple of the clever neighborhood boys decided to escalate their assaults, taking them from simple teasing and petty theft to outright assault.

  You may know who I am now. The situation made the papers. My mother saved them all while I was hospitalized. Local girl attacked. Unknown assailants still at large. But they weren’t unknown, were they? Not really. I told their names to anyone who would listen as soon as I woke up. I gave descriptions, addresses, everything. And it didn’t matter. They may have beaten me hard enough with a baseball bat that for a time, the doctors didn’t think I was ever going to wake up; they may have done their best to murder me for the crime of being slightly different from them; but they didn’t kill me. They didn’t do anything that couldn’t be written off as “youthful hijinks gotten out of hand” or excused with a calm “they have their whole lives in front of them.”

  They tried to take my life away from me. They tried to make me stop. They did everything they could to remove me from the world, and why? Because I liked to talk about dinosaurs? Because I wasn’t exactly the way they wanted me to be? But somehow their futures were more important than my present, and they got away with it again. One big thing in a lifetime defined by little things, and one very important lesson. Humans will always defend the offspring of the privileged, if allowed to do so.

  (Sometimes I’ll admit I’ve wondered whether the attack might not have had a more sinister cause: whether my attackers might have been overcome by consciousnesses from the future, disembodied and sent back to prevent me from achieving my life’s work. Tempting as it is to turn a defeat into a validation, doing so would be admitting defeat all over again. If there are time travelers in the future of this world, I am about to fail. And I refuse to fail.)

  You have been reading for approximately 1,600 words now. If your reading speed matches the average, it has been eight minutes since you opened this file and beheld my salutation. At this moment, you should be experiencing shortness of breath, tinnitus, and a dull ache in your joints. Perhaps you were unaware of these things until I pointed them out. People are remarkably good at ignoring small discomforts.

  I recovered from my injuries, obviously. I never got my day in court, but I got something that was arguably better: I got blood money. Payments, anonymous donations to my care and education, totaling more than a million dollars. It’s amazing what guilt and the desire to avoid a scandal will do. I ran the numbers, did the math, made a f
ew casual comments about how affording college would still be so difficult, and wouldn’t it be a shame if I had to stay in town forever, talking to people about what had happened to me. I was offered three scholarships inside of the week.

  Even people like me can learn to play the game, if you insist on teaching us. If you won’t leave us alone.

  Protecting the money from my mother was surprisingly easy; the numbers were too large to make sense to her, and so she left me alone. I kept my head down, wore a back brace through most of high school, made few friends, never dated. I understood that I was not part of the herd. I understood that I was not welcome in this particular primeval world. I attracted as little attention to myself as possible, and I endured, keeping my eyes on the bright speck of light approaching in my own secret sky. My comet. My beautiful comet.

  College was almost enough to change my mind. There’s no shame in admitting that I was tempted. Humanity is not entirely bad, after all, and for a mind like mine, the halls of academia were uniquely designed to provide temptation. I closed my eyes at night and saw my instructors, my fellow students, my future, instead of the kindly smiling face of Dr. Wu. Surely he would understand if I changed my course. Surely he would see that sometimes there are options apart from mass extinction.

  There were many small extinctions before the mass die-off which ended the first age of dinosaurs. There were many second chances. Humanity could be afforded one as well.