Neverland

eight

"I would bring warmer clothes too. The temperature tends to drop at night, especially after a storm," Harry noted as he sifted through the papers on my desk.

He was wearing the beanie I lent to him on one of the colder nights. It looked really good on him, but that boy would probably look good wearing a potato sack on his head.

"Alright," I said. I opened up another drawer and began pulling out my coziest sweatshirts and tossing them on the floor behind me.

Considering the snow weighing down on the damaged roof above us, it was obvious that we would not be able to get one last lesson in before leaving the next night. So instead, Harry had been helping me pack and felt inclined to look through my things as he did so.

"What are all these red marks on this essay?" he asked.

I glanced over to see him holding up one of my college essays I had an old teacher from Hampshire edit.

"They are corrections," I answered and returned to folding the heap of clothes gathered in the center of my room.

"Well I don't think that this essay needs 'em. It's fantastic the way it is." 

"Thank you," I said,  a smile pulling at my lips.  Compliments from Harry were rare, so I took the time to revel in the small praise, memorializing it in my brain.  I always took his words to be extremely sincere.

He offered up a small smile before diverting his eyes back to the paper.

I was not completely comfortable with him reading through my things, but I was burried with too many thoughts to care at the moment. Around the same time the next day, we would be departing to an entirely new world and I could not help but feel a bit anxious.

Harry said that for the most part, the Lost Boys were easy to get along with. However, he did mention that a few of them were hot tempered. I worried my personality or even my mere presence would rub them the wrong way.  His deep voice finally brought me out of my thoughts.

"Leo is excited to see you."

"Well I can't wait to see him," I said and sat down on the edge of my bed. "I never thought I would get the chance again."

I stared down at the ground and envisioned the way Leo looked the last time I saw him. He was frail, sitting up stiffly in his own bed with the understanding of what was to come etched in his blue eyes. He wanted to be brave, but I knew he was afraid. 

And I sat by the side of his bed when he was too weak to hold those worried eyes open any longer, wanting to just reach down his throat and rip out all of toxic and destructive cells from his body I could grab.  The doctors said there was nothing they could do, nothing I could do to save him.  The stubborn child still inside me somehow believed he would make it through.  

His skin was a translucent grey and I remembered his eyelids being so thin that the veins within them looked like tiny little spider legs.  I held his cold hand, acknowledging each and every pulse as if they were the fluttering wings of a beautiful yet endangered tiny bird.  Humans and animal species are the same in that way I suppose, some are just created to exist on Earth longer than others. 

"You okay?"

I looked up and the vision of Leo's cold grey eyes were replaced with Harry's churning green ones.  He stared down at me intently.  For a moment, I considered opening up to him, but I wanted to keep the mood light.  Reuniting with Leo was supposed to be something that brought me joy.  I tried to push the ghastly images from his sickness out of my mind and replace them with predictions of what he looked like right then: a much healthier version of himself, thriving in the magnificent and far off Neverland.