-This Review can contain SPOILERS-<br /><br />Wendy gets a mean crush on Neil the year she's twelve, and her friendship with Neil will continue throughout her teenage and early adult years. They're just a couple of crazy kids hanging with each other to placate the boredom of living in the middle of no-where. At night she has dreams that they are Bonnie and Clyde together, blowing away "boring innocents" with their machine guns, with their arms wrapped around one another. They are both reckless outsiders like Bonnie and Clyde, both hated by the other kids who reject their mindset and style. They hate Neil for being a queer, and the girls think Wendy is strange herself by openly declaring herself his friend by walking home from school with him every afternoon. But Wendy doesn't care. She hangs tough about all the other stupid kids in school. Wendy vows to herself, "If I could make Neil my friend, I figured I wouldn't need anyone else." Eventually, Wendy and Neil become the closer than if they were even lovers. Wendy just understands something about the perverse Peter Pan in Neil that even he doesn't understand about himself. It's almost as if she were his perverse Wendy who can sometimes visit never-never land together.<br /><br />From the get-go, Wendy and Neil are of a like mind. She witnesses Neil trying his sex games out on a retarded boy. "Now, some dire section of my brain longed to find out what twisted things Neil could do to this nimrod, this Stephan Zepherelli." By the time Neil and Wendy are 15 years old, it doesn't surprise Wendy one bit that Neil is showing signs of degeneration. Especially since she witnessed him going down on this retarded boy. Neil has told Wendy all his private stories about being with Coach, and older man who used to make-love to Neil when he was a little boy. In Neil's mind, it has been a great thing, a great love experience. But deep-down, Wendy knows there's something wrong with Neil, and his love relationship with Coach is somehow to blame. Neil is now perversely attracted to older men, and wants to sell his body to get both his cheap thrills again, and earn an income, "so I could get more drugs for Wendy and me."<br /><br />Neil, a little later, will go to New York City and begin his tenure as a full time street prostitute. Wendy is the friend he shacks up with. They both have managed to escape Kansas, and get away to AIDS ridden Manhattan. But meanwhile, they are still growing up in Kansas, and Neil gets his first real job as a hustler. He takes the bike he stole over to Wendy's to celebrate their first hoist. Never mind that Neil let his first john almost mutilates his genitals. Neil and Wendy stop and wait for a train. Neil puts the candy wax lips over his mouth, and Wendy leans over to kiss them. They go to the park and Neil writes his advertisement on the in magenta crayon. Then he says, "I have something to show you." And here Wendy witnesses teeth marks on Neil's prick when he takes his pants down to show what this john did to him. "Your dick is not a candy-cane!" she lectures him. (Because Wendy enjoys this privilege), "Pull up your pants, exhibitionist!"<br /><br />It is in the very last chapter of part one of the novel that Heim shows the reader how close Wendy and Neil are. More than high school sweethearts, more than a married couple. They are almost like soul mates who share the same secret language. Written from Neil's Point of View, we can see just how much Wendy means to him, as his friend who he's willing to share his deepest secrets with. As the snow begins to fall, Neil thinks, "it's as if I'd punched a button marked MIRACLES." Neil takes Wendy's hand. "I wish they were showing a movie right now," Wendy whispers, a film about our lives, everything that's happened so far. And we would be the only ones standing here, you and me." They unhook a phone form a pole they're standing by. Is Wendy playing a joke on him, Neil wonders? "I hear something," she tells him, listening, "it's the voice of God." But Neil has a need to trust his in soul-mate, the girl who does everything for him, even gets God on the phone for Neil, just so he can believe in something for one single moment in his life, something that isn't a joke told by his best friend. Neil takes the phone out of her hand, brushes the snow out of her face, and says, "I hear him." -review from "The Bad Art Cafe" based on "Mysterious Skin" novel, by Scott Heim.<br /><br />Amazing (if crude at some moments) film, but my only complain is that Wendy had played a larger role in the story, as she does in the book, hence posting this review I found on internet as commentary. I really ended envisioned Neil (and Brian too) as Peter Pan types, whose normal lives had been cut off from themselves by the sinister coach.