PROLOGUE
Locals say the dirt in Cutwater isn’t good for farming. Too swampy, too clotted with clay, too much rain in the fall and not enough in the spring. But behind our house the tulips break through the mud, fearless, staking their claim in the terrible soil.
They are night bloomers.
Tiny green sprouts twirling upward in wild, broken rows beneath a star-crusted sky. Full of promise.
But after a time, when the smooth, silky heads begin to unfurl under the dusky light of a spring moon, the blooms reveal their truest, darkest nature.
The white petals are marred.
Imperfect.
Cut through as if by a villain’s bone-sharpened blade.
Crimson streaks run down each delicate, buttery petal, as dark and gruesome as blood freshly broken from young veins.
Mrs. Thierry, who lives half a mile down the dusty, rutted lane, calls it a curse. Some peculiar poison in the land. Others say it’s a result of the graveyard whose headstones once dotted the meadow behind our house, bodies rotting beneath the earth, ancient bloodleaching up into the tulips. A reminder of what lies below.
Whatever the cause, these rare tulips have darkened my family for generations. For it’s not only the tulips that others find strange…. It’sus.
The Goodes are a family to be avoided. The odd and unordinary. The ones who speak in riddles before we can even walk, who prefer night over day, who drink sunrises and sleep in a drafty, cobwebbed attic. Or so the locals like to say. Most of it isn’t true.
Far from it.
But still, they steer clear of us, of the teetering house where we live, built—foolishly—over Forsaken Creek. Glacier water rushes beneath the floorboards at all hours, even while we sleep—our dreams are saturated with the sound of it—the current threatening to carry the old, rotted house away into the elm woods, into the soft, grassy valleys at the lower end of the state.Good riddance,most would say. Because the Goode family is anything butgood.
When I was young, I used to believe it was the creek that split us apart, made our family wild and feral and heedless. But it’s the tulips that make us go mad.
The tulips… that will destroy us all in the end.
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 itin 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 theo’s and thes’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.
