“I’m not getting my hair wet,” Olive adds.
Oak reaches into the back of the truck and pulls out two yellow-striped beach towels. “You’re trembling,” he says, folding one around my shoulders. But I can no longer tell if it’s the cold making my body convulse or the nerves building inside me. I reach for the passenger door, just wanting to get inside so we can leave.
Oak’s eyes flick to the group as they pass the truck, and he seems unconcerned, as if there is nothing for us to fear. I watch as they head for the water, and I think we’re in the clear—they’ll just keep going. They haven’t seen me. Or maybe they can’t tell who I am—hair wet, lake water dripping from my skin.
But Olive’s face turns in our direction, and I can see the recognition land in her eyes. “Oh shit!” she remarks, grabbing Titha by the arm. The others stop and swivel around, and I know it’s too late—they recognize me.
Oak rubs the towel through his hair and starts around the hood of the truck to the driver’s side, when Sebastian calls out, “You should be careful, man. You know that’s Lark Goode?”
The air plummets into my stomach. My heart starts to race.
Oak frowns and takes a step back toward me, so he’s partly blocking their view of me.
“She might seem harmless, but she isn’t. You’d be better off just leaving her out here. Save yourself, man.”
Titha chuckles at this, but it’s Olive’s gaze that makes me the most uneasy. She takes a step closer to us, then another. Sebastian reaches for her but doesn’t grab her in time; she’s striding in our direction.
“Please!” she says, her eyes focused solely on me. “I only need one, that’s it. Just enough to get him back.” I remember Olive’s desperation that morning in front of the school, the ache in her eyes as she grabbed at me. She wanted a tulip so Tobias would love her again. She felt the heartache a single tulip can cause. And she covets one still. “I’ll pay you anything. Please!”
I feel paralyzed as I watch her move closer, hating that Oak is witnessing this, hating the look in her eyes. Wishing I could do something to make her see that a tulip won’t get her what she wants. It’ll only make things worse.
“Lark,” Oak is saying, and I look up at him. “Get in the truck.” He’s opened the door and is urging me inside. I climb up to the seat, body shivering, the towel still wrapped around my shoulders. He closes the door behind me, then hurries around to the driver’s side, swings himself in, and turns the key in the ignition.
Olive reaches the truck and presses her hands to the window. “Lark!” she begs. “I know you have them—that boy wouldn’t be here with you if you didn’t. Just one,” she pleads. “You don’t need them all.”
Her pleas are all too familiar, the same appeals I heard that day on the school lawn. I stare at her, into her wide blue eyes, and feel a sadness for the pain the tulips have caused her. But before she canreach for the door handle, Oak leans over me and slams his palm against the lock, ensuring she won’t be able to get inside.
He puts the truck in reverse, and in an instant we’re backing away from Olive, leaving her standing in the headlights, the lake shimmering behind her. Oak puts the truck in drive, hits the gas, and peels away, steering us back toward the tree line. He drives as if we’re fleeing a real threat, a lake monster risen from the deep, a girl with heartache on her lips.
We are quiet the entire drive home, and when we pull up to my house and he kills the engine, I feel a hollowness inside me—certain how this will end. Oak may have brushed off all the rumors whispered about the Goodes, but it’s another thing to see how my classmates react to me. To hear their warnings, to see Olive coming after me.
“I’m…” I shake my head, looking down at the pile of clothes in my lap. “I’m sorry for that. It’s not…” My eyes turn to the window, looking out at my sad, sloped house, and I feel stupid for thinking this thing with Oak could ever be more than a delusion. A few days of pretending I could be like any other girl in this town. “Thank you for tonight.” I don’t let my eyes find him. I unlock the door and start to open it.
“Why are you sorry?” I look back at him. “Those kids are idiots. You don’t need to apologize for the things that other people say or do.”
His eyes are soft, gentle, but I still feel embarrassed. I still feel like I should say goodbye, leave his truck, walk to the house, and not look back.
And mean it.
But he keeps his eyes on me, refusing to let me go. “Can I takeyou somewhere else, since tonight didn’t end like I’d hoped?” He releases his hands from the steering wheel. “I want to show you something. But it won’t be for another few days, maybe more. The timing needs to be just right.”
The air in my lungs feels caught, stalled between an inhale and exhale. “What is it?”
He smiles, and it destroys me. The way his mouth forms, tugging up on one side. “It’s a place I’ve never taken anyone to before.”
I thought he’d want to be rid of me after tonight, but he looks like a boy simply asking a girl if he can see her again… shyly, with a hint of hope in his eyes.
“Okay.”
He nods. “You can keep the towel.”
I open the truck door and step out into the night air. “Thanks.”
“Good night, Lark Goode.”
TEN
Let them love us, never the other way around,” Mom would tell Archer and me when we were young. She watched our father leave only days after she told him she was pregnant. Tulip season had ended—the summer was over—and the love he felt for her had faded with the season. He no longer remembered why he had followed Alice Goode around town as if she were the very air in his lungs. He returned for our birth—an obligation, a duty he felt—but he left again shortly after. He was simply a man who got tangled up in a curse he knew nothing about.
