They never did.
Archer sighs, sliding the guitar pick back into his pocket, like hefeels it too—that no matter how much we might wish for a different life, wishing won’t make it happen.
The notebook lies open in my lap, the sketch of the boy staring back—Oak.
Not the name of a boy, but of a fairy tale, a dream I must not have woken from yet.
I run my thumb along his jaw, and my thoughts tumble back: to the feeling of his hand on mine, pulling me free of the mob. Warm and real and alive—not a dream at all. I can still feel the wind against my cheeks as we ran up the road, our feet smacking against the pavement, and then the coolness of the trees as we ducked down the path, out of sight. In the shadow of the forest I tried to study every feature of his face, gather every detail so I could recall it later. It’s been only two days since I stood on that path, staring up at him, and yet I’m already struggling to recall the way his hair swept across his forehead, or the slant of his eyebrows. Did he have freckles? Were his ears level with his eyes? I was distracted, tangled up in a feeling that’s hard to describe, but it was more than that…. It was thewayhe looked at me. Passively, indifferently. Like he felt no madness-laced desire coiling upward into his throat, felt no need to tip closer to me. Just like the day I first saw him at school.
As if he felt nothing at all.
Yet when he turned away, a flicker of something caught in his eyes: a nervousness, an edge, a hesitation in each blink of his eyelids. But I can’t be sure what it was. Not exactly.
Archer steps through the front door, a stack of mail in his hands,and I lift my thumb from the sketch—not wanting my brother to see the concentration in my eyes, the confusion.
He crosses the living room to where I’m seated on the couch, and he drops a large envelope into my lap, covering Oak’s image. I frown, but Archer is already striding into the kitchen, thumbing through the rest of the mail.
The envelope is from Cutwater High. I tear it open, and inside I find two stiff pieces of paper.
Our diplomas.
One for Archer, one for me.
Paper-clipped onto the front is a note from Principal Lee:After this week’s events at school, we think it best that you do not attend the graduation ceremony on Sunday. Congratulations on receiving your diplomas.
“What is it?” Archer asks. When I don’t reply, he comes back into the living room and peers down at the two rectangles of paper. “Shit!” he says, yanking his diploma from my hands. “They let me graduate!”
“They probably didn’t want you returning for another senior year. Easier to just shove you out into the world, let someone else deal with you.”
He laughs. “Works for me.” He holds up his diploma in the light, marveling at his achievement. My brother missed at least half a year of classes, nowhere near the attendance required to graduate. But Cutwater High would likely prefer not to have a Goode in their classrooms next year.
I slide my fingers over the heavy card stock, feeling relief, but also a twinge of something I can’t pinpoint. I’m grateful we won’tneed to attend a graduation ceremony—I won’t have to face my classmates again—but it also feels lacking somehow, to receive our diplomas this way. In the mail, shoved into an envelope.
“Should we burn them?” Archer asks, raising both his eyebrows, looking impish and full of bad ideas.
My eyes skim the name printed in black ink:Lark Goode. And I know… this paper is my permission. My freedom. I’ve graduated, and now I can finally leave this town.
“You can do whatever you want with yours,” I say. “But you’re not touching mine.” I stand up, sliding my diploma back into the envelope.
Archer shrugs, tossing his diploma onto the couch, already disinterested in it, then grabs his jean jacket from the hook beside the front door—the one he found in the alleyway behind Maple’s Burger Stop last summer, the one I swear still smells like french fries. But he loves it.
“Where you going?”
“Huck’s Drive-In. It’s the end-of-the-year party.”
“You’re not serious.”
His hands sink into his coat pockets. “I told Willa I’d meet her there.”
“Willa Howard?”
He lifts a shoulder. Willa graduated last year and is entirely out of his league, even for him.Even for a Goode.
“You should come,” he offers.
“No thanks, I barely escaped a mob at school two days ago. And what if someone comes to the house, tries to steal more flowers? You’ve barely slept the last few nights, and now you’re just going to leave?”
His eyebrows cinch together, wrinkling the small scar he’s had since we were kids and we both got chicken pox. I managed to avoid scratching, but Archer had no self-control. Now he has a tiny, round mark beside his right eyebrow. “I put up barbed wire yesterday,” he answers, as if this has solved all our problems. I walk to the back window and look out at the garden, where a row of wire has been strung around the perimeter. But it’s haphazard, sagging in places, having been nailed to a dozen bent and rotted posts he’s shoved into the dirt.
