Neverland
Authors: Anna Katmore
Neverland
GENRE: YA/FANTASY
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, businesses, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
NEVERLAND
Copyright © 2014 by Anna Katmore
Cover design by Laura J Miller,
www.anauthorsart.com
Edited by Annie Cosby,
www.AnnieCosby.com
All cover art copyright © 2014 by Anna Katmore
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
As usual in this place, I want to say thanks to a few awesome people out there.
Mom, Dad … I love you. I don’t know where I would be without your support and encouragement.
Johann and Kevin … You two are my everything.
Silvia … Thank you for dragging me away from my books whenever it gets too much and I need a break.
Lynda … You know you’re my online bestie, and I love you for the wonderful work you do in your critiques.
Jessa Markert … Thanks for being a lovely beta-reader and giving me awesome feedback.
Some time before I started writing this book, I asked my readers to lend me their names for some of the characters. It was totally amazing how many of them answered to that post. Unfortunately, there aren’t as many characters in this book as I got beautiful names and the choice was incredibly hard.
Here’s who made it into the book…
Angelina McFarland
(Angel, the heroine)
Brittney Renae Goff
(The fairy bug, one of the twins)
Paulina
(The honey bunny, one of the twins)
Tameeka Taylor
(Tami, the pixie)
Remona Karim and Karima Olayshia Bre’Shun
(The fairy sisters)
Thank you for naming my characters!
Table of contents:
Chapter 1
A LAUGHING BUNDLE of strawberry blond hair squirms on my bed. “Angel! Angel, stop! I’m gonna pee my pants!”
Immediately, I stop tickling my baby sister, sit down on the bedside, and put her on my lap, giving her one of those
you-do-that-and-I-rip-off-your-stuffed-bunny’s-head
looks. She knows I would never really do it, but the threat works every time.
At that moment, the exact likeness of the five-year-old on my legs comes walking through my door. Only this one’s wrapped in her purple fairy dress that has a pair of net wings attached at the back. The chiffon buckles angrily, and I wonder if she’s been sitting on the floor with her dolls for the past half hour.
She waves her glowing pink fairy wand that has a star tip in my face. “Why is Paulina screaming like the Barbie Dreamhouse is burning down again?”
The Barbie Dreamhouse didn’t burn down…completely. It caught fire when we lit some candles on Christmas Eve a few weeks ago. Dad draped a blanket—Mom’s favorite cashmere quilt—over the wooden house and extinguished the flames. The house was saved, but its west wing needed reconstruction and my sisters bugged me to paint the sitting room walls candy pink to cover the smoke marks.
“She’s screaming because the ugly Captain Hook is on the hunt for little princesses again,” I snarl, before putting Paulina back on my bed and chasing after a squeaking Brittney Renae, who makes a dash for the hallway and, in her polished, dark-red, patent-leather shoes, runs for her life.
I catch her right before she makes it to our parents’ bedroom and would have slammed the door in my face, no doubt. With one arm around her tiny body, I scoop her up and flop with her onto the king-size bed that will stay empty once again tonight because our parents are at another charity thing, which they do almost every weekend. I claw my index finger like it’s the ruthless pirate’s silver hook. “I’m the captain of the pirates, and I’ll slice you with my hook from your belly to your nose,” I say in a deep, rumbling voice.
Brittney Renae buries her face against my shoulder and giggles. She bursts into laughter like a volcano exploding as soon as I dig my fingers between her ribs.
There’s nothing in this world that delights me more than the sound of the twins’ laughs. Their carefree temperament catches me every time, whether I’m stuck in the middle of studies for my high school graduation in just a few months, or helping Miss Lynda with the household.
Mom and Dad don’t like me giving our stone-aged housekeeper a hand in the kitchen.
Girls from a good family don’t get their hands dirty
is what they taught me all my life. I wasn’t allowed to play in the mud with other kids, nor could I wear torn jeans with hoodies, or listen to rock music in my room without headphones on.
When the twins’ nanny moved away last spring and my parents couldn’t find a replacement that did an equally good job, my chance for a change had come. I offered to watch the girls on weekends, if my parents would allow me to wear normal clothes instead of the expected blouses, pantsuits or classy dresses—at least inside the house and as long as we weren’t expecting any guests for a dinner banquet. I hate being dressed like one of the Queen’s closest confidants.
Mom agreed after a long discussion dominated by sighs. Dad insisted they keep looking for a new nanny, but when the twins made their huge puppy eyes at him, he gave in. No one in this family can resist Paulina’s or Brittney Renae’s soulful looks when they push the pretty-please button.
Dad’s condition to let me wear my own choice of clothes inside was that I meet Jasper Allensik, the son of his business partner, who apparently was related to the royals in some convoluted way. I agreed but later nailed Dad down on the fact that the deal was: I only had to date the guy if I liked him at least sixty-five percent. Which I did not.
Jasper Allensik is a jerk. He’s tall, thin, wears his oiled black hair in a side part and drinks tomato juice at every meal he eats, which again comes out through his nose if something absolutely not-funny makes him laugh, like a ridiculous article in the
Financial Times
.
After a long school day in London, I like drinking strawberry milk with my fries if I have a chance to drop in at Burger King, but I never release the milk through my nose, laughing or not.
We usually don’t have strawberry milk at home, because Dad isn’t a big fan of that, and neither do we get to eat fries. Miss Lynda is advised to serve things like lobster, chicken breast, and sometimes even caviar on toast. Brittney Renae and Paulina are allowed to skip the fish-egg antipasti, but from the time I turned twelve, I was told to get used to the god-awful stuff, so I wouldn’t embarrass my parents again by spitting a mouthful back into the bowl in front of their guests. Yeah, sometimes it’s just exhausting to be the firstborn in George McFarland’s house.
I grab Brittney Renae by her waist and set her on her feet. “Now you have to make their bed again,” she says, waving her wand at me.
I obey. Miss Lynda makes the twins’ beds at least five times a day to keep my parents pleased, since they are sticklers for tidiness. I make my own bed every morning and try to keep it that way until the evening, which doesn’t happen often so I remake it as often as Miss Lynda does the twins’ beds. But to frolic with my sisters in my parents’ bed is a sacrosanct no-no. We aren’t even allowed in this room. But George and Mary are out, so who would stop us from turning the mansion into a playground?
I pull at the sheets’ ends and smooth them with my palms until they are perfectly straight again. The little fairy bug has left me alone and probably went back to her room to continue playing tea party with her dolls. As soon as I turn off the light in the room and step out into the wide carpeted hallway, Paulina skips into my arms. I lift her up and wonder why she’s grinning like a birthday clown. It usually means she has a brilliant idea…or that Miss Lynda smuggled some homemade cookies into the McFarland house, which happened just this afternoon.
“What is it, honey bunny?” I ask and rake my fingers through her long, straight hair that’s thick like weeds.
“I have a surprise for you.”
Uh oh.
Her last surprise gave me a strand of green hair. Thank goodness finger paint isn’t a permanent dye. I shroud my grimace with a fake smile. “Great! Let’s see it.”
“It’s a tattoo.”
“Bloody hell!”
Paulina instantly covers her mouth with her tiny hands and sucks in a shocked breath, but I don’t care. My parents aren’t here to send me to my room for swearing. In a slight panic, I put my sister down, squat in front of her, and shove up the sleeves of her red panda-bear sweater, one at a time, checking her arms for images of any kind.
She giggles. “Not me, silly.”
Phew!
My mother would have killed me.
“It’s your name, so you have to put it on,” Paulina informs me, and my chin knocks against my chest.
“What?”
She holds out her hand und uncurls her fist. In her palm lies a paper snippet with the word
Angel
on it. No one but the twins calls me that, and it’s the only word in the world they can spell yet. On their demand, I had to teach them—over an entire week. If it wasn’t for the cute reason that they couldn’t say Angelina properly when they learned to speak, it would have been totally ridiculous that I was called Angel. Seriously, I look like anything but. I didn’t inherit Mom’s angelic strawberry blond locks but instead Dad’s raven black hair, which I wear nowadays in a chin-length bob. My skin is pale and my dark brown eyes stand out from the rest of my face.
I take the cutout from my sister’s hand and examine it. It’s one of those tattoos you find in Disney princess magazines. The letters are curvy and purple with a mist of small stars underneath. Fantastic. And she wants me to put that where? On my forehead so my parents can blow a gasket about it in the morning?
As if she can read my mind, Paulina shrugs. “We can put that on the inside of your forearm. You always wear those black sweaters. Mommy won’t see it.”
Who could ever say no to a hopeful heart-shaped face like that? I blow out a resigned breath and make a mental note to scrub the tattoo off tomorrow morning before joining my family downstairs for breakfast. “All right. Let’s do it.”
I usher her across the hallway into the bathroom. The light comes on as soon as we open the door and reflects in the shiny peach and white tiles all over the place. I sit down on the edge of the oval white tub and watch the busy dwarf pull out the stool from under the washbasin so she can step on it and reach the faucet. She then brings a wet cloth and tampers with my arm while I patiently wait.
When she’s done and radiantly happy, the fairy bug appears in the doorway. “What are you two doing in here?” she asks and stems her little fists on her hips. For once, she didn’t bring her wand.
“I tattooed Angel’s name on her forearm,” Paulina informs her.