And I didn’t die.
So I did the whole thing right. I put the suit on right, I got the sample off the island and contained properly, and I got away as clean as one could expect after being caught and held prisoner on a superyacht for nearly twenty-four hours.
I felt good about that. I felt like… I was on my way. Things were going really well with the jobs and I was definitely very good at them by this time.
But the very best thing about my life back then was Nate.
Even though I wasn’t allowed to tell Nate what I was doing when Adam and I left, I was allowed to tell him approximately how long I would be gone.
There was a lot of discussion about this right about the time I was turning fourteen. Adam didn’t want me to say anything to Nate. Adam didn’t like Nate. McKay didn’t like Nate either, but I was starting to get the feeling that Adam kinda hated Nate.
But McKay said, “She has to tell him something. Whether you like it or not, they’re close friends. You don’t wanna see him lurking in the woods when she’s gone, just waiting for her to come back. And that kid will be a problem if she keeps too many secrets from him.”
Adam countered with, “That kid is nobody. And his grandfather is on death’s door.”
Then they saw me spying on them and Adam pushed his office door closed and I didn’t hear anything else after that. But that was OK. Because I was picturing Nate lurking in the woods around Old Home, just waiting for me to come back.
He probably did do that and McKay just didn’t see him. Nathan St. James had more up his sleeve than even I knew about. He was some kind of superhero out in those woods. Nothing could touch him.
So I had already decided, before I went to do that job on that island, that I was gonna have my very first kiss with Nathan St. James when I got back.
He didn’t know it yet. It was a secret plan. But I didn’t think he’d mind. I knew because he was my boy next door. And I had already read that paperback book too many times to count so this was just how things were supposed to be.
Nate and I were fate.
I made a whole plan for how I was gonna entice Nathan St. James to kiss me. Of course, I could’ve just kissed him all on my own, but that’s not how the story went in the book.
In the book the boy did all the preparing. He planned the whole thing from top to bottom and beginning to end. And by the time that kiss happened, the girl in the story had been swept right off her feet from all the romance.
So I planted ideas in Nate’s head.
My birthday is in May, and on the night I turned fourteen Nate took me by the hand out into the woods. We were careful not to trip over any snakes as we made our way over to the river and down on the sandy part that always showed up when the water was a little low. It was spring, and the water was really low that year, but we didn’t care because that just meant in the summer there would be a lot of beach to wander on.
But he took me by the hand. And he didn’t have any plans to kiss me back then. He just said, “There’s a full moon tonight, Indie. Do you wanna go look at it with me down by the river?”
I never said no to Nathan. Ever. I was up for everything. So we went moon-watching that night. And there were fireflies out. Tons of them. And I made a big deal about those fireflies. I let him know that I loved the way they lit up the night and I told him that I wished the night was thick with them. So thick that they would light up the woods and make magic.
That was the first hint about how I wanted my first kiss to go down.
The next hint was a few weeks later. Nate had asked me to go up to the river town with him to grab some supplies for his grandfather. And while we were in the drug store we got ice cream, like we always did. Only this time I said, “I wish I could eat an ice cream cone at night in the woods with you. Wouldn’t that just be so refreshing, Nate?”
He agreed. But there was no way to take ice cream cones home on the boat. It took almost an hour to motor back down the river to our little beach where he hid his boat in the trees. And even then, we’d have to walk a good way on to get to our familiar woods where we liked to hang out.
But this was just an idea for planting, not an idea for doing that day.
Adam always had supermarket ice cream in our freezer because he liked to eat it at night too. On the porch or out under the pavilion, though. And in a bowl. Not out in the woods in a waffle cone. But I didn’t want to eat Adam’s grocery store ice cream in the woods out of a bowl. I wanted to eat drug store ice cream from a waffle cone.
The next hint I dropped was about the mosquitoes.
Now, these little critters were just a way of life in the swamp. We had mosquito netting hanging down over a pavilion on the Old Home grounds. This was in the fancy garden between the house and the duck lake. This pavilion was McKay’s favorite place. And even though it was hot and sticky in the summers, more often than not—and weather permitting—this is where you could find McKay when he was not training me, or building things, or talking to Adam about plans.
McKay built the pavilion that first summer I came to live with them. In fact, he was in the middle of the project when I arrived. And by the time my life as a runaway in the woods was over, he was almost done with it.
It was like an outdoor living room and it was the shape of a fat, stubby L. The short length of the L was meant as an outdoor kitchen and dining area and the long end was meant for comfortable conversation or watching football in the fall.
There was a large outdoor fireplace that had a big ol’ flat screen TV over it, and neither of those were there when I first came. It took another year for him to collect enough stones to build the fireplace. So he and I built it together the following summer.
But that fireplace made up the interior corner of the L. I wanted him to put it on the exterior corner of the L because it was gonna block my view of the lake. But McKay said, “People who come down here want to look at the lake, not that ramble of forest behind us. So what is the point of building this beautiful fireplace only to put it behind us and never look at it?”
It made sense.
But that first summer, once I was done runnin’ away, McKay let me help him finish the pavilion off. By this I mean decorate. McKay can make anything with his hands. Anything. So I looked through a bunch of country magazines and found some porch swings for him to make. One was your traditional swing you find on a porch, but the other was more like a bed. It was a long rectangular platform that you could lie down on and it felt like a tire swing.
And once he hung that from the ceiling in his pavilion that was my spot. Two or three pushes from McKay while I was lying on that swing and I would fall asleep like a baby.
Anyway, my point is that McKay would hang mosquito netting around the perimeter of the pavilion in the summer and put out lots of citronella candles to keep the bugs away. And we would eat dinner out there in the evenings. Sometimes Adam ate with us, but not all the time. It was a special place just for McKay and me.
So I hinted to Nate that it would be nice if the fort we had made in the woods a few summers ago had some netting to keep those mosquitoes out.
And that was my plan. That’s how I wanted my first kiss with Nathan St. James to happen. In the woods, thick with fireflies, eating ice cream cones, in our fort, safe from mosquitoes.
I didn’t say anything else after that. Not about my dream, anyway. But the night before I left for that island job Nate and I took a walk like we always did before I had to leave town. By this time, we held hands a lot. Not in front of McKay or Adam, but whenever we were in the woods, or down by the river, or out on the north side of the duck lake looking at birds and mossy trees.