A root catches her foot and sends her sprawling. She skids on the path, her breath cutting out, pain shocking through her as she tries and fails to catch herself. For a moment, all she wants to do is lie there, curl in on herself and sob. Let Peter find her. What does she care anymore?

In the next breath though, the thought fills her with dread. She cannot stay. She cannot let Peter take her away from herself. She doesn’t belong in Neverland. She isn’t a lost girl. She has a home. She has parents. She has a name, and it isn’t Wendy… She’s—Jane!

The name is suddenly there, wrested from behind the curtain in her mind. Jane slaps a bruised and dirt-smudged hand over her mouth, muffling a sound between a shout and a sob. Everything comes rushing back to her—the stricken look on her mother’s face as she was pulled through the window and all the stars went plummeting by, the cold as they flew, Peter’s hand wrapped around her wrist and how the whole time she was afraid of falling.

She remembers the moment they passed through. There’s no better word she can think of for it. The sky around her changed in ways that shouldn’t even be possible, and yet it happened. It was like passing through water, surfacing through a puddle and suddenly being on the other side of everything she’d ever known. After that, the stars whirling past weren’t the same ones visible from her window at home. She isn’t even certain how she could tell, only that she knew, felt it deep inside, the sense of being somewhere else, somewhere wrong.

She remembers shouting for her mother. Then shouting for Peter to let her go, even though she didn’t know his name then. As soon as she’d made the demand, she’d become terrified that he would comply and she’d plummet out of the sky. She’d swallowed her voice, squeezing her eyes tight shut so it had been a surprise when they finally landed, thumping down hard on the sand.

When she’d opened her eyes, she’d been dazed by bright sunlight, another impossibility, for a moment ago they’d been flying through the dark. She’d felt bruised from striking the ground, but she’d scrambled up as fast as she could, kicking at Peter, scratching, trying to bite him, trying to throw sand in his eyes. She’d called him names, screaming at him, unladylike things that would horrify her grandfather if he could see her, but which might, just might, make her mother proud though she would never admit it.