“No,” he answers, running his thumb over the blank paper. “It means you make your own fate. It hasn’t been decided for you.” He quickly folds the origami back into its original shape, then slides it into the oversized pocket of his cardigan. But before he turns away—as I expect him to—he reaches out suddenly, like a snake snapping at its victim, and grabs my left hand, pulling it toward him.
I let out a little squeak, caught off guard, but when I look up at Jude, his eyes are closed, fluttering like honeybee wings, and he places his other palm flat against mine—as if we are two sheets of paper laid one on top of the other.
“You shouldn’t touch me…,” I say, starting to pull away, but he holds firmly to my hand—not painfully, but enough to keep me from slipping from his grasp.
I watch his eyelashes flap, his bottom lip sag, and I feel the strange heat of tears against my own eyes—a loosening in my chest I can’t quite explain. Jude’s mother is from Germany, his father from Tampa, Florida. But his mom was a fortune teller when she lived in a small town outside of Hanover—at least that’s the rumor. People came to her home and sat in her living room over a pot of black tea. She was a seer of fates.
And now Jude can see them too.
“Your family has caused so much heartache in this town,” he mutters, tilting his small-angled chin, the voices of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman blaring from the speakers behind me, the flickering images ofCasablancacast out onto the lawn and through the line of trees. “You want to leave Cutwater… don’t you?” I nod, but he doesn’t see; his eyes are pinched closed. His palm becomes too warm against mine, sweat beading down his forehead. I want to pull away, but I also want to hear the rest—I want him to finish. “Tears and rain… it’s all the same.” His eyebrows pucker. “Forsaken Creek… is the only way to leave.”
“What?” I narrow my eyes at him.
Jude’s head sways a little, then his swimming-pool-blue eyes break open at the same moment he releases my hand, letting it fall to my side. A tingling numbness spider-crawls across my palm, as if I’ve just felt an electrical shock.
“How does the creek… help me leave?” I rub my hands together, trying to work out the nervy sensation.
Jude blinks at me, then reaches forward, pushing his index finger into my chest, right over my heart—sharp and pointed. “This must break. This must weep, and then…” He breathes. “You will finally be free.”
I shake my head at him. “I don’t understand…. What does that mean?”
But Jude pushes his hands into his cardigan pockets, and his eyes water like dew on cut blades of grass. “It’s your fate…. It’s for you to interpret, not me.”
“But what does the creek have to do with anything?” I lean closer to him, anxious suddenly, disoriented. Confused.
Someone starts laughing to our left, a deep, rolling belly laugh, and Jude’s eyes snap toward the sound.
“Jude,” I press, but he’s backing away from me. “Please.”
From his pocket he pulls out the origami chatterbox again, and without another word he heads away from the ticket booth, away from me, toward a group of juniors seated on a large beach towel.
He has more fortunes to give tonight, more fates to hand out, and he’s already spent too much time beside Lark Goode. But as I pull in a warm breath of air, my mind crunching and churning over the words he spoke, the sky makes a low rumbling sound. A second later rain begins pinging against my forehead, the start of a storm darkening the skyline.
I turn and run home through the rain.
SIX
Maybe Jude is full of shit.
I lie in bed, listening to the gurgle of Forsaken Creek as it meanders beneath the floorboards before cutting its way out into the tulip rows. My fate was decided long ago, on the night I was born: doomed to bear the Goode last name.
“Forsaken Creek is the only way to leave,” Jude said.
If only I could sail away on a paper boat—like Archer and I used to make. But the creek is a shallow, wild thing. Not deep enough to carry me far away from this life. So Jude… must be full of shit. Yet the other part of his fortune, about my heart needing tobreakand then I’ll be free, felt a little too William Shakespeare. Like he was only trying to scare me, threaten me with the same heartbreak my family has caused this town. Because how could a broken heart set me free from this place?
The only freedom I need is a train ticket.
And after tomorrow, after our birthday—once I’m officially eighteen—I’m leaving.
The morning sun finally rises through the window, baking the wet, swampy soil behind the house, but I lie in bed, letting the hourspass, listening to the lonely quiet. Around noon I finally slip from bed. I pass the open doorway into Archer’s empty room: my twin never came home last night, and it looks like I will spendourbirthday alone.
In the kitchen I open the freezer and pull out the paper bag. I’ve been saving it, tucked at the back behind bags of frozen peas and expired Tater Tots. I’m not sure if Archer even knows it’s here.
I remove the two tiny cakes inside, still shimmering with golden sprinkles, and place them on the kitchen table—beside the growing pile of Archer’s unopened love letters—and they look just as perfectly sweet and delicate as they did the day Dad gave them to us. Months ago now.
He rarely visits Cutwater—he stays away, working on a fishing boat in a small coastal town that he said suffers its own curses and torments: boys who drown in the harbor, witches risen from the deep. But there is a small cake shop near the waterfront that sells a variety of peculiar flavors, promising to blot out unwanted memories, to help people forget the things they’d like to wipe clean from their mind. Dad chuckled when he said it; he thought it was an absurd notion. Still, he brought back two cakes for his two children. Archer and me.
“For your birthday,” he said, handing me the paper bag.
