My twin is comfortable in his own skin, cool and calm, a sanguine ease in every move he makes—a nonchalance that came easy to him right after birth. While I have tiptoed carefully around in my skin, certain I was born in the wrong house, in the wrong town, in a place meant for someone else.
My self-assured brother has never once stumbled, never woken with hair that wasn’t perfectly tousled or with clothes that were damp and wrinkled. He strides through town with his wicked, cloying smile that can charm the skirt off any girl or boy who has the unfortunate luck to happen across his path, never again able to look away. He is a twin that casts a shadow, long and lean, a shadow that’s nearly impossible to crawl out from under.
But to be honest, I like it in the dark. In the shade of invisibility.
Because I’ve felt the opposite: the madness that comes from standing in the light. The way others contort themselves to be closer to a Goode. Then run screaming when the seasons change.
It’s safer in the dark. And that’s where I’ll stay.
“You missed school again,” I point out, uncoiling my hair from its braid, letting the auburn waves spill down my shoulders and using my fingers to work out the spiderweb knots.
“Like I said”—he nods through the screen door at the garden beyond—“they’re almost in bloom.”
I stand beside my brother, gazing out at the acre of dark, ruddy soil. He’s right: the tall green shoots—wide leaves peeled open, with closed buds shaped like teardrops—will soon crack apart and reveal their strange, unnatural petals to the sky. Scarlet and vermilion, like dark red wine. Like blood. Like a sacrifice.
This season’s crop… is about to bloom.
“You should stay home too,” he adds, gray eyes cutting over me as he pulls the blue guitar pick from his pocket and flips it easily through his fingers. He claims that it’s his lucky guitar pick. But luck in this family doesn’t come from guitar picks. Our fate is determined by that acre of flowers. “No point going to school now. You’ll only make it harder on yourself.”
My throat tightens. The afternoon breeze rolls throughs the garden of tulips, their weighted heads like babies unable to hold up their own skulls, as if they’re a little drunk—chugged too many beers at one of Roy Potts’s infamous lakefront-cabin parties during midsummer. “There’s only a week left,” I answer, holding strong to the promise I make to myself every year:Stick it out, suffer through these last few days before summer break.Finish school, graduate this year, because even if I can’t afford college, at least I’ll have something. A high school diploma. At least I won’t repeat the same mistakes my mother made: dropping out when she was only seventeen. Pregnant and alone.
Archer shrugs, raising a perfectly framed eyebrow, then walks to the kitchen table to rip open one of the letters. “Soon enough you’ll be getting as much mail as me.”
“I don’t encourage it like you do.”
He flashes me a smug look, the guitar pick now perched between his lips. “It’s more fun this way. Might as well use our fate for something.”
I feel my teeth clamp together, hating the self-satisfied way he brushes everything off like it’s nothing at all, like our lives aren’t some cruel, inescapable joke. In a few days’ time, late one night, the tulips will break open, unfurling their rare, curse-ridden petals toward thestars. But Archer’s never cared what any of it means, he only cares what itdoes—the side effect bestowed on him.
On both of us.
Because when the tulips finally bloom, love and madness knot themselves together, andyourheart is no longer your own. It belongs to us. To the Goode family.
The sun rises into a gray, rain-weighted sky—the tulips still not yet bloomed—and I board the bus to Cutwater High while Archer sleeps in. He’s no longer interested in attending the last week of our senior year.
I sit at the back of the bus, headphones on, listening to the Counting CrowsAugust and Everything Afteralbum, imagining Mom playing this same cassette, on this same ride to the same awful school. Lives repeated.
Inescapable.
Destined.
I feel the eyes of Abby Reece, seated across the aisle, skip over me once, twice, until the bus stops to pick up Mia Churchill, and Abby bolts from her seat and moves three seats away, unwilling to take the risk any longer.
To live in the town of Cutwater is to know countless stories about the Goodes—fables of heartbreak and madness and desire.
But to understand the truth of our past, one must go back to the middle. Because the beginning is too far away and too troublesome, wrought with lies and riddles that I’ve still never quite picked apart. Lies are that way: sticky, honeylike, melted into the truth until it’s impossible to know the sweet from the sour.
Our birth—Archer’s and mine—was an inconsequential one. Trivial, at least according to our father, who paced the tulip rows unfettered by the event, while our mother bent her face to her chest with the pain of labor yet never made a sound—according to the two attending midwives whose names have never been told to us. What was also never told to us was the timing of our births: who was born first, Archer or me. We were told only that we came into that damp, rotted house sometime after midnight but before the sun rose. And that in the custom of all Goode family births, it happened in spring, just as the tulips began to bloom. As though the awakening of the blossoms had stirred our mother’s womb, calling us out.A curse awaits you, it’s time to be born.
But a curse is only known as such depending on the affliction. And to some, what we suffer might be seen as a gift, handed up from the soil each spring. A birthday always marked the same way: warm easterly winds through the elm trees and a tide of sweet floral scents carried through the windows.
At the onset of tulip season, when the garden breaks open with their snow-white blooms—a slash of color through each petal—desire and desperation, love and lust, are not far behind.
The bus idles to a stop in front of the school, and I find myself striding down the hall to first period, my classmates parting around me as if I were a death ship sailing through a black sea. They press themselves up against their lockers and duck into bathrooms. They know madness season is close. But some watch me with renewed, even if hesitant, curiosity. They look at me as if I were a flower breaking through my old skin.
A girl who they suddenly can’t turn their eyes away from—for reasons they don’t entirely understand.
By lunchtime, spring rain gives way to opal-blue skies, and I sit alone—far away from the others—in the grass near the high school parking lot, under one of the sagging elm trees, listening to “Lovefool,” by the Cardigans—a silly bubblegum song about a girl begging a boy to “leave me, leave me, just say that you need me.” I let it play while I eat my flattened peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwich. Wiping the crumbs from my lap, I flip open my notebook and press the sharpened pencil to a fresh, blank page.
