The Beautiful Maddening

Chapter Four

FOUR

The tulips split us apart, make us a myth—people to be feared and loved and hated. We are a paradox, a puzzle, we are the old wives’ tale that locals like our neighbor down the road, Mrs. Thierry, talk about during bingo and brunch club. The Goodes can’t go out after dark, someone will say. No, they only go out after dark, another will interject. They bury their kin beneath the house; they let them float away on the creek; they never die.

This is the problem with rumors. It’s rare to find a kernel of truth within the tangled yarn of tall tales. Too many muddy, mucky lies.

It’s impossible to see what’s real.

Morning sunlight spears over the treetops, ricocheting through the bus windows. The brown bench seat is cracked along the edge, digging into the backs of my legs, and the air smells like waffles and maple syrup. Tim Zhang’s mom makes him waffles every morning before school, and this morning he still had a waffle in his hand when he boarded the bus; now he sits chewing the last of it from the seat in front of me.

I don’t mind—perhaps the sugary scent of batter, butter, and syrup will mask the covetous scent of tulips on my skin. I even manage to get my bus window open just a crack, the fresh air whirling over me.

Still, anxiety clatters along my thoughts.

Get through class, finish out the week, and then I’ll be free.

And not just free for the summer.

Free for the rest of my life.

I’ll graduate, get my diploma, and then I’m leaving this town.

For good.

In my lap the notebook is spread open, and I shade in the boy’s hands, his knuckles, imagining the parts I didn’t get close enough to see. It’s pure curiosity that keeps me coming back to this sketch, a need to finish it.

The bus thumps over a pothole, someone shrieks from the front of the bus, startled, but I lose myself in the rhythm of the pencil scratching against the paper, the side of my hand smearing the edges. I lose myself in his face, the slope of his eyes—how they stared back at me, reckless, unafraid. Sunlight sparking off his lashes. I could have moved closer, I could have asked him his name before he strode away. I should have held on to the moment, squeezed it in my fist until it was burned onto my flesh.

The.

Boy.

I close my eyes, trying to conjure the memory, but the boy is slipping away like a dream at first light.

The bus finally turns into the Cutwater High parking lot and lumbers to a stop. The school looks like a brick prison as I exit the bus, making my way down the metal steps. Only two more days. Two days of suffering, two days of enduring my classmates’ covetous stares. But it’s more than that now. I don’t know how many tulips have been passed and traded in secret; I don’t know who possesses them. And I don’t know what will happen to those who do.

Sliding my headphones over my ears, hitting play on Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” I make my way across the lawn—my eyes lowered, the front doors into the school only a few paces away.

But I never reach them.

Chloe Perez—a sophomore who last year had a locker next to mine—appears from behind one of the craggy oak trees bordering the lawn, as if summoned by the shadows. She calls out to me, her eyes watery like she’s been crying, but I only make out a few of the words. I let my headphones slide down to my neck—the song still playing from the tiny speakers like a faint insect hum—and she marches up to me, stopping much too close.

“I thought you’d never get here,” she repeats, her face a galaxy of freckles, dark hair curled around her small ears, but her features tug strangely to one side, and there’s a sharpness in her butterscotch eyes that frightens me. “They were right,” she continues, nodding. “There’s something inside them, the devil’s perfume or… or real magic, or the flesh of the dead, I don’t care what it is. I need more.” She looks like she hasn’t slept, but has instead been pacing the lawn in front of the school all night, her cheeks hollow, her lips dry and colorless.

“What?” I say, my voice cracking, as I take a step back.

“The rumors…” Her eyes widen like I should know what she’s thinking. The air hisses from her lungs, and she lets out a short, uneasy laugh. “It was always the tulips that made everyone love you… the Goodes .” She nods again, more manic this time. “It was those flowers. All along. And they’ve just been growing behind your house, sprouting right up from the ground. For free.” She laughs, and her eyelashes flutter like the whole world has suddenly come into focus—like she’s finally seeing clearly.

She shifts on her feet, then begins rummaging in the pocket of her blue corduroy skirt, before holding something up for me to see: a single cursed tulip.

A Goode tulip.

The petals are still intact, the crimson streaks visible across the soft white flesh, but it’s wilted, losing its color—turning pale and lifeless. It should be in a vase of water, but it looks as though she’s been clenching it in her fist for at least twenty-four hours, unable to part with it. Let it out of her grasp.

“Where did you get that?” I lean closer to her, wanting to snatch it from her hand.

“Took it out of Connor’s backpack at lunch yesterday when he wasn’t looking.” Her eyes are wild and treacherous—she is pleased with herself, with the heist she managed to pull off. But her words make me feel sick. The tulips have changed hands so many times, there’s no hope of ever getting them all back.

She smiles, almost laughs again, her eyes bright and unblinking. “And right after, Archie Green offered to carry my bag. Then Billy Ruthers said he’d give me a ride home today so I don’t have to take the bus. Billy Ruthers…, ” she says again for emphasis, both eyebrows peaked into her forehead like she still can’t believe it—Billy Ruthers, who drives an old, restored black Chevelle and parks it in the teachers’ parking lot. They just let him do it. Like even the teachers know he’s better than this place. Untouchable. But yesterday… he noticed Chloe Perez.

“Please,” she hisses, tilting her chin closer to me, unafraid. “I need another one, before this one dies.” Her teeth are mashed together, her fingers gripping the tulip stem so tightly, I think it’s going to snap.

“I don’t have any….” I shake my head at her, “Wonderwall” still playing from the headphones around my neck. “I’m sorry, but—”

She reaches out with her free hand and grabs my forearm, holding tight. “I can’t lose this feeling, the scent of it….” Her eyes flutter closed, before she snaps them open again. “Is this how it feels all the time for you, living in that house? Is this how you feel right now? Like your skin is tingling? Like you’re sleepwalking but you never want to wake?”

I take a step back, but she follows me, her eyes wetting at the corners. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, trying to shake her off.

Chloe tightens her grip on the fabled tulip, and her bottom lip trembles, as if she’s going to cry. “It’s like…” She breathes. “Like… warm sunlight on my skin… like something is shifting my cells, something strange and wonderful. Almost…” A laugh bubbles up from her throat. “Like I’m drunk, but only a little…. You know what I mean?”

I swallow tightly, not answering.

“I feel”—she leans in close, her voice thin and haunted—“like I’m falling in love.” But then her eyes turn serious. “No, that’s not it…. It’s like falling in love for the very first time .” She nods at me, looking for me to agree, to verify what she’s saying. She really does look intoxicated, dizzy, as if the tulip in her hand is coaxing her under a spell so deep and treacherous that she might never find her way out of it.

“Is it how you feel?” she presses. “Like your bones are drenched in it, like you could fall in love with the next person you see, or touch? Like the air in your lungs tastes like a summer sunset, a first kiss with someone whose lips you’ve dreamed of touching for years, like a whisper in your ear, so soft and perfect that you never want to hear anyone else’s voice ever again?”

I yank my arm free. “No,” I tell her, an uneasy twisting in my gut.

Now I see, I understand: this is what it feels like for everyone else; this is what the tulips are doing to anyone who isn’t a Goode. They conjure feelings of delirious love. False love. And she’s already addicted to it—the tulip makes her feel this way just by holding it. And those around her feel it too—drawn in, pulled by the same sensation. Once you possess a tulip, you become the focus of desire. Just like with Billy Ruthers, who suddenly felt pulled into Chloe’s orbit.

“I need more,” she says, tapping her teeth together, her eyes shuddering, looking at me like I can save her. “I’ll pay whatever you want.”

I shake my head, backing away. “No.”

“Please, you have a whole garden, you don’t need them all.” Her voice is sugary and plying, odd. Unnatural.

The air grows stiff and rancid in my lungs.

“Don’t be selfish,” she spits, all the sweetness suddenly gone—just like that—her mouth contorting into a venomous grin, baring her perfect row of teeth as she moves toward me.

I eye the front doors of the school across the lawn, safety , but before I can even turn, someone else touches my arm. Grabs it. “I’ll buy one.” Titha Roberts, who yesterday said I looked pretty after history class, is now standing to my left, looking edgy, impatient.

I shake my head. “I don’t have any.” I flash a look behind me to the parking lot and the road beyond. The school no longer feels like a haven. I never should have come today. It was stupid to think I could make it to the end of the year.

Titha frowns, like she doesn’t believe me, and I backstep through the wet, uncut grass, my sandals catching briefly, my heart starting to race. Both Titha and Chloe follow, matching my steps, looking irritated, desperate, like they’re not about to let me leave the school grounds, not for anything.

It’s stirring up something inside them. Something hostile. Something dangerous.

But another voice pitches over the morning wind.

“I’ll buy all of them!” It’s Olive Montagu—who was blowing bubbles over her flock of friends during lunch, who was the girlfriend of Tobias Huaman until yesterday, when Tobias seemed more concerned with Clementine Morris during his fight with Mac. Now Olive is striding toward me, hands planted on her hips, fingernails painted a loud shade of bubblegum pink. “I don’t care the price,” she shrieks, edging past Titha and Chloe, producing a folded wad of twenties from a pocket in her white skirt, then shoving them toward me.

I’m about to tell her that I don’t have any, when she abruptly reaches out and yanks my book bag from my hands.

“Hey!” Titha barks, scowling at her. “I was here first.”

“Tough shit, I need them more than you,” Olive barks, shoving her hand down inside the bag. And to my shock, she extracts a single tulip, crumpled and sad, several of the petals torn away. It’s the tulip I took from Mac on the front lawn yesterday— I never removed it from my bag . And now Olive clenches it in her trembling fingers, blinking down at the unusual bloom as if it held all of life’s cosmic secrets and unsolvable mysteries within its white, streaked petals. “Wow,” she remarks under her breath. She drops the bag to the ground, bringing the tulip to her face to breathe in its hypnotizing scent. “I know he can’t really love that awful Clementine,” she mutters, before her soft blue eyes scrape up to mine. “And now he’ll love me again.”

I forgot about the tulip in my bag, and I realize maybe this is why Raif came after me this morning at the end of the driveway. Stupidly, I had a tulip stashed in my bag, the perilous scent scorching the air.

To my left, Chloe’s eyes go wide, and she lunges at Olive, ripping the bloom from her hand in one swift motion, then clutches it to her chest. But instead of darting away with it, she brings it to her nose, breathing deeply, entranced by its sickly sweet scent.

“Wait!” someone else cries. Olive’s best friend, Lulu Yen, jogs across the lawn, and suddenly the commotion has drawn the attention of others—those who were walking across the parking lot toward school—and they start moving closer, crowding toward me, pressing in, eyes locked on the single tulip. “I’ll pay you fifty dollars for one,” Lulu says, her voice cracked, jittery.

Olive shoots her a look, one best friend to another. “Screw off, it’s mine,” she declares, and she snatches it back from Chloe’s hands before Chloe can react.

But Lulu’s expression changes, the need taking shape in her striking chestnut eyes. She leaps at Olive, clawing at the flower, and the tulip petals begin pinwheeling down to the grass like spent autumn leaves.

In an instant, everything changes.

Olive shrieks, reaching out for Lulu with a wildness cut into her usually composed, porcelain features, while her bright pink fingernails flash through the air. Scratching, tearing . Titha and Chloe drop to the ground, gathering petals, but there are others pressed in around us now, and when they see the bits of tulip littering the grass, they fall to their knees and begin grabbing for the torn remains, shoving them into their pockets. As if they were a prize, a gift from cruel, spiteful gods.

The air is quickly filled with a familiar, intoxicating scent: the fate-laced aroma of Goode tulips.

Someone screams to my left, their hand crushed by someone else standing above. Billy Ruthers shoves Abby Edwards in the face to steal the crushed tulip petal in her fist, but she bites his hand, drawing blood— actually bites him . Someone else shoves half a tulip petal into their mouth, then crawls away from the clot of students mashed together on the ground. I see Dale Dawson stand up, part of a tulip stem in his hand, and he darts toward the parking lot, as if a broken piece of stem were more valuable than anything he’s ever held in his life. I spot Olive slinking away too, at least three tulip petals in her hand, and she heads around the back of the school, maybe to hide them, maybe to find a way home, where no one will spot her.

After a half second I, too, drop to the ground, but not to retrieve tulip petals—I’m searching for my bag. I scan the trampled grass and see that someone else has found it, and they’re digging around inside, pulling free a few petals—ones that likely fell off when the tulip was still inside. A second later they abandon the bag, but someone above steps on it, leaving a dirty shoe print. I push against their leg and manage to yank it free. But when I try to scramble back, the crush of people tightens around me. Someone yells, a cry of pain or greed, it’s hard to tell, then another person slams into my shoulder—they’re fighting over the last remaining scraps, any remnant they can find in the damp grass. The wind stirs through the mob, becoming spirited and strange, as if a dark storm has settled over us. A boy—Randy Ashspring—has the last part of the tulip stem gripped between his teeth, and he’s trying to army-crawl out of the crowd but gets punched in the face, the stem ripped from his mouth. Someone curses beside me—a girl whose face is beet red, her eyes dripping with tears, looking terrified—and then there is weight on top of me, crushing me.

I feel the air tighten in my lungs, the struggle to draw in a breath—pain working its way down my chest.

I need to get out of here.

I try again to shimmy back, to work my way free, but I’m met with more bodies pressed together. Hands clawing at the ground, faces marred by rage and desperation. The feeling of claustrophobia starts setting in, becoming panic .

I try to look up, toward the sky, toward fresh air, just as someone falls against me, knocking me flat against the ground.

My face presses to the wet grass. I choke on it. Breathe, breathe —I tell myself to draw in air, but it smells like damp soil and fear, and my lungs are tightening in my chest. The weight is too heavy. Not enough air. My head swirls, I lose track of the sky, up from down.

I make a sound, a desperate little cry, but no one hears me—and there is a hand on my arm. I try to shake it free, but it grips even tighter. I try to yell, but only air comes out, and then the hand is pulling me back, opening a space behind me. Whoever has ahold of my forearm is shoving people away, making room, and in one sudden movement I’m yanked free of the crowd.

I buckle over, coughing, hands on my knees, sucking in the clear morning air. A few tears drip from my eyes. But I don’t wipe them away. Because the pain in my chest is only starting to loosen, and I pull in a deep lungful of air.

But the relief doesn’t last.

“She’s right there!” someone shouts. I glance up to see Lulu Yen pointing a long finger at me.

Several faces snap my way, eyes feral and enraged like those of animals who haven’t fed in days. The crowd starts to slither apart, their heads lifted in my direction, hands pushing their bodies up.

I draw in a shaky breath….

As if I’ve found myself in some awful black-and-white horror film— zombies reborn, bloodthirsty and crazed —the crowd begins coming toward me.

I stagger a moment, still unbalanced, out of breath, but a hand folds through mine. Strong, warm.

For the first time, I turn, looking at the person beside me—the person who saved me….

Him.

The boy.

He doesn’t speak, but squeezes my palm, his eyes swaying from me to the crowd.

I suck in a quick, stunned gulp of air, and he pulls me away from the mob, away from the lawn, from Cutwater High. And we run.

The morning air whips past my face, cooling the sweat on my skin, my heart still a roar in my ears.

A half mile up the road we cut into the trees—to a path known only by locals, that winds through the woods along Rabbit Cross River. At last, when the sound of voices behind us fades—the crowd given up, probably gone back to the school to sweep up any last tulip fragments from the grass—the boy and I slow to a stop.

My lungs heave, adrenaline still thumping through my veins, and when I finally lift my eyes, it feels like shivering awake from a strange dream. The same boy I saw days ago in the school parking lot—whose sketch has been slowly coming to life in my notebook, who started to feel like a false memory, a shadow I conjured in my mind—is now standing in front of me.

I didn’t simply imagine him.

He is tall, with dark eyelashes and green, green eyes—the same hue as the trees behind him—and skin that reminds me of the sky when it rains. Dusky and beautiful. The air gets caught in my throat, before I swallow it down. He is different up close, bewildering and… beautiful . Wild and civilized all at once, like a sunlit afternoon and the dark, impossible sky. Like he’s holding a thousand little secrets beneath his flesh.

He breathes deeply, shifts his weight, then looks up the path from where we’ve come. For a moment I think he’s going to speak, but then his eyes settle on me and his mouth falls still. I should tell him not to get any closer, but my voice feels like mud, and my eyes follow every tick of his movements as he lifts an arm… reaching out for me.

My heart scrapes against my windpipe.

He’s going to touch me, my mind yells.

No, no, no .

But his fingers only graze my hair, just barely , like the tiniest whisper, the smallest breath, and when I blink, I see that he’s holding a single tulip petal between his fingers. It was tangled in my hair, after being crushed by the crowd.

But this one escaped.

Quickly I pluck it from his fingers, not wanting him to hold it too long—or risk madness seeping into his skin—and I press it into the pocket of my shorts. Out of sight.

“Thank you,” I gasp, trying to slow my breathing, trying to appear steadier than I feel—staring at the boy I’d made into a myth.

He nods, and the curves of his mouth pinch closed. I want to peer inside him, gather up the details of who he is before this moment is lost: a boy with a freckle beside his upper lip, hair that curls slightly around his ears, sweatshirt sleeves pushed up to his elbows, dark jeans faded, well-worn. They’ve seen miles of walking, of climbing trees, maybe, of being tossed onto a bedroom floor and forgotten for days at a time. Softened by years of wear. I force my eyes away, but they slide back, as if pulled in by gravity, skipping across the sturdy outline of his shoulders, and I’m certain you don’t get that strong from only reading paperback books. He is a boy of another breed. Not the kind you find in Cutwater. He is careful, quiet, and I want to tiptoe into his head and unearth all his thoughts. I want to remember him so I can sketch every part of him later, every missed detail.

“Did you just move to town?” My voice breaks the silence, but I’m holding back a tide of questions wanting to spill out all at once.

His bottle-green eyes flash to the trees. “No.”

“Do you go to Cutwater High?” I’m certain he doesn’t, but it feels like the right thing to ask, the acceptable string of questions.

“I go to school in Favorville.” I can hear the wariness in his voice, like he’s already given too much away. Like he’s looking for an escape out of these woods.

Favorville sits just across the county line, only a few miles from Cutwater. But they have a real indoor movie theater and a small local museum and a large public library. Students at Favorville High don’t venture into Cutwater—there’s nothing here. No reason to waste their time.

A new idea begins to form inside me: a theory, a notion that makes my heart begin to beat nervously again. I harden my jaw. “Someone broke into our garden two nights ago….”

His pupils are flat, emotionless.

“They stole my family’s tulips, cut them from the ground.”

He frowns back at me, but in an indifferent way. “Are you asking if it was me?”

My eyes feel like they’re vibrating, watching him, looking for any hint of a lie. Someone stole the flowers. And this boy is a stranger. Maybe it’s why he’s been lurking around the school—he heard the rumors about my family. Even in Favorville. And now he’s been selling the flowers he stole.

A heaviness sinks into my chest, like concrete being poured into my rib cage.

But he exhales. “I don’t want your flowers,” he answers, staring back at me, like he’s daring me to find even a molecule of mistruth in his words. But there is something else in his eyes, or a lack of something.

I see no lost, swimming look in the center of his pupils. No dizzying desire. No craving, no twitch of need or longing taking shape in his stare. He seems unaffected by me. By being this close to a Goode. To anyone else, his gaze might feel cold, unsettling, but to me it feels oddly comfortable. Easy. Safe in a way I’m not accustomed to.

He is a boy whose face reminds me of a midsummer lightning storm—flashes of light and long, thundering darkness. I am wholly perplexed by him.

But I also believe him.

He seems like a boy who couldn’t care less about tulips or a Goode family curse. But this creates more riddles than it solves.

“Are you safe to walk home from here?” he asks bluntly, his eyes steady and unflinching.

I glance up the path, a route I’ve walked countless times. “Yes.”

His feet shift in the dirt, and he seems uncomfortable, as if the moment has been stretched out too long, standing here in the trees with me.

He takes a couple of steps back.

“Wait,” I say, moving toward him. “What’s your name?”

The muscles in his shoulders draw down, like he might not say it, like he might turn and vanish into the forest and I will never know. But he drags his eyes back to me, swallows. “Holden,” he says. “But everyone calls me Oak.” He sounds earnest, but there is something else in his tone, like maybe this isn’t the whole truth, or maybe he thinks he’s just given up a part of himself, like he’s worried what this knowledge will mean now that he’s said it aloud.

Oak—a tree that grows roots deep in the soil. A tree that’s good for rope swings and forts and climbing. A tree that stakes its claim in a bit of dirt and never loosens its hold.

“I’m Lark,” I offer, and it occurs to me that I’ve never needed to introduce myself to anyone. Lark Goode is a name that’s known before I even walk into a room.

But this boy from Favorville only blinks.

A second passes, then another, before at last he says, “I know.”

And as swift as the creek below the house, he turns away before I can reply, starting up the path toward town—a paperback book still in the back pocket of his jeans.