Page 22 of Creeping Beautiful

I think I read that thing cover to cover dozens of times since then.

Adam threw the old copy out, or maybe it got lost sometime in my early teens. But I never forgot the title and every time I wandered into a used book store, or I was browsing a bookseller at the flea market, I would look for it.

I’ve had three or four different copies over the years. The cover changed once. I bought it with the new cover because it was only forty-five cents. But I didn’t like it as much. Just didn’t do anything for me the way the original did. Because the original people on the cover kinda looked like me and Nate.

She had long blonde hair, like me. And blue eyes, like me.

And he had sun-kissed skin and dark blond hair, like Nate. And brown eyes that weren’t really brown, but almost the color of an almond shell in the shade. And I thought that was some kind of sign. Because I have never ever seen another boy with almond-shell-colored eyes like Nate had. He said they came from his great-grandfather’s werewolf blood. Ha ha.

But I didn’t care where they came from, I just loved them so much.

Nathan St. James was my boy next door. He was my first friend, he was my first kiss, and later, when we were older, he was my first love too.

Nate and I met about three days after I had moved in with Adam and McKay on Old Home Island when I was ten years old. It wasn’t really an island because when I think of islands I think of oceans. I come from an ocean island so I know what islands are.

We didn’t live on the ocean, we lived on the Old Pearl River in lower Louisiana. But it felt like an island because the river wound around two sides of Adam’s property and there was a small duck lake on another side. So Nate and I just called it an island anyway.

He lived on the other side of the duck lake, which was on the west side of my island. I could see his house from my bedroom window. It was a brick house the color of the rusty mud in the Old Pearl River when the water level was low. And his bedroom was in the attic. His window was small but when I used my night vision scope, I could see him walk past the window from time to time.

I lived in the smallest room on the second floor of Adam’s old family home. It had old-time wood paneling painted white—McKay did that for me. It had an old claw-foot bathtub in the corner and a small sink, but no toilet.

Even though I laughed at that tub the first time I walked through the door, I loved it. And I took a bubble bath nearly every night once I settled in.

My bed frame was made of old iron that used to be painted white, but the paint had been chipping for decades before I showed up. The sheets were the softest white cotton I had ever felt in my life, and there was a blue quilt as a bed cover. An old, soft quilt that many people had used to keep warm in the past.

There were little pillows on the bed, propped up in front of the real pillows. They were also quilted and handmade. All of them had large flowers pieced together with geometric shapes of varied fabric on the front. And on the back, there was a checkerboard of all these same fabric patterns.

The floor was old bare wood. But it had been polished and sealed before I got there so there was no chance of splinters. And there was a big, round coiled-rope rug on the side of the bed that matched the blue and white color scheme of the room. Half of it was hidden underneath the bed, so when I swung my legs out of the bed in the morning there was a perfect half-moon of blue below my feet that made me think of the sea.

My room faced the trees, but beyond the trees was the duck lake and that’s how I could see Nathan St. James from my bedroom.

The house was old and white, but it had been recently remodeled so everything was fresh and clean when I arrived. Adam said it was a Victorian house because it had a turret in the front, just over the porch, which was just an atrium in the foyer inside and not even a real turret.

But it kinda looked like a small castle, if you didn’t pay too much attention to the white-wood siding.

There was a gate at the end of the driveway with a weathered brass plaque on the front of it that read Boucher House, but no one called it that. We just called it Old Home. Or Adam’s Old Home. Or sometimes just Home. And you couldn’t hardly read that sign, anyway. It was covered in creeping vines. So you couldn’t fault anyone for not calling it the Boucher House. They couldn’t really see the letters.

In the early years it was hard to see Nate’s bedroom window from my window because of all those old trees with creeping vines. But one summer, when we were eleven, we cleared a path through the trees with a chainsaw and then, and forever more, we had a direct line of sight to each other.

Adam was furious with us that day we came at the trees with a chainsaw. And really, it was McKay who actually did most of the work. But it was our idea and we started the project, so we took credit for it.

As long as we used a night vision scope we could see each other when we stood in front of our windows. I gave Nate one of my old scopes for his fourteenth birthday because I wanted him to look at me too, and up until that time it was just me looking at him, mostly.

A year later we had cell phones. And then we would talk on the phone and I would look through the scope and watch him through the window as he talked to me.

He knew I was doing it. I’m not a liar. Adam thought I was but McKay always said that one day my honesty would get me killed. I didn’t care what Adam thought. And Nate didn’t care that I was watching him, anyway. We were best friends and didn’t have secrets like that.

Nate and I met because I was a runaway. Less than two hours after Adam brought me to the island I had decided that I would not live in Adam Boucher’s Old Home, that I would live in his woods.

I mostly did this on principle, but also because it pissed Adam off and drove him crazy.

I really liked to drive Adam crazy back then. I feel like that was my only hobby during those first months I lived with him and McKay. Before Donovan talked me into “behaving myself”.

But those few weeks in the woods were fun for me. I caught Nate fishing in the river on day three. He was in a little motor boat and he had already caught many fish by the time I wandered onto the sandy shore. He made a fire on the beach that afternoon and cooked up those fish. So I didn’t starve while I was living in the woods. I think I might’ve gained weight, that’s how well I ate.

Nate said he knew who I was. He had been watching when Adam brought me home in the rain. He likes to hunt for gators when it rains like that, so that’s what he was doin’. And he heard me screaming as Adam dragged me into the house and locked me in the small upstairs room that would become mine.

But Nate didn’t know my name so I told him that my given name was Indie Anna Accorsi, but everyone just called me Indie.