Lost Boi Read online

  Pan pointed to a trail of smoke on the other side of the fence. They could hear chanting and drumming drifting like the smoke into the night air. “That’s the Urban Primitives,” Pan whispered. “I don’t like them.”

  John Michael had heard of them. “I don’t give a fuck what kind of spiritual meaning they think they’re getting,” she said. “That’s stolen ritual, and they have no right to it! Goddamn racists, could they be any more colonialist?” John Michael whispered through clenched teeth.

  All of this talk irritated Pan. He didn’t like the Urban Primitives. They were sworn enemies of the lost bois because they were a bunch of racist pricks, and he personally took pleasure in letting the air out of their bike tires whenever he saw them parked outside of the organic food co-op. But he mostly hated that John Michael already knew of them; he always wanted to be the one who knew everything.

  Pan grew quiet again as they kept walking. The train tracks had taken a steady turn to the right. Wendi could smell rotting fish and hear water lapping down the hill from the tracks. “That,” said Pan, pointing to what appeared to be a floating house, “is the Lagoon, where the Mermaids live.”

  Wendi squinted into the dark and could make out the shape of a little red house with black trim that seemed to be sitting right on the water. It was old and looked as though someone had just thrown it into a puddle. The roof was sagging, and there were no handrails on the second-floor widow’s walk. She couldn’t make herself look away until she tripped over a broken bottle and would have fallen if John Michael hadn’t reached out to steady her.

  “Who are the Mermaids?” Wendi whispered to Pan, again trying to catch his hand. Pan puffed up, eager to have the power that knowledge once again restored to him. “The Mermaids,” Pan explained, “are a gang of femmes—they’re not girls.”

  I once watched a new boi make that mistake. Before the word “girl” even finished falling out of his unfortunate mouth, Undine had thrown him up against the wall of Neverland with her little silver knife pressed to his throat. All I could see was her teal Bettie Page hair and the way her knuckles tightened around the mother-of-pearl knife handle. The boi never made that mistake again.

  Pan told Wendi that the Mermaids are our biggest allies, that they are beautiful and fierce and incredibly loyal, mostly to each other. He told her that they are nocturnal, working the streets and the bars by the Interstate, pleasing men. With that he hocked a loogie and spat over the edge of the tracks. Wendi couldn’t hear it hit the water below, but she watched it fall like a dirty, snotty falling star.

  Pan didn’t speak for a moment, but sensing Wendi’s impatience, began again. “There are six Mermaids now living in that house, though the number ebbs and flows like the dirty water. Now it’s Siren, the leader, Undine, Melusine, Naiad, Ningyo, and Kelpie. They are, as I said, most loyal to each other, sharing their earnings to make the rent on the houseboat and filling it with as much finery as they can. Before you think them shallow and materialistic, you should know how hard they work for every stitch of dress, and they steal their makeup from the drugstore—but that’s another story. The Mermaids work harder than anyone I’ve ever met, and are the most creative too. They dumpster at the university behind the art building, finding bolts of fabric and rolls of ribbon, which they transform into curtains for each window on the little house and string like billowing walls to create private sleeping caverns in the little attic.”

  Pan didn’t tell Wendi about the Mermaids’ dirty little secret, but I guess he spared her ours too. He didn’t mention the liquor bottles thrown into the river from the attic window, the SOS message of dirty needles. Pan didn’t know it, but Wendi would figure out soon enough that the Crocodile was always after them. The Mermaids liked to think that the Crocodile was their friend, that they had tamed it, and it protected them against their work, against those men. The Mermaids were always making bargains and deals, but the Crocodile always took their money and swam away, leaving them dazed and confused. After all, heroin is heroin no matter what you call it. You can’t domesticate a monster.

  The Mermaids are our biggest allies, but they are separate from us. Pan makes sure of that. For all of his love of fluidity, there are lines he just won’t let be crossed. A couple of years ago, right after I came to Neverland, there was a big fight between us and the Mermaids. It was the kind of fight that almost ruined everything about our alliance. Naiad broke some unwritten rule and asked Pan for his cuff. Instead of refusing her respectfully, he laughed, and she left Neverland in tears.

  Naiad had been so good in the way that she had approached him. All winter, she’d been at Neverland, learning how to hold the pigeons and battle with us bois. She knew how to black boots, and her knees were as calloused as ours. She wore old ripped band shirts and a short skirt with her combat boots. Naiad was a femme, but a boi too, and she wanted to leave the Lagoon and become Pan’s boi. All winter, he led Naiad on, letting her battle and dumpster with us. We saw her as one of us, but everything changed the night that she was alone with Pan, us bois in our hammocks listening in. Siren later told me that Naiad had prepared for this moment for months, talked of nothing else. The other Mermaids knew that she wanted to be a lost boi, secure in her place under Pan’s boot.

  Pan must have known what was coming, but he was going to make her come out and say it. He cleared his throat.

  “You wanted to speak with me?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Naiad replied firmly.

  Silence.

  “Sir, all winter I have been with your bois, learning the way you like your coffee and how you prefer your boots done. I can hold my own in a battle as well as any boi. Sir, all I want is to join your pack, to be one of your lost bois.”

  We heard a thud that could only be a boi falling to her knees, and then … the horrible sound of Pan’s cruellest laugh. Maybe at first he thought that Naiad was playing, but when she fell to her knees, he must have known she was serious. He laughed anyway.

  “No grrrls allowed,” he finally said.

  It seemed unlike him—after all, he’d fought against Hook’s Old Guard rigidity, and yet Pan couldn’t see the boi trembling before him, a boi who believed in magic and who was ready to take an oath never to grow up and to serve him loyally. But Pan couldn’t or wouldn’t see her. Naiad was left to peel herself off the cold, pigeon-shit-covered concrete as Pan’s attention turned to some scraps of leather. But that was long ago.

  Wendi and John Michael kept walking behind Pan, and only he knew that they were getting close to Neverland. A flock of pigeons burst from the broken windows on the upper floor of a warehouse, and Wendi gasped.

  Pan only laughed. “That” he said, “is Neverland.” But instead of leading them directly to us, he pointed to a hole in the fence on the other side of the tracks, and led them into an alley. “This is the Jolly Roger, home to Hook and his Pirates. You need to see that first.”

  Pan told them that the Pirates were almost worse than grownups, because they knew better; they knew the life they could have had, but instead pledged their service to Hook, the worst of all. Wendi could feel something in the way that Pan talked of Hook, but she couldn’t guess what it meant. Pan then turned and pointed to a little window, almost completely hidden by a dumpster. “Want to have an adventure?” his crooked grin teased. For a moment, Wendi thought of how wrong it was to trespass, but then she reminded herself that she was a runaway who had only hours before given her consent to Mommy a boi who was probably twice her age. This was not a night for logic. This was a night for breaking rules. They slipped through the window into darkness. Wendi looked back longingly at the sidewalk and the warm glow of the street lamp. Pan hit a switch, and electric wall-mounted candles flickered on, illuminating a room with burgundy walls. Suddenly Wendi recognized the smell that had punched her as soon as they crawled through the window. There was more leather here than either she or John Michael had ever seen—furniture, benches, platforms, and crosses made entirely of leather and steel filled the room
. Between the flickering lights hung whips, floggers, cuffs, hoods, and things Wendi didn’t know at all. There were beautiful coils of black rope labelled with the names Smee, Starkey, Jukes, and Cecco.

  “Those belong to the Pirates,” sneered Pan. “Hook takes safety to extremes; he doesn’t know how to let go, how to be free. He says it’s part of having ‘good form.’ Hook thinks he’s Old Guard, and good form is everything to him,” finished Pan.

  “Good form?” Wendi hesitantly asked.

  Pan grinned. “He’s got rules for everything, and a high standard that he holds everyone, mostly himself, to. For Hook, good form is more than rules. It’s how he constructs the world around him, the expectations he holds for himself and his Pirates. It’s a code of conduct that he never breaks.”

  John Michael pulled cuffs off the wall, fingered the smooth stitching, and then put them back. Next, she grabbed one of the heavy oar-shaped paddles that hung suspended between pegs and playfully swung it toward Wendi. Turning his attention to John Michael, Pan whispered, “All bois in service to me must swear that Hook is always to be left to me. You may battle any of his Pirates in whatever way you please, black and blue if you want, but Hook is mine. Understood?”

  “Mine” was such a strange word: As in Pan’s lover? His enemy? Wendi didn’t dare ask. She felt almost jealous of the way that Pan had called Hook his, but she didn’t yet understand why. John Michael, eager to prove allegiance, responded with a convincingly quick “Yes, Sir.”

  The Jolly Roger is an old 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 a sailing 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.

  “I 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.

  “I’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

  Without 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 the good 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 you have to get used to. There were also bois who couldn’t hack it, who didn’t meet Pan’s expectations, who had to go. Neverland was the kind of place where we could be anything we wanted, everything we never believed was possible before we got lost. Pan would forgive his bois for pretty much anything, except growing up. It’s harsh, but once a boi grows up, Pan just forgets he ever existed.

  That horrible day when Wendi came, Siren and Kelpie were at Neverland. Pan had told Kelpie that he would take her out to the roller derby. He knew the dyke working the door, and she had promised to let them in for free. Kelpie is a big femme who cuts the crotch out of her fishnet stockings to help them fit over her thick thighs and, let’s be real, to save time. She’s kinda the closest thing that Pan’s ever had to a grrrlfriend. Kelpie danced at the peep-show place by the Interstate, and Pan liked to surprise her at the end of her shift, when she traded stilettos for boots and threw her bleach-stiffened pink hair into pigtails. Kelpie is tough, but her face always softened into a smile when she pushed open the heavy black door, stepped into the alley behind the club, and saw Pan leaning against a dumpster. He never told her that he was coming, but luckily for him, she never had plans that couldn’t be ditched for milkshakes and fries at the all-night diner. Kelpie was tender and soft with Pan in a way she couldn’t be with anyone else. She told him things, let him touch her in a way that no one else could. Kelpie was close to all us bois; she respected us and our role in Pan’s life, but she also wanted more than Pan could give. The week before Wendi arrived, Kelpie’d asked Pan if he would start calling her his grrrlfriend.

  Siren and I had been messing around together for a few months, at that point. Mostly, we saw each other when Pan wasn’t around. Its not that we bois weren’t allowed to hook up, it’s just that Pan preferred that us bois kept our external entanglements simple, so that our primary focus was on service to him. Sometimes he had to help us, to forbid us from seeing someone. I was always grateful when that happened, because it helped me to keep my focus on what mattered most.

  Siren and Kelpie were as close as Pan and I were, and so when Kelpie and Pan were going to meet up at Neverland to go on their date, Siren tagged along. All afternoon, Kelpie waited for Pan to show up. Siren and I tried to keep her occupied with stories and snacks, but as evening stretched into night, she finally gave up. Kelpie pulled on her boots, reapplied her lip gloss, and went into the bathroom, emerging a few moments later with eyes glazed and far away, tugging the sleeves of her shirt down quickly. Siren offered to go to the roller derby with her, out of Mermaid solidarity, but Kelpie refused, saying that she was going to bike up to the arena. Not twenty minutes after she left, I was lying on the floor on an old sleeping bag with Siren when Tink flew in through the jagged glass of a broken window. Siren had just reapplied her cherry lipstick and lit a cigarette. Curled up on the sleeping bag wearing only stockings and a lacy bra
, Siren was ready to pounce. I groaned as Tink pecked me hard while I struggled to get Pan’s letter out of her harness.

  Bois—

  On my way to Neverland. Be ready to present yourselves.

  Have two new hammocks prepared.

  —Pan

  As I read the note, Tink soared to the rafters to sulk. I threw the crumpled paper down next to me and groaned. Siren looked so beautiful—I mean she always does, but I don’t think she believed that, no matter how many times I told her. As she read Pan’s note, her face went hard. She didn’t like that Pan had stood up Kelpie, that he seemed to have forgotten about her entirely, and for what? More bois? As she stared at the letter, I thought about the way the black slip she wore rode up her fishnet-covered thighs and how the toes of her black boots would get jammed into the chain-link fence that surrounds Neverland when she climbed it. When we fucked, I would fantasize about licking those boots, but she’d never let me. Siren wanted a boifriend, not a boi. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  Siren saw her first. I looked out the window and was surprised to see a grrrl struggling to climb that chain-link fence. She was such a silly looking little grrrl, wearing a pink hoodie and a white nightgown, with bare legs and little white sneakers. I glanced behind me; Siren was already pulling her black slip-dress over her head and lacing her boots tight against the curve of her calves. I didn’t know what to do. I could have called the other bois; it’s what I should have done, but I didn’t want to look weak in front of Siren. I guess I actually looked pretty helpless, because she rolled her eyes, took one last drag of her cigarette, threw it into a nearby beer can, and stood. “You going to just sit there with your cock out and let Neverland be invaded?”