Lost Cause

Somewhere only we know #2: Tinkerbell

Continued from Somewhere only we know…

I was twelve years old when I met Peter and Tinkerbell. I was reading in my room on the second floor. We had a townhouse in a nice area of the city. It was quiet there, even in the middle of the day when the streets were crowded, there was a sense of, what’s the word? Decorum. Yes, there was a sense of decorum.

I didn’t feel like we were wealthy, but we were more fortunate than most. I didn’t like the school I went to. The children there were very wealthy and generally jerks. Some weren’t of course. But this didn’t stop them from acting like jerks when in the presence of real jerks. I could never bring myself to be a jerk. I was too afraid. I just hid and avoided most of my classmates as much as humanly possible. Sometimes I hid in the toilets or up at the farm behind the school feeding the chickens. Other times I hid in my mind. Only a few special people could find me there. It was a safe place.

I eventually had a go at being a jerk in a moment of desperation. It didn’t work out. My mouth was too dry and words caught in my throat. I mumbled some unintelligible compliments — I’d wanted them to be insults but as previously stated, I was afraid — and I ran. Everyone laughed and decided I was too stupid to be at the school and promptly forgot about me.

I was an accidental genius. The rest of my years there were spent in blissful solitude. I studied and learned and I loved it. I would catch the occasional mean glance or dismissive comment, but mostly I was blissfully ignorant. Until I met Tinkerbell.

She followed me home from school one day. I had seen her hanging about a few times. She was quite tall with a delicate build, but completely covered in spikes which made her not look very delicate at all. It made her look like a tall, thin, living medieval weapon. Perhaps a mace.

She had a spiked collar, no big deal. But she also had several small fluorescent pink spikes visible through her short, midnight black hair, somehow attached to her head and a long curved claw protruding from each wrist behind the thumb. The wrist claws were a dull bone colour.

Combined with some very creepy red eye shadow this felt like quite a big deal indeed. She was also incredibly pale, whiter than white. I thought to myself, perhaps she was wearing face paint? Framed with her black hair, chillingly complemented by her red eye shadow, iridescent spikes and bone claws, I am not ashamed to admit she was utterly terrifying.

I pretended not to notice her following me and I cut through the gardens. Tinkerbell followed, a casual threat, weaving through the trees and flowers, stalking her prey. I arrived home, hurried inside and locked the door. Being a child, I didn’t tell my parents what had happened. They were very nice parents, very nice indeed, but they had no interest in my tales of fancy or really anything I did that was not having a cup of tea or reading a good book. Or chores.

Usually, I was quite good at forgetting things, even things as odd as being followed by a vicious-looking goth girl. But something about it stuck with me. It had been so deliberate. She had been intent on me for some reason; like I had taken something that belonged to her.

Anyway, so I was reading on my bed in the early evening, occasionally musing on why she had followed me when a boy appeared at my window. He was perhaps fourteen years old and very pretty for a boy. I remember he wore quite a striking hat. A fluorescent green fedora that glowed around the edges in the dark.

There was graffiti (not sure how else to describe it) artfully drawn to wrap around his clothes from head to foot, front to back in a paint that seemed to only be visible in the dark. It was a drawing of a young man, tall and impossibly lithe, dressed entirely in branches and leaves with the inscription “Pan” scrawled diagonally across it in vibrant blood red. It was…a lot.

I was bemused as to how he had appeared at the window, and I studied him quizzically for a moment. He stared at me. I felt, briefly, like my eyes were bound to his. He had a gravity — I could see people and places and thoughts and feelings and dreams being implacably drawn toward him and sucked into the void behind those eyes.

“Go away”. I said as politely as I could and returned to my book. Shockingly, he ignored my firm and articulate request and sat there gazing around the room as if he had never seen ordinary stuff like a bookcase or a dresser before.

The girl who followed me home appeared beside him a few minutes later and looked at me with such disdain I wondered if perhaps I had soiled myself and not noticed. Blessedly I had not, so I responded as I always did to people who thought they were better than me: I ignored her and him and the weirdness of them somehow scaling our townhouse and appearing at my window and continued to read my book.

After 15 minutes or so I began to feel tired so I closed the blinds, turned off my lamp, and went to sleep.

When I awoke in the morning, they were gone, but they had written in red spray paint on my window.

“Lost Cause”.

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