Leaving Neverland

Avery turned thirteen recently. He has officially joined the ranks of teenager-hood, thus upping our numbers to the hideously enormous sum of five. And do you know what follows?


The majority of the Fountain children are teenagers. Not cool.

I don’t want us to grow up. When you grow up, you leave. It’s hard to realize that someday we’re not all going to be the Fountain Children any more. We won’t even be the Fountain Adults. We’re going to be “those kids of Ann and Andrew’s who all got married and have their own families now.” We won’t really be brothers and sisters any more. I mean, we will, but not every day. We won’t share bedrooms. We’re not going to eat our meals together. There’s not going to be the loud, jostling, cheerful racket around the dinner table, and we won’t be sharing silly stories about bowling last night. We won’t be tickling and teasing each other all the time. We won’t be in the same house as each other. Not even the same neighborhood, probably, and maybe not even the same state.


We’re already kind of grown up, some of us. Allison and I used to have this game we played unfailingly very single day. We were twin princesses, Ann and Anna, and people were always chasing us, so we ran into the forest and ate berries to live. Sometimes we’d have to swim through rivers and climb eighty-foot trees and commandeer large ships. Or sometimes we’d disguise ourselves as maids-of-all-work and take jobs in restaurants (those were the times we had to do our chores, and it wasn’t work at that point; it was a fairy tale adventure). I remember clearly the very last time we played Princesses, how the realization that I didn’t want to any more hit me in the stomach like a boxer’s glove. I remember how awful it was that we’d grown out of our favorite game, and how I wondered what we’d do with ourselves. Now that we’re grown-ups, Allison and I don’t play pretend any more. We have bigger things to do. But you know something? I know Allison on a much deeper level than I ever could have when I was ten, and she knows me. We’re quieter now, and we don’t play silly games, but we love each other all the more for the seriousness. The sister connection runs deeper when you’re sharing your hearts rather than your toys. The magic of childhood has pretty much vanished, but something new has replaced it, and I kind of like it. We still laugh and tease, and we are still silly sometimes. We’ll always be sisters, despite this new thing called growing up. The only thing I don’t really like is the idea that someday soon my sisters will be kidnapped by dastardly strangers who claim they love them, but at heart are nothing more than sister-poachers. I’ve got my eye on those men.

Amy’s going to be twenty soon, and I just know that on the very day of her birthday some tall, handsome, well-dressed stranger on a white horse is going to come and whisk her away, and where will I be then? A roommate short, that’s where. I will stand in the dust and watch by best friend and only older sister gallop off into the sunset. She’ll be gone. I will be the oldest. But I can’t do it like Amy. Amy knows everything. She knows what to do and when to do it, and I don’t. I don’t know who her husband is going to be, but I do know that I resent him deeply. And then Allen is going to set his eyes upon some pretty, curly-haired girl with a beautiful smile, and I’ll be bawling at his wedding. And pretty Allison has no chance. I’m going to blink and she’ll have six kids.

We’ll call each other on the phone all the time and swap stories about our new families. We’ll have dinner at each other’s houses and things. We’ll still be very close, and I am certain that parting won’t make an enormous difference in our relationships. But it will never be the same. We can’t just look across the table at each other on a summer day and yell “Water fight!” and run outside. We won’t be everything to each other any more. We won’t be immediate family; we’ll be secondary family.

New lives.

I know it is God’s plan that a man should leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and that the two should become one flesh, and it’s a wonderful, beautiful, exciting plan. It truly is. I suppose that it will be even better than where I am now to have my own family someday. I just… I don’t know whether it’s bad or good to have a family so wonderful that you never ever want to leave them. All I know is that the first man who mentions the word “court” in Amy’s presence I’ll be very tempted to set the dog on. It’s selfish, I know. You would think that someone with an imagination as big as mine would be able to think up a wonderful new life for each and every one of us, and I can do it for everyone else, but somehow it doesn’t work out quite right for me without my family.

I guess I just don’t know what it’s like to love my own family. Not the family I’m in, but the family that will belong to me. I don’t know what it’s like to be married or have children. The children part I can kind of imagine, through the loud, messy, frustrating, yet delightful experience of owning a dog. I don’t know. I’m just being silly, I guess. Mommy says it’s the best thing in the world, and I’m sure it is. I know it is, else why would it be in God’s plan? Ah, there we have an inescapable argument! The God who loves us introduced it from the very beginning, so we know we’re just going to be leaping from a great place to a fantastic one. I am satisfied now. And what makes it even better is that I know I will have years and yeeeeeears to have my brothers and sisters all to myself. Most of them, anyway. Stupid Amy is walking closer and closer to the leaping point, but that can’t be helped. She will always be my older sister and my best friend, no matter how soon that tall, handsome stranger comes banging on our door. I guess things will change, but since I am certain they won’t get worse, and by definition they cannot remain the same, logically the only option that remains to us is that things will improve greatly when we’re all grown up.

Suddenly leaving Neverland isn’t looking so bad after all.