But instead of moving even closer, instead of reciting more lines from the book he’s given me, he blinks and straightens his shoulders back. “I need to get home.” He looks restless suddenly, edgy, like he’s stayed far too long, and he reaches for his own book in his back pocket—probably out of habit. The cover is creased, bent in half, and I envy it: the adoration he’s shown the book, the time he’s spent in its pages. The love he’s given it. I exhale, pushing away the stupid thought.
He’s already turning away, striding through the overgrown grass toward Swamp Wells Road, and I feel a pain in my throat, in the center of my heart—not wanting him to leave.
“Hey!” I call out.
He stops, soft green eyes glancing over his shoulder.
“Come back tomorrow,” I say, I dare, I risk—when I know I shouldn’t. “After sunset. I want to show you something.”
For a second too long, he looks like he’s going to say no—tell me that I won’t see him ever again. Getting this close to me was a bad idea.
But his silent eyes flicker with something else, and he nods. “Tomorrow,” he repeats. “Okay.”
SEVEN
Oak might be the villain of my story.
He might be the thing that unravels me—makes me feel something I shouldn’t. Something dangerous. A boy who is a paradox. Who defies all the warnings Mom recited to me before she left.
But every time I see him, the less I’m able to remember what it is I should really fear.
I sink back into bed, knees pulled up, and stare at my suitcase.Nothing has changed,I tell myself. I can leave the following day. I don’t have a train ticket. I don’t have anyone waiting for me. I make my own rules. I can spend one last day in Cutwater, with Oak, before I leave for good.
No harm in that.
I’m allowed one more day.
I stay awake and readPeter and Wendy, turning each page as if it will reveal some secret about Oak—tell me who he really is—but the story begins to feel like an omen.
A fable about the truth of who we really are, deep down. About the life we choose. And about loss. Wendy may love Peter, but she chooses the real world instead.
But my life is not a fable. It’s much worse, because it’s real.
I close my eyes and let the sound of the creek muddy my thoughts.
“Forsaken Creek is the only way to leave,” Jude said. But his fortune might only be another fable. A made-up tale, a trick he learned from his mom.
I fall asleep just as the morning sun peeks through the damp woods, the book resting beside me in a streak of sallow light, and I dream of lands far,faraway, where boys can fly and no one ever grows up.
But I wake not long after, a loud bang vibrating through my dreams.
I sit up, shaking off the haze of too little sleep, and I hear Archer’s boots stomping down the hall. But he stops short before reaching my doorway, and I hear him enter Mom’s abandoned room—a room we keep closed. A room we never step inside.
I throw back the bedsheet, still in last night’s clothes, and hurry down the hall. Mom’s doorway is still open, but Archer is no longer inside. I find him in the living room, moving toward the front door. “There’s a whole damn crowd out there,” he says, flashing me a look, then pointing toward the front window. “And they’re asking for tulips.”
It takes a moment for my mind to catch up, to realize what Archer is holding: our grandfather’s old, antique shotgun. There’s no ammunition for it—it’s so ancient and rusted that it wouldn’t matter even if there were—but Archer pulls open the front door and steps out onto the porch, holding the gun as if he’s about to fire it into the sky.
A dozen of our classmates from Cutwater High have gathered at the end of the driveway, several cars parked along the ditch, one of them still idling.
For years they couldn’t understand why they felt drawn to the Goodes each spring. But now they do.They know.It was the tulips all along—because now they feel the ache, the pull toward the tulips.
And they want a bloom for themselves.
Yet none of them have mustered the courage to walk down our driveway. They stand, shuffling nervously, desperate for a tulip but unwilling to face the Goode twins, who might be witches, vampires, trolls who sleep beneath the floorboards of our house, who will rip out their eyes and swallow their hearts if they get too close.
Archer broadens his stance at the edge of the porch. “Get the hell off our driveway!”
The group falls quiet but doesn’t move.
