Wicked Charm

by Amber Hart

“I knew it.” Her eyes slide my way. “You like him. Every girl who likes boys does. It’s not just you. But you have to learn to fight it, or he’ll devour you.”

  I’m not so sure I consider that a bad thing.

  “And yes, he’s taken. Every day of the week. The girls don’t last more than a couple of weeks, but they are always there. One after the other,” she says.

  The thought irks me. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.

  “Well, he and I aren’t anything to each other, so I’m sure there’s nothing for me to worry about,” I say. “I don’t even think he’s hot.”

  Yes I do.

  “Atta girl,” Jorie says. “Keep lying to yourself and eventually you might actually believe it. It’s a start.”

  “I’m not lying,” I say.

  “You’re lying now,” she says.

  “Maybe,” I admit.

  “Like I said,” Jorie continues. “Almost all girls fall for him. But be careful. He’s an inch shy of as wicked as they get.”

  Maybe I like wicked. Maybe I top my pies with wicked, and maybe I order wicked every day; she doesn’t know. I can handle it, I tell myself. But that might be the lying liar in me.

  “Him and that sister of his, both,” Jorie says. “You’ll mostly find him with those two goons, Grant and Pax. I’m sure you’ve seen them. One looks like a bird and the other like a gorilla. You might get a chance to see him alone more than most people, though, because he’s your neighbor, right?”

  “Hard to tell,” I say. “I’ve never seen him before, and I used to visit often.”

  A memory hits me. A stringy young boy—same age as me at the time, eight—running around the yard, chasing squirrels as though he means to catch one.

  “If you’re looking to eat it, you have to set a trap, you know,” I say. “And try being quiet when you approach them—it helps. Plus, who are you and why are you on my gran’s property?”

  “I’m not. I’m on my grandpa’s side. See?” he replies. “That’s the dividing line back behind you.”

  He was right. He was technically on his side.

  “Unless he was the boy I once met years ago,” I say to Jorie. “I’d always thought he was visiting before. I never saw him afterward.”

  “Well, you’re Old Lady Bell’s family, right?”

  “Yes,” I confirm. I’m proud of Gran. Don’t care what anybody says. And I’ve heard it around town, how my gran’s the crazy lady who lives in the deep swamp, who’s taken to feeding the gators and yellin’ at anyone who tries to trespass her land. Doesn’t mean she’s bad. Just means she likes privacy and animals. She can’t help it if most of the animals in the swamp are of the reptilian kind.

  “Then he’s been your grandma’s neighbor since he was ten,” she says. “I knew your grandpa, by the way. He was a good man. My grandpa used to frog hunt with him. He’d stay for dinner from time to time.”

  “Sounds like Grandpa,” I confirm. “May he rest in peace, amen.”

  I was taught to give respect to the dead and attach amens to the ends of sentences like periods.

  “When was the last time you visited here, before actually moving, I mean?”

  “More than a year ago,” I say. I wonder why Gran never mentioned having neighbors my age next door, but then I remember how she warned me away from Beau. She must not have wanted me to befriend him or his sister.

  My hands shoot out to stop my body from hitting the seat in front of us as the driver slams on the brakes at a stoplight. Jorie grabs a sheet of paper and begins writing her number.

  “Here, call me if you want to hang out sometime. I live down the way from you, about ten miles.”

  I take the paper and fold it until it fits tight-like into my jeans pocket. My red-and-white-striped shirt sticks to the back of the seat as I scoot forward. The bus seems to have no air-conditioning, even though it should because senior year is only three weeks in and summers in Georgia are brutal.

  “Anyway,” Jorie says, “Beau’s family—him, his sister, momma, and poppa—moved in with his grandpa when his parents fell ill. Rumor has it that they eventually died.”

  What a wicked-sad thing to have happen. If it’s true, maybe that’s why Beau supposedly isn’t nice? Grief can make a person act all sorts of ways.

  “No one reliable has seen his parents there or around town. ’Course you always get those few looking to tell a juicy tale, aching for attention, who want to say they’ve seen them. No proof, though. No pictures. Supposedly seeing them when there are no witnesses to back up their claims. You’ll learn that some folks ’round here are as good at lying as they are at breathing, and they’re not afraid to show it. Carry it around like a prized medal for winning best pie or something.”

  I can tell the exact moment we leave the city part of town and enter the swamp because the driver stops roughly and lets most of the kids off. Only eight of us remain. Like a demon straight out of hell, the driver takes off again, leaving stoplights and houses behind for trees and water encroaching on both sides.

  “I guess the mystery works for him, though. He has half the girls at our school in love with him.”

  “Must be more than his mysteriousness.” I watch the muddy water bubble and pop. “If girls are falling that hard.”

  Vines slither and wind their way around trees, choking the trunks. Very little light enters the cover of leaves, making daytime appear more like dusk. The road is the only thing lit by the sun, save a few breaks in the vegetation.

  “Do you know what it’s like to be in love, Willow?” Jorie asks.

  It’s a personal question, but I answer anyway. “No.”

  “Neither does Beau,” she replies. “For all the girls he’s broken, he doesn’t know a thing about love. You’d be wise to remember that.”

  I have no idea what she means, but I realize that people in the Georgia swamp are simply different than the people I knew back in Florida. They speak their minds here. Leaving Georgia when I was only nine affords me few memories of small-town life. What always did stick was my accent. Tried scrubbing it away with many years in Florida. Tried not standing out, but it never worked. Always felt forced.

  “Jorie,” I say. “If all girls fall for him at one point or another—if they like boys, that is—how have you not fallen?”

  “Oh, I have,” she says. “You think I don’t look? It’s too hard not to. I’m not immune, but I’ve learned how to avoid him. How to not draw his eye. Maybe when he’s made it through all the girls here, he’ll come for me. But for now, I’m safe.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

  “It means that he’s not finished breaking hearts. That’s what.”

  She looks me over, eyes resting on mine.

  “Or maybe I’m not safe at all anymore now that we’re friends,” she says. “We are friends, right?”

  “Sure.” She’s the closest I have to a friend here.

  Jorie twists the bangle bracelets on her wrist in a nervous kind of way. “Then maybe I’m not safe. I will be in his line of sight now. He might be too preoccupied with you, though. He’s taken to you already. That’s not a good thing, by the way.”

  “Maybe it could be a good thing.”

  “You think that now,” she says. “But your tears will tell you differently later.”

  Maybe she’s right. But maybe she’s wrong. I think about Beau’s disarming smile and how I could hardly look away from him. Yes, she’s probably right. She is most likely absolutely right.

  And somehow, I don’t care. I’m going to talk to him again anyway.

  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 t
he 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.

  5

  Willow

  I think back to the conversation I had with Gran yesterday.

  “It’s just an apple pie, Gran,” I say. “Don’t you think it’s nice that I baked him one? You always tell me to be kind. I thought I could take it to him and introduce myself. Maybe make a friend.”

  “He doesn’t deserve kindness,” Gran replies. “Don’t you have anything else to do instead of spending an hour in the kitchen making that good-for-nothin’ boy a treat? He’ll steal your soul, that’s what he’ll do.”

  I laugh. “Gran, that’s a little far-fetched. I thought you said the devil’s the only one powerful enough to do that.”

  “Who says he’s any different?”

  “It’s just a pie.”

  Gran walks up to me slowly, relying heavily on her cane.

  I don’t see the fork in her hand until it’s too late. She scoops a bite and chews. I don’t know how she expects me to give it to him now that she’s taken a chunk out of it.

  “Delicious, that’s what this is. Sweet, so sweet.”

  She sets the fork in the sink. Then she picks up the pie quicker than I would have expected her to and throws it in the trash. It melts and crumbles against the plastic bag.

  “Let me tell you something about boys like him, Willow Mae.” I stare at her, slack-jawed. “They’re attracted to sweet more than anything. The sweeter, the better. That boy will make you feel crazy-wonderful, all right. Yep, sure will. And then he’ll break you.”

  Gran hobbles to her room and slams the door.

  “What is it you want to know?” Beau asks.

  I probably shouldn’t trust the way he makes my insides quiver. I place a hand against my stomach to try to steady myself.

  “Maybe the things I heard today are true.” I think back to what Jorie told me, hoping he doesn’t plan to chew me up and spit me out like the others.

  “And what kinds of things are those?”

  His look twists me up, and so I glance into the trees, instead of his eyes, distracting myself with the moss that hangs like tinsel.