4

Beau

“You’re waiting on the new girl to get home from school, aren’t you?” Charlotte joins me at the old window, peering out of the smudges made by age to see the house in the distance. Thankfully we drive to school and don’t have to wait on a bus to make several long stops. “We only have one neighbor within two thousand acres, and a new girl our age happens to move there when most of the people around here are as old as time. What do you think the odds are?”

“Slim.”

I lean farther back in the purple chair that faces the window. Charlotte sits in a matching one.

“She was talking to you in class,” she says. “What a fool.”

My sister is kind to no one. Well, that’s not the full truth. She is sometimes kind to family—what she has left of it, Grandpa and me—but to no one else. She is perhaps meaner than me, which is saying something.

Her long pink nails tap, tap, tap on the wooden armrest of her chair. Her eyes roam our home, a small wooden cabin. The place where my dad was raised.

My mind flashes to my parents.

The swamp hisses at us from all angles, wind rushing through trees. Charlotte and Mom paddle a canoe ten feet away, Mom at one end and my sister at the other. Neither of them is wary of the bog, as though they’ve lived here their whole lives instead of where we actually live, Atlanta proper. Grandpa is the one who lives here, paddling a canoe of his own, leading the way.

Dad sits across from me, a slight smile on his face. He’s more relaxed here, in his element. We’ve visited enough times to not frighten when alligators curiously venture near or when fish jump out of the water, belly flopping back in. I wonder if they’re being chased beneath the surface. I can’t see through to tell. The water is a patchwork quilt of algae-green and muck-brown.

Dad looks at me with a face just like my own, only older, with wrinkles and hair as black as moccasins. His rough blue eyes focus on nothing in particular.

“Nice out here, isn’t it?” he says.

I nod. It really is. What eight-year-old wouldn’t like this?

Mom reaches out a hand and brushes a string of branches that spread toward her canoe. I can hear her laugh ping off bark, and it might be my favorite sound. Charlotte smiles widely and stretches for the leaves, too. Their canoe nearly tips, and they collapse into a fit of giggles, the two of them.

I wonder if there will ever be a day when we don’t have to leave, when we can pack our bags and make this our daily life. I certainly wouldn’t mind.

I never intended to live here without my parents.

“Will you break her heart today?” Charlotte asks.

Charlotte often talks to me like she’s the older one, though I was born minutes first.

“So soon? Where’s the fun in that?”

She laughs. “Go on then, here she comes.”

Willow emerges from the path and steps onto the porch attached to her small home, sunshine pouring over her. She looks back toward my house.

“If only a guy had moved next door,” Charlotte says. “That would have been much more fun. For me, of course.”

She leaves me with my thoughts, her bare feet smacking against the wooden floor beneath her.

Willow stands there for a moment before I step outside.

I don’t walk all the way to her property. That wouldn’t be wise. Mostly because I’m not a fan of Old Lady Bell, and the feeling is mutual. She’s always been quick to yell at me to get off her land. I wait for Willow halfway, at the line where the properties are severed.

She comes to me.

“Hello, Willow Bell.” I smile.

“Hello, Beau,” she says, amusement skating across her lips. I wonder if I’m imagining the way her pupils dilate the slightest bit with my closeness. “I heard a funny thing today.”

She turns, leaving me to follow after her. I don’t know quite what to do, so I just stand there.

“Are you coming or not?” Willow flips her dark hair over her shoulder and flashes me a sweet smile.

“I haven’t decided,” I say honestly.

“Okay.” She shrugs. “Then I suggest you go back home because Gran will wake from her nap in about five minutes, and she won’t be happy about you crossing her property line. She’s not a fan of trespassers.”

“What are you talking about, Willow?”

She glances at my feet.

I look down. Well, what do you know? I guess I had taken a few steps toward Willow after all. I’m now on Old Lady Bell’s side.

Hell with it.

I run after Willow. She smiles because she knew I’d come. I decide, when I catch up, that I like her smile, her plump lips. I think I even like the tiny gap between her two front teeth. I hadn’t noticed that before. I guess I hadn’t been close enough.

“There’s a place just past here, ’round a bend of water lilies, where we can sit. Would you like to do that, Beau?”

“I would,” I say.

Willow approaches a tiny, dingy, metal boat with rust eating at the sides, stained where the water has touched the bottom. She pushes it toward the marsh, her feet squelching in mud. She’s wearing the right kind of shoes—snake-proof, water-resistant boots—I’ll give her credit for that. Her shorts are short and her hair is long and her look is deep, just the way I like it.

“Fair warning.” She pulls back her shirt just slightly to reveal a sheaved knife tucked into her shorts. “I’m not afraid to use this if I need to.”

I like her already. “Why would you say something like that?”

“Like I said, I hear things,” she replies. “And I don’t know you well. But I suppose I oughta give you a chance and judge for myself, right? If I listened to all the gossip ’round this town, I’d never have any friends.”

She has a point.

Willow hops in when the boat begins to float, and I join her. Our boots leaky-faucet drip onto the inside metal as we grab oars to row. The water is as murky as triple-steeped tea, teeming with gators, vipers, and fish. Frogs bask on cypress roots that grow out of the water like fingers, protecting the creatures that live underneath. Dragonflies whir past us, and mosquitoes swarm.

“You just moved here,” I say, offering up a conversation.

“And you moved here almost eight years ago, I hear,” she replies.

“You seem to hear a lot of things.”

She surprises me with a smile. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“Tell me some of it?”

I row steadily through the marsh. Eyes open and ready. Never can be too careful. Once had a coral snake drop out of a tree and into my canoe.

“Okay, for starters, do you really think you should be in this boat with me?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

Willow doesn’t lose her grin or her sharp wit. She says exactly what she wants, and I happen to like that in a place where people will bless your heart at the same time that they’re muttering curses under their breath.

“Would your girlfriend like it if you were here?” she asks.

I didn’t realize she knew yet. Guess word does spread fast. The funny thing is: she waited to ask until I was already in the boat, so what does that say?

“Are you hitting on me? Because otherwise, why would it matter if I have a girlfriend? I thought we were just beginning to become friends.”

She blushes swamp-berry red.

“I thought maybe we were going for a boat ride as friends, and you could tell me all about why you’re here in this swamp.” I make sure to catch her eye.

“Okay, then,” Willow says, turning back to the water.

The bend of lilies takes only a minute to get to, and soon we’re docking the boat and climbing out into gurgling mud, grabbing onto tree branches to not sink into the quicksand that lines the shore.

I watch the way Willow knows just what to do. How to relax and to not fight the mud. How to slowly get herself out. How to climb the cypress tree roots and take a seat atop so that she’s safe from the water. She begins scooping mud off her boots and flinging it back into the depths. Her hands are dirty, and she smears muck across her cheek by accident.

“You look as though you’ve done this a hundred times.”

“I might have.”

“Tell me how that’s possible?”

I haven’t seen her in the swamp before. She must have been here, though, I reason as I climb the tree roots. They’re not wide, so I cozy up next to her. Thankfully, she doesn’t send me toppling into the water.

“You tell me something first,” she says.

I find myself wanting to tell her anything.