Was this, I wondered, what it felt like to be a grown up? Did you always feel the weight of things on you, your cares pressing you down like a burden you could never shake? -Jamie

I didn't know how to explain to him that for all that I still looked young, I had been feeling old. The years had passed, so many of them, and they were starting to wear on me. After a while it wasn't fun to always feel like you had to have fun. -Jamie

Was this, too, part of growing up? Was it facing the bad things you’d done as well as the good, and knowing all your mistakes had consequences? Peter made mistakes all the time— he was thoughtless; he hurt people. But it never troubled him, not for a moment. He forgot all about it in an instant. That was being a boy.

I huffed out a deep breath. “It’s something huge, isn’t it?” Beezle nodded. “Yup.”
There was a sound of several limbs splashing in the water. “Is it all squishy and tentacly?”
“Yup.”
“I hate my life,” I said, and as I turned I conjured a ball of nightfire and threw it.

I didn’t believe him at first, about the island, though.”

“I didn’t either,”I said. “I don’t know that anyone does. It sounds like a fantastic lie.”

“It is a fantastic lie,” Sal said, and her face was very earnest. “This isn’t a wonderful place for boys to play and have adventures and stay young for always. It’s a killing place, and we’re all just soldiers in Peter’s war.

We were still children, for all that we thought we weren’t. We were in that in-between place, the twilight between childish things and grown-up things.