Chapter One #2
Several others on the lawn have paused to watch Tobias, breaths held in throats, a weighted silence suspended in the spring air.
Mac wheels Tobias around so he can no longer see me, then forces him to sit back down, crouching beside him and saying words I can’t make out—as if they’re in a halftime huddle and Mac is giving him an impromptu pep talk. Get a grip, bro, I imagine Mac muttering. Don’t be an idiot, she’ll have you following her around like a puppy by the end of the day.
And I could, if I wanted.
I could control every last one of them. I could be voted queen at prom, ice princess at winter formal, have my locker overstuffed with love notes on Valentine’s Day, be swooned over and pawed at and adored like royalty. They wouldn’t stand a chance.
I could have any boy or girl I wanted, just like Archer.
But instead I only want one thing: to get out of here.
I want freedom from this town and everyone in it.
Across the lawn, voices resume their muttering, a few side-glances are shot my way—but quickly; they never allow their eyes to linger for too long. For fear I’ll ensnare them. I’ll bewitch them like poor Tobias Huaman, who nearly stumbled closer, compelled by a feeling he didn’t understand.
The bell rings, lunchtime over—third period about to start—and the horde of students begins the slow, reluctant shuffle back toward the double doors of Cutwater High.
I stuff my notebook into my backpack, then brush away the grass clippings from my pale, bare legs and the blue summer dress embroidered with forget-me-not flowers that was once my mother’s—one of the few things she left behind in her closet.
She must have thought she wouldn’t need it. Or it wasn’t good enough to take.
Left behind: worthless and meaningless.
Just like me .
Just like the name she gave us: Goode. Her family name. Not our father’s.
But I wear her things because I long for her in a marrow-deep, aching part of my chest that I wish I could scrape away. I wish I didn’t miss her. I wish I didn’t think of her every day.
I wish I could just fucking forget her.
I stand up, sling my bag over my shoulder, but I wait before heading toward the school. I’ll be the last one to step through the doors—the last one to pass down the nearly empty halls, where only a few stragglers retrieve textbooks from lockers or hustle from bathrooms—then I’ll slip into my economics class just before the final bell tolls, skirting down the edge of the room to the back, eyes on the floor, careful not to look at anyone. This is how I get through the day.
But as the last of the students swing through the doors, the noise of footsteps and murmuring voices fading into the walls of the brick building, I notice something.
Some one who wasn’t there a moment ago.
Out in the school parking lot.
I pull my headphones off, slinging them around my neck, and blink through the midday sunlight—eyes narrowing on a boy standing in the shade of a crooked elm, long branches tilting in the breeze, not far from the weedy, overgrown soccer field. One hand is slid into his jeans pocket, the other holds a paperback book. His eyes are lidded and soft, settled on the pages like he hasn’t heard the bell at all. I watch him a moment too long—and his eyes tip upward, finding mine. A cool, clement green. Or maybe blue. It’s hard to tell at this distance. But they reflect the sunlight strangely, beautifully, as if he were some rare creature awoken from a storybook, whose eyes are meant to be seen only by the one who finds him, rescues him, who digs him up from some underground catacomb. But I don’t know who he is: I’ve never shared a class with him or seen him in the halls or at assembly or crowding out of school at the end of the day.
Either he’s new, a transplant from some faraway city, or he’s a boy who doesn’t go to Cutwater High.
I blink again, knowing I need to look away—if I stare too long, he’ll find himself shuffling closer, pulled by some strange thread in his chest, a need he didn’t know he had until this moment, as if caught by some indefinable longing. But before I can cast my eyes away, he turns suddenly—unaffected, unfazed —and strides casually out across the parking lot toward the street, the paperback book now slid into the back pocket of his jeans.
He walks away.
Away.
As if he felt no pull toward me, no sickening, undeniable enchantment swirling in his gut, no thread of need in the center of his chest. He looked Lark Goode dead in the eyes, met her stare, then walked away. As if, as though , he felt nothing.
An impossibility.
I swallow, feeling strangely unsteady, like my knees want to hinge, sink down to the dirt.
But the boy is already gone. A phantom, a chimera, slipped from the shadows back into the daylight.
I can hear the sounds of lovesickness as soon as I drop my bag onto the couch: the rustling fingertips, the laughter that is more desperation and need than the ease of real love. Through the back screen door I see Archer out at the edge of the garden, at the border of the woods—where he’s pressed a girl up against a swaying birch tree, her hair knitted between his fingertips, kissing her neck while she giggles uncontrollably, teeth smiling up at the cloudless afternoon sky. Tulip season is almost here, and the girls are already fretting over him, besotted, bending themselves closer, hoping they catch the light, catch a Goode in the palm of their hand. Although I’ve always thought they’d love him even if he weren’t a Goode. Even if he were a boy by another name, they’d spill into his arms like milk down a drain.
It makes me cringe, a bitter prick along my spine—that love can be so foolhardy and false, contorted by old, misunderstood magic. By a garden of tulips.
Love, I’ve always known, cannot be trusted.
Finally Archer slips away from the girl, flushed cheeks and lips, fingertips lingering against hers, arms reaching long, before at last they release each other, and Archer strides idly through the tulip garden toward the house, the girl following, brushing her palms down her cheeks as if she could wipe clean the dizzying lust she feels when she’s near him.
She doesn’t know that the garden of flowers where she walks is partly to blame for the desire she feels for my brother.
But Archer doesn’t bring her up to the back porch—he knows better. Knows I’m tired of the nameless girls he brings home, then never sees again. Knows it’ll start an argument between us—and starting a fight with your twin is like fighting with yourself. No one wins. Instead he walks her to the side of the house, where I can just see a sunshine-yellow bicycle leaning against the toolshed. He kisses her one last time before she pedals away up the driveway, then turns toward town. Five miles. Uphill. All to spend a few moments pressed against Archer.
I push open the screen door, and the air has that dreamy summer feel: bees humming, a woodpecker thumping against the trunk of a tree somewhere in the woods, searching for insects. The season is changing.
Archer perches himself against the porch railing, the sun in his eyes, and runs a hand through his hair. “How miserable was school?” he asks, looking lazy, casual, like James Dean in an old film poster.
But I ignore his question because I’m thinking of something else: the boy I saw at school. The one I didn’t recognize but who seemed completely unaffected by me—Lark Goode, who can ensnare another with just a glance.
And yet the Goode curse is not a witch’s spell. It doesn’t force a person to love another. It’s merely a little enchantment , a glimmer in the eyes, a hint of seduction in the lips. My classmates still have control of their own minds, their own actions. They decide what to do with the desire they feel. But most are weak, unable to resist the magnetism that stirs inside them whenever they’re near a Goode.
Still, somehow, the boy at school seemed to feel none of it.
Not even a hint of fascination when he looked at me.
I shut my eyes, pushing away the memory, savoring the soft spring breeze against my cheeks.
“What will you do when we graduate?” I ask Archer, lifting my eyelids.
He stares down at the creek rushing below the house, tracking the path it makes through the center of the tulip garden before it disappears into the woods beyond, eventually joining with Rabbit Cross River and running all the way to the sea. “Doubt I’ll graduate,” he answers bluntly, elbows pressed against the railing. “I’ve missed too many classes.”
“Then why bother staying in town at all?” My brother has always behaved as if his own life bored him, as if he were indifferent to the outcome. As if life weren’t unfurling rapidly before us—and if we don’t grab ahold of it, if we don’t alter its course, we’ll be doomed to the fate of every Goode who came before.
My brother grins, cheeks still flushed from the girl. “Why would I leave? I can do whatever I want in Cutwater.”
He’s never felt a lump-in-the-throat desperation to escape this town like I have. He’ll probably live in this sorrowful, old house for the rest of his life. Maybe he’ll even marry a local girl, have babies—children who will be just as ill-fated by the Goode name as we are now. Somehow he’ll be satisfied to never see what waits beyond this shithole town.
I feel Archer looking at me. “You really think you’re getting out of here, don’t you?” he asks. I shrug, refusing to meet his eyes, and he snorts, lips curled down, holding back a laugh. “How? You don’t even have money for bus fare.”
I dig my thumbnail into one of the porch posts—the soft wood starting to rot, like everything else, the creek slowly taking back the house and the land.
“It’s not like you can get a job,” he adds. “You can’t scoop ice cream at the Tasty Swirl, or shelve books at the Cutwater Library, or run the cash register at Al’s Hardware. All the customers will fall in love with you.”
I dig my nail in deeper, making a half-moon shape in the wood, a marker that I was here— Lark Goode lived in this awful house . But he’s right. Any job won’t last. I’ve seen how quickly love can spiral into devotion and then obsession: I’ve seen the girls at school tattoo Archer’s name onto their forearms and wrists; and the boy who once sang a song to Archer during an assembly our freshman year, belting out “I Will Always Love You” in front of the whole school. But no one laughed, no one snickered at how lovesick and foolish it was. Because they all felt it too—a strange yearning to be near Archer. To me.
“If you just used our talent, instead of hiding from it, you’d have everything you want.”
“It’s stealing,” I say, dropping my hand from the post.
“It’s not stealing when they hand it over.”
“They don’t realize what they’re doing. They’re delirious.” I raise my eyebrows at him. “Remember Maisie Lee?”
Archer smiles so wide, his eyes gleam, the memory flicking through him. “She was a little delirious,” he admits. “But I only winked at her.”
“During tulip season,” I point out.
Maisie Lee used to work at the Square Mart gas station. Her father owned it—owns it still—but last summer Archer convinced her to sell him a six-pack of beer, and instead of making him pay for it, she gave him all the cash in the register. Over $400. All because he winked at her. The next day her father stomped up to our front porch in his muddy rain boots, arms crossed, hair oily and slicked back as if he’d just been crouched beneath a car engine in the repair shop beside the gas station, and demanded all the money back. Archer handed it over, with his apologies, but swore he hadn’t “stolen” it. Thankfully, Maisie’s father didn’t go to the local police. But Archer still manages to come home with cash in his pockets, an extra twenty-dollar bill handed back to him at the movie theater up in Favorville when he paid with a ten. Free ice cream at the Tasty Swirl by the baseball field, free soda and fries at Maple’s Burger Stop. He never pays for anything.
I suspect he could even get a free bus ride out of here if he tried.
But he wants to stay. This small, backwoods town gives him everything he needs. He stays because of the tulips, because if he left, his charm, his magnetism, might wear off. He needs the tulips.
But our mother managed to leave—without a word, without an explanation. She slipped out the front door and strode down the driveway as if she had already forgotten about the children she was leaving behind. And after three years she hasn’t so much as sent a postcard. She’s good and gone. Long gone. Never even glances over her shoulder, gone.
“You might as well stay,” Archer says, turning toward the screen door. “Nothing for us outside of Cutwater. Better just to get used to the place.” He steps back into the house, screen door slamming shut, and the thud is like a brick cracking against the hope growing inside me. Better just to get used to the place. But I have no intention of sticking it out here.
In a few days I’ll graduate, and I won’t die here, old and bitter beside that god-awful cursed garden of tulips.
Archer doesn’t know it yet, doesn’t know the plans I’m already making.
But I’m getting out of this town.
And I’m never coming back.