Chapter Three
THREE
What the hell happened?” Archer asks as I climb the porch steps. He’s seated on the porch swing, strumming our father’s old guitar—the strings frayed at the ends, the wood worn thin in places. “You ditching class?”
My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. “There was a fight at school….”
Archer frowns, dark hair sliding over his eyes.
“I think…” I suck in a breath, my heart slowing its rhythm. “It had something to do with the tulips.”
He lowers the guitar in his lap. “What do you mean?”
But I move past him into the house, dropping my bag to the floor beside the kitchen table, then throw open the back door. As I stand on the porch, the tulips appear motionless, harmless, like children sitting perfectly still in an attempt to appear as if they’ve done nothing wrong—cookie crumbs on their cheeks and beneath their fingernails.
But I find what’s wrong.
Along the east edge of the garden, a swath of white-and-bloodred blooms… is gone .
A good thirty—no, forty—tulips have been snipped clean off from their stems. The green stalks now standing like tombstones, headless, lifeless.
Stolen.
A spike of fear drops into my gut.
In the dirt a few feet from the ravaged blooms sits a pair of shears—I recognize them from the toolshed. Sometime before the sun cracked above the horizon, a thief crept into the garden, yanked the shears from the nail where they usually hang against the slatted wall of the shed, and hacked away at a few dozen Goode tulips.
My temples throb.
A buzzing twists its way up from my stomach.
“Shit,” Archer murmurs, standing a few paces behind me, hands on the back of his head.
We’ve never worried about thieves sneaking into the garden. Locals fear us—the stories of how we practice black magic, how we slice out the eyes and pull out the bones of anyone who steps foot on our land—it’s enough to keep them away. Only Archer’s love interests dare to visit the Goode family home and only because they are entranced by Archer’s whispered words against their throats.
We’ve never needed a fence or a sign that reads KEEP OUT! We’ve never fretted about burglars or nosy neighbors wandering through the garden, plucking tulips from the soil. The legend of the Goode family has always been enough.
I move down the steps, running my fingers along several headless stalks, the delicate blooms gone. I hate the tulips, hate the garden, but this… this feels like a violation—like someone has cut out my own flesh.
“Who the hell would do this?” Archer asks.
“I think Mac… and probably his friends.”
Archer makes a face. “Those guys couldn’t tiptoe through the garden quietly if their football scholarships depended on it. You sure it was them?”
I lift a shoulder. “Mac had one at school. But I took it from him.” The bloom now stuffed into my bag.
“Shit,” Archer repeats. “We need to get the rest back.”
The sun flashes through the clouds, making me feel dizzy. “I think it’s too late for that.” I remember the desperate look in Gabby Pines’s eyes, begging me for a tulip. But another memory blinks into focus: Mr. Loon confiscating something in class. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly—it was hidden in his palm—but now I start to wonder. The way he looked at it, the way he paused, mesmerized. And the fight in the hall, between Tobias and Mac, Clementine watching with satisfaction in her eyes. Did it all have something to do with the tulips?
And now they’ve surely been traded and passed around school many times. Impossible to find, to recover them all.
Archer rubs a hand across his neck. “This isn’t good, Lark.”
He pulls the guitar pick from his pocket and starts scraping it against the side of his jeans. A habit to calm his thoughts. “No one except a Goode has ever possessed a tulip before.”
“I know.”
“And we haven’t even cut one from the garden in generations.”
“I know,” I repeat.
“We don’t know what will happen.”
I nod, dropping my hand from the decapitated stem.
“We should put up a fence,” he says, but I’m not listening. I’m thinking of Mom, and in this moment I wish she were here. She would tell us not to worry in her cool, unaffected way. She’d breeze through the house, calm and halcyon, humming to herself—she crafted an air of ease, which Archer inherited. It’s also why it was so easy for her to abandon us; her mind was always set adrift, she went where the wind tossed her. And the stolen tulips would be something she’d ignore, in hopes that the problem would solve itself.
But problems in my mom’s orbit rarely solved themselves. They usually grew larger until they destroyed everyone around her.
The night before Mom left, she and I sat on the roof of the house, making wishes on falling stars. I remember the lilac smell of her skin, her hands tapping against the roof, a song always in her head, trying to get out. “I’m looking for a sign, Lark,” I remember her saying. She was hoping to find something in the formation of stars, a clue about her life, her fate, her future. She was like that. Mercurial, enigmatic. The kind of woman who people had a hard time looking away from. She was a Goode, after all. Archer got all her charm. I got none.
“There’s a wind in my heart,” she liked to say, holding a hand to her chest. “I can hear it, whispering to me, telling me there’s something better waiting beyond this town.” She talked about leaving Cutwater, she talked about escaping.
This part of her, I did inherit.
The desire to get as far from this town as fate and luck would allow.
By the next morning she was gone.
I woke just in time to see her striding down the driveway, pulling the suitcase behind her.
And I haven’t been on the roof again since that night. It’s a reminder of her, of when I might have been able to hang on to her, keep her from leaving. But I wasn’t able to.
Now I lie in bed, unable to sleep.
An owl lands on the highest point of the house, hooting into the dark, and I hear Archer bolt from his bed and slam out through the back door—certain someone is in the garden. He does this a dozen times more during the night. At every sound, every shift of the house, he’s up, ready to catch a thief. But he always finds the garden empty.
And the tulips just as they were a few hours before.
After sunup I make myself a cup of tea, heft my bag over my shoulder, and walk down the driveway to wait for the bus. Every part of me is screaming that I should go back to bed. I have no idea what awaits me at school.
But I just want to get this week over with. I ditched the second half of classes yesterday, and I hope that no one noticed—and that they’ll still let me graduate.
Beside the driveway, Forsaken Creek is full and rushing, the spring thaw sending snowmelt down from the Middle Fork Mountains. The soft morning quiet is broken by the sound of the school bus roaring up Swamp Wells Road. I draw in a breath, bracing myself for what’s to come. But it’s not the yellow bus that comes into view. It’s a truck—veering off onto the side of the road, kicking up a cloud of gritty road dust, and skidding to a stop in front of me.
I scramble back, nearly slipping into the creek, coughing as the dust settles around me. I squint, recognizing the sun-faded green Ford—it belongs to Talon McDonald, who graduated last year, but like everyone else in this town, he never left Cutwater. He’ll rot here.
Wary, I take another step away, the sketchbook gripped under my arm, but I’m afraid to turn my back on the truck—Talon can be a real asshole. But it’s also tulip season, so he’ll either say some shithead thing, then peel away, or he’ll confess his love for me.
In the passenger seat sits another boy—long dusty-blond hair sticking out beneath a baseball hat and the beginnings of a pale, wispy mustache on his upper lip. I think his name is Raif, a kid who graduated two years ago but has nothing better to do and nowhere to go. In the bed of the truck are two younger boys slumped against the side, staring out at me. One is shirtless, his dark hair windblown and greasy. The other wears a black T-shirt and sips on a can of soda. I think they’re Talon’s younger brothers. One of them will probably be a freshman at Cutwater High next year.
“You hitchhiking?” Raif calls out through the open passenger-side window, his upper lip curled.
I glance up at the house, gauging how quickly I could run the distance—but they could drive it much faster, and maybe even beat me on foot.
“We’ll give ya a ride,” he offers, tapping his fingers against the truck door. His face is sunburned, the sleeves of his sailor-blue flannel shirt rolled up to his elbows.
I blink, keeping my mouth shut.
“She’s that witch-girl, you dipshit,” one of the boys in the back of the truck says. “Didn’t you hear what happened at the high school yesterday? Tobias Huaman has a busted rib. They’re sayin’ it’s because of those flowers she grows behind her house.” The boy shoots me a look, his pale eyes like a bird gaping at an insect.
The morning air suddenly feels unbearably hot against my skin. The sun blinding through the trees, and I just want to sprint up the driveway and duck into the shade and safety of the house.
“She looks harmless enough,” Raif comments, his eyes lidded away from the sun.
“Careful…,” Talon remarks from the driver’s seat, nodding at Raif. “Don’t look her straight in the eye, or you won’t be able to think of anyone else but her.”
I wonder why they’ve stopped at my driveway. Just to be assholes? Just because they’re bored and they saw a girl to harass? Or because they want a tulip.
Both of the boys in the back of the truck quickly shift their gazes away. But Raif keeps his focus on me, elbow resting in the open window, forehead already glistening from the morning heat. A second later I watch his expression change: mouth parting just a little, doughy and soft, as he leans farther out the window.
I force my eyes down to my feet, feeling the shift in his stare, knowing it’s already happening. Some are more susceptible than others—easily caught by the Goode snare.
I hear the metal truck door creak open, and Raif steps out onto the gravel driveway. His footsteps are heavy and lumbering, and I lift my eyes when he’s only a couple of paces away. His eyes begin to water at the corners, like he’s seized by something—his heart caught in a vise. “I’ll buy a tulip from you. Ten of them.” He nods to the house, his tone suddenly serious and unnerving. The blooms, the enchantment, are already beneath his skin.
“You don’t have any money, you moron,” Talon shouts through the open window.
But Raif reaches for the wallet in his back pocket, thumbs through the bills, then holds out everything inside. Four one-dollar bills.
“They’re not for sale,” I tell him, a sturdiness in my voice that makes my jaw contract, clenching on the words. Biting them until they break.
But Raif isn’t looking at me, he’s staring up the long driveway at the house, and I know what he’s thinking.
“Get back in the truck!” Talon shouts, revving the engine. “You shouldn’t be that close to her.” But Raif isn’t listening, he doesn’t hear a thing. He takes a step past me, starting up the driveway. He’s going to rip the tulips from the soil, beckoned closer by their hypnotizing scent wafting through the spring air. He’s feeling bold, overcome, and maybe it’s because of me. The scent is on my skin, too, and being this close to me, near the garden of tulips, it’s more than his small mind can manage.
“Be right back,” he mumbles, though it’s too quiet for Talon to hear. He takes another step, but I swivel around and reach out for him.
“I said no!” I snap, grabbing his arm. He jerks back, his cheeks red, sweat beading down his temple. “They’re not for sale.” And for a second he looks like he’s going to lunge at me, but instead his shoulders drop and his eyes sink low, settling on mine.
“Raif, what the hell!” Talon barks, impatient now.
But Raif lifts his hand, the movement slow, like he’s half-asleep, and I can tell he’s going to run his fingertips down my cheekbone, caress my skin, while his dark, close-set eyes pinwheel deeper into mine.
“Don’t touch me,” I snarl, shoving his hand away. His expression tightens with anger, with confusion—his emotions a riot inside his head. He both loves me and loathes me right now, and he can’t decide which feeling makes sense. But without warning, his features change, turn hard and mean all at once, and he clamps a hand around my forearm, like he’s going to drag me with him.
Love has a different effect on everyone. Some want to cherish the ones they love, caress them and care for them and plant delicate kisses across their lips. While others want to control the ones they love, lock them up and keep them “safe” so no one else can have them.
Raif is the latter sort.
“Stop!” I shout, dropping my bag and notebook in the dirt, then shoving my hands against his chest, trying to push him back. But he’s too strong, yanking me toward the truck.
I hear the groan of another truck door opening, and Talon steps out. “What the hell are you doing, man?” he says to Raif. But Raif has lost all sense of himself, and I can see the single-minded determination on his face, cut into his sunburned forehead. He’s not about to let me slip from his grasp. Not for anything.
“Let me go!” I yell, digging my fingernails into his jaw, his throat, making claw marks down his flesh. He doesn’t even flinch.
Time seems to careen forward as he drags me to the truck, the sun wheeling hotly overhead. My mind screams, No, no, no. My body pulls fiercely away, without success.
But behind me I hear the screen door of the house slap open and the steady thud of footsteps on the front stairs. “Fuck off, Raif!” Archer shouts.
Raif stops, swings his gaze over my shoulder. And in the next blink I launch my leg forward, kicking him hard in the shin with a loud crack. He cries out, wincing, then buckles over just before he releases my arm.
I nearly drop to the ground but manage to stagger back, thumping against the mailbox.
“Get the fuck out of here, Talon!” Archer yells, striding down the driveway toward us, the anger hot across his face.
I draw in a breath, my heart biting against my ribs, and when I look up, both Talon and Raif are back inside the truck, doors slammed shut, and the truck is screeching away, rear tires kicking up dust. One of the younger boys in the back tosses out his can of orange soda, and it hits the ground at my feet, splashing sticky soda onto my bare shins, before the truck speeds up the road and vanishes around a bend.
In the dirt lies my notebook—pages fanned open, covered in gravel.
I touch my arm where Raif’s fingers dug into my flesh, the skin tender but unbroken. Archer stops at the end of the driveway and glares up the road, where gray exhaust clouds the air.
Nearly everyone in town loves Archer—whether they want to admit it or not—but some of them also fear him. He’s been in enough fights, usually over a lost love or a stolen love or an unrequited love: often a jealous boyfriend picking a fight with Archer after his girlfriend was seen lurking around the Goode house. “You only have to win a few fights before the reputation sticks,” he told me once.
“Idiots,” he says now, exhaling through his nostrils, then swings his focus back to me. “You okay?”
I nod.
Archer bends down and picks up my notebook from the driveway, brushing away the dirt to reveal the sketch of the unknown boy. He stares down at it, and for a moment I think he might recognize the face. But then he asks, “Who’s this?”
I step forward and grab the notebook from his hands. “No one.”
He shoots me a suspicious look. “You only sketch real people, so he must be someone . New kid at school? Paperboy? What is it?”
I don’t answer him, tucking the book back under my arm, my cheeks still hot from the fight with Raif. Shins sticky, my heart only beginning to slow.
But Archer smirks. “Lark Goode… my little sister, keeping secrets.” His face brightens, amused, and he starts to move toward me, like he’s going to rip the notebook from my arms.
“I’m not your little sister,” I counter.
He lifts an eyebrow, like he finds this funny. “I guess we’ll never know for sure. But it’s obvious I was born first: I’m stronger, taller, and more handsome.”
I swing the notebook behind my back. Out of reach.
But our attention is pulled away by the sound of another car approaching up the road. This time the school bus comes into view, sputtering and lumbering toward us.
Archer turns back to me, suddenly looking serious. “Maybe today is not the day to go to school.”
I brush my hair behind my ears, letting out a breath. I won’t let Raif and Talon scare me. And with only two more days of school, I’m so close to being done with this town forever.
“Lark…,” Archer says, lifting both eyebrows. “I know I give you shit about going to school. But this is different. Those stolen tulips are in the hands of strangers now—we don’t know what this means, what will happen.”
The bus rattles to a stop along the shoulder of the road, doors folding open, and I look at my brother. “Exactly, we don’t know…. Maybe the worst of it is already over.”
Archer shakes his head but doesn’t seem to know what else to say.
“I’ll be fine,” I assure him, forcing a smile. But my brother doesn’t look relieved. Not even a little. He watches as I step up into the bus—my heart banging against my eardrums—and I find a seat near the front of the bus so I can exit faster when we reach the school. I gaze out the window at my brother, standing at the end of the driveway, hands in the pockets of his jeans, our shithole house sinking into the wet soil behind him.
And I’m certain that by the end of the school day, I’ll know just how bad of an idea this is.