“Keep standing there… and you’ll find out how serious I am,” he adds, voice booming through the clear morning air.
Still no one moves.
A wretched need for tulips keeps them right where they are. And I wonder if there’s a twisting pain inside them, a longing they can’t ignore—a desire for love that overrides everything else.
A feeling I’ve spent my life trying to avoid.
Archer grumbles something, irritated, and he clomps down the front steps, over the creek, and starts striding up the driveway, shotgun at his side. He’s fed up. He won’t call the local police; he’ll deal with this himself.
“Archer!” I call after him, afraid of what he’ll do.
But he never reaches the end of the driveway. Maybe it’s the look in his eyes, maybe it’s just Archer himself, but in an instant the crowd scatters. They scramble back to their cars, climb atop bicycles, peeling away up Swamp Wells Road.
They don’t stick around to find out how far Archer will take it.
He’s a Goode, after all, and Goodes are both gods and monsters. Unpredictable and dangerous, with nothing to lose. Because everything has already been taken from us.
“They’re vultures,” he growls when he climbs back up the porch steps.
He’s scared them off. But I know it won’t last.
They’ll come back with hope in their eyes. Tomorrow or the next day, they’ll return. As the old tulips they possess wilt and fade, the effect wearing off, they’ll need more.
They’ll crave it.
Because the tulips bring them an even more potent intoxication:
l
o
v
e
And now that they’ve had a taste, one more will never be enough.
I dig through my suitcase, pulling out my jean shorts—the ones I cut off from a pair of thrift-store Levi’s—and my favorite teal-green tank top with the three white buttons down the front. I pull them on, then face the mirror over my dresser.What the hell am I doing?I should have been on the first train leaving Cutwater, sketching the faces of the other passengers, daydreaming about the life waiting for me at the end of the tracks.
Instead I’m standing in my room, in this house, all for one lastglimpse of a boy I can’t explain. A boy who is a riddle I feel desperate to solve.
“Thought you were leaving today?” Archer asks. I turn, and he’s standing in my bedroom doorway.
“I’m still leaving,” I assure him, stepping into my sandals. “Just delayed it a little.”
He squints down at my suitcase, partly unpacked. “Decided that you’d miss me too much, huh?”
“Hardly,” I reply, striding past him.
“Seriously, though, why are you still here?”
I stop at the front door and look back at him. “Just something I have to do tonight.”
“That’s how it starts.One more day, and before you know it, twenty years have gone by and you’re still in Cutwater.”
I pull open the door. “That’s not happening to me.”
Archer follows me out onto the porch. “Sure, little sis. Ten bucks says you’re not going anywhere. You’ll still be in this house by the end of summer.”
