“I was keeping watch.” My shoulders settle. “Someone broke into our garden again; they stole more tulips.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t who I thought it would be.” I shake my head, thinking of Clementine and her friends. “But… my brother has been up watching the garden since it happened.”
“And tonight is your shift?”
“Something like that.”
He smiles, and the night feels more alive, the wind tracing my ears, the starlight sharper against his silhouette. “You want some company?” he asks.
I hold back my own smile; I tuck it down. “You sure you wantto risk it?” I keep my mouth serious, giving nothing away. “It’s nearly a full moon. This is usually when my family sacrifices helpless boys to the ancient gods.”
His smile flattens, but only for an instant. “Then I’ll have to warn any helpless boys if I see them.”
I tilt my head, a smile reaching my eyes, still trying to understand why Oak isn’t afraid, why he doesn’t tip forward to breathe in my skin and confess all the ways in which he can’t live without me. He is a boy I can’t decipher. A paradox. Beautiful and strange.
We stare at each other, like two rivals sizing up the competition, trying to decide who’s bluffing, who will flinch first. Who will make it out alive.
“Sure,” I relent.
He steps over the creek and climbs the steps. We settle onto the porch swing, a soft wind stirring up from the nearby elms, sending a shiver through me. It’ll rain soon, I can feel it.
“What do you listen to?” he asks.
I lift an eyebrow.
“On that old Walkman.”
I realize the headphones are still around my neck. “They’re old cassette tapes that belonged to my mom.”
“Are they any good?”
“Some of them.” I turn my eyes back to the dark sky, watching the moonlight as it’s swallowed up by the clouds. “It’s better than the silence.” It makes me wonder why I’m so afraid of the quiet. What makes me crave the thrum of noise in my ears? Maybe because I hate the sound of the tulips, of Forsaken Creek, of the whispers in the halls at school whenever I walk by.
Music drowns out the shrill, painful orchestra of my life.
I remove the headphones from around my neck, placing them in my lap.
“I know what you mean.” His voice is a whisper, careful, but not weak. “It’s hard to sleep most nights…. The silence is too suffocating.”
I want to know abouthissilence—because I’m certain it’s different from mine. But the hush of the wind, the quiet of the sky, stall the words on my tongue. I don’t want to break this moment with questions that will surely open up parts of him he might not want to share. Not yet.
So I let the quiet pacify my thoughts. And I realize that I likethiskind of quiet. With him.
Two humans watching a storm smear across the sky. Only a few inches between us. But as the minutes flit away, my mind starts to nag at me, old thoughts, old warnings seeping back in. “Aren’t you worried…?” I say, keeping my eyes on the darkening clouds. “I mean—don’t you worry why you’re here, why you walked all the way to my house? Why you’re sitting next to me on my porch?”
“I’m here to help you catch your thief,” he says, tilting his eyes at me, a soft, unaffected smile curling across his lips.
I almost smile back. “But what if it’s not that? What if you’re here against your will?”
“Like you’re keeping me prisoner?” he asks with an even bigger grin.
“You know what I mean.”
His smile fades. “You think the tulips lured me here?”
“Maybe.”Most likely.
