Neverland Read Online Free PDF Page B

years before I was born, back when she didn’t spend most of the year on Gull Island, but the man had gotten some local girls in trouble and had to be let go. The shed had been his, and when he’d left the peninsula, no one bothered to take it down. This was when the surrounding trees still were seedlings, my mother told me, when the view from the Retreat to the sea was clear, when she and Aunt Cricket and my other aunt, the one they called Babygirl, would take Grammy’s Victorian doll collection out to the bluff and play tea party and watch pelicans glide like winged horses over the shoreline.
    I had never known Gull Island to be a beautiful place. As far as I could tell it was a sweaty, sandy stretch of family arguments.
    And the shack: I had tried to look through the dusty windows before but never dared to go inside it. Just as Sumter had said, it was “where you ain’t supposed to go.”
    And I never went places where you ain’t supposed to go. Before this particular summer I had always stayed to the paths, I had always been under the shadows of grown-ups, and I had always been a good boy. I was tired of it. As we headed toward the door, I began to see nothing but Neverland and the piney bluff it rested on, the sea below.
    The house behind us was nearly invisible from the stand of trees that guarded the shack. The trees were wiry and thin but clumped together, like fingers along the rim of Neverland. There was something like an irresistible smell emanating from the place, or like a high-pitched whistle that only
Sumter and I could hear. I wanted to go inside that place at that moment more than anything in the world.
    There was a lock on the door, too, but when Sumter took me up the threshold, he unlocked it with a key.
    “How’d you get that?” I pointed to the key.
    “Nobody gave me it. I took it. You want something, Beau, you just take it. If I waited for folks to give me things, well, where would I be?” From the way he said this, I knew it was something his daddy had said.
    “Welcome,” he said, flinging the door wide, “to Neverland. If you tell anybody about this, Beauregard Jackson, I am warning you, it’s gonna be the end.”
    The door, as it opened, scraped across moldy earth and broken clay pots. I got a whiff of something like old socks and detergent and dead sea creatures. For a single moment my curiosity was replaced by dread and I did not want to venture inside.
    But I went with my cousin because we were both boys, and boys will always go where they know they shouldn’t.
    On the back of the door was spray-painted this warning:
    fuck
    Fluorescent orange spray paint, curved into curlicues and raggedly connected at the tail end of the k . I knew then that no grown-up had been in here in a while, because this one word above all others marked the territory of taboos. This was the road sign.
    I felt as if I were about to enter the Holy of Holies. I crossed myself as a form of protection. The dirt beneath my toes was cold and crumbly.
    I peered through the doorway and glanced back at my cousin.
    Sumter grinned. His teeth were hopelessly crooked and canine, and his overbite made it seem like he was about to take a chunk out of his lower lip.
    “Wait’ll you see what I got in here. Watch out, watch out—” He pointed to bits of broken green glass from Coke bottles that had once been stacked near the door. “Jinx on a Coke, I just saved your life, cuz, so you owe me. I’m always saving your life, ain’t I?”

    I couldn’t stop coughing on my first visit within those hallowed walls. You could see the dust hanging in the air—you could practically cut off a hunk of it and bite down.
    “Smells like the shower at the YMCA at home,” I said, pushing my way through the gray light, tiptoeing between the thick chips of glass the way I’d seen Indians do it in a Disney movie.
    The two windows on the side walls had a skin of dust and grime, and surrounded by trees as the shack was, it gave the effect