Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [10]
Peter couldn’t sleep because he thought about Bo, and also he thought about how odd it was to be thinking about her. She’d been his once-a-year playmate for as many years as he could remember. They’d scaled imaginary castle walls together and vanquished fierce dragons. They’d made mud pies and mud forts and just about anything else that could be formed out of mud. No matter how often the games changed, they’d always played together, because they were friends, and that was that. But then last year something happened that changed everything. On the final day of the harvest festival in Old Winsen Town, when both families were loading up their wagons and saying their reluctant goodbyes, the Peeps to return home and the Pipers to move on, Bo had done a strange and alarming thing. She’d taken Peter around behind the wagons, where they were all alone, and solemnly kissed him on his cheek, saying, “We can marry when we grow up.”
Peter was appalled. He vigorously and savagely wiped her kiss off his cheek right in front of her, which brought instant tears to her eyes. She turned and ran from his sight, with an angry huff of breath, which quickly turned into a great wet honk of despair as only a thoroughly miserable, blubbering, runny-nosed child can make. That was the last he’d seen of her.
Over the intervening year he’d often remembered that small chaste kiss, and wondered what it meant. And he wondered if they could become friends again this time, or if she’d somehow grown into too much of a girl, like her sisters, so that their children’s adventure games were done forever. He was ten now; if not close to being a man yet, he was not nearly a child any longer. Maybe it was time for him to put away silly children’s games as well. But then what would they do instead? If you had a friend and wanted to spend as much time with her as possible, in the very little time you had, what else could you do but go out and play? Once in a while he’d seen how some of Bo’s older sisters spent time with the boys who’d call on them. They wouldn’t do anything but sit on the front porch and talk all day, or stroll together through the gardens and talk some more. How many things could there possibly be to talk about? And why would anyone want to waste his time doing that, when instead he could do something fun? Peter had seen those boys who came to visit the Peep daughters, and every one of them looked nervous and fidgety, sometimes completely miserable, and always as though they’d prefer to be anywhere else but where they were, talking and talking endlessly throughout the day. Lord of the murky depths! What if that’s all Bo wanted to do from now on? Sometime in the last year, while he wasn’t even looking, his entire world had transformed into something alien and impossible to understand. And somehow it was all Bo Peep’s fault.
This is what he thought about, as forest gradually gave way to fields and a turn in the road brought the caravan wagon into view of the Peep estates. “Time to wake up,” Bonny Lumpen called from outside. “We’re here.”
“WELCOME!” SQUIRE PEEP BELLOWED from the shade of his columned veranda. “Welcome back to our home!” He’d been sitting in a high-backed cane chair as they drove up and needed the help of his walking stick in one hand and a solid tug from one of his daughters on the other hand (it was Dorthe, or possibly Brigitte) to rise to his feet. “We couldn’t get a single thing done today, because we were all too excited waiting for you!” In the time it took Mr. Peep to negotiate the three steps down from the porch, the front doors burst open and Mrs. Peep flew by him and rushed into the yard, making happy squealing sounds all the while.
There followed a long bout of hugging and backslapping, as Mother Piper hugged Mother Peep, and then Mr. Piper hugged Mrs. Peep, while Mr. Peep hugged Mrs. Piper. The men happily whacked at each other, as men will do. And then the daughters, more of whom had materialized seemingly out of