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She's just turned eleven yesterday, and she walks around the school courtyard licking on an ice-cream as if she owns the place (she doesn't, and she walks alone, always alone, a vague despise for the other children for reasons she can't yet place). Her hair is pulled up on a gravity defying ponytail, and she's wearing the shimmering blue dress she got for her birthday, the one that matches the eyeshadow she stole from her mom.
She spots him under a tree, a small pale boy, a bowl cut that makes her think of that guy in that sci-fi show her dad likes to watch on VCR, and a white t-shirt that's only slightly less dirty than his denim pants. He's barefoot and digging his feet into the dirt, fidgeting nonstop, as if the sole act of standing still required unbelievable effort. She's not sure what he's doing, but he stares at all the other kids with such a–she can't think of the proper words, for she's eleven still, so in her head it's “grown-up” and maybe “mean”, but most likely just a series of interjections and wow!s–strange glint in his eyes that she can't help but walk towards him.
“Hi, I'm Wendy.”
He looks at her with the same intensity he dedicated to the other kids, but more, because it's all focused on her, all going from his eyes into hers, and she's taken aback.
“Hi, I'm Neil.”
His voice is small and childish, doesn't match that look at all, and when she smiles at him she's in love already.
She doesn't think about the complexities of it, but she's vaguely aware that he can't be his boyfriend because he doesn't like girls in a girlfriend sort of way. He taught her that when she tried to kiss him once, a few months after their first meeting, high on the thrill of stealing candy from the gas station store, sitting under a tree–that same tree he was under on the first day, although she doesn't think he realizes it. She turned to him and pressed her lips–sticky with sugar and blue with food coloring–against his–chocolate dripping from the corners of it. He pulled back and laughed, that same strange glint–which she had translated finally to “mysterious” and definitely a hint of “mean”–, and told her he didn't kiss girls. She blushed and mumbled an apology, but didn't try it again until years later, and he didn't talk about it.
No matter what the reasons are, that first failed kiss turned them into the next best possibility–which is actually, now that she thinks about it, the best possibility–for two soul mates who aren't meant to be a couple: they became partners in crime.
Soul mates, soul mates, soul mates, she repeats in her head, tells it to herself silently as she watches him blow up a sparkler on a boy's face, as the boy's cheeks streak with blood–and she's not used to blood and she thinks what he's doing is cruel, and she doesn't understand the purpose of it, but she's brave and they're soul mates, and she's going to stand by him through thick and thin–, as he unzips the boy's pants and does something she vaguely knew happened with boys but had never stopped to figure out exactly how.
The boy cries and Neil laughs and she just stands there, wanting to cry but thinking she should be laughing. She stays quiet instead, walks home with Neil and pretends nothing happened, even when he makes fun of her for being bothered, tells her she's too easily embarrassed, tells her she doesn't know the half of it.
That night, she doesn't sleep.
She knows the half of it now. More than that. She knows everything, every single detail there is to know about Neil McCormick, the boy who doesn't have a heart of his own, only hers. And she loves him, she loves him with all her might, tells herself he needs her as a friend and moral compass, yet knows deep down that she needs him even more.
He starts being picked up by guys at the park and she worries. The first few times she drops him off at the park, she doesn't really leave, but stays nearby, half-hidden, just in case something goes wrong, just in case he needs her to help him. She watches him pace around, approach a car, cock his hips and throw his cigarette on the ground and give the driver a smile full of promises. Eventually she starts going home, because the feeling in her guts won't go away and Neil won't change a thing for her and it's better if she can just distract herself.
It's when she notices that being apart from him actually clears her mind instead of clouding it, that she makes her final decision about New York.
They say their goodbyes. She asks him to write, even though she knows he won't. She will, though. She will write him long letters telling him everything about the parties she's going to, and short postcards telling him he's an ass, and tentatively subtle notes of worry and motherly “take care”s. He won't reply, because he doesn't need her as much as she wants him to.
When it's time to let Eric go, she warns him. She warns him about Neil's black hole of a heart, and she knows Eric thinks she's joking, but she's really not. She fell in it years back, she hasn't gotten out of it yet. She probably never will.
Wendy kisses Neil goodbye–a peck on the lips that's now allowed, so different from the first time they touched–and, as she turns away, she sees his eyes, dark blue with the same devilish twinkle she saw the first time. Her head finally comes up with the word for it: lost.