Chapter One
ONE
Their eyes stab my flesh, the back of my skull, watching as I rise from my seat at the front of the bus and escape out into the cool spring air, drawing it into my lungs.
They fear me. They should.
I don’t turn. I don’t glance back at the faces of my Cutwater High classmates, gaping out at me through the dirty square windows of the school bus, relief in their eyes, glad to be rid of me. Poor Lark Goode, they think, eyes skipping past me to the awful, slack-roofed little house at the end of the driveway. The only house on this sad stretch of backwoods road that sits half-perched on wooden stilts to keep the wet, swampy ground from swallowing it up. To keep the creek from spilling through the floorboards. Poor cursed Lark, who has to wake up in that shithole house each morning and return to it every day after school. With no way out. No other option. A life handed to her by fate—cruel and snickering, with fingers crossed behind a back.
The bus spews out black smoke, sputtering on up the road—taking their awful glaring eyes with it. I know their pity is fleeting, because it’s mostly fear that occupies their small minds. A wariness of getting too close. Lark Goode will snatch out your heart and bury it in the garden behind her house. If only that were true. If only I could.
I slide the headphones down around my neck, pressing stop on the ancient Walkman—Cyndi Lauper’s “All through the Night” ceasing to vibrate in my ears. The Walkman belonged to my mom when she was a teenager. The stack of cassette tapes beside my bed was hers too. But the clunky Walkman isn’t a token of my retro coolness, it’s just the only option I have. It’s one of the few things Mom left behind the day she dragged her suitcase out the front door, the broken wheels thumping down each step, while the early-morning sun speared through the elm trees beside the driveway, making her dark hair glisten like raven feathers.
She never looked back.
Not once.
I yank open the tiny metal door of the mailbox—overstuffed, always —letters spilling out. Lipstick marks crisscross the envelopes, pastel hearts sketched with marker and eye pencil beside the address, 114 Swamp Wells Road, followed by tiny sunflowers and daisies trailing up from the o ’s and the s ’s. As if these symbols were a part of our address—the post office unable to deliver our mail unless these hieroglyphs of love have been properly accounted for. Unable to deliver as addressed; more hearts required.
I scoop up the fallen letters, irritated—Archer didn’t even bother to get the mail—and I make the long march up our driveway, stepping wide over the cold creek that cuts in front of our slanted porch. I wrestle with the front door—always stuck, always hanging wrongly from its hinges—and finally push inside. “You got more letters,” I shout to Archer, tossing the envelopes onto the kitchen table, knowing tomorrow there’ll be even more. And more the day after that, jammed into our mailbox until the postman has to leave a stack in the dirt, neatly tied with string.
Archer is perched against the kitchen counter, spooning a mouthful of sugared cereal into his mouth. He smiles crookedly, impishly. “It’ll only get worse,” he answers, still chewing. “Did you see the garden?”
Dropping my canvas bag onto the wood floor—damp from the creek roaring below, moisture stuck to everything—I move past him to the sink, fill a glass with cold water, then down the whole thing. The bus ride home is always too warm, humid and thick, the windows all stuck shut, so we sweat and breathe in fumes and one another’s teenage stench, arriving home like animals sent to market. “Haven’t noticed,” I lie, because in truth, I can see the whole god-awful garden from my back bedroom window. I wake to it each morning, the sea of green stalks teetering in the sharp morning air. Taunting me, cloying and malevolent.
Archer chews loudly, noisily—on purpose, just to annoy me—then drops his empty bowl into the sink, spoon clanking against the drain. Our kitchen cupboards are poorly stocked with boxed cereal, dried rice, canned beans, and a few jars of peanut butter. A sad assortment. Dad sends us grocery money from time to time, he pays the utility bills online—thankfully—but it rarely seems like enough. If it weren’t for Archer’s flirting, for the jars of homemade jam, baked strawberry pies, dusted sugar cookies, and casseroles that adoring girls leave on our front porch for him, we’d never have a proper meal.
“End of May, just like clockwork,” he adds, walking to the screen door at the back of the house and resting a hand against the doorframe, the wind stirring his black T-shirt and his dark hair.
My twin is comfortable in his own skin, cool and calm, a sanguine ease in every move he makes—a nonchalance that came easy to him right after birth. While I have tiptoed carefully around in my skin, certain I was born in the wrong house, in the wrong town, in a place meant for someone else.
My self-assured brother has never once stumbled, never woken with hair that wasn’t perfectly tousled or with clothes that were damp and wrinkled. He strides through town with his wicked, cloying smile that can charm the skirt off any girl or boy who has the unfortunate luck to happen across his path, never again able to look away. He is a twin that casts a shadow, long and lean, a shadow that’s nearly impossible to crawl out from under.
But to be honest, I like it in the dark. In the shade of invisibility.
Because I’ve felt the opposite: the madness that comes from standing in the light. The way others contort themselves to be closer to a Goode. Then run screaming when the seasons change.
It’s safer in the dark. And that’s where I’ll stay.
“You missed school again,” I point out, uncoiling my hair from its braid, letting the auburn waves spill down my shoulders and using my fingers to work out the spiderweb knots.
“Like I said”—he nods through the screen door at the garden beyond—“they’re almost in bloom.”
I stand beside my brother, gazing out at the acre of dark, ruddy soil. He’s right: the tall green shoots—wide leaves peeled open, with closed buds shaped like teardrops—will soon crack apart and reveal their strange, unnatural petals to the sky. Scarlet and vermilion, like dark red wine. Like blood. Like a sacrifice.
This season’s crop… is about to bloom.
“You should stay home too,” he adds, gray eyes cutting over me as he pulls the blue guitar pick from his pocket and flips it easily through his fingers. He claims that it’s his lucky guitar pick. But luck in this family doesn’t come from guitar picks. Our fate is determined by that acre of flowers. “No point going to school now. You’ll only make it harder on yourself.”
My throat tightens. The afternoon breeze rolls throughs the garden of tulips, their weighted heads like babies unable to hold up their own skulls, as if they’re a little drunk—chugged too many beers at one of Roy Potts’s infamous lakefront-cabin parties during midsummer. “There’s only a week left,” I answer, holding strong to the promise I make to myself every year: Stick it out, suffer through these last few days before summer break. Finish school, graduate this year, because even if I can’t afford college, at least I’ll have something. A high school diploma. At least I won’t repeat the same mistakes my mother made: dropping out when she was only seventeen. Pregnant and alone.
Archer shrugs, raising a perfectly framed eyebrow, then walks to the kitchen table to rip open one of the letters. “Soon enough you’ll be getting as much mail as me.”
“I don’t encourage it like you do.”
He flashes me a smug look, the guitar pick now perched between his lips. “It’s more fun this way. Might as well use our fate for something.”
I feel my teeth clamp together, hating the self-satisfied way he brushes everything off like it’s nothing at all, like our lives aren’t some cruel, inescapable joke. In a few days’ time, late one night, the tulips will break open, unfurling their rare, curse-ridden petals toward the stars. But Archer’s never cared what any of it means, he only cares what it does —the side effect bestowed on him.
On both of us.
Because when the tulips finally bloom, love and madness knot themselves together, and your heart is no longer your own. It belongs to us. To the Goode family.
The sun rises into a gray, rain-weighted sky—the tulips still not yet bloomed—and I board the bus to Cutwater High while Archer sleeps in. He’s no longer interested in attending the last week of our senior year.
I sit at the back of the bus, headphones on, listening to the Counting Crows August and Everything After album, imagining Mom playing this same cassette, on this same ride to the same awful school. Lives repeated.
Inescapable.
Destined.
I feel the eyes of Abby Reece, seated across the aisle, skip over me once, twice, until the bus stops to pick up Mia Churchill, and Abby bolts from her seat and moves three seats away, unwilling to take the risk any longer.
To live in the town of Cutwater is to know countless stories about the Goodes—fables of heartbreak and madness and desire.
But to understand the truth of our past, one must go back to the middle. Because the beginning is too far away and too troublesome, wrought with lies and riddles that I’ve still never quite picked apart. Lies are that way: sticky, honeylike, melted into the truth until it’s impossible to know the sweet from the sour.
Our birth—Archer’s and mine—was an inconsequential one. Trivial, at least according to our father, who paced the tulip rows unfettered by the event, while our mother bent her face to her chest with the pain of labor yet never made a sound—according to the two attending midwives whose names have never been told to us. What was also never told to us was the timing of our births: who was born first, Archer or me. We were told only that we came into that damp, rotted house sometime after midnight but before the sun rose. And that in the custom of all Goode family births, it happened in spring, just as the tulips began to bloom. As though the awakening of the blossoms had stirred our mother’s womb, calling us out. A curse awaits you, it’s time to be born.
But a curse is only known as such depending on the affliction. And to some, what we suffer might be seen as a gift, handed up from the soil each spring. A birthday always marked the same way: warm easterly winds through the elm trees and a tide of sweet floral scents carried through the windows.
At the onset of tulip season, when the garden breaks open with their snow-white blooms—a slash of color through each petal—desire and desperation, love and lust, are not far behind.
The bus idles to a stop in front of the school, and I find myself striding down the hall to first period, my classmates parting around me as if I were a death ship sailing through a black sea. They press themselves up against their lockers and duck into bathrooms. They know madness season is close. But some watch me with renewed, even if hesitant, curiosity. They look at me as if I were a flower breaking through my old skin.
A girl who they suddenly can’t turn their eyes away from—for reasons they don’t entirely understand.
By lunchtime, spring rain gives way to opal-blue skies, and I sit alone—far away from the others—in the grass near the high school parking lot, under one of the sagging elm trees, listening to “Lovefool,” by the Cardigans—a silly bubblegum song about a girl begging a boy to “leave me, leave me, just say that you need me.” I let it play while I eat my flattened peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwich. Wiping the crumbs from my lap, I flip open my notebook and press the sharpened pencil to a fresh, blank page.
I scan the lawn, dotted with my classmates, their faces bent toward cell phones while their mouths lazily chew their food, most looking a little frayed—that anxious excitement layered with exhaustion from a school year that’s almost over. Only four days left until summer break. And you can feel the cracking edges, the parts of us that are ready to break.
Across the newly cut grass, Jude—a short, bony kid with coils of light blond hair and pale, close-set eyes—wanders through the sea of Cutwater High students. In his left hand he holds a chatterbox: a paper origami fortune teller, folded at the corners. He makes a new one every morning in first period, doodling on the outer corners in elaborate floral patterns with black ink. On the inside he sketches either numbers or words, like “ochre,” “azure,” “periwinkle.” And beneath the corner flaps are hidden fortunes. Little glimpses into your future that Jude writes himself.
Fate revealed on lined notebook paper.
I watch as he kneels down beside a group of freckle-faced girls from band class, flutes and harmonicas and trombones resting in their shiny black cases beside them. A girl named Clementine hands Jude something, and he takes it in his palm before sliding it into his pocket. He dispenses fortunes only in trade for something—they are never free. A stick of gum, a pretty piece of agate, a ride home after school, a song played on a guitar. I can’t see what Clementine gave him, but he never takes money, only a trade. “The barter system was the fairest form of economy,” he once proclaimed in fourth-period history class. He holds out the paper chatterbox for Clementine to select a number or word, then he opens and closes the origami to reveal her fortune.
Her cheeks turn pink, eyes watery and bright as she listens to him recite her fate. I can’t hear a word of it over the Cardigans singing in my ears. So I drop my eyes back to the notebook, my pencil carving out the slope of his cheekbones and a flat, pinched mouth. I wasn’t sure who I’d sketch today, but the coils of hair begin to form from the scalp, and I see Jude take shape from the end of my pencil, small eyes set into his soft face. As I shade in his hands, the chatterbox held delicately in his fingertips, my eyes lift to see that Jude has stood up from the group of girls. His gaze sways over the front lawn of Cutwater High, seeking the next person in need of a fortune, but when his eyes catch on mine—only briefly—he snaps his head away and starts toward the small, grassy hill at the east edge of the school. He’s never read my fortune. It’s not worth the risk. Like everyone else at school, he keeps his distance.
No eye contact, no straying looks.
I’m too dangerous.
But I keep my distance from them, too. When you risk madness laced in love every spring, you can’t risk friends. The few friendships I’ve made never lasted: a girl in fourth grade with black hair and clear-framed glasses who always chewed gum when she talked. We’d spend weekends at my house and mornings chatting on the bus, until the spring of fifth grade, when she began looking at me as if I were air itself. As if she wouldn’t survive if I didn’t love her back. Freshman year, I shared a locker in the south hall with a boy in my biology class who seemed unaffected by the pollen scent of my skin. For a time, I thought we’d stay friends until we graduated. But then three days before summer break, we stood at our locker and he lifted a finger, tracing a line of yellow sunlight—from a nearby window—across my cheekbone down to my chin. And I could see it in his swimming eyes, in the curious, soft flutter of his bottom lip—I knew it even before he did. He had fallen in love, just like that, snap your fingers and it’s tulip season.
Blink your eyes and love has knitted beneath the bones.
“Love finds the Goode twins,” I hear them hissing in the halls. Even when they don’t understand why, even when they swear it won’t happen to them—because what is there to love about two half-orphaned misfits whose house is sinking into the wet, swampy soil? Two twins who, without logic or reason, smell like the wind, like a perfume spun from ancient magic.
So most stay away… from me , anyway. I sit at the far back of every class, near a window, where the fresh air dulls the heady scent of spring flowers on my skin. I sit alone outside at lunch. I keep myself separate. Unlike Archer, who strolls through town when he should be at school, wandering into the small music shop on the corner of Willow Street and Goose Neck Drive—the only intersection with a blinking light—where he thrums through the wall of guitars, playing a few chords. And by some lost, spell-spun magic, the girls walking by outside pause to press their fingertips to the glass windows, then shuffle inside the shop to watch him play. He’s not even that good—he could never play in a band—but it doesn’t matter. It’s him they’re after.
He just has to be a Goode. A boy born into a family where love comes easy.
And easy it does come. For all of us.
But it’s much harder to keep it away. To rid it from the skin once someone has clawed their nails into you.
I fold my notebook closed—a notebook filled with sketches of almost everyone at school. If I can’t get near them, at least I can draw them onto paper, feel some closeness in the gray lines that shade their eyes and chins and somber mouths. It’s a notebook filled with the people of this town, a collection of lives pressed flat onto paper.
The Cardigans’ cloying love song ends, and the next track begins: “The Great Divide.”
The irony is not lost on me. So I hit the fast-forward button—the sound of the spinning cassette tape shrieking against my ears.
A few yards away, Olive Montagu blows bubbles from a blue plastic wand she holds in front of her glossy pink lips, adorning her circle of friends with delicate, floating bubbles that break against their smiling, impossibly porcelain faces. Occasionally Olive glances my way, a touch of curiosity in her blue eyes, before blowing another wave of bubbles toward Lulu Yen’s phone, pointed in her direction. Olive’s group of five friends take countless photos of themselves throughout the day: a camera lens documenting every application of eyeliner in the bathroom mirror, every outfit planned and choreographed so they’re all color-coordinated as they stride into first period, talking to the camera as if they were talking to an audience—a delicate facade captured for the world to see. Every moment posted mere seconds after it happens. As if they’re afraid of being forgotten.
But unlike Olive and her friends, I want nothing more than to be forgotten . A girl lost to memory. Olive blows another wave of bubbles through the tiny wand, and they’re caught by the wind, spiraling through the warm air in my direction, but before the little orbs can reach me, I notice something from the corner of my vision.
I hit stop on the Walkman.
Across the grass, Tobias Huaman, who was seated on the concrete steps near the main doors, stands up suddenly, blinking away the brilliant midday sun. He is tall, muscled, with dark skin and dark, striking eyes, and I watch as he begins moving toward me, a smile taking shape along his arched lips—that terrible, familiar expression.
Shit.
The tulips aren’t yet in bloom, but the air that hovers around me has shifted—the promise of what’s to come—and the faintest hint of tulip pollen is already dusting my flesh.
His white sneakers start to carry him across the lawn, his green raincoat unzipped—a coat he wears because Jude once told him to beware of rainy days. And at Cutwater High we believe in fate and fortunes and bad luck. But before Tobias has taken even five steps, a hand grabs his shoulder, firm and abrupt, yanking him back. His best friend, Mac Williams—all full lips and football shoulders and midnight skin—stops Tobias from going any farther.
From getting any closer to me.