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 thevery 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,youbecome 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 tothe 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, whowasthe 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, blinkingdown 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 lovemeagain.”
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, theneedtaking 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.
