Page 7

Few people have ever left Cutwater. Those who did never returned. Including our mother, Alice Goode.

In those first few months, I waited for letters to come, a postcard from somewhere beautiful: Mykonos, the south of France, Australia, or maybe a tiny island in the Atlantic. I pictured her skin sunned and salty, spending her days drifting in turquoise waters. I waited for her to write and ask us to come, giving instructions on how to find her. I imagined her setting up a life somewhere, getting it just right, before she sent for us.

I imagined a fairy tale.

One that never came true.

Because in three years there have been no postcards. No word.

She might as well be dead.

And it makes me hate the tulips even more—because whatever the reason for her leaving, the tulips are certainly to blame. One way or another.

I move quickly down the driveway, over the creek, and I find my brother in the kitchen when I step through the front door.

He spins around, and there’s something in his hand—but he quickly tucks it away into his pocket. Out of sight. My eyes narrow, a twinge of curiosity about what he’s hiding, but not enough to ask. In fact, I probably don’t want to know—it’s likely something he stole, even though he’ll deny it and insist it was given to him by someone who couldn’t resist his charm. Or maybe it’s one of the love letters that have begun to pile up on the kitchen table—too many to count.

“The school called,” he says, turning to the refrigerator and pulling out the carton of orange juice. I wince, certain it’s bad news—they’re not going to let me graduate, not after what happened on the front lawn. But Archer raises an eyebrow at me. “They said classes are canceled tomorrow,” he continues, shooting me a look. “It’s the end of the year. No more school… ever. We’re done with that place.” His mouth edges into a smile as he fills a coffee mug with juice, then stares down at it like he’s changed his mind. “And since you’re home before first period has even begun, I’m guessing something happened.”

I sink into one of the kitchen chairs, a sudden relief spilling through me: No more classes. No more awful stares as I make my way down the halls of Cutwater High.

I’m really done. I’m free.

“It was the tulips,” I answer. “Everyone at school was…” How do I explain? “They wanted a Goode tulip, they were begging for them.”

Archer stares down at his mug, then asks, “Did you find out who stole them?”

I lift a shoulder, uncertain. “No, but I think they’ll all be trying to sneak into the garden now. It’s like…” My eyes click to the front window, the gray floral curtains pulled back, and I stare down the driveway. “Like they’re addicted to them.”

Archer leaves the mug on the counter and walks to the kitchen table. “Like they’re in love?” he asks pointedly, sinking into the chair opposite me and leaning back. “Dale Dawson said that someone was in the alley behind the school last night charging five dollars to hold one of the tulips for a single minute. Dale paid it, and said it was the most enchanting minute of his life. ‘Like falling in love with a god.’ But Dale can be dramatic.”

I push aside a stack of love letters on the table, making room to rest my elbows. Mom always said the tulips contain the highest concentration of pheromones of any flower that’s ever existed. She claimed that those pheromones could command armies, control worlds if someone wanted. And we, the Goodes, grow them in the garden behind our house. We sleep beside them, live our lives only a few feet from where they sprout from the soil; we’re born when the tulips bloom.

I push myself up from the table, the chair scraping against the floor, and walk to the back door. I look out at the uneven rows of tulips: our entire life, our whole fate, tangled up in those flowers.

“There’s some old barbed wire in the shed,” Archer says. “I’m going to string it up around the garden. I don’t know if it’ll stop them, but it might slow them down, at least until tulip season ends.”

I don’t answer. My mind is divided: I hate the idea of others slinking into the garden, ripping flowers from the ground. But I also feel myself letting go of this place. School is done. In a few days I should have my diploma, and then I’ll be gone. And I’ll no longer care what happens to the tulips, to this house, to the garden. A part of me is already miles away from here.

“Do you think Mom was running away from this house or from us?” I ask, a thought that has lived inside me since the day she left, but I’ve never said out loud.

Archer exhales behind me. “I think she wanted to be someone else.”

I hate this description—because it sounds like what I want too. To bury my last name in the swampy dirt and never speak it again. The only thing I don’t want to leave behind is my brother. “This whole place feels damned,” I mutter.

“No shit.” Archer stands up, crosses the living room to stand beside me, then pulls out the guitar pick from his pocket, turns it through his fingers, an unconscious habit.

The sound of the creek fills the quiet between us, and I imagine myself drifting away on its surface, letting it carry me out through the garden and into the forest beyond, a hundred miles to the ocean, where I’ll spill into the sea and be set adrift on the Pacific. “Remember when we used to make paper boats?” I say, glancing at Archer.

The features of his face sometimes remind me of our father’s—gentle and quiet, unflinching.

“We’d drop the boats into the creek at the front porch, then run through the house, chasing them, and when they appeared from under the back porch, we’d follow them out into the garden.”

“You said we should write wishes on our boats,” he adds, a smile barely touching his eyes.

I forgot about this, how we’d write our wishes in crayon on the side of our flimsy paper boats, then let them be carried away, hoping they’d come true.

They never did.

Archer sighs, sliding the guitar pick back into his pocket, like he feels it too—that no matter how much we might wish for a different life, wishing won’t make it happen.

The notebook lies open in my lap, the sketch of the boy staring back—Oak.

Not the name of a boy, but of a fairy tale, a dream I must not have woken from yet.

I run my thumb along his jaw, and my thoughts tumble back: to the feeling of his hand on mine, pulling me free of the mob. Warm and real and alive—not a dream at all. I can still feel the wind against my cheeks as we ran up the road, our feet smacking against the pavement, and then the coolness of the trees as we ducked down the path, out of sight. In the shadow of the forest I tried to study every feature of his face, gather every detail so I could recall it later. It’s been only two days since I stood on that path, staring up at him, and yet I’m already struggling to recall the way his hair swept across his forehead, or the slant of his eyebrows. Did he have freckles? Were his ears level with his eyes? I was distracted, tangled up in a feeling that’s hard to describe, but it was more than that…. It was the way he looked at me. Passively, indifferently. Like he felt no madness-laced desire coiling upward into his throat, felt no need to tip closer to me. Just like the day I first saw him at school.

As if he felt nothing at all.

Yet when he turned away, a flicker of something caught in his eyes: a nervousness, an edge, a hesitation in each blink of his eyelids. But I can’t be sure what it was. Not exactly.

Archer steps through the front door, a stack of mail in his hands, and I lift my thumb from the sketch—not wanting my brother to see the concentration in my eyes, the confusion.

He crosses the living room to where I’m seated on the couch, and he drops a large envelope into my lap, covering Oak’s image. I frown, but Archer is already striding into the kitchen, thumbing through the rest of the mail.

The envelope is from Cutwater High. I tear it open, and inside I find two stiff pieces of paper.

Our diplomas.

One for Archer, one for me.

Paper-clipped onto the front is a note from Principal Lee: After this week’s events at school, we think it best that you do not attend the graduation ceremony on Sunday. Congratulations on receiving your diplomas.

“What is it?” Archer asks. When I don’t reply, he comes back into the living room and peers down at the two rectangles of paper. “Shit!” he says, yanking his diploma from my hands. “They let me graduate!”

“They probably didn’t want you returning for another senior year. Easier to just shove you out into the world, let someone else deal with you.”

He laughs. “Works for me.” He holds up his diploma in the light, marveling at his achievement. My brother missed at least half a year of classes, nowhere near the attendance required to graduate. But Cutwater High would likely prefer not to have a Goode in their classrooms next year.

I slide my fingers over the heavy card stock, feeling relief, but also a twinge of something I can’t pinpoint. I’m grateful we won’t need to attend a graduation ceremony—I won’t have to face my classmates again—but it also feels lacking somehow, to receive our diplomas this way. In the mail, shoved into an envelope.

“Should we burn them?” Archer asks, raising both his eyebrows, looking impish and full of bad ideas.

My eyes skim the name printed in black ink: Lark Goode . And I know… this paper is my permission. My freedom. I’ve graduated, and now I can finally leave this town.

“You can do whatever you want with yours,” I say. “But you’re not touching mine.” I stand up, sliding my diploma back into the envelope.

Archer shrugs, tossing his diploma onto the couch, already disinterested in it, then grabs his jean jacket from the hook beside the front door—the one he found in the alleyway behind Maple’s Burger Stop last summer, the one I swear still smells like french fries. But he loves it.

“Where you going?”

“Huck’s Drive-In. It’s the end-of-the-year party.”

“You’re not serious.”

His hands sink into his coat pockets. “I told Willa I’d meet her there.”

“Willa Howard?”

He lifts a shoulder. Willa graduated last year and is entirely out of his league, even for him. Even for a Goode.

“You should come,” he offers.

“No thanks, I barely escaped a mob at school two days ago. And what if someone comes to the house, tries to steal more flowers? You’ve barely slept the last few nights, and now you’re just going to leave?”

His eyebrows cinch together, wrinkling the small scar he’s had since we were kids and we both got chicken pox. I managed to avoid scratching, but Archer had no self-control. Now he has a tiny, round mark beside his right eyebrow. “I put up barbed wire yesterday,” he answers, as if this has solved all our problems. I walk to the back window and look out at the garden, where a row of wire has been strung around the perimeter. But it’s haphazard, sagging in places, having been nailed to a dozen bent and rotted posts he’s shoved into the dirt.

It couldn’t keep out a toddler, let alone a determined, lovesick teenager. I lift an eyebrow at him.

“I doubt anyone will come here tonight anyway,” he adds with a smirk, trying to convince me. “They’ll all be at the drive-in.”

I want to argue, but I also know my brother will always do whatever he wants. Whether I agree or not. Whether I think it’s a bad idea or not.

Archer breathes, then nods down at the envelope in my hand. “Now that you have your diploma, what’s your plan?”

We’ve never really talked about this, not seriously, anyway. Maybe he didn’t truly believe I’d do it: leave Cutwater. But now he looks at me with the smallest hint of sadness in his eyes.

“There’s a town on the coast, I, uh—I figure I’ll start there. Train can get me there in a day.”

His face goes slack, eyes falling to the floor briefly before he looks back up. “You don’t have any money.”

“I have enough… enough for a ticket, anyway. I’ll find a job when I get there.”

“Where will you stay?”

“Not sure yet. Hoping to rent a room somewhere.”

He touches the front door handle, then smirks. “You’d really leave all this behind, huh?”

“Because this place is so great?”

“Anywhere can be great if you let it.”

A soft exhale leaves my lips. “This place will never be great. As long as our last name is Goode, it will torture us. The only way to become someone new is to leave this town behind.”

My brother nods, like he understands. “When you leaving?”

“A day or two. Just need to pack, buy a train ticket. Now that I have this”—I hold up the envelope with my diploma inside—“I don’t have a reason to stay.”

I realize too late that this sounds harsh—because Archer is a reason to stay. He’s the only thing I love about this place.

But he nods, unfazed by my words, and flashes his eyes to the door. “Well… we might as well go break some hearts tonight while we have the chance.” He winks, and I know: his nonattachment, his recklessness, is how he survives.

Without it, he’d be the one left heartbroken over and over.

“Come on, you’re leaving this town anyway. You’ll never see these people again. You have nothing to lose. Think of it as your send-off party. One last night out with your charming brother. How can you say no to that?”

I’m about to shake my head, tell him no—I have no interest in repeating what happened on the front lawn at school—when another thought tiptoes through my mind:

Maybe he’ll be there. At the drive-in.

The boy named after a tree.

If I could see him one more time, I could finish the sketch.

One last time… would be enough.

It’s a simple curiosity, I tell myself. That keeps my thoughts returning to him. Nothing more. He is a boy I don’t understand. A boy whose unfinished sketch haunts me whenever I turn the page.

And maybe my brother is right: if I’m finally leaving… maybe I have nothing to lose.

“Okay,” I say.

Archer’s eyes widen, and his mouth falls open.

“Don’t make a big deal of it or I’ll change my mind.”

His jaw snaps shut. “Fine, understood.”

Huck’s Drive-In used to be called Lost Lane Drive-In, before it shut down back in the early nineties. Mom would tell stories about watching films like The Outsiders and The Princess Bride , but I think she spent more time in the back seat of local boys’ cars than actually watching films.

Now, every summer, Huck Sanchez sets up his dad’s projector and plays old black-and-white films that I’m sure nearly everyone at Cutwater High has never heard of. But just like Mom, they only come to drink and make out and do whatever they want without a single adult in sight. All of this I’ve been told by Archer—since I’ve never actually seen one of Huck’s films. Until tonight.

Moonlight shivers against the trees, laying its pale weight over everything, and we pass a small building—a ticket booth, the rectangular window shattered, graffiti marring the exterior walls. And beyond it, a larger building with a wooden deck built onto the front, the railing now sagging and broken. The sign above reads CONCESSIONS . A place where you could once buy soda in paper cups, boxed candy, and buttered popcorn. But now the whole place is abandoned, gone back to the forest and the kids who’ve broken in over the years.

Ahead of us, a half-moon-shaped field fans out around a wooden theater screen, and a sea of Cutwater High students fill the overgrown grass. Some have parked their cars facing the screen and now sit reclined on hoods or perched on roofs, while others are strewn across beach blankets and towels, faces to the sky, smoking, drinking beers, kissing beneath the stars, while they wait for the film to start playing on the massive screen.

Only a few yards away my eyes find Clementine Morris—shy, quiet Clementine—seated on the hood of Tobias Huaman’s silver Audi. I squint, certain I’m wrong, but her head is resting on Tobias’s shoulder while he plays with her long, unruly hair, coiling it through his fingers like he is completely and deliriously lovestruck. I recall the fight that happened in the hall at school, Tobias and Mac facing off, while Clementine stood nearby, lips curled secretively. Now I’m starting to understand…. Clementine must have possessed a tulip, concealed out of sight, and the tiny bloodred bloom ensnared the attention of both Tobias and Mac.

And tonight she has found herself in the arms of Tobias.

But that’s not the only peculiarity. Two other boys stand nearby, their arms crossed, as if waiting for their chance to confess their love to Clementine as soon as Tobias looks the other way. I wonder how many tulip petals she has hidden in her pockets, in the folds of her skirt. Maybe she’s even been bathing in them, letting the perfume soak her skin.

Several cars away, Tobias’s girlfriend—or likely ex-girlfriend now—Olive Montagu, leans against the tailgate of a black truck, three boys gathered around her, which isn’t that unusual for Olive. Except when another girl approaches—Titha—and the boys snap their eyes to her as if suddenly confused as to who they love more: which girl has more stolen tulips stashed in her pockets. Two of the boys stagger after Titha, their eyes like pools of desire, a pathetic slant cut across their mouths as they call after her, begging her to let them hold her hand.

As my eyes sway over the crowd, I find more evidence of the same awful affliction. At the border of trees, two girls are tugging on the arms of a boy who looks like Dale Dawson, and they shriek at each other, shouting for the other to let go, but Dale just grins. He must have a tulip hidden somewhere, or maybe he swallowed it like several others did on the lawn outside of school.

They’re falling in love with one another, desperate and unnatural.

And suddenly I’m reminded why this was a bad idea.