I move down the steps, running my fingers along several headless stalks, the delicate blooms gone. I hate the tulips,hatethe garden, but this…thisfeels 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’mthinking 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.
Thispart 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.
