Neverland by Douglas Clegg Page A

and he didn’t seem to move at all, but in the next second I felt the prick of the fishhook, like a needle of ice, thrust into my thumb, and he was holding our thumbs together, kneading the blood as it dripped out in shiny red pearls. We are jars of blood. I heard his heart beating in my thumb; I tasted something like the rusty metal of the hook in the back of my throat.
    “Swear,” he said, “ swear .”

    “No.” I tried to draw back, but our thumbs were glued together. I had to breathe through my mouth because for some reason my nose didn’t seem to work right. I wanted to be back home, or back in the boat. My whole head felt warm, and I felt Grammy’s silver brush stroking through my crewcut. Flesh is our prison. I felt imprisoned then, wanting to get out of my body, which felt hot all over, which would not let me run away.
    “Swear you won’t ever tell, swear in blood.”
    “No.”
    Grammy Weenie said flesh is our prison .
    “Swear.”
    Spirit and flesh constantly at war.
    “No.”
    Angel and Devil .
    “By your blood. Say it. Say it.”
    Something was pressing into me—not his hand clutching mine, trying to draw my thumb closer to the hook poised for jabbing—but something in my blood, like the tingling feeling I got whenever my circulation failed to kick in, the need of my bones and flesh to move, but my blood went from hot to freezing, icing around my veins, under my skin.
    I shut my eyes to will this feeling away.
    It was like the strokes of Grammy Weenie’s brush, down through my scalp, creating some kind of electric field around me. Like that, but not, because whatever feeling this was, it was breaking down that field, it was invading my pores, it was turning me to rigid stone, a large block of ice.
    “By my blood,” I said and the pins-and-needles feeling crept across the backs of my legs.
    “I swear.”
    “I swear,” and my breath was frozen in the air.
    “I will keep secret.”
    “I will keep secret.” My jaws ached, my elbows creaked when I tried to bend them.
    “All that is Neverland.”

    “All that is Neverland.” I felt the hook penetrate my skin.
    “Now our blood is mixed, cousin. Now I’m in you and you’re in me. I will know if you break this, your most sacred vow.”
    When he let go of my hand, I heard the blood pounding in my thumb like waves breaking against some shore of night. I stuck it in my mouth and sucked at the drying blood as though I’d been bitten by a snake and needed to spit out the poison.

3
    While I still pressed my bleeding thumb against my lips, Sumter cried out, “Look! Gawd .” He pointed to a tamped-down patch of reeds. He waded through a stagnant pool and alongside some prickers, carelessly pushing them aside. I followed close behind, and the pricker branches sprung back at me.
    He knelt down in the reeds, spreading them apart. When I came up behind him, he had a twig in his fingers and was poking at his find.
    I squatted down, barely balancing with my hands on my knees.
    Another bunny, but this one was dead.
    Its black-and-white fur was matted with blood and crusted dirt. A gash ran down its stomach. While this wasn’t the first dead animal I had ever seen, it was the only one with its guts hanging out. My usual death sightings involved roadkill or animals much lower on the food chain, and certainly none as sweet as a bunny. “Lookit,” I said, my finger hanging just above the rabbit’s head. Half of one of its floppy ears had been chewed off. When you’re ten, death is less horrifying than it is fascinating. I would’ve been equally thrilled to have come across the corpse of a human being, and not in the least bit terrified.
    Sumter industriously poked its guts back inside its stomach. “I bet everybody looks this way when they kiss off.”
    “I wonder what got it?”
    “A dog or something. Maybe a raccoon. Or a Gullah.” He dropped the twig and brought his hand down to the animal’s belly. Its eyes were
partially sunken in. Tiny