Wendy sticks her tongue out at the tent wall, even though there’s no one left to see her. Of course when Peter says everyone he doesn’t mean her. His words never say what they ought to, and yet the way he says them is so certain. It infuriates her.

It doesn’t matter that the swords are only long branches and sticks stripped of their leaves. To the boys they’re real enough and the fact that she doesn’t get one of her own still stings. Wendy keeps her eyes fixed on the tent wall, watching the sun cast the boys’ flickering shadows against its skin as they gather their weapons. All except Peter’s.

She thinks again of how he made such a fuss when she sewed the shadow he brought her back onto his body. And after all the squirming and pouting, after all the trouble she went to, it unraveled almost immediately. Wendy knows she isn’t the best seamstress—and according to her mother, she might just be the worst—but her stitching isn’t that bad. Shadows aren’t meant to come apart like that, or, now that she thinks about it, even be separated from the people they belong to in the first place.

Why should it surprise her though—when none of Peter’s other words mean what they should—that he might have lied to her about his shadow, too? It’s clear enough that he managed to lose his somehow, but she’s almost certain the one he brought to her to sew back on didn’t belong to him.

As the boys drift away from the tent, Michael and John among them, Wendy’s shoulders slump. She wonders if either of her brothers spoke up for her, or whether she was the only one to argue with Peter’s ridiculous rules. She looks around the tent, restless and irritated. Peter hasn’t even left her anything to do, other than clean up the boys’ things and she’s had quite enough of that already. Everything can just lie where it is and rot for all she cares.

With nothing else to occupy her, Wendy tries to count on her fingers the number of days they’ve been here, but she loses track immediately. Time is tricky in Neverland, just like everything else. Days and nights blur together, and there’s so much to see and do, it’s easy to become distracted.

Are their parents worried? At least they must know that she and Michael and John are together, and she’ll take care of them, like she always does.