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of being in some dark, underground tunnel. I watched dark spiders run madly under the sills as I tried to wipe away at the glass. I spread layers of dust upon dust. My fingers painted dirt circles without ever cleaning a way to the daylight.
    Sumter pointed out a stack of dirty magazines: old Playboys , women’s lingerie catalogues, and—his pride and joy—a cutout in the form of a pair of glasses, but these were a woman’s breasts. He picked up the cutout and draped them across the bridge of his nose. “I see you, Beauregard Jackson, I see you.”
    Despite the fact that the Playboys had the most female nakedness on display, Sumter’s prize dirty pictures had been culled from the pages of National Geographic : endless clippings of topless African women with their lips extended, with a dozen metal rings around their necks, a look in their eyes as if they were not even aware of their nudity. Sumter waved a page in front of me; he pressed the page up to his face.
    “You’re gross,” I said.
    Ignoring me, he smooched with the photograph before tossing it down onto the rest of the clippings.
    “Hey,” he said to no one. He glanced about, kicking up some dirt around his magazine collection. Then he knelt down and scratched around in the debris. He squinted, sniffing the air. “Something’s changed.”
    I looked around. Three old tires leaned against a rusted-out wheelbarrow in my path. Brown-red flowerpots—some cracked, some whole, some
in the process of breaking down into bits of earth and clay—defined a path between the jumble of hacksaw, a manual lawn mower, and miscellaneous souvenirs of yard work.
    “Someone’s been in here.” He rose and began wading across the floor.
    “Who’d be in here ?”
    “The witch. The Weenie. She’s jealous ’cause I got the key.”
    “She wheel in here on her own or’d somebody help her?” I pumped sarcasm into every word.
    “I know she did,” he said, clenching his fists tight, closing his eyes as if it hurt to admit this. “She’s so mad , she’s so jealous , she’s so jealous ! Why does she hate me so much?” He stomped one foot on the ground, and when he did this I thought I felt the ground shaking, but it was only the rattling of paint cans as he kicked one of them. He punched one fist into the other—it looked like it hurt—and when he opened his eyes they were full of tears. His face was red like one of Grammy Weenie’s neck boils. He wiped at his eyes.
    Sumter never scared me when he acted like this. In fact, he only terrified me at his quietest, because it meant he was scheming. But when he went into one of his tantrums, he seemed pathetic and silly, and I always had to suppress the urge to laugh out loud. “Where’s this god thing?” I asked impatiently.
    He calmed down a bit, and when he spoke again it was as if nothing had happened. His eyes were dry, his hair only slightly ruffled from the exertion. He wiped the palms of his hands across his shirt. “All the way to the back,” he directed me. He returned to the door, closing it.
    With the door shut, Neverland was twilight dark, even though I knew perfectly well it wasn’t even eleven in the morning. Colder, too, and somehow larger, longer—its very geometry having changed with the closing off of its only exit. Sumter went around me, complaining that I was too slow, but my fears of things like black widow spiders and coral snakes—even though I was never sure if they inhabited Gull Island at all—kept me moving carefully amidst the debris.

    Sumter bounded over all of it, and when he got to the back corner of the shack, he dragged a plank off the top of a crate. It had pictures of peaches on the outside of it. He lifted the crate up a few inches off the ground and carried it over to where I had stopped walking.
    “You keep god in a crate?” I snorted.
    I peered into the shadows of the wooden box and thought I saw something move. I was almost frightened, but Sumter was always such a liar