Page 11

EIGHT

I won’t fool myself into thinking that love is anything other than madness. A delusion formed by old, spiteful tulips. A malediction. A sickness carried in the Goode family line—a thing for which there is no cure.

I felt the moon-mad lunacy taking shape beneath my skin when Oak stood too close—so close he could have touched me—carving its way along my pale bones. But I’ve spent my life at a distance, safely away from anyone who’d dare look my way. And I can’t allow myself to forget who I am. I can’t let anyone in. Even a boy with pond water on his eyelashes and a breath held dangerously against his lips.

The tulips may make others fall in love with us, but we are just as susceptible to love’s intoxicating rhythm. We can become just as sick with love’s affliction.

The truest kind of love.

Because we’re human. Because love is treacherous in all its forms.

I bury my head in my pillow and try to sleep. But his voice is there waiting, words against my heated skin: You want me to be afraid of you… but I’m not.

It wasn’t what I really wanted. Not even close.

I wanted him to kiss me, desperately, gravely, the tall meadow grass licking at my knees, our skin wet from the pond, his hands so close that they could have strayed along my temple, tangled in my hair.

But I walked away.

It hurts to think of it now, a terrible grinding ache behind my eyes, in my throat—choking on everything I wanted to say to him but didn’t—yet he keeps resurfacing, no matter how hard I try to push him away.

I crush my palms to my eyes.

But there are other voices too… in the night air, hissing, reaching out for me through the open bedroom window. Echoing, whispering… giggling .

I toss back the bedsheet.

The voices aren’t in my head; they aren’t a conjuring of the summer wind. They’re real. My feet hit the cold wood floor, and I move to the window.

A tiny ember of hope itches at me: maybe Oak has been unable to sleep too, his mind cycling over thoughts of me, and he’s come to climb through the open window and kiss me in my room while the moonlight peels away all the doubt still clinging to my skull.

But out in the garden is not a single shadow… but many.

There are four, no , five people skulking through the rows of tulips.

I yank open my bedroom door and find Archer already rushing down the hall. He grabs the shotgun from beside the woodstove, then bursts through the screen door onto the back porch.

But he stops short… staring out into the garden.

I see what he sees: the five thieves are not trying to steal the tulips, not exactly; they rip the petals from the white-and-bloodred blooms and rub them across their skin, their flushed cheeks and forearms, and along their scalps. They bring the petals to their noses and draw in deep breaths, trying to inhale whatever ancient magic lives inside each silk-soft flower.

As if they want to press them down into their blood and bones.

As if they want to become a Goode.

“I told those boys to stay away,” I mutter, squinting into the dark.

Archer shakes his head. “It’s not Tobias and Mac.” He nods toward one of the figures as it steps into the moonlight.

Clementine Morris.

Soft-spoken, head down, brown hair always in her eyes—Clementine.

Who stood in the hall while Mac and Tobias swung their fists at each other. Who, at the drive-in, sat beside Tobias, his hands folded protectively around her. Clementine Morris, who had her fortune read by Jude during lunch while sitting with her friends from band class. I wonder what fortune he gave her, if he foresaw this—that she would steal tulips and find herself the envy, the desire, of her classmates, those who had ignored her only days earlier. Those who had teased her since grade school for her tangled, unruly hair, for her quiet nature.

But now she holds a tulip to her chest and sways in time with the breeze.

One of the other girls—Jada Reynolds, a sophomore who has a tattoo of a bluebird on the inside of her wrist—begins taking off her clothes, down to her bra, and lies on the ground among the scattered petals. A few rows away a girl I can’t fully make out begins plucking off tulip petals and sticking them in her mouth, swallowing them whole. Another girl giggles manically, skipping through the rows, arms reaching for the tulips while her head tilts to the sky like she’s calling down the moonlight, summoning some dark spell that will turn her into a Goode once and for all.

Archer glances at me, an eyebrow peaked into his forehead.

I would laugh—watching them roll around in our garden—if it weren’t so unsettling. They must be drunk, I think. But I know it’s another kind of inebriation: the delirious kind.

The kind our ancestors warned about.

“Fucking heathens,” Archer says through an exhale, stepping to the edge of the porch. “Get off our property!” he shouts. “I won’t tell you twice!” He grips the shotgun in his hands, even though he knows as well as I do that it’s useless—the thing belonged to our grandfather, and our great-grandfather before that, an heirloom that’s so old, it was probably used in the Civil War. And in truth, my brother doesn’t need it: words uttered from Archer Goode’s lips are nearly as unrefusable as law.

The girl who has been stuffing her face with petals abruptly stops, letting the remaining bits fall from her hands, while Jada pushes herself up from the dirt, eyes shivering open and closed, open and closed . They look mesmerized, stoned, like sleepwalkers who we’ve just awoken from some wondrously enraptured dream. I worry they’re going to lunge toward us, try to rip us apart just as they have the tulips, but Archer stomps his foot against the wood porch, as if he’s scaring away a pack of stray coyotes.

“Get!” he yells, louder this time.

And they scatter, like frightened animals, sprinting down the tulip rows, shoving themselves through a hole in the barbed-wire fencing they must have cut open, then into the dark of the woods beyond.

But Clementine doesn’t move. She looks paralyzed.

Her mouth falls open, and she blinks.

“It was a dare…,” she says, voice broken by deep inhales. “The first time.”

I frown at her, unsure what she’s saying.

“We only wanted to see the flowers up close. To tiptoe through the Goode garden. We didn’t know what they were, what they did. But…” She shakes her head, and I realize that she’s confessing her crime, that even in her greed for the tulips, there still remains the guilt of stealing something that doesn’t belong to her. “I can’t go back to how it was….” She looks like she’s holding down a sob, her eyes watering, hands trembling. “Tobias never even looked at me before. Not until…” She looks down at the clump of tulips in her fist.

She stole the tulips. It was always her.

Sweet, mild-tempered Clementine Morris. And now she needs more.

“Jude said that a single tulip would bring me love….” She blinks up at me, as if she knows I was watching her that day on the lawn, when Jude read her the fortune. “I didn’t know what it meant. But Suzy remembered the tulips behind your house. We didn’t really think anything would happen. We didn’t even plan on stealing them at first. Until we saw them… breathed them in.” She shakes her head, looks briefly lucid. “But yesterday I asked Jude for another fortune. He said that the love wouldn’t last. I’d lose it just as quick as I’d found it. But I…” Her eyes brighten, her mouth twitches at the edges. “Maybe I can change fate.” She makes a sound, almost like a laugh, then she quickly stuffs a handful of tulips into the pocket of her white shorts, before turning and darting down the tulip rows, then out through the severed opening in the fence.

She vanishes into the dark edge of the trees.

Jude told her that a single tulip would bring her love. He saw what the future held.

Archer walks out into the empty garden and picks up Jada’s pink tank top from the dirt. He looks up at me, exhaustion, shock, and something else pulling at the features of his face. “Go back to sleep,” he says. “I’ll fix the fence.” He glances at the place where Clementine and her friends fled into the woods. “But I don’t know if it’ll do much good now. If they want the tulips bad enough, they’ll find a way in.”

The morning sun finally scrapes above the tree line, and I find Archer on the back porch, seated on one of the old rocking chairs, staring out at the tulips.

“Did you sleep at all?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

My brother feels protective of the garden, of this house—maybe because we have so little, he doesn’t want to lose what’s left. Even the Goode name holds value to him, as if it stood for something once, as if somewhere in the lineage it might have meant honor or bravery, something worth defending. But I know better—there’s nothing worth saving here.

I leave my suitcase on my bedroom floor, half-packed. I can’t bring myself to leave my brother, not after last night, not with the nervy, bloodshot look in his eyes, waiting for someone else to sneak into the garden.

I’ll wait a day or two, for things to settle, for my brother to ease back into the normal rhythm of his self-obsessed life… and then I’ll leave.

Because he can’t watch the garden day and night. The madness has already spread; they’ve had a taste of false love, and they’ll come for more tulips.

And maybe we should let them.

Let them feed the desperation growing inside them, let them choke on the petals if that’s what they want. I’m no longer certain if we’re protecting them or ourselves.

Let them go a little mad.

Let them know what it feels like to be a Goode.

Maybe they’ll see how terrible it really is.

Near sunset Archer is still on the back porch, his eyelids slipping closed, the shotgun resting on his lap. I touch his shoulder. “Go inside,” I say. “Get some sleep. I’ll keep watch,” I assure him.

He mumbles something, shaking his head. But I grab his arm and help him stand, then lead him into the house. Inside I shove him into his room and close the door; I suspect he’ll sleep for twelve hours.

But I don’t go back out onto the porch. I have no interest in holding the gun and keeping watch over the tulips. Instead I carry my sketchbook out onto the front porch, ease into the wooden swing that my grandfather built long before we were born, and stare out at the black length of Swamp Wells Road. This is the view I prefer.

A road under the weight of stars.

A road that will lead me out of this town.

It’s just a little delay, I tell myself. Another day won’t make a difference.

With my headphones on—Sinéad O’Connor wailing about loneliness—I tilt my head back, the last of the setting sun now gone, and let my eyes stray across the star-pricked horizon. The quiet soothes my thoughts, and I watch as clouds pour across the skyline, dark and heavy, a summer storm gathering strength. They come almost every night this time of year. Rain and wind to cool the sweltering heat. And sometimes there is lightning, too, thunder that shakes the whole house.

I start to open my sketchbook, when my eyes catch a flash of movement—a shadow out on the road.

I sit up, squinting through the dark.

It could be Clementine, returned for more tulips—greedy, unable to keep away.

But the silhouette isn’t trying to hide, to keep to the shadows; the person stands in the open, and now they’re looking up at the house. I can’t be sure if they can see me in the dark, or if they’re just staring at the cursed Goode home.

I remove my headphones, keeping still and quiet, watching, and the shadow takes a step up our driveway, then another, moving toward the house.

I should wake Archer—if someone is coming to cut through our fence and steal more tulips, I won’t be able to defend them on my own. And I’m not sure I even want to.

But the person stops, abruptly, looking back over their shoulder.

I don’t understand what they’re doing.

They turn, and just as swiftly they start back toward the road—like they’ve changed their mind.

I stand up and peer down the drive—confused—and for the second time the figure pauses, hesitates, turning slightly to look back toward the house. And when they do, I see it: the outline of a book held in his left hand, just before he slides it into his back pocket.

“Oak?”

He spins around, and in the dark he looks not quite real—like the night will swallow him up at any moment. I walk to the front steps, and he must see me, because he moves closer, stopping only when he reaches the edge of the creek running below the front porch.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

He lifts his chin, hair brushed back from his forehead, and every feature of his face feels familiar. As if it’s a face I’ve known my whole life.

“I’m sorry about the other night,” he says, feet shifting in the dirt, voice windswept, roughened from the miles of pavement he’s walked to get here. “I should have been more careful, I shouldn’t have tried to…” His eyes skip past me to the house, then back. He was going to say that he shouldn’t have tried to kiss me, and I wonder if he’s afraid of the same things I am—that maybe he wanted to press his lips to mine only because I’m a Goode, because of the tulips—or if he’s afraid of something else.

“You walked all the way here from Favorville just to tell me that?”

He clears his throat. “I usually walk at night… and read.”

I think about the book in his back pocket, about the dark stretch of road that leads from his county to mine. I think about the night air in his lungs, the thoughts stirring inside him. And all the things he might be thinking right now.

“I think books prefer the quiet, and the dark. It lets the pages breathe,” he says, a soft twitch at the corner of his mouth, like he’s saying things he didn’t anticipate.

But I smile, liking this description. Liking the way words form on his lips. Liking the shyness that skips through his eyes, there and then gone. Like he’s not used to the feeling, and he doesn’t know how to push it away.

“I wasn’t sure if I should come up to your house, once I got here.” He looks me clear in the eyes now, the shyness gone. “I started to turn around and walk home.” He glances past me to the porch swing. “I didn’t think you’d be out here. That anyone would see me.”

“I was keeping watch.” My shoulders settle. “Someone broke into our garden again; they stole more tulips.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t who I thought it would be.” I shake my head, thinking of Clementine and her friends. “But… my brother has been up watching the garden since it happened.”

“And tonight is your shift?”

“Something like that.”

He smiles, and the night feels more alive, the wind tracing my ears, the starlight sharper against his silhouette. “You want some company?” he asks.

I hold back my own smile; I tuck it down. “You sure you want to risk it?” I keep my mouth serious, giving nothing away. “It’s nearly a full moon. This is usually when my family sacrifices helpless boys to the ancient gods.”

His smile flattens, but only for an instant. “Then I’ll have to warn any helpless boys if I see them.”

I tilt my head, a smile reaching my eyes, still trying to understand why Oak isn’t afraid, why he doesn’t tip forward to breathe in my skin and confess all the ways in which he can’t live without me. He is a boy I can’t decipher. A paradox. Beautiful and strange.

We stare at each other, like two rivals sizing up the competition, trying to decide who’s bluffing, who will flinch first. Who will make it out alive.

“Sure,” I relent.

He steps over the creek and climbs the steps. We settle onto the porch swing, a soft wind stirring up from the nearby elms, sending a shiver through me. It’ll rain soon, I can feel it.

“What do you listen to?” he asks.

I lift an eyebrow.

“On that old Walkman.”

I realize the headphones are still around my neck. “They’re old cassette tapes that belonged to my mom.”

“Are they any good?”

“Some of them.” I turn my eyes back to the dark sky, watching the moonlight as it’s swallowed up by the clouds. “It’s better than the silence.” It makes me wonder why I’m so afraid of the quiet. What makes me crave the thrum of noise in my ears? Maybe because I hate the sound of the tulips, of Forsaken Creek, of the whispers in the halls at school whenever I walk by.

Music drowns out the shrill, painful orchestra of my life.

I remove the headphones from around my neck, placing them in my lap.

“I know what you mean.” His voice is a whisper, careful, but not weak. “It’s hard to sleep most nights…. The silence is too suffocating.”

I want to know about his silence—because I’m certain it’s different from mine. But the hush of the wind, the quiet of the sky, stall the words on my tongue. I don’t want to break this moment with questions that will surely open up parts of him he might not want to share. Not yet.

So I let the quiet pacify my thoughts. And I realize that I like this kind of quiet. With him.

Two humans watching a storm smear across the sky. Only a few inches between us. But as the minutes flit away, my mind starts to nag at me, old thoughts, old warnings seeping back in. “Aren’t you worried…?” I say, keeping my eyes on the darkening clouds. “I mean—don’t you worry why you’re here, why you walked all the way to my house? Why you’re sitting next to me on my porch?”

“I’m here to help you catch your thief,” he says, tilting his eyes at me, a soft, unaffected smile curling across his lips.

I almost smile back. “But what if it’s not that? What if you’re here against your will?”

“Like you’re keeping me prisoner?” he asks with an even bigger grin.

“You know what I mean.”

His smile fades. “You think the tulips lured me here?”

“Maybe.” Most likely.

“Or… maybe I have more free will than you give me credit for,” he suggests, lifting an eyebrow, his hand so close that he could lay it atop mine, his eyes so close that he could peer inside me and see all my secrets. And when he looks at me like this, it makes me feel like I’ve known him for lifetimes, like I’ve always known him, like we grew up next door to each other and we’ve spent countless summer nights together just like this. When his eyes blink slowly, lidded, when his mouth forms a barely there smile that I could almost mistake for sadness, I feel like I could stay here beside him for a hundred years. Like we are the oldest of friends, like we could tip into something deeper if we’re not careful. Something dizzying and weightless and risky.

Something we are destined for.

But his mouth drives into an almost-serious line. “I’m here because I want to be here,” he says. “I could leave at any time.” He stands from the porch swing, shoulders broad, and takes a step toward the edge of the porch. “I could walk away right now, all the way home, if I wanted.” He takes another step. “I’m serious. You better tell me to stay. Otherwise, I’m leaving. I’ll really do it.”

I watch him, trying not to smirk.

“Last chance, Lark,” he warns, glancing over his shoulder as he descends the porch steps. “I’m going to walk home… in the dark… and the cold.”

A short laugh falls from my lips. “You said you like walking in the dark,” I point out. “And it’s summer, it’s not even cold.”

He tilts his head at me. “The wolves, then, the wolves will surely get me. Imagine what a horrible death.”

“Okay,” I say, unable to contain the grin taking up most of my face. “Stay.”

But he raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think you really mean it. It feels like you’re just saying that to be nice.” He steps over the creek, pushing his hands into his pockets, like he’s preparing to make the long, dangerous trek back to Favorville. He looks at me one last time, forlorn and desperate, and when I don’t say anything, he starts walking.

But I sit up straight. “Oak,” I call, still grinning. “I want you to stay…. Please stay.”

He swivels back to me. “You’re sure? You’re not just saying that?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I don’t want you to leave…. I need you to stay.”

He smiles, holding up his hands. “Fine, fine, I will if you want me to that badly.”

I scowl at him, and when he climbs back up the steps, settling onto the porch swing, I shove him in the shoulder.

“I didn’t know you were so desperate for me to stay,” he says, shooting me a half smile, looking far too handsome in the filtered moonlight.

“You’re lucky I’m not a real witch like everyone thinks I am,” I tease. “Otherwise, I’d hex you and turn you into something awful.”

“Even if you were a witch, I’d still stick around.”

Our eyes meet, and it feels like gravity has untethered me from the earth. I let my eyes trace every detail of his face. I don’t look away. Of my own free will. Because maybe I am a witch and he’s a wolf and we have nothing to lose. Maybe this moment is all there is, and I want to feel the closeness of someone who isn’t afraid of me.

I pull my knees up to my chest, and he leans back against the porch swing, causing it to tip slightly—enough to allow the sketchbook resting beside me on the swing to slide off the edge, landing with a thud on the porch.

Oak leans forward, retrieving it for me. But it’s fallen open, and as he lifts it up, the pages flutter, revealing the sketches inside. “Did you draw these?”

I barely nod, a twitch of unease tugging at my chest.

“Wow… Lark. They’re really good.”

I try to force a smile.

“Are they real people?”

The pages have stalled on a sketch of Mr. Andrews, our postman. A portly man with reddish hair and a bent nose, like he was punched in the face at one time. “Yeah.”

Oak turns to me. “Sorry, I should have asked. You probably don’t want me looking at them.” He starts to close the sketchbook.

But I smile. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

Because strangely, the nerves in my stomach have settled. I trust him—a feeling I’ve rarely known, a feeling I hardly recognize. He flips forward through the book, past the faces of my classmates, my teachers, my school bus driver, and I tell him the names of the people in the images. Their stories. The pieces of their lives I’ve witnessed from afar.

The passage of time loses all meaning. His shoulder grazes mine, but he doesn’t inch closer. Tonight is not like in the pond, when I felt desperate to touch him—to lay my fingers against his shoulders. Tonight I feel calm, the ease of our conversation, our laughter, soothing my usually guarded mind. As if we’ve done this a hundred times before, sat on the porch swing and talked like old friends. Like two people tipping toward something slowly, carefully, without much effort.

Tonight I let myself be here with him. I let myself feel safe. And unafraid.

I almost forget about the last sketch waiting at the back of the notebook. Until his fingers turn the page, and he is staring up from the paper.

Oak blinks. And my heart stops beating.

I tip back from him, swallowing, trying to think of what to say.

But he speaks first.

“Is this how you see me?”

I nod, but I don’t think he notices. He is quiet, unmoving beside me.

“It’s not finished yet,” I say, worried he sees something in the image that he doesn’t like. Worried he sees all my thoughts hidden in each pencil stroke. All the ways my heart has been unraveling onto this page. Worried it’s not himself he sees, but me . The truth of what I feel when I look at him. “I know it’s not…” I shake my head. “I mean, I don’t usually show anyone my sketches. So you probably think it’s… it’s not really…” I don’t know what I’m trying to say, but I feel suddenly anxious, fidgety, with his eyes staring down at the sketch. I feel vulnerable , certain he can see all the things I’ve been trying to hide. The ache in my chest when I think of him. The perfect slant of his eyes, his lips. I drew him how I see him in my dreams.

And now he can see it too.

I clear my throat, about to stand up, when he finally lifts his eyes and turns to look at me. But it’s not disgust or disapproval I see in his face. It’s something else—a thing that’s hard to describe.

“Lark…” His voice falls away, becomes part of the wind and the storm.

I can’t breathe.

I want to inch closer until there’s no air between us. Until the beating of his heart drowns out my own.

I wish for things I would never say aloud.

But beyond the trees, the light is beginning to change. The sunrise approaching.

He breathes, and I watch every flicker of thought slipping past his eyes. I see the air held in his lungs; I see all the reasons why we shouldn’t be this close. Why time feels unbending, immeasurable when we’re together.

But above us, the stars begin to melt away.

The night ending.

And through the soft rush of the wind, I hear footsteps from inside the house.

Then the slamming of a door.

Archer is awake—probably crossing from his room to the bathroom. It’s only a matter of time until my brother wanders into the kitchen, looking for caffeine. Only a matter of time until he discovers me on the porch, with a boy, looking like I’ve ensnared him. Like I’ve cast a Goode spell, making him mine.

But Oak doesn’t pull his eyes away, and it feels like we’re suspended in that gentle state between sleep and wake—like I could slip back into this dream with him, or rise and be reminded of who I really am.

But when I hear another door close, and the sky turns pale and yellowing with the first hint of sunlight, I can’t deny that the dream is over.

“I should get back inside,” I say.

Oak nods, but neither of us stands.

Neither of us wants this to end.

“Thank you…,” I say as the stars fade from the sky. “Thanks for staying up with me.”

I feel weightless as I force my legs to stand. He holds out the sketchbook, and I press it to my chest, never taking my eyes off him.

“Can I take you somewhere…?” he asks. “Tonight, after sunset?”

I hesitate, looking to the front door. I feel the conflict inside me—the part of me that knows I should be on a train today. I shouldn’t waste any more time with this boy. But my heart is a pendulum in my chest, knocking against my ribs whenever his eyes settle on me, and it’s a feeling I can’t ignore. No matter how hard I try.

And right now, honestly , I don’t want to ignore it.

“Okay,” I agree, forcing down all the parts of me screaming that I should end this now. I should tell him it’s better if we don’t see each other again. Instead I let myself live in the dream a little longer.

He smiles, then descends the porch stairs and steps over the creek. “Good night,” he says, even though it’s morning, taking several steps backward up the driveway, like he can’t bring himself to turn away.

I don’t care where he’s taking me later tonight. The heat inside me is a roar. I only care that I’ll be seeing him again. And this feeling is starting to feel like air, like something I’ll die without.

I should be afraid that I’m losing control.

But I watch him walk away, and it’s only warmth I feel. A dizzying euphoria that must be akin to what others feel when they’re near a Goode.