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brownstone whose basement room has been restored and made to appear antique and elegant. While Pan talked to John Michael about Hook, Wendi inspected a wooden table carved with intricate ships and waves. She had been crouching to look more closely at asailing ship so detailed you could see sailors on the tiny deck preparing the sails for the carved storm approaching. When she stood, her eyes met the gleam of steel. Arranged on the tabletop was an array of hooks, beautiful ones of fancy shining metal. In the back row was one of medium size, not as elaborate as the rest. The steel was polished to a shine, but it was otherwise almost ordinary in appearance. Next to it was a little black card, like the ones that had sat in front of the rope coils. In the same golden script, Wendi read the name: Pan.
    â€œI ruined him.” Pan’s voice pulled Wendi back. Pan told the two of them how, years ago, Pan had thrown a piece of Hook to the Crocodile. They almost didn’t believe him. John Michael didn’t mean to be disrespectful, but until now, she hadn’t fully understood the cruelty of the world they had just entered.
    Wendi wanted to ask a question, but there was a sound outside the door, the unmistakable sound of heavy boots on stairs. Quickly Pan flicked off the light. John Michael had stashed herself under a table, but Wendi stupidly stood frozen. Pan pushed her toward the window.
    â€œI’ll meet you at Neverland!” His hoarse whisper echoed in her ears as she ran. “Second streetlight on the right and straight on till Morning Street,” was all Pan told Wendi about how to get to Neverland. He purposely didn’t give her enough information to find Neverland; he didn’t yet trust her, but at that moment, Wendi trusted him completely.

5
    Hook’s Dirty Truth
    W ithout Pan around, things at Neverland were usually quiet. It’s like the magic just evaporated when he was away. Sometimes us bois would stage battles with each other, but usually there was more than enough of that when Pan was home, so when he went out on one of his adventures, we tended to keep to ourselves. It was hard to find joy in anything when Pan wasn’t with us. Sometimes we talked about the past, or what we could remember of it, anyway, because birth families, and especially parents, were a forbidden topic when Pan was around. Most of us couldn’t remember much of anything from before we fell out of our prams or were pushed out of them. We’ve all got reasons for having left our parents. I don’t want to remember mine.
    Mothers are the kind of grownups that Pan and I hate more than any others; I understood completely why Pan would forbid us from talking about them. This is where Slightly and I disagreed—she felt the need to flaunt her memories, all thegood ones, anyway, the big family dinners, vacations to the beach, that kinda shit. Things didn’t get bad for her until after her mother died. Cancer, I think. Slightly didn’t like to talk about what came next, the group homes she had to live in because her perfect little extended family was too busy with their picket-fence lives to make room for an orphan. Slightly usually ignored that part of the story, and instead talked about her perfect mother and showed off her pink rosary beads. It’s easy to make a saint out of someone who’s gone. Slightly was so pretentious, always talking like she was better than us because she graduated high school and could have gone to college. It made me want to just punch her for not appreciating how lucky she was to be away in our own world. I never understand what Pan saw in her. There were six of us bois in Neverland before Wendi and John Michael arrived. The number of us bois could shift dramatically, because the world’s a dangerous place. I mean, it wasn’t uncommon for a boi to disappear—or die. If you’re going to fall out of your pram, I guess that’s just something that