But now she holds a tulip to her chest and sways in time with the breeze.
One of the other girls—Jada Reynolds, a sophomore who has a tattoo of a bluebird on the inside of her wrist—begins taking off herclothes, down to her bra, and lies on the ground among the scattered petals. A few rows away a girl I can’t fully make out begins plucking off tulip petals and sticking them in her mouth, swallowing them whole. Another girl giggles manically, skipping through the rows, arms reaching for the tulips while her head tilts to the sky like she’s calling down the moonlight, summoning some dark spell that will turn her into a Goode once and for all.
Archer glances at me, an eyebrow peaked into his forehead.
I would laugh—watching them roll around in our garden—if it weren’t so unsettling.They must be drunk,I think. But I know it’s another kind of inebriation: the delirious kind.
The kind our ancestors warned about.
“Fucking heathens,” Archer says through an exhale, stepping to the edge of the porch. “Get off our property!” he shouts. “I won’t tell you twice!” He grips the shotgun in his hands, even though he knows as well as I do that it’s useless—the thing belonged to our grandfather, and our great-grandfather before that, an heirloom that’s so old, it was probably used in the Civil War. And in truth, my brother doesn’t need it: words uttered from Archer Goode’s lips are nearly as unrefusable as law.
The girl who has been stuffing her face with petals abruptly stops, letting the remaining bits fall from her hands, while Jada pushes herself up from the dirt, eyes shivering open and closed,open and closed. They look mesmerized, stoned, like sleepwalkers who we’ve just awoken from some wondrously enraptured dream. I worry they’re going to lunge toward us, try to rip us apart just as they have the tulips, but Archer stomps his foot against the wood porch, as if he’s scaring away a pack of stray coyotes.
“Get!” he yells, louder this time.
And they scatter, like frightened animals, sprinting down the tulip rows, shoving themselves through a hole in the barbed-wire fencing they must have cut open, then into the dark of the woods beyond.
But Clementine doesn’t move. She looks paralyzed.
Her mouth falls open, and she blinks.
“It was a dare…,” she says, voice broken by deep inhales. “The first time.”
I frown at her, unsure what she’s saying.
“We only wanted to see the flowers up close. To tiptoe through the Goode garden. We didn’t know what they were, what they did. But…” She shakes her head, and I realize that she’s confessing her crime, that even in her greed for the tulips, there still remains the guilt of stealing something that doesn’t belong to her. “I can’t go back to how it was….” She looks like she’s holding down a sob, her eyes watering, hands trembling. “Tobias never even looked at me before. Not until…” She looks down at the clump of tulips in her fist.
Shestole the tulips. It was always her.
Sweet, mild-tempered Clementine Morris. And now she needs more.
“Jude said that a single tulip would bring me love….” She blinks up at me, as if she knows I was watching her that day on the lawn, when Jude read her the fortune. “I didn’t know what it meant. But Suzy remembered the tulips behind your house. We didn’t really think anything would happen. We didn’t even plan on stealing them at first. Until we saw them… breathed them in.” She shakes her head, looks briefly lucid. “But yesterday I asked Jude for anotherfortune. He said that the love wouldn’t last. I’d lose it just as quick as I’d found it. But I…” Her eyes brighten, her mouth twitches at the edges. “Maybe I can change fate.” She makes a sound, almost like a laugh, then she quickly stuffs a handful of tulips into the pocket of her white shorts, before turning and darting down the tulip rows, then out through the severed opening in the fence.
She vanishes into the dark edge of the trees.
Jude told her that a single tulip would bring her love. He saw what the future held.
Archer walks out into the empty garden and picks up Jada’s pink tank top from the dirt. He looks up at me, exhaustion, shock, and something else pulling at the features of his face. “Go back to sleep,” he says. “I’ll fix the fence.” He glances at the place where Clementine and her friends fled into the woods. “But I don’t know if it’ll do much good now. If they want the tulips bad enough, they’ll find a way in.”
The morning sun finally scrapes above the tree line, and I find Archer on the back porch, seated on one of the old rocking chairs, staring out at the tulips.
“Did you sleep at all?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
My brother feels protective of the garden, of this house—maybe because we have so little, he doesn’t want to lose what’s left. Even the Goode name holds value to him, as if it stood for something once, as if somewhere in the lineage it might have meant honor or bravery, something worth defending. But I know better—there’s nothing worth saving here.
I leave my suitcase on my bedroom floor, half-packed. I can’t bring myself to leave my brother, not after last night, not with the nervy, bloodshot look in his eyes, waiting for someone else to sneak into the garden.
I’ll wait a day or two, for things to settle, for my brother to ease back into the normal rhythm of his self-obsessed life… and then I’ll leave.
Because he can’t watch the garden day and night. The madness has already spread; they’ve had a taste of false love, and they’ll come for more tulips.
And maybe we should let them.
Let them feed the desperation growing inside them, let them choke on the petals if that’s what they want. I’m no longer certain if we’re protecting them or ourselves.
Let them go a little mad.
