I scan the lawn, dotted with my classmates, their faces bent toward cell phones while their mouths lazily chew their food, most looking a little frayed—that anxious excitement layered with exhaustion from a school year that’s almost over. Only four days left until summer break. And you can feel the cracking edges, the parts of us that are ready to break.
Across the newly cut grass, Jude—a short, bony kid with coils of light blond hair and pale, close-set eyes—wanders through the sea of Cutwater High students. In his left hand he holds a chatterbox: a paper origami fortune teller, folded at the corners. He makes a new one every morning in first period, doodling on the outer corners in elaborate floral patterns with black ink. On the inside he sketches either numbers or words, like “ochre,” “azure,” “periwinkle.” And beneath the corner flaps are hidden fortunes. Little glimpses into your future that Jude writes himself.
Fate revealed on lined notebook paper.
I watch as he kneels down beside a group of freckle-faced girls from band class, flutes and harmonicas and trombones resting in their shiny black cases beside them. A girl named Clementine hands Jude something, and he takes it in his palm before sliding it into hispocket. He dispenses fortunes only intradefor something—they are never free. A stick of gum, a pretty piece of agate, a ride home after school, a song played on a guitar. I can’t see what Clementine gave him, but he never takes money, only a trade. “The barter system was the fairest form of economy,” he once proclaimed in fourth-period history class. He holds out the paper chatterbox for Clementine to select a number or word, then he opens and closes the origami to reveal her fortune.
Her cheeks turn pink, eyes watery and bright as she listens to him recite her fate. I can’t hear a word of it over the Cardigans singing in my ears. So I drop my eyes back to the notebook, my pencil carving out the slope of his cheekbones and a flat, pinched mouth. I wasn’t sure who I’d sketch today, but the coils of hair begin to form from the scalp, and I see Jude take shape from the end of my pencil, small eyes set into his soft face. As I shade in his hands, the chatterbox held delicately in his fingertips, my eyes lift to see that Jude has stood up from the group of girls. His gaze sways over the front lawn of Cutwater High, seeking the next person in need of a fortune, but when his eyes catch on mine—only briefly—he snaps his head away and starts toward the small, grassy hill at the east edge of the school. He’s never read my fortune. It’s not worth the risk. Like everyone else at school, he keeps his distance.
No eye contact, no straying looks.
I’m too dangerous.
But I keep my distance from them, too. When you risk madness laced in love every spring, you can’t risk friends. The few friendships I’ve made never lasted: a girl in fourth grade with black hair and clear-framed glasses who always chewed gum when she talked. We’dspend weekends at my house and mornings chatting on the bus, until the spring of fifth grade, when she began looking at me as if I were air itself. As if she wouldn’t survive if I didn’t love her back. Freshman year, I shared a locker in the south hall with a boy in my biology class who seemed unaffected by the pollen scent of my skin. For a time, I thought we’d stay friends until we graduated. But then three days before summer break, we stood at our locker and he lifted a finger, tracing a line of yellow sunlight—from a nearby window—across my cheekbone down to my chin. And I could see it in his swimming eyes, in the curious, soft flutter of his bottom lip—I knew it even before he did. He had fallen in love, just like that, snap your fingers and it’s tulip season.
Blink your eyes and love has knitted beneath the bones.
“Love finds the Goode twins,” I hear them hissing in the halls. Even when they don’t understand why, even when they swear it won’t happen to them—because what is there to love about two half-orphaned misfits whose house is sinking into the wet, swampy soil? Two twins who, without logic or reason, smell like the wind, like a perfume spun from ancient magic.
So most stay away… fromme, anyway. I sit at the far back of every class, near a window, where the fresh air dulls the heady scent of spring flowers on my skin. I sit alone outside at lunch. I keep myself separate. Unlike Archer, who strolls through town when he should be at school, wandering into the small music shop on the corner of Willow Street and Goose Neck Drive—the only intersection with a blinking light—where he thrums through the wall of guitars, playing a few chords. And by some lost, spell-spun magic, the girls walking by outside pause to press their fingertips to the glasswindows, then shuffle inside the shop to watch him play. He’s not even that good—he could never play in a band—but it doesn’t matter. It’s him they’re after.
He just has to be a Goode. A boy born into a family where love comes easy.
And easy it does come. For all of us.
But it’s much harder to keep it away. To rid it from the skin once someone has clawed their nails into you.
I fold my notebook closed—a notebook filled with sketches of almost everyone at school. If I can’t get near them, at least I can draw them onto paper, feel some closeness in the gray lines that shade their eyes and chins and somber mouths. It’s a notebook filled with the people of this town, a collection of lives pressed flat onto paper.
The Cardigans’ cloying love song ends, and the next track begins: “The Great Divide.”
The irony is not lost on me. So I hit the fast-forward button—the sound of the spinning cassette tape shrieking against my ears.
A few yards away, Olive Montagu blows bubbles from a blue plastic wand she holds in front of her glossy pink lips, adorning her circle of friends with delicate, floating bubbles that break against their smiling, impossibly porcelain faces. Occasionally Olive glances my way, a touch of curiosity in her blue eyes, before blowing another wave of bubbles toward Lulu Yen’s phone, pointed in her direction. Olive’s group of five friends take countless photos of themselves throughout the day: a camera lens documenting every application of eyeliner in the bathroom mirror, every outfit planned and choreographed so they’re all color-coordinated as theystride into first period, talking to the camera as if they were talking to an audience—a delicate facade captured for the world to see. Every moment posted mere seconds after it happens. As if they’re afraid of being forgotten.
But unlike Olive and her friends, I want nothing more than to beforgotten. A girl lost to memory. Olive blows another wave of bubbles through the tiny wand, and they’re caught by the wind, spiraling through the warm air in my direction, but before the little orbs can reach me, I notice something from the corner of my vision.
I hit stop on the Walkman.
Across the grass, Tobias Huaman, who was seated on the concrete steps near the main doors, stands up suddenly, blinking away the brilliant midday sun. He is tall, muscled, with dark skin and dark, striking eyes, and I watch as he begins moving toward me, a smile taking shape along his arched lips—that terrible, familiar expression.
Shit.
The tulips aren’t yet in bloom, but the air that hovers around me has shifted—the promise of what’s to come—and the faintest hint of tulip pollen is already dusting my flesh.
His white sneakers start to carry him across the lawn, his green raincoat unzipped—a coat he wears because Jude once told him to beware of rainy days. And at Cutwater High we believe in fate and fortunes and bad luck. But before Tobias has taken even five steps, a hand grabs his shoulder, firm and abrupt, yanking him back. His best friend, Mac Williams—all full lips and football shoulders and midnight skin—stops Tobias from going any farther.
From getting any closer to me.
Several others on the lawn have paused to watch Tobias, breaths held in throats, a weighted silence suspended in the spring air.
Mac wheels Tobias around so he can no longer see me, then forces him to sit back down, crouching beside him and saying words I can’t make out—as if they’re in a halftime huddle and Mac is giving him an impromptu pep talk.Get a grip, bro,I imagine Mac muttering.Don’t be an idiot, she’ll have you following her around like a puppy by the end of the day.
And I could, if I wanted.
I could control every last one of them. I could be voted queen at prom, ice princess at winter formal, have my locker overstuffed with love notes on Valentine’s Day, be swooned over and pawed at and adored like royalty. They wouldn’t stand a chance.
I could have any boy or girl I wanted, just like Archer.
