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must have known she was serious. He laughed anyway.
    â€œNo grrrls allowed,” he finally said.
    It seemed unlike him—after all, he’d fought against Hook’s Old Guard rigidity, and yet Pan couldn’t see the boi trembling before him, a boi who believed in magic and who was ready to take an oath never to grow up and to serve him loyally. But Pan couldn’t or wouldn’t see her. Naiad was left to peel herself off the cold, pigeon-shit-covered concrete as Pan’s attention turned to some scraps of leather. But that was long ago.
    Wendi and John Michael kept walking behind Pan, and only he knew that they were getting close to Neverland. A flock of pigeons burst from the broken windows on the upper floor of a warehouse, and Wendi gasped.
    Pan only laughed. “That” he said, “is Neverland.” But instead of leading them directly to us, he pointed to a hole in the fence on the other side of the tracks, and led them into an alley. “This is the Jolly Roger, home to Hook and his Pirates. You need to see that first.”
    Pan told them that the Pirates were almost worse than grownups, because they knew better; they knew the life they could have had, but instead pledged their service to Hook, the worst of all. Wendi could feel something in the way that Pan talked of Hook, but she couldn’t guess what it meant. Pan then turned and pointed to a little window, almost completely hidden by a dumpster. “Want to have an adventure?” his crooked grin teased. For a moment, Wendi thought of how wrong it was to trespass, but then she reminded herself that she was a runaway who had only hours before given her consent to Mommy a boi who was probably twice her age. This was not a night for logic. This was a night for breaking rules. They slipped through the window into darkness. Wendi looked back longingly at the sidewalk and the warm glow of the street lamp. Pan hit a switch, and electric wall-mounted candles flickered on, illuminating a room with burgundy walls. Suddenly Wendi recognized the smell that had punched her as soon as they crawled through the window. There was more leather here than either she or John Michael had ever seen—furniture, benches, platforms, and crosses made entirely of leather and steel filled the room. Between the flickering lights hung whips, floggers, cuffs, hoods, and things Wendi didn’t know at all. There were beautiful coils of black rope labelled with the names Smee, Starkey, Jukes, and Cecco.
    â€œThose belong to the Pirates,” sneered Pan. “Hook takes safety to extremes; he doesn’t know how to let go, how to befree. He says it’s part of having ‘good form.’ Hook thinks he’s Old Guard, and good form is everything to him,” finished Pan.
    â€œGood form?” Wendi hesitantly asked.
    Pan grinned. “He’s got rules for everything, and a high standard that he holds everyone, mostly himself, to. For Hook, good form is more than rules. It’s how he constructs the world around him, the expectations he holds for himself and his Pirates. It’s a code of conduct that he never breaks.”
    John Michael pulled cuffs off the wall, fingered the smooth stitching, and then put them back. Next, she grabbed one of the heavy oar-shaped paddles that hung suspended between pegs and playfully swung it toward Wendi. Turning his attention to John Michael, Pan whispered, “All bois in service to me must swear that Hook is always to be left to me. You may battle any of his Pirates in whatever way you please, black and blue if you want, but Hook is mine. Understood?”
    â€œMine” was such a strange word: As in Pan’s lover? His enemy? Wendi didn’t dare ask. She felt almost jealous of the way that Pan had called Hook his, but she didn’t yet understand why. John Michael, eager to prove allegiance, responded with a convincingly quick “Yes, Sir.”
    The Jolly Roger is an old