Page 9

SIX

Maybe Jude is full of shit.

I lie in bed, listening to the gurgle of Forsaken Creek as it meanders beneath the floorboards before cutting its way out into the tulip rows. My fate was decided long ago, on the night I was born: doomed to bear the Goode last name.

“Forsaken Creek is the only way to leave,” Jude said.

If only I could sail away on a paper boat—like Archer and I used to make. But the creek is a shallow, wild thing. Not deep enough to carry me far away from this life. So Jude… must be full of shit. Yet the other part of his fortune, about my heart needing to break and then I’ll be free, felt a little too William Shakespeare. Like he was only trying to scare me, threaten me with the same heartbreak my family has caused this town. Because how could a broken heart set me free from this place?

The only freedom I need is a train ticket.

And after tomorrow, after our birthday—once I’m officially eighteen—I’m leaving.

The morning sun finally rises through the window, baking the wet, swampy soil behind the house, but I lie in bed, letting the hours pass, listening to the lonely quiet. Around noon I finally slip from bed. I pass the open doorway into Archer’s empty room: my twin never came home last night, and it looks like I will spend our birthday alone.

In the kitchen I open the freezer and pull out the paper bag. I’ve been saving it, tucked at the back behind bags of frozen peas and expired Tater Tots. I’m not sure if Archer even knows it’s here.

I remove the two tiny cakes inside, still shimmering with golden sprinkles, and place them on the kitchen table—beside the growing pile of Archer’s unopened love letters—and they look just as perfectly sweet and delicate as they did the day Dad gave them to us. Months ago now.

He rarely visits Cutwater—he stays away, working on a fishing boat in a small coastal town that he said suffers its own curses and torments: boys who drown in the harbor, witches risen from the deep. But there is a small cake shop near the waterfront that sells a variety of peculiar flavors, promising to blot out unwanted memories, to help people forget the things they’d like to wipe clean from their mind. Dad chuckled when he said it; he thought it was an absurd notion. Still, he brought back two cakes for his two children. Archer and me.

“For your birthday,” he said, handing me the paper bag.

“Our birthday isn’t for another three months,” I replied.

But he lifted a shoulder, like he’d lost track of time or it didn’t matter either way. He knew he wouldn’t be here for our birthday. It was too painful to stand in this house with his two children, borne by a woman who carried a curse around inside her bones. Our father fell victim to this curse. And when tulip season ended, our mom’s belly beginning to grow, our parents knew it wasn’t love. Not truly. It was only the tulips that had held them together for a few summer nights.

Love ruins everything.

I leave one of the tiny cakes on the kitchen table for Archer, and I carry the other one into my room, placing it on the windowsill to thaw in the sunlight.

I find the old suitcase that once belonged to our mother, stuffed under her bed, and I drag it down to my room. There are no tough decisions to make about what I should pack and what I should leave behind—I don’t own enough things for this. Instead I pull every item of clothing from my closet, carefully folding it all into the suitcase. Two pairs of shoes and one pair of flip-flops. A few small trinkets from atop my dresser: A tiny silver rabbit, which likely once belonged on a charm bracelet that Archer found out in the woods, then gave to me for Christmas when I was eleven. A wooden bookmark that the middle school librarian gave to me in sixth grade with a quote on one side:

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

—Stephen King

I have a stack of two dozen sketchbooks on my bedside table, every page filled, and I lay these carefully atop my clothes. Jewelry, I own none. Cash, I have very little. Dad sends us money every month, for essentials, but whatever is left over after groceries and shampoo and light bulbs, Archer and I split. I’ve mostly saved mine over the years, while Archer spends his as fast as he can. I have nearly $500 counted and pressed into a wallet—that also used to be Mom’s.

Enough to get me out of this town and keep me fed until I find a job.

I sink down onto the window seat, legs curled beneath me, and watch the tulips tip and sway in the soft spring wind, and I wonder, How long before someone tries to sneak through the dagger-sharp barbed-wire fence?

I grab my notebook and press the flinty tip of my pencil to the page, right at Oak’s collarbone. I shade in the sturdy lines of his shoulders, the curve of his lower lip, the way his mouth sat suspended just before he spoke, and the soft silhouette of the tree branches above him. I lose myself in the sketch, filling in the last of his hair—dark and short, slightly wavy at the ends—then I let the pencil fall to the notebook, staring down at him. A boy I don’t understand. My fingertips stray across his eyebrows, his lips, the pale afternoon sunlight on his cheeks. I’m curious about him in a way I’ve never known before—but I also know I could never be this close to him in the real world. Not for long.

The light outside has dulled into late afternoon, and the tiny cake has now softened. Carefully I peel back the paper, and when the warm cake breaks apart on my tongue, I close my eyes, savoring the hint of lemon and mint and lavender. It tastes like a stormy night at sea, like a life I might have had if I’d been born somewhere else, instead of in this house—a birthday spent with family gathered around a homemade cake, blowing out candles and opening presents wrapped in silvery bows. Maybe I’d go into town with friends, see a movie, stay up late whispering in the dark, wrapped in sleeping bags on the floor of my normal room—no sounds of a creek rushing below us—giggling, refusing to sleep until the sun came up.

But in this life not even my twin is anywhere to be found.

Yet, for the briefest moment, it feels like the cake is stripping away the worst of my memories: the day Mom left, her silhouette vanishing into the dark. No goodbyes. No promises to return. Only a cold, empty house and nothing for breakfast.

Our world was cleaved in half that morning. And nothing would put it back together.

I swallow the last of the cake, my shoulders settling against the window frame, and listen to the constant gurgle of Forsaken Creek—even when snow carpets the ground in winter, the creek still flows, refusing to freeze. I push open the window—the sun gone to the west; the night revealing itself, warm and windless; insects thrumming from the field; frogs croaking along the muddy banks of the creek—and I sink into bed.

Tomorrow I leave this place.

I listen to the tulip petals brush together like silky paper. Some years the tulips stay in bloom for months; other seasons it’s only a couple of weeks. The heat and cold have no effect on them—it’s some other peculiar enchantment that causes them to wilt back into the soil. Sometimes they simply refuse to wither or decay, and they go on blooming, showing their vibrant petals well into autumn, into winter, even after the first snow falls. They follow no natural order, no farmer’s almanac or rhythm of the seasons. They behave as they want.

I hear the click of the front door opening. Archer is home.

His footsteps travel down the hall, but he doesn’t turn into his room. He keeps walking, until his shadowed outline is standing in my doorway. His hair is a little wild, cheeks flushed, like he’s either just run home or been kissing someone on the front steps. “Everyone in town’s talking about it,” he says, as if he knows I’m still awake.

He walks across the room, the old, rotted wood floor creaking beneath him, threatening to collapse and send us both crashing into the creek below—but it won’t, because this house refuses to die, refuses to sink into the swampy soil, when it should have decades ago. Archer stands at the window, looking out at the tulips. “They’re bathing in the tulips, rubbing the pollen on their skin.”

I exhale and push myself up, leaning back against the headboard. “They’re drunk on them,” I say. “It makes them feel like they’re in love.”

He looks back at me, jaw tensed, and the breezy calm that usually rests just beneath the surface of his disinterested eyes is briefly gone. “Lacy Bates said she’d pay me a hundred dollars for a single tulip. She likes some girl from her algebra class, and she thinks the tulip will help her odds.”

“Love has always been a lie for us,” I say. “Now it’s a lie for them, too.”

Archer turns fully, his tall frame casting a lean, moonlit shadow across the floor. It’s unsettling seeing him like this, the nervous pulse at his temples. “They don’t have much interest in me anymore either.” He drags a hand through his dark hair, looking to the floor. “A whole tulip season wasted,” he says. “Doesn’t seem fair.”

“Nothing about being a Goode is fair.”

He nods, looks somber, tired even. Unlike him.

A long, frigid silence hangs in the air between us before I finally say, “I’m leaving tomorrow.” The words are heavy on my tongue. Because even though I’ve been counting down the days until this moment, even though freedom feels so close that it makes me lightheaded, leaving my brother behind is the only thing that hurts. The only part of this that feels wrong.

He smirks a little, like he thinks I’m making a joke, but then his expression drops, his eyes swiveling to my packed suitcase. “You’re serious? I guess I always thought you just liked talking about it, but that you’d never actually do it.”

“You could come with me,” I offer, daring to hope he might say yes.

Archer shakes his head, smiling, the light returning to his eyes. “You know I’d never survive outside of this town. This is where I belong. But you…” His smile pinches together. “You’re better than this place, I’ve always known it. You know it too. I’m glad you’re finally doing it—escaping.”

I stand up from the bed, but Archer holds up his palm to me. “No goodbyes yet. Let’s save them for the morning. You know I hate sentimental shit.”

I laugh. “Okay, tomorrow.”

He walks to the doorway, then stops and looks back at me over his shoulder. “Happy birthday, sis.”

The air inside my bedroom feels heavy, humid, even with both windows open and a breeze sailing from the back garden, across my bed, then out through the front window facing the road. I crave the numbing quiet of sleep, but I blink up at the ceiling—knowing that this is my last night in this room, this house.

A faint tap-tapping enters my ears.

I hold my breath, listening into the dark of the room, but there is only the sound of the creek rushing beneath the floor. Nothing else.

I force my eyes closed, willing sleep to take me under, when I hear another sound.

But this noise is different: softer, muted, like footsteps on wet soil.

I fling my eyes open and look to the front window—where I can see something resting on the sill. Something foreign.

The breeze tugs softly at the edges of the thing, and I feel a sharp twinge at the base of my neck—the part of my brain that tells me this isn’t right. I force my feet to slide to the floor, then cross the room, while a chill scratches down my spine.

At the window I stare down at the thing.

A book has been placed on the windowsill.

Left here. Out of place. Where it doesn’t belong.

In the moonlight I can just barely read the title: Peter and Wendy , by J. M. Barrie. I run my fingers across the black cover, the gold lettering—it looks old, a book that’s been read many times over the decades. I lift my eyes to the open window, peering out into the dark, and catch a shadow slipping away through the tall grass toward the road.

“Hey!” I call.

The silhouette stops, seems to melt in with the dark, but when I blink again, he starts to turn, pushing back the gray hood of his sweatshirt, tilting his chin so his forehead and nose catch the soft moonlight, revealing his face.

He stands that way for a second, then another, as if deciding whether to run the rest of the distance out to the road or turn and walk back to my window.

Slowly he strides toward me.

Oak.

“You’re trespassing,” I say when he reaches the window, my voice hushed, eyebrow lifted, while my heart thuds strangely.

He is quiet and beautiful and almost otherworldly in this late, watery light, the spring air against his dark skin, the trees swaying behind him. “I’m sorry.” His eyes are soft, and he seems different, bold, preternatural, as if he’s emerged from the woods across the road like a storybook creature. “I wanted to leave you something… for your birthday.”

I slide my finger down the spine of the book, feeling the subtly raised letters.

He watches me, and there are questions in his eyes, a paradox he’s trying to unravel—a boy who has strayed too close to a cursed girl, standing in the moonlight, Forsaken Creek churning only a few feet away. He should leave, back away from the window. But I don’t want him to… not yet. I like being close to him, a boy who still shows no sign of delirium.

A boy I don’t understand.

“I wasn’t sure if you already owned a copy,” he adds, shoulders dropped, easy, his hands sunk into the pockets of his jeans.

I shake my head and smile. The books I’ve read are always borrowed, a library stamp on the inside flap stating the date it must be given back. “It looks old,” I say, turning it over in my hands.

“My father has a library of rare books.”

My eyes flick to his. “Does your father collect them?” I ask, hoping to extract any kernel of information about who Oak is.

“Yeah, and other things.”

“Then you probably shouldn’t give it to me. It looks valuable.” I hold it out through the open window, toward him.

But he doesn’t blink; he looks straight into the beating heart of my chest. “He won’t even know it’s gone.”

The warm spring wind plays against the tall grass behind him, and I watch his eyes, looking for any sign of love, for any hint that he’s starting to tumble down a dark rabbit hole into madness. But his gaze is flat, unfettered, and I don’t know how to feel. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Should I fear him… his lack of emotion when he looks at me?

How can the tulips have no effect on him? How can I have no effect on him?

“You came here just to give me a book?” I ask.

A wisp of hair strays across his eyes. “Is that okay?”

I love the way words slide carefully between his lips, how his skin reminds me of an autumn rainstorm, dark and cloying. Maybe it’s him who’s cast the spell on me?

“Did you come for a tulip?” I ask, the mistrust and doubt creeping into my thoughts. Maybe the book is simply a ploy to get close to me, to the house and the garden, so that he can ask for a tulip, like everyone else.

But his shoulders stiffen a little, an eyebrow lifts. “I don’t care about your tulips.”

“Everyone else in town does.”

He runs a hand along his forearm, glancing up to the few stars visible in the heat-drenched sky. “They’re just afraid they won’t find love without them,” he says, before lowering his green eyes back to me. “They’re afraid of being alone.” He slows his breathing, watching me like he’s trying to make sense of what I am. “Isn’t that what we’re all afraid of?”

A pressure forms in my throat. He’s talking about love, about loneliness, as if these are two ordinary things to be discussed by strangers in the middle of the night through an open window. But the way he says the word “love,” it’s as if it were nothing at all. A thin measure of air, a single grain of sand. Something that can be breathed in and let go just as easily. Dropped or forgotten. Meaningless.

“Not everyone,” I reply, because I’m afraid of something else…. I’m afraid I’ll only ever be loved because of the tulips.

Oak takes a step closer to the window, unfathomable green eyes piercing into mine, but his body is now tensed, like he’s ready to turn and run if he needs to—if he starts to feel something for me that isn’t natural, a deep obsession rising up from his gut. The curse spreading along his veins.

But it’s me who feels something I don’t like, a coiling need that I’ve never felt before.

“What are you afraid of?” he asks.

I bite down against the heat in my cheeks, because I can’t tell him the truth: That I’m afraid the love others feel for me will always be entwined with the Goode family curse, that love will always be a lie for me. That it’s something I can never trust.

And that now I’m also afraid of him . He scares me: The way my head thumps when he’s only a few feet away. How I imagine him inching closer, how I daydream about what it might be like to feel his hand again—like when he pulled me away from the crowd at school. How I would like to know what he smells like when rain touches his skin, what his heartbeat sounds like in my ear, listening to the rhythm that keeps him alive.

But these treacherous thoughts can’t be real, can’t be allowed to cement in my mind, so I grip the book tighter in my hands. “I’m afraid I’ll end up like every other Goode who’s ever lived in this house,” I answer. Plainly. Truthfully.

I feel him observing every flick of my eyelashes, every twitch of unease at the corners of my mouth. He looks at me as if I am a memory—like he can recall something in my eyes. Two moments in time. Two pools of darkness and light. As if I am something he has lost but found again. A girl from one of his books.

He takes another step toward the window, and my treasonous heart claws up into my throat. He nods to the book he’s given me, my fingertips pressing deeply into the cover, holding on to it like a tether. Like it’s the only thing keeping me from drifting away into the stars. “It’s about a girl who leaves her ordinary life for an unexpected one,” he says.

“What if I want to leave this world for one that is ordinary?” I pose.

“Most people are bored with ordinary.”

“I crave it.”

He smiles, a shiver in his eyes. “?‘Second to the right, and straight on till morning,’?” he says, quoting the book I hold. “Maybe that’s your way out of here, just like Wendy.”

My heart pulses in my ears. “It’s easier for fictional characters to run away from home than it is in the real world.” I think of my packed suitcase, lying behind me on the floor, in the dark of my room. I’m almost gone. I’m almost free of this place.

“That’s exactly what someone would say in a book just before they kill the villain and flee the castle and find true love.”

I let out a tiny laugh, but it’s mostly just air. “If only I knew who the villain was.”

He smiles a little. Only a little. “I’m trying to figure that out too. And finding it harder and harder.”

My mouth falls back into place, uncertain what he means. Who is the villain of his story ? Who is the villain of mine?

But instead of moving even closer, instead of reciting more lines from the book he’s given me, he blinks and straightens his shoulders back. “I need to get home.” He looks restless suddenly, edgy, like he’s stayed far too long, and he reaches for his own book in his back pocket—probably out of habit. The cover is creased, bent in half, and I envy it: the adoration he’s shown the book, the time he’s spent in its pages. The love he’s given it. I exhale, pushing away the stupid thought.

He’s already turning away, striding through the overgrown grass toward Swamp Wells Road, and I feel a pain in my throat, in the center of my heart—not wanting him to leave.

“Hey!” I call out.

He stops, soft green eyes glancing over his shoulder.

“Come back tomorrow,” I say, I dare, I risk—when I know I shouldn’t. “After sunset. I want to show you something.”

For a second too long, he looks like he’s going to say no—tell me that I won’t see him ever again. Getting this close to me was a bad idea.

But his silent eyes flicker with something else, and he nods. “Tomorrow,” he repeats. “Okay.”