I leave Oak standing nearly naked beside the pond.
And I force myself not to look back.
EIGHT
I won’t fool myself into thinking that love is anything other than madness. A delusion formed by old, spiteful tulips. A malediction. A sickness carried in the Goode family line—a thing for which there is no cure.
I felt the moon-mad lunacy taking shape beneath my skin when Oak stood too close—so close he could have touched me—carving its way along my pale bones. But I’ve spent my life at a distance, safely away from anyone who’d dare look my way. And I can’t allow myself to forget who I am. I can’t let anyone in. Even a boy with pond water on his eyelashes and a breath held dangerously against his lips.
The tulips may make others fall in love with us, but we are just as susceptible to love’s intoxicating rhythm. We can become just as sick with love’s affliction.
The truest kind of love.
Because we’re human. Because love is treacherous in all its forms.
I bury my head in my pillow and try to sleep. But his voice is there waiting, words against my heated skin:You want me to be afraid of you… but I’m not.
It wasn’t what I really wanted. Not even close.
I wanted him to kiss me, desperately, gravely, the tall meadow grass licking at my knees, our skin wet from the pond, his hands so close that they could have strayed along my temple, tangled in my hair.
But I walked away.
It hurts to think of it now, a terrible grinding ache behind my eyes, in my throat—choking on everything I wanted to say to him but didn’t—yet he keeps resurfacing, no matter how hard I try to push him away.
I crush my palms to my eyes.
But there are other voices too… in the night air, hissing, reaching out for me through the open bedroom window. Echoing, whispering…giggling.
I toss back the bedsheet.
The voices aren’t in my head; they aren’t a conjuring of the summer wind.They’re real.My feet hit the cold wood floor, and I move to the window.
A tiny ember of hope itches at me: maybe Oak has been unable to sleep too, his mind cycling over thoughts of me, and he’s come to climb through the open window and kiss me in my room while the moonlight peels away all the doubt still clinging to my skull.
But out in the garden is not a single shadow… but many.
There are four,no, five people skulking through the rows of tulips.
I yank open my bedroom door and find Archer already rushing down the hall. He grabs the shotgun from beside the woodstove, then bursts through the screen door onto the back porch.
But he stops short… staring out into the garden.
I see what he sees: the five thieves are not trying to steal the tulips, not exactly; they rip the petals from the white-and-bloodred blooms and rub them across their skin, their flushed cheeks and forearms, and along their scalps. They bring the petals to their noses and draw in deep breaths, trying to inhale whatever ancient magic lives inside each silk-soft flower.
As if they want to press them down into their blood and bones.
As if they want to become a Goode.
“I told those boys to stay away,” I mutter, squinting into the dark.
Archer shakes his head. “It’s not Tobias and Mac.” He nods toward one of the figures as it steps into the moonlight.
Clementine Morris.
Soft-spoken, head down, brown hair always in her eyes—Clementine.
Who stood in the hall while Mac and Tobias swung their fists at each other. Who, at the drive-in, sat beside Tobias, his hands folded protectively around her. Clementine Morris, who had her fortune read by Jude during lunch while sitting with her friends from band class. I wonder what fortune he gave her, if he foresaw this—that she would steal tulips and find herself the envy, the desire, of her classmates, those who had ignored her only days earlier. Those who had teased her since grade school for her tangled, unruly hair, for her quiet nature.
