Page 13

TEN

Let them love us, never the other way around,” Mom would tell Archer and me when we were young. She watched our father leave only days after she told him she was pregnant. Tulip season had ended—the summer was over—and the love he felt for her had faded with the season. He no longer remembered why he had followed Alice Goode around town as if she were the very air in his lungs. He returned for our birth—an obligation, a duty he felt—but he left again shortly after. He was simply a man who got tangled up in a curse he knew nothing about.

His heart was not his own.

This is why love cannot be trusted in our family.

Three days pass, and I begin to think Oak won’t come back.

I wouldn’t blame him.

Once he got home, once he had time to think about what had happened at the quarry, he probably decided I’m not worth the risk. I’m too messy, dangerous, bewildering… bewitching .

A girl you can never take home to meet the family.

A girl you don’t want to be seen with, for fear of being followed, chased, or warned that you shouldn’t be so close to her. A girl you always have to defend, a girl who over time you begin to wonder if you should trust. Or if all the rumors are true.

I’m not worth spending one more day with.

But on the fourth day, an hour before sunset, I hear the sound of a truck rumbling up the driveway. At first I’m certain it can’t be him, but when I pull open the curtain on my bedroom window, I see his gray truck slow to a stop near the front porch.

I pull on a sweatshirt, step into sandals, and yank open the front door before Archer can ask where I’m going… or who is waiting for me in the truck.

I reach the passenger side before Oak even has time to open his door. I climb up onto the bench seat, and he looks at me. “Sorry I didn’t call, but I, uh—I don’t have your number. I didn’t have a way to let you know that I was coming.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

He smiles, as if he likes this answer.

“Any hints about where we’re going?” I try, eyeing him, hoping for a clue.

“My house,” he answers, starting the engine.

“We’re going to your house?”

“I hope that’s okay?”

I can’t help but smile. “Yeah, I mean… of course.” I’ve tried countless times to imagine where he might live, imagine his bedroom, his life in Favorville, but I’ve never been able to conjure it in my mind. Now I’ll be seeing it for myself.

Windows rolled down, spring wind coiling through my hair, we drive west up Swamp Wells Road. I like this night already, feeling the air slice through my open fingers. Even Oak seems more relaxed than usual, an elbow resting in the open window, one hand on the steering wheel, his eyes clear and shimmering in the evening light.

The county line runs north to south through a forest of elm trees, and we cross into the outskirts of Favorville. The air smells different, like lilacs and ferns and spring mud, but we drive only a short distance before we turn onto a paved driveway that winds up a hill.

He lives just over the county line, not far at all—an easy enough walk under midnight stars.

But I’m not expecting the house that comes into view, perched atop the grass-lined hill at the end of the driveway. It stands two stories high, sunlit and towering, with a gray stone arch over the door, a modern slanted metal roof, concrete walls, and wood slats—it looks like it’s straight out of an architectural magazine. I feel my eyes gaping through the truck window, tracing every angle, every surface—I can’t believe a place like this even exists in Favorville.

Just to the right of the house sits a separate garage with four massive glass doors, a place to hold a fleet of cars, far nicer than the truck Oak is driving.

He parks on the far side of the circle driveway, and when I step out, I stare up at the row of windows on the second floor, wondering which one belongs to Oak—which one faces into a bedroom where he grew up, his clothes neatly organized in an oversized closet, a bed with fresh white sheets tucked perfectly at the corners. Maybe he has photographs pinned to his wall, memories with childhood friends, tokens from traveling carnivals, movie ticket stubs—the road map of a normal life.

A home like this creates a boy who has a plan, colleges lined up, a career path, a future that’s been predestined. But he’s never mentioned any of these things.

My mouth hangs open, and I want to ask him a hundred things, want to know every detail, but he walks to the front of the truck and nods at me. “This way.”

I follow him around the side of the house, across a neatly mowed lawn, to where a river is winding through the elm trees below—the low evening sun gleaming against the water. “Is this Rabbit Cross River?” I ask.

“Same as the one behind your house.” His eyes flick softly to me.

The same water that pours past my house makes its way across two counties, eventually snaking behind his—although the ground behind my home is a low-lying swamp, while the land behind his is grassy and treed, with a view out over the valley.

I peer back up at his home, wanting to go inside—curious about the clues that wait within its walls about who Oak really is—but instead he leads me down to the river’s edge, where a small rowboat lies belly-up on the sandy bank, green with a painted white stripe down the side.

He drags the boat out into the slow-moving river, his arms flexing from the effort, then reaches out a hand to me.

I know we shouldn’t touch—the closeness is dangerous, and I fear I won’t want to let go—but I allow my fingers to fold into his, and he helps me into the boat, one hand grazing my lower ribs, my spine, his touch making it hard to breathe as his eyes drag over me.

But once I’m seated on the wooden bench, he releases his hold on me, then shoves the boat the rest of the way into the river, swings himself easily over the side, and takes up the oars in his hands. I draw in a deep breath, reciting all the warnings I’ve told myself over the years, yet they don’t seem to stick. I lose myself in the steady rhythm of Oak’s arms as they pull the oars through the crystal-clear water, a motion he knows by heart, guiding the boat down the center of the river.

“Do you come out here a lot?” I ask, trying to distract my thoughts, my hands pressed to the wooden bench beneath me, my heart feeling light and windless as we move away from his house, following the lazy current of the river.

He draws in the warm forest air, the low light through the trees dappling his face. “Every morning, before sunrise.”

I like the image of this: him waking when the light is still pale and soft, rowing up the river and back, sweat at his temples, his torso and shoulders strengthened a little more each time from the effort.

I lean against the side of the boat and trail my fingertips along the surface of the water, feeling lost in a dream that is pulling me farther and farther downstream—but I love this dream too much to force myself to wake. I love this impossible day, with him, the river widening around us, carving a path through the green forest, the evening sunlight peeking through the trees, the shore grassy and quiet, not a stirring of wind. I could drift for hours like this, watching him row with each practiced stroke, an easy smile finding his eyes whenever I look at him.

It feels like something I’m not allowed to have. This moment was stolen from a different life, a different girl. Yet I am greedy and selfish and will keep it for as long as I can.

A school of tiny silver fish whip past, slipping beneath the boat, then hurrying off downstream. “My mom used to say that if you eat a fish’s eye, you’ll be able to see underwater,” I say.

Oak’s eyebrows come together.

“I never tried it, obviously.” My gaze falls back to the river. “She was like that, always making up stories and riddles, her own kind of folklore. When I was younger, I loved it. But now…” I shake my head. “I realize that most of them were just lies.”

“Maybe her lies were just a way to make sense of the world.”

I look up at him, but his face is unreadable.

“Maybe.” But I think about the lie she told the morning she left, the lie that was hidden in her silence. Her refusal to tell us the truth—that she was running away and never coming back. “She was a mystery, even to me.”

Oak stares at me, like he understands what I mean.

I lift my hand from the river, waterdrops clinging to my fingertips, and I release an uncomfortable laugh.

“What?” he asks.

I shake my head, keeping my eyes on the shoreline as it drifts by.

“I just…” I swallow. “I can’t believe that some part of you isn’t afraid. Terrified, even.”

He drives the oars into the water, steering the boat through a series of rocks jutting out from the shore. “Of what?”

“Of being this close to me. A Goode.”

He smirks, and I like the way his green eyes crinkle at the corners. The way his mouth forms when he has a thought, a secret idea he’s deciding whether or not to share. “I won’t fall in love with you…,” he says decisively, like he’s already made up his mind, but there is a shiver in his eyes, a tug at the edge of his mouth. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m not like everyone else in this town.”

And this is precisely what ties my mind into knots. What I don’t understand. Why is he not like everyone else? Why does he seem unaffected by the tulips? By me? I try to recenter my thoughts, but his eyes are too crushing, his mouth too perfect— my sketch of him doesn’t even come close.

“The real question is,” he continues, upper lip pulled into a merciless smile that makes my chest want to cave in, “can you keep yourself from falling in love with me?”

I want to laugh, a nervous twitch nearly breaking across my lips—I know he’s making a joke, but I feel a pressure against my ribs, the truth of his words, and I don’t know if I’m strong enough. I don’t know if I can keep myself from crashing into something I won’t be able to save myself from. Because when he looks at me like he does right now, I know it’s possible. I know I could let my heart unravel and never look back.

And I know each moment I spend with him only makes it worse.

I know it might already be too late.

The river narrows, and we fall into a teetering silence, easy and untroubled. His arms flex, rowing harder, keeping the boat from plunging into the soft shoreline. The water heaves around us, splashing over the side, dampening my bare legs, but then it calms, flattens out again, and I tilt my eyes up to the halcyon blue sky, trees swinging by overhead. No moment in time, no river through the trees, has any right to be this perfect, this chest-swayingly beautiful.

No boy should look like him, no boy should say the things he does, and somehow sit only a few feet away and not lose his mind to the obsession that plagues others. He looks at me with something else… something simple, instinctual, a wandering faraway shiver. A thing I haven’t deciphered yet. But God, I want to figure him out.

“Why does everyone call you Oak?” I ask.

His eyes flicker, a memory rising behind the green. “When I was young… my mom used to call me her ‘little acorn.’?” He smirks, looking the tiniest bit embarrassed. “But she said that I had the bones of an oak tree inside me and that someday, when I grew up, I’d be sturdy, even against the strongest storms. That I could never be ripped from the soil or upended.”

“I like her,” I say, trying to imagine a mom who would say such things and mean them.

“Me too.” He glances out at the wide, slow stretch of water where the boat drifts for a moment, and he relaxes his arms, ripples feathering away from the bow. “She died when I was ten. She was sick for a long time.” His jaw tenses, eyes steady. “She fought it… until she couldn’t anymore.”

Without thinking, I lean forward on the seat, closer to him: I want to touch him, lay my hand on his, press my fingers against his jaw until it relaxes. But I only shake my head. “I’m so sorry.” I wish I had something more useful to say, and when he looks back at me, wetness rims his eyes before he blinks it away.

I sense that he’s told me more than he’s used to. These are memories he doesn’t often let rise to the surface.

I sink back against the boat, the light of day fading around us, the sun inching below the tree line, and I wonder whether it’s more painful to lose a parent to death or betrayal. Is his hurt worse than mine? My mother is still alive, but she chose a life that doesn’t include us. Include me.

Dad left too, but it wasn’t his fault. It was the tulips’.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Pain is pain. It digs deep no matter the method, the weapon. We both carry around wounds inside us, cut into the place where our heart used to be.

The river widens even more, becomes lazy and fattened, nearly as still as the pond where we swam, but Oak steers the boat to the shore and drags it halfway up onto the grass.

“Where are we?” I blink through the golden light of the setting sun, to a grassy hillside.

“Follow me.”

I let my hand find his again, stepping free of the boat, but this time he doesn’t release it. He squeezes his palm to mine, and he might as well have my heart in his fist—clenching tight, threatening to destroy me.

The sun is now gone from the sky, the air turned dark and warm, and we walk through the tall grass, up a gently sloping hill to where a row of trees grows toward the night sky.

At the line of birch trees, the land opens up, a meadow of wildflowers stretching out into the distance—soft and swaying in the moonlight. Yet it’s not the wildflowers that stall the breath in my throat, it’s the thousands—maybe millions —of winged insects fluttering through the night air.

Fireflies.

Tiny little orbs of light pulse golden and rhythmic among the dark, so many that it feels like candles set adrift in the air—an otherworldly sight.

I laugh, and the sound echoes through the trees, before I clasp a hand to my mouth. “What are they all doing here?” I ask, turning my eyes to Oak.

“I don’t know. They shouldn’t be here, in this part of the world. It doesn’t make sense. But they come to this meadow every spring. My mom showed me this place when I was little.”

I realize how special this meadow must be to him. I showed him my secret places—the abandoned train car, the farmhouse and the pond—and now he’s showing me his.

“She used to tell me that there are all kinds of magic in this world. But not all of it has an origin. Or a reason. It just exists.”

This place—fireflies humming all around us—feels like the most genuine kind of magic, a summoning of tiny winged creatures that should be witnessed only by kings and queens, a rarely performed ritual that bestows lasting luck on those who glimpse it before it’s gone.

“It’s beautiful,” I hear myself say.

Oak squeezes my hand and pulls me out into the meadow, into the thumping, pulsing heart of the fireflies. Their wings sound like bits of paper rubbing together, and they look like confetti hovering in the airless sky, a kaleidoscope of dancing light. I laugh again, grinning, and I release Oak’s hand to turn in a circle, feeling heady and buoyant, the fireflies amassing around us.

But when I tip my face back to Oak, I realize that he’s watching me—his face soft and silent, like nighttime, like a thousand thoughts are trapped inside him but he’s afraid to say any of them aloud. Half a dozen lightning bugs have landed on his shoulders, their incandescent lights pulsing slowly—like heartbeats. I reach out, and one of the insects lifts from his shirt, then lands on my index finger. I smile, holding it in the air between us, a beacon, a lighthouse, the rhythm of the light hypnotic.

“I feel like I’m in a dream,” I mutter.

He is silent, and it feels like I’m drifting farther from the waking world.

“If you’re the dreamer…,” he says, his mouth forming carefully over each vowel, “then please don’t wake up.”

Nothing feels real, his eyelashes, the lightning bugs pulsing around us like falling stars, the air in my lungs.

“I…” Oak’s voice is a whisper, a rainstorm. A weight of words gathers in his eyes. “You don’t know…” He breathes, and breathes, and breathes. “How hard it is to look away from you.” He swallows and looks briefly startled by his own words, like he knows how treacherous they are. But he doesn’t take them back.

“It’s just the tulips…,” I begin, dissolving the meaning from his statement.

But he shakes his head. “No… it’s not.” His mouth settles into a line, eyes clear and sharp, and when he looks at me like this, I don’t trust myself.

The firefly lifts from my hand, wings thrumming, and disappears into the crush of all the others. Oak takes a step closer, and I forget how to breathe. His hand strays across mine, his fingers tracing my palm. Circling my wrist. His face is a poem that hasn’t yet been written, his lips are a question that only I can answer. He’s inches away, and I want nothing more in this whole awful world than to sink into him, let his eyes drift down into my bones, and rip me apart.

“I told you before, kissing Lark Goode is a bad idea,” I whisper, remembering back to the pond when I uttered these same words.

He drifts even closer, too close , his mouth hovering just over mine. Only a few centimeters separate us now—only air and wings and a heartbeat that’s slamming against my ribs. He does something to me that feels beyond all logic. All magic. “Do you want me to kiss you?” he asks, out of breath, out of thoughts, out of any reasons why he shouldn’t.

“I…” Only air comes out, because I know what I want—what I feel coiling tight in the lowest part of my stomach. But I also know I shouldn’t want it, shouldn’t want him .

I can’t trust this feeling, this moment.

None of it.

His mouth hovers over mine, and I feel the soft, barely there graze of his lips. He smells like wildflowers and a hundred years of quiet, unspoken words. Ancient and alive. Like oak trees and sweat on summer-heated skin. He looks like fate. Like the very thing that might save me. Destroy me. Put me back together.

My lips part, the word “yes” suspended so delicately on my tongue that it feels like the thinnest shaving of glass. Cold and perfect and dangerous. But before the word can slip free, a fraction of a second before I can crush my mouth to his and tell him all the ways I shouldn’t want this but I do… a voice echoes through the air.

Loud and booming.

A voice that isn’t Oak’s.

I snap my head toward the sound, and across the meadow I can just make out a figure at the far tree line. A silhouette. And it’s shouting at us. “Who…?” I start to ask, but Oak’s hand is already clenching mine, yanking me away from the meadow.

We run through the flickering haze of lightning bugs, and they part around us, a sea of sunshine-gleaming orbs. At the border of trees, I glance back and see the figure moving toward us, still shouting, but I can’t make out the words over the thrum of flapping wings. “What’s he saying?” I ask.

“I can’t tell,” Oak says, darting a look over his shoulder. “But I understand his meaning.”

“Are we trespassing?”

His mouth tugs at the corner, a wild, windless smile, and he pulls me down the hillside toward the river.

“Shit, Oak,” I say as we run, the warm night air rushing around me. But when he flashes me a look, still smiling, I can’t help but laugh. I wonder if this is what others feel when they clench a tulip for the first time. A delirious thrill, drunk on something that almost feels like love. Wasted on it. Soon enough the hangover will come, but right now, running hand in hand with Oak at my side, I feel more alive than I ever have.

At the river’s edge, he shoves the boat back into the water in one push, and I splash into the shallows, clambering over the side. The man has reached the top of the hill, and he yells down at us, something about “keeping off his property,” but Oak is already rowing us back upstream.

A grin spreads across his face, while my eyes water from reckless, giddy laughter.

Rowing upstream is much harder than rowing downstream, and Oak’s arms tense with each stroke, his shoulders contracting. My head is whirling from the rush of sprinting down from the meadow, vibrating from the starry haze of thousands of fireflies, teetering from the feel of Oak’s lips nearly touching mine. I feel untethered and windswept, a little madcap.

“You do that a lot?” I ask, still breathless. “Sneak onto other people’s property?”

“Only every spring.” A smile touches his eyes, and I tilt my head back, the night air streaming against my face, wishing I could feel this way every second of every day: heedless and wide open. Not a single thing in my way. He makes me feel like I could be someone else. Like I already am.

I tip my eyes, watching Oak dig the oars into the water, and a question rises inside me, one I’ve been curious about since I first saw him in the school parking lot. The last detail of my sketch that I never finished.

“What book are you always reading?” Even now, I know the book is there: I noticed it tucked into the back pocket of his jeans when we walked down to the river, and when we fled the meadow.

Without a word, he stops rowing, releasing one of the oars to reach into his back pocket, pulls out the paperback, and hands it over to me. I’m caught off guard—I didn’t expect he would so easily let me see it—but I run my hand over the bent cover while he grips the oars again and resumes rowing us upstream. The book is clearly not from his dad’s rare collection. It looks like it probably came from a cheap used bookstore—I know there’s one or two in Favorville, shops where dusty, fifty-cent titles sit in stacks from floor to ceiling. Most of the books sit forgotten, left to molder for decades; not even the shop owners know what titles lie hidden among the crowded rows.

This one is no different—a piece of the corner has been torn away, the pages bent, like the book was rolled up at one point to swat a fly. But I can still read the title: Lonesome Traveler , Jack Kerouac. The illustration on the cover is an unusual watercolor, depicting a man holding a walking stick, I think. It’s hard to tell exactly. The cover is so worn, nearly breaking apart in my hands.

I glance up at Oak, but his focus is out on the water, keeping a steady rhythm as he rows, not wanting to lose any ground with the current always pushing against us. The book might seem cliché in the hands of anyone else: mysterious boy who reads Kerouac while walking lonesome roads across a county line. But it doesn’t feel that way. There is a genuineness to it, a boy who’s searching for something and hoping he’ll find it in the yellowing pages of this book.

“Is it good?” I ask.

He looks briefly serious. “Yeah, it’s good. No one writes like him anymore.”

I hold the book out, and he takes it gently, his fingers sliding over mine, before stuffing it back into his pocket.

“You only read used paperbacks?”

“More portable,” he answers with a grin. “And they’re cheap.”

I feel my eyebrows tug together—he lives in a beautiful house atop a sun-kissed hill; I doubt he needs to save a few dollars on books, especially if his dad collects them. But there’s obviously more to the story. More about him that I don’t understand.

His hands clench the oars, eyes averted, before he asks, “Where will you go when you leave Cutwater?” It feels like he’s trying to change the subject.

The river swirls past us, little ribbons of moonlight catching on the surface. “The ocean.” I’ve only ever said this aloud to Archer. “There’s a small town—my dad told me about it—just a fishing community, not much more. But there’s a little cake shop near a marina, and it sounds so quiet and perfect, a place where no one has heard of my family. Maybe I can rent a room somewhere, a place overlooking the sea.” I imagine it so clearly, it’s like I’m already there. A place that waits for me.

I only need to board a train and not look back.

“The truth is, I don’t really care where I go…,” I add. “As long as it’s far away from Cutwater.”

“And the ocean is far enough?”

I lift a shoulder, a stirring warmth expanding in my chest at the thought of leaving—just talking about it fills me with a hope so large, I feel lightheaded. “If I could afford it, I’d cross the Pacific. I’d buy a small boat, learn to sail, then I’d never be stuck anywhere for long.”

“I could teach you to sail,” Oak says.

“You know how to sail?”

“A little. My dad taught me.”

A tiny shiver slides along my skin. It feels silly, impossible: talking like this, like it’s something we could really do. The two of us on a sailboat, his practiced hands showing me how to steady the mainsail and navigate at night, while the wind grows stronger against our backs. Pushing us out into the deep, the endless ocean ahead of us, and nothing in our way.

I sink back against the boat, dipping my hand into the water, letting my fingers trail against the current. Because I know it’s a future that won’t really happen. Wherever I go, I will always be alone— because I can never trust a life spent with anyone else. Love is a cruel, deceiving trick.

“Where will you go after graduation?” I ask—now I am the one who wants to change the subject.

“My dad wants me to go to college….” His tone changes—almost imperceptibly—but I can hear the strain, the edge, as his arms pull heavily against the oars, the motion almost like a meditation, a thing he does to calm his racing thoughts. “But he doesn’t get to choose my life… not anymore.”

“Does your dad live here?” I think of the large, beautiful home looking out over Rabbit Cross River, wondering whether he has a father waiting somewhere inside—seated at a desk perhaps, inside a home office, a reading light switched on nearby. Or maybe he’s in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Pasta and garlic bread. Windows open to let in the evening breeze.

But Oak breaks apart this image in my mind.

“No,” he answers, digging the oars into the water, the moonlight darkening in his eyes—as if a storm has settled over him. “He’s been gone for a while. Doubt I’ll see him again.”

Gone. A word I know too well.

Gone. A word that can mean so many different things.

A parent you learn to hate because they left, a parent you imagine returning one day and all the things you would say—all the vile, hate-drenched words that would rush from your lips.

He lost his mom.

And his dad too.

A life shattered, much like mine. And while I know there is more that he’s not saying, a story beneath the rigid slant of his eyes, I don’t press it. Because I know the pain that comes from talking about what’s been lost, and when his jaw forms a stiff, unbroken line, I know I’ve strayed too far into something that hurts.

He rows even harder, driving the boat against the current, his breathing heavy, his face losing all its softness. We reach the shore below his house, and he steers the rowboat up onto the dirt, then swings himself out quickly to drag it the rest of the way onto land.

My heart is beating low in my chest as I step onto the shore, knowing that something is wrong. That everything about him has changed.

He stands for a moment, looking back at the river, but I stare up at his solitary, empty house. “Are we going inside?” I ask softly.

“Not today.” He looks at me like he’s trying to force a smile, but he’s all hard edges and cold glances.

We leave his home on the hill and drive back across the county line, his truck chugging up the last rise on Swamp Wells Road, the silence growing wider between us.

I want to ask him what’s wrong, what’s changed, why talking about his dad made him turn to stone. But I sense the asking won’t fix anything, and he’ll cinch the armor even tighter around his chest.

We come to a stop at the end of my driveway, the truck engine still running, and I sit for a moment, waiting for him to speak, but his hands only twist against the steering wheel, his eyes unblinking, staring through the windshield.

“Thank you for today,” I say, but my mouth tastes like metal. My heart is shrinking closed.

He nods but won’t look at me.

I watch him for a half beat more, my bottom lip hanging open, like the right words might fall out, but nothing does. I open the door and step onto the driveway.

He backs away before I’ve even reached the porch, and I hear the roar of the old truck accelerating up Swamp Wells Road, back to his side of the county line.

And I start to doubt, to fear… that I’ll never see him again.