Neverland Read Online Free PDF

arm. “Don’t go.”
    “I want to go.”
    “Don’t go and I’ll show you. What I got.”
    “Where is it?” I asked while Julianne counted to five and then ten and then fifteen on the floor below.
    “I keep it someplace. Someplace where you ain’t supposed to go.”

3
    On Gull Island we went barefoot. It didn’t matter that Aunt Cricket would be there warning us that hookworms were no laughing matter and that broken glass grew like kudzu along the shoreline; it didn’t matter that the summer before, Nonie had sliced a neat wedge from her heel when she came down on a fancy fishing lure that had fallen out of my Daddy’s tackle box; nor did it make any difference whatsoever that we would all, on occasion, slip into a fresh pile of dog doo and have to not only hose the flats of our feet down, but put up with endless ribbing and the uncertain feeling that somehow the stuff was never completely washed away.
    As Sumter and I stepped down off the front porch into the fat slab of mid-morning sunlight, I noticed that my cousin was still wearing his sandals and socks. “Hey,” I said, pointing to his feet.
    “She’ll go into conniptions,” he whispered. I didn’t know why he was whispering when no one else was outside with us, nobody was on the porch, and, as far as I knew, our mothers were upstairs with the baby and both our fathers were down at the Footlong Nightcrawlers-Live Bait store over to the West Island; Grammy Weenie couldn’t hear much, and Julianne and
my sisters were already halfway down the steep path that ran down the bluff to the shore.
    But Sumter kept his finger pressed against his lips to shush me until we were farther into the scraggly woods.
    “The Weenie lets her mind roam,” he said. “She knows what I’m gonna do before I do it. My mama bought me a new croquet set, and the Weenie yelled at me through one whole game because she knew I was up for cheating.”
    “You mean like a mind reader, like Kreskin?”
    “I mean like a witch. In olden days they would’ve burned her. Oh, how I wish these were the olden days!” He plopped himself down on a stump and began removing his sandals. “Something about the Weenie—if I’m anywhere within a mile of her, she knows everything .”
    I could hear Julianne crying out to my sisters to stay away from the rocks. The air smelled of dead sea creatures and leftover bacon brought by a breeze from the house. The cluster of trees we called the woods was that deep rich odor like when my father used to unroll his tobacco pouch when it was new and I’d lean into it and breathe it in until bits of dark tobacco flew up my nostrils. But even so, at Sumter’s suggestion I could almost smell Grammy Weenie’s Isis of the Nile perfume. “We’re not even a mile away,” I said, looking back at the Retreat through the spiky line of trees.
    “You know the shack,” he said after he’d wadded his socks up and stuffed them with his sandals into the rotted hollow part of the tree stump.
    I nodded.
    “That’s where I keep it.”
    “What is it?”
    He looked to his left and then to his right; he looked up in the branches of the tree; he looked down at his wiggling toes; he looked at my face for signs of betrayal. He whispered, “It’s god . And it’s in there .”
    He pointed to a place I had always seen and never noticed, as if it had been a blank spot, a hole in the world. Even though I knew the place had
existed there every summer we’d come up to the Retreat, I had no curiosity about it, I had no thought for it.
    “In Neverland,” Sumter said.
    The shack was falling apart. When I was younger I thought that it was some kind of old outhouse given that it stood within a quarter mile of the Retreat, hidden back among the trees, and it looked and smelled pretty bad. I had never been inside it before. The windows were caked with dust, and when you tried to look in, it was full of nothing but old tools and cans of paint.
    Grammy Weenie had hired a caretaker