Lost Boi (14 page)

“If you go to the hospital tonight, you are no longer my bois,” Pan replied. “You aren't overdosing anymore. You feel like shit, and you should. You will be sick, and maybe you'll think differently before chasing the Crocodile again,” Pan said coldly from his hammock.

I went to Pan, but before I could say anything he gave me a look. “Surely you aren't doubting me, are you, boi?” he said. I went back to bed. Besides battling harder than anyone else, what bonded us was our love of these bois, our belief
that Neverland was the way to save lost and broken kidz, to keep them not only alive but safe and protected. That night, I started to lose respect for Pan. It wasn't something we could talk about.

I started to fight a lot with John Michael. I wanted to break her face. John Michael's lack of respect for Pan, perhaps because it reflected my own unexpressed feelings, brought me to quick anger. Just the sight of her made me feel worse than dope-sick. I kept trying to initiate battle, thinking that might take the edge off. I'm the kind of boi who breaks all the conference rules and plays mad. She isn't that kind of boi. She turned me down and asked me if I had something I needed to process. That only made me angrier.

It wasn't against the rules to be angry like that, to want someone's blood. We'd all pledged blood, but we weren't permitted to keep secrets. I was supposed to talk to Pan. My rage was the first real secret I kept from him. I didn't even know why I did it, maybe because I didn't want to tell him that the magic was slipping away. It's not like I went out and started planning insubordination; it just happened. Wendi knew, even though I didn't tell her. “Mommy always knows,” she would whisper as she tucked me in. She didn't tell Pan either, and so it became our first secret.

Neverland began to feel small. From the moment I'd arrived, I'd been like Pan, never wanting anything else, never lusting for a different life. Other bois did, and that's why they left. It wasn't sudden; I think I would have noticed if I had
come home and suddenly seen our world through another's eyes. I could have taken that to Pan, I could have asked for his help, but my questions and dissatisfaction rolled in slowly, like a fog, and once I was surrounded, I couldn't see his magic. All of Neverland had changed, or maybe it was me who changed.

What had once been mystery and adventure now felt like a burden. I saw the empty cupboards, felt the knotted rope in my stomach when there hadn't been enough food to free-box, when Mommy stood and stirred an empty pot and heaped imaginary pasta into our chipped cups. One night it rained so hard that the pigeons' nests and our hammocks flooded, so we all roosted together on the kitchen floor. Once this would have been an adventure, but now I just felt wet and cold. It was only Pan who found magic in the scabies we got from the Mermaids and the bed bugs that came from the mattress abandoned by the Urban Primitives that we carried into Neverland for Mommy. It looked really nice with the heavy, metal police barricade we snagged after the Pride parade to use as her headboard. The whole setup was great for bondage, if you didn't mind the bugs in the mattress. I loved being Pan's lost boi, but I couldn't stop thinking of all the kids even more lost than me and how I couldn't help them. Pan didn't know that my ability to believe was faltering; I just couldn't reach him. No, let me not dishonour Sir. The truth was, I didn't want to reach Pan any more. I let our world, the one he and I built, the one in which his belief never wavered, slowly slip away.

Mommy had taken to calling Pan “Daddy” all the time. I hadn't ever had a Daddy, so I was no expert, but I knew that to be a Daddy, you had to be a grownup, Pan's greatest sworn enemies. He was my Sir, captain of adventure and danger, who left us bloody, glassy-eyed, and on our bruised knees, begging him for more, asking him to turn us inside out, fling us through his slingshot. Anything that he wished was all that we wanted. Mommy thought it was disrespectful that we didn't play family the way she did, but I didn't want no fucking Daddy.

One afternoon, us bois had been wrestling and battling all through the kitchen, and just generally being nuisances. Wendi told us to go outside so “Mommy and Daddy could have some grownup time.” The words slipped like silk from her mouth. I don't think she even realized what she'd said. Pan was in the rafters and couldn't hear, which is all that kept his fist from her cheek. John Michael had a Twin in a head-lock, and Curly looked like he was trying to sneak into the bedroom with the other Twin, whose hand had slipped past the loose waistband of his jeans when Mommy's order came down. I was the only one who heard her slip. I flashed anger then worry, but kept it off my face.

I made the decision right then to disobey her, and I sneaked back in as the bois hit the street, half going to spange coins outside the diner and the others to the Lagoon to see if any of the Mermaids were home. Alone, I climbed onto the dumpster behind Neverland and peered in through a sooty
window cracked with BB holes. I lay on the dumpster with my head just below the window. I knew that Pan and Wendi, curled together on the futon, couldn't see me. I thought Erebos might bark at the window and blow my cover, but Wendi had given him a bone she pulled from her purse. She must have had a special night planned for Pan and didn't want any distractions.

I felt bad about spying on Pan. I was mad and disappointed, but my loyalty ran deep. He'd made sure of that when he took me. I thought about my first night in Neverland and how uncertain I'd been of my place with the other lost bois. But I knew, for the first time, when I was under Pan's boot, that I was where I belonged. Watching Mommy and Pan, I realized that I had become one of those bois who'd spied on my most private moments when I first came to Neverland, watching me from their hammocks, sizing me up. Their eyes had glinted in the weak street light that pushed through the very same filthy windows that I now, all these years later, looked through. I saw Wendi tighten her apron strings, reapply her lipstick, and run red nails through her long hair. A Mommy's motions. Pan sat on the futon, Tink perched on his shoulder and picking at his hair. I thought I saw a flash of silver in her beak, but I'm sure it was just the light. Pan's eyes never left Wendi. He was as devoted a boi to her as I was to him.

The night I gave myself to Pan, he left me alone in that hammock. I didn't take my jeans off, and he didn't try to stay. I throbbed against the ropes. I had sworn my allegiance to
Pan in blood. It would not be the last time, but that's the night I will always remember, because he took me with him. My two stars, birthed in a burst of blood at the tip of his knife on my right shoulder, shot pain through my body like I'd never felt before. I was home. I was Pan's lost boi.

From my spot on the dumpster now, I spied as Wendi gave herself another once-over in the cracked mirror. She crossed the room and perched next to Pan, stockinged leg draped over the futon edge, torn from snagging fingernails and fence tops. Wendi's scuffed heel dangled, clinging to her toe. I ground myself against the ridges on the dumpster's lid; I couldn't help myself, even if it makes me sound like a peeping Tom. I promise it didn't feel that creepy. It was hot and forbidden, watching Mommy and Pan. His hands rounded her hips, fist clenching the knot of her apron strings, pulling up the gingham fabric of her dress to get to her. I should have looked away.

Pan took Wendi there on the futon, his filthy hands disappearing into her. She was beautiful as she surrendered to him, but it was Pan I couldn't look away from. He was fucking her hard, the muscles in his right arm flexing under tattoos and track-mark scars. I loved his arms with their ropes of muscles that held me down, choked me out, or helped me up. My eyes had been locked on the place where wrist met grrrl, and then I saw his face, sweat dripping from his temples, contorted into a pained look I didn't recognize. Rivers of tears mixed with the sweat. Pan doesn't cry; he tells us so. Wendi's eyes were
closed, her head thrown back, sweat pooling in the hollow of her throat, her hands clenched into fists. I've fucked her enough to know that she was close. Out of respect, I didn't want to look at Pan's face, but there was a burning I couldn't avoid. And then his green eyes, glassy with tears, met mine. I moaned. Wendi came with an earthquake-tremor and a cry so loud it drowned mine. I didn't understand what was happening to me or Pan or Wendi or the bois—any of us.

I flattened myself lower on the dumpster, but I didn't have to peek through the window to know that Wendi was nestled into him, her hands playing with the short hairs at the base of his neck. She wanted to seduce him. I'd heard her talking about us, about their bois. She didn't include him as a boi. Wendi discussed our training. I knew I should probably not be listening to this part especially, but I didn't want to leave. Wendi spoke about our future. Her language was careful but firm, and she wanted Pan to take a firmer hand with us. She wanted less unplanned battles, more structure. She said, “Structure is what little bois need.”

Pan had been silent as Mommy spoke of the leather bois she would polish us into, the fine representatives of leather community we would be, how it was their responsibility to raise the family right so that we could go out into the world, so that we could make them proud.

“But being Daddy to these bois … it's just a game, just pretend. Right, Wendi?” Pan asked.

I pulled my hands under my chest to keep my heart from
banging against the dumpster lid, and I peered up through the window. Mommy wiped tears from her face with the corner of her apron, then began to pick at the fraying edge, scraping off clumps of mascara. At first I thought the conversation was over, but then, so quiet I could hardly make out her words, she pleaded, “But these bois, they belong to us, to you and me?” Her voice trailed off into an accidental question mark.

I saw Pan shake his head but couldn't make out his words. Wendi wanted us to be a family, not a feral pack. Like any good Mommy, she wanted to tame and housebreak all of us, even Pan. But we were wild and vicious, and that's what always made us real.

“What do you really want me for?” Wendi finally whispered, crumpling into the corner of the futon, as far away as she could get from Pan. This was not what she had run away for. There was a coldness in her voice that was new.

Pan pulled himself to his fullest height, straightened his binder and T-shirt, and looked directly into her eyes. “I want to be the most devoted boi, Mommy!”

11

Tootles' Story

I
rejoined the bois but didn't breathe a word of anything that I had seen or heard. That would have been even more dishonourable. Besides, I didn't want to know any of it.

Pan had brought a Mommy to take care of us, but mostly to tell us stories. It was her stories that Pan had first fallen for, and every night, after we climbed into our hammocks, she told us stories that were dark and yet beautiful. Wendi could string words together into feelings in our fucked, damaged boi bodies and make them into bodies we wanted to think about, be in. Instead of being embarrassed, us bois began to hope her next story would be about us, and not a poem about femme solidarity among the Mermaids, or worse, about one of the other bois. Never before had there been such competition or jealousy between us. Before Wendi, we'd been a unit of Pan's sworn bois. Mommy was slowly pulling us apart, calling us out in turn, and writing about each of her bois as
though we were individuals. She articulated John Michael's wit, Curly's humour, or the way she felt when I wrapped my hands around her waist. Wendi had stopped going to the open mic since she came to Neverland, but she performed for us in the kitchen. Pan, of course, still liked to listen to her stories—though like the rest of us bois, he liked them best when they were about him. He tolerated stories about his bois, laughed as she read tales about the Mermaids, and punched walls when, on rare occasions, she shared anecdotes about parents and grownups, about life before Pan. She hadn't forgotten where she came from, and Pan couldn't seem to make her.

I don't know what got into Wendi. Perhaps she was punishing Pan for not being the kind of boi she wanted, but one evening, she announced that she would be telling us a story. All us bois kneeled around her, rowdy and boasting to each other that surely the story would be about us. But Mommy's story was about Mr and Mrs Darling and their house. It was about her school, the GSA, and the college she was to have attended. She talked of a world so foreign it might as well have been outer space to us bois, except to John Michael. Once, I punched the pretentious little snot when she said she knew the Darlings. I don't know why I hit her, but I just didn't like her knowing more about Wendi than I did. And I didn't want her to have had another life before Neverland. I was no one before Pan.

Wendi loves a happy ending, and she'll do anything to get
one. All her stories, no matter how gritty, must end happily. On this night, Wendi was telling us about her life before she ran way with Pan, before I shot her, before Pan tied the apron around her waist, before she was my Mommy. I understood why Pan locked himself in the bathroom and punched the walls. He hated stories like this—stories without us, stories about the kind of grrrl Wendi had been and the kind of woman that she was supposed to grow into.

Mommy was breaking the rules. Had she been anyone else, I would have punished her myself for such an infraction. She wanted us to feel sorry for the Darlings, for these grownups. She was asking us to think of how they must have felt the night that she and John Michael went out the window with Pan, the night that she came to us. I crossed my arms across my chest. Washington had flown down and was perched on my hand, but I refused to laugh at his antics and scowled as Mommy continued her story.