Free Lost Boi by Sassafras Lowrey

when he was like this. I left him sulking in the corner, mocking the mirror shine on John Michael’s boots and trying to get the Twins to side with him about both Wendi and John Michael.
    Wendi walked out of Neverland into the downtown, and I slipped out behind her. She wasn’t used to living on the run,hadn’t mastered paranoid focus, and so didn’t sense me walking behind her. She hurried along the sidewalk. Next to the grocery store was a flea market, a mix of antiques and trash. The vendors were in a gentrification battle for booth space.
    Wendi stopped to look at something on a table, and I hid myself behind a rack of faded dresses someone labelled “vintage.” I was pretty sure I had seen them in the thrift store dumpster last week, but now they had sixty-dollar price tags. I could only imagine what Siren would say about that. She’d have been pissed off about the price. I don’t make a habit of looking at dresses, and I thought for sure the lady working the booth was going to kick me out, but she didn’t.
    Wendi was at a booth that looked like a yard sale, with everything from baseball cards and old postcards to toys and shoes. It also had a wide table filled with jewellery and was run by an old man who smiled at Wendi. She fingered a tray of charms, picking through them and putting the ones she wanted into her other hand. I was too far away to see what she had chosen. Wendi paid with a couple of crumpled bills she pulled from her bra. The last of her babysitting money, she would later tell me.
    Wendi walked back toward the street but stopped at another booth that sold gourmet doughnuts and fancy buttons and ribbons. The booth was staffed by a straight girl who flipped through a fashion magazine and didn’t bother to look up as Wendi helped herself to a spool of light green ribbon. She stuffed it into her hoodie and left the market. I wished thatNibs had been there to see that Wendi wasn’t so innocent. I was beginning to see why Pan had liked her.
    Next, Wendi went into the grocery store, and I turned back toward Neverland. I felt bad about spying. Clearly, she really did want to cook for us! I left her there and ran back to Neverland, bursting in and shouting, “Mommy Wendi is making us dinner tonight! We need to finish cleaning everything!” Nibs had gone out, but Curly, the Twins, and I kept cleaning things until Pan came over and said he needed me to go out with him.
    We walked quickly toward the Interstate, and he explained that a leather cuff was not the proper way to mark a grrrl, that our Mommy needed something fancier. We stopped at the Pawn Shop and peered in the streaked windows. Pan saw a grrrl he knew who worked there and we walked in, the bells on the door announcing our arrival. He looked carefully at everything in the cases and then spotted it, a birthstone ring, the kind that suburban mothers are given on Mother’s Day by husbands who are sent to the mall with toddlers clinging to the seams of their jeans. It had a plain silver band and little gemstones representing each child’s birth month. By luck, there were eight cut-glass “stones” on the ring. No wonder some poor mother had had to pawn the thing; she was probably broke, with all those mouths to feed. It made the perfect pervertable gift because, with the addition of John Michael and if you counted Pan, there were eight of us bois whom Wendi would be Mommy to.
    â€œShe’d like this wouldn’t she?” Pan asked me.
    â€œOh, yes, Sir! I think Mommy will like it very much,” I assured him.
    The grrrl working in the shop offered to cut Pan a deal if he’d meet her out back, on her smoke break. Somehow, by the time we joined her in the back, where she sat with a lit cigarette, the ring had been “lost.” Pan leaned in with a lighter and a filthy hand to shield her cigarette from the wind, and when the cigarette lit, the ring had slipped into his palm and