“Our birthday isn’t for another three months,” I replied.
But he lifted a shoulder, like he’d lost track of time or it didn’t matter either way. He knew he wouldn’t be here for our birthday. It was too painful to stand in this house with his two children, borne by a woman who carried a curse around inside her bones. Our father fell victim to this curse. And when tulip season ended, our mom’s bellybeginning to grow, our parents knew it wasn’t love. Not truly. It was only the tulips that had held them together for a few summer nights.
Love ruins everything.
I leave one of the tiny cakes on the kitchen table for Archer, and I carry the other one into my room, placing it on the windowsill to thaw in the sunlight.
I find the old suitcase that once belonged to our mother, stuffed under her bed, and I drag it down to my room. There are no tough decisions to make about what I should pack and what I should leave behind—I don’t own enough things for this. Instead I pull every item of clothing from my closet, carefully folding it all into the suitcase. Two pairs of shoes and one pair of flip-flops. A few small trinkets from atop my dresser: A tiny silver rabbit, which likely once belonged on a charm bracelet that Archer found out in the woods, then gave to me for Christmas when I was eleven. A wooden bookmark that the middle school librarian gave to me in sixth grade with a quote on one side:
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
—Stephen King
I have a stack of two dozen sketchbooks on my bedside table, every page filled, and I lay these carefully atop my clothes. Jewelry, I own none. Cash, I have very little. Dad sends us money every month, for essentials, but whatever is left over after groceries and shampoo and light bulbs, Archer and I split. I’ve mostly saved mine over the years, while Archer spends his as fast as he can. I have nearly $500 counted and pressed into a wallet—that also used to be Mom’s.
Enough to get me out of this town and keep me fed until I find a job.
I sink down onto the window seat, legs curled beneath me, and watch the tulips tip and sway in the soft spring wind, and I wonder,How long before someone tries to sneak through the dagger-sharp barbed-wire fence?
I grab my notebook and press the flinty tip of my pencil to the page, right at Oak’s collarbone. I shade in the sturdy lines of his shoulders, the curve of his lower lip, the way his mouth sat suspended just before he spoke, and the soft silhouette of the tree branches above him. I lose myself in the sketch, filling in the last of his hair—dark and short, slightly wavy at the ends—then I let the pencil fall to the notebook, staring down at him.A boy I don’t understand.My fingertips stray across his eyebrows, his lips, the pale afternoon sunlight on his cheeks. I’m curious about him in a way I’ve never known before—but I also know I could never be this close to him in the real world. Not for long.
The light outside has dulled into late afternoon, and the tiny cake has now softened. Carefully I peel back the paper, and when the warm cake breaks apart on my tongue, I close my eyes, savoring the hint of lemon and mint and lavender. It tastes like a stormy night at sea, like a life I might have had if I’d been born somewhere else, instead of in this house—a birthday spent with family gathered around a homemade cake, blowing out candles and opening presents wrapped in silvery bows. Maybe I’d go into town with friends, see a movie, stay up late whispering in the dark, wrapped in sleeping bags on the floor of my normal room—no sounds of a creek rushing below us—giggling, refusing to sleep until the sun came up.
But in this life not even my twin is anywhere to be found.
Yet, for the briefest moment, it feels like the cake is stripping away the worst of my memories: the day Mom left, her silhouette vanishing into the dark. No goodbyes. No promises to return. Only a cold, empty house and nothing for breakfast.
Our world was cleaved in half that morning. And nothing would put it back together.
I swallow the last of the cake, my shoulders settling against the window frame, and listen to the constant gurgle of Forsaken Creek—even when snow carpets the ground in winter, the creek still flows, refusing to freeze. I push open the window—the sun gone to the west; the night revealing itself, warm and windless; insects thrumming from the field; frogs croaking along the muddy banks of the creek—and I sink into bed.
Tomorrow I leave this place.
I listen to the tulip petals brush together like silky paper. Some years the tulips stay in bloom for months; other seasons it’s only a couple of weeks. The heat and cold have no effect on them—it’s some other peculiar enchantment that causes them to wilt back into the soil. Sometimes they simply refuse to wither or decay, and they go on blooming, showing their vibrant petals well into autumn, into winter, even after the first snow falls. They follow no natural order, no farmer’s almanac or rhythm of the seasons. They behave as they want.
I hear the click of the front door opening. Archer is home.
His footsteps travel down the hall, but he doesn’t turn into his room. He keeps walking, until his shadowed outline is standing in my doorway. His hair is a little wild, cheeks flushed, like he’s eitherjust run home or been kissing someone on the front steps. “Everyone in town’s talking about it,” he says, as if he knows I’m still awake.
He walks across the room, the old, rotted wood floor creaking beneath him, threatening to collapse and send us both crashing into the creek below—but it won’t, because this house refuses to die, refuses to sink into the swampy soil, when it should have decades ago. Archer stands at the window, looking out at the tulips. “They’re bathing in the tulips, rubbing the pollen on their skin.”
I exhale and push myself up, leaning back against the headboard. “They’re drunk on them,” I say. “It makes them feel like they’re in love.”
He looks back at me, jaw tensed, and the breezy calm that usually rests just beneath the surface of his disinterested eyes is briefly gone. “Lacy Bates said she’d pay me a hundred dollars for a single tulip. She likes some girl from her algebra class, and she thinks the tulip will help her odds.”
“Love has always been a lie for us,” I say. “Now it’s a lie for them, too.”
Archer turns fully, his tall frame casting a lean, moonlit shadow across the floor. It’s unsettling seeing him like this, the nervous pulse at his temples. “They don’t have much interest in me anymore either.” He drags a hand through his dark hair, looking to the floor. “A whole tulip season wasted,” he says. “Doesn’t seem fair.”
“Nothing about being a Goode is fair.”
He nods, looks somber, tired even. Unlike him.
A long, frigid silence hangs in the air between us before I finally say, “I’m leaving tomorrow.” The words are heavy on my tongue. Because even though I’ve been counting down the days until thismoment, even though freedom feels so close that it makes me lightheaded, leaving my brother behind is the only thing that hurts. The only part of this that feels wrong.
He smirks a little, like he thinks I’m making a joke, but then his expression drops, his eyes swiveling to my packed suitcase. “You’re serious? I guess I always thought you just liked talking about it, but that you’d never actually do it.”
“You could come with me,” I offer, daring to hope he might say yes.
