Peaches

most tree carvings per capita anywhere in the United States. As one peach tree unfurled the words M ILLER A BBOTT LOVES J ODEE M C G OWEN 4 EVER for the thirtieth year in a row, and an oak bearing the names C YNTHIA AND W ALTER inside a jagged heart went brown at the leaves and began to decay, churning itself back into the Georgia soil one letter at a time, a magnolia next to the cider house came to bear three sets of initials:

    M.M.
    L.C.S.
    B.D.

    For years after, it grew, and the scars of the wood deepened, and stretched out. Until the letters were no longer anything but puckered, jagged lines marking the time the tree had passed. Marking life.

Chapter One
    L et me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you’ve heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn’t win. In some places, there is something ultimately good about endings. In Neverland, that is not the case.
    To understand what it’s like to be a faerie, tall as a walnut and genetically gifted with wings—who happened to witness such a series of events—you must first understand that all faeries are mute. Somewhere in our evolution, on our long crooked journey from amoeba to dragonfly to faerie, nature must have decided language wasn’t necessary for us to survive. It’s good in some ways, not to have a language. It makes you see things. You turn your attention, not to babbling about yourself, broadcasting each and every thought to everyone within earshot—as people often do—but to observing. That’s how faeries became so empathic. We’re so attuned to the beating of a heart, the varied thrum of a pulse, the zaps of the synapses of a brain, that we are almost inside others’ minds. Most faeries tune this out by only spending time with other faeries. They make settlements in tree stumps and barely venture out except to hunt mosquitoes. I get bored by that. I like to fly and keep an eye on things. That was how I saw it, from the beginning. Some would like to call it being nosy. That’s what my mother would say, at least.
    That morning, I was on my way to see about some locusts. They’d invaded and eaten all the good parts of a faerie settlement near the river, and I had never seen a locust before. I was flying along on a curiosity mission when I passed the girls in a manioc field.
    They were out cultivating the tubers—in the tribe, a woman’s job. All in their early teens: some of the girls were awkwardly growing but still thoroughly in their skin, with gangly limbs that expressed their most passing thoughts, while others were curvy, and carrying those curves like new tools they were learning. I recognized Tiger Lily instantly; I had seen her before. She stood out like a combination of a roving panther and a girl. She stalked instead of walked. Her body still held the invincibility of a child, when at her age it should have been giving way to fragile, flexible curves.
    These were Sky Eaters, a tribe whose lives were always turned toward the river. They fished, and grew manioc in the clearing along its shore. A Sky Eater wandering far into the thick, unnavigable forest was like a faerie wandering into a hawk’s hunting territory. It happened only rarely. So when they heard the crashing through the trees, most of the girls screamed. Tiger Lily reached for her hatchet.
    Stone came through first, splitting through the branches. The other boys rallied behind him. And Pine Sap, last and weakest of them all, brought up the rear. They were all breathless, shirtless, a muscular and well-organized group with weedy Pine Sap trailing at the back.
    Stone gestured for the girls to come with them. “You’ll never believe it.”
    The girls followed the boys through the forest, and I grabbed a tassel of Tiger Lily’s tunic because I, too, was curious, and she ran faster than I wanted to fly. And then we cleared the last of the trees leading to the cliffs, and the way to the sea was open, and I heard a noise escape Tiger Lily’s lips, a little cry, and heard it on the other girls’ lips too as they arrived behind her. There upon the water was a large ship, a skeleton against the sky, collapsed and flailing into the rocks close to shore, broken apart and drowning. The scene was all deep blues and grays and whites and the wild waves lifting it all like deep gasping breaths.
    Looking closer, I could see little pink people—tiny, falling and clinging. I knew right away they must be