Page 110 of Pretty Nightmare

A vehicle pulls up directly outside the motel room so I walk over to the window and swipe the curtain aside.

Beck and Moore are facing each other in the front cab of a truck having some kind of heated conversation—which is most likely about something inconsequential because that’s just how they act.

Beck is a big white guy with steel-gray eyes and a nearly shaved head of golden fuzz who is way more muscle than brain. I’m not calling him stupid because I don’t care how big you are, you don’t get this far in this line of work by being stupid. He’s just more front-line defense than he is back-end planning.

Moore is an equally huge black dude from Detroit who picked up my Southern accent and ran with it. At first, he was just making fun of me because my roots run deep. But he’s been doing that for four years and now I can’t picture him talking any other way. He’s my tech guy. You give that man a computer and he will fuck a whole lotta shit up with the tips of his fingers.

They continue their argument in the truck so I let the curtain slide back in place and go back to thinking about Indie.

We spent weeks running around in the swamp when Adam first brought her back to Old Home. I hid with her during the day and I took her home at night. She would climb up a tree, and walk along the roof of my grandfather’s cottage, and then slide her little slip of a body into my attic window. She slept on the floor those three weeks we were hiding from Adam and McKay. I offered her my bed but she said no. She told me…

I have to stop in the here and now and swallow hard as I think back on this moment. Because she said it so casually.

But she told me… “I always sleep on the floor. It’s fine for me. But you’re probably used to sleeping in a bed, so it wouldn’t be right to take a good thing away from you just to make myself comfortable.” She had a different kind of accent back then. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just regular. I can’t remember it very well now. I just recall thinking, She’s not from around here.

That’s how it started. My internal musing about her accent, or lack thereof, and where she might be from. That was the loose thread that, when tugged on with the slightest pressure, started to unravel everything I thought I knew to be true.

That first night she took the blanket and pillow I offered her, went into the corner, and curled up like she was both a lost little kitten and a fierce, wild lioness at the very same time.

She didn’t have any trouble falling asleep. She snored a little, breathing deep at times. She even moaned now and again and kicked her feet like she was dreaming.

I didn’t sleep the whole night. Not one second of it.

I spent every moment of that night trying to imagine where this little golden-haired girl with bright blue eyes came from that she never had a bed before. I pictured caves. Because I was a child with a sense of adventure. I thought myself a boy akin to Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. A boy who craved, and looked for, and oftentimes found—with a little imagination—adventurous things right in front of him almost every second of the day.

So I didn’t picture scary caves. I didn’t have the… the right… mindset, I guess, to think up awful living conditions for other children.

Oh, to be young like that again. To be that innocent.

The kids in Pearl Springs were not rich. Not by any means. In fact, knowing what I do now about that town and the people in it, I would definitely call almost all of them poor and underprivileged. But they had homes. And families. They had bedrooms and food to eat. They had clothes to wear to school and clothes to play in after they got home.

And in that respect, all those kids were a lot like me. I know now that I had privilege that others in my school did not. But I didn’t know it back then. I don’t really understand my privilege right now because it’s not all that easy to… to quantify, I guess.

I have things others do not. Things like a bloodline and a last name that guarantee me a certain place in the world. Of course, that’s the Company world and not the one everyone else lives in, but I get it. Certain things are guaranteed to me.

Like McKay saving my life after Indie tried to kill me.

So I didn’t picture Indie’s life before me filled with mind-control assholes who doled out a special kind of punishment when she didn’t obey her orders.

I didn’t picture her running in the woods, panting so hard, she was on the verge of hyperventilating.

I didn’t picture her being yanked backwards by her long, golden hair until she fell to the ground.

I didn’t picture what came after that, either.

I pictured Indie Anna’s life before me as one long, grand adventure instead. I was enamored with her from the very first second. And when she started telling me about tropical islands, and jungles filled with snakes big enough to eat a man alive, I fell into her face first.

She was no Becky Thatcher, that’s for sure. She was so much better than any girl I had ever read about in a story. But sometimes she was exactly like a storybook girl. She would wear pretty dresses, and she lived in that mansion across the duck lake. And she went to school at home. She didn’t have a mother or a father, but two men took care of her like she was a treasure chest overflowing with jewels and gold.

And the idea of her never having a bed to sleep in—the idea that she had spent her whole life sleeping on a floor… well. I had to figure that out. Because even though it felt foreign, it felt familiar too. After a while, anyway. Not that first day. But maybe a couple weeks later. By the time Indie had agreed, with some prodding from Donovan, to leave the woods and go home I was caught in the net. Struggling to connect the dots of memories that were starting to pop back up in my dreams.

It would take me years to understand what her life was really like before she came to Old Home to live with Adam and McKay. Five years on and I was still trying to piece it all together.

I would not call Indie a liar. She wasn’t a liar. Because to be a liar you have to tell untruths on purpose. And she never did that.

She only told lies she thought were truths.

The door beeps, then opens. Beck comes in first, still arguing with Moore about whatever the fuck. He throws the truck key down on the dresser. “You’re so full of shit, Moore.”