I push open the screen door, and the air has that dreamy summer feel: bees humming, a woodpecker thumping against the trunk of a tree somewhere in the woods, searching for insects. The season is changing.
Archer perches himself against the porch railing, the sun in his eyes, and runs a hand through his hair. “How miserable was school?” he asks, looking lazy, casual, like James Dean in an old film poster.
But I ignore his question because I’m thinking of something else: the boy I saw at school. The one I didn’t recognize but who seemed completely unaffected by me—Lark Goode, who can ensnare another with just a glance.
And yet the Goode curse isnota witch’s spell. It doesn’t force a person to love another. It’s merely a littleenchantment, a glimmer in the eyes, a hint of seduction in the lips. My classmates still have control of their own minds, their own actions. They decide what to do with the desire they feel. But most are weak, unable to resist the magnetism that stirs inside them whenever they’re near a Goode.
Still, somehow, the boy at school seemed to feel none of it.
Not even a hint of fascination when he looked at me.
I shut my eyes, pushing away the memory, savoring the soft spring breeze against my cheeks.
“What will you do when we graduate?” I ask Archer, lifting my eyelids.
He stares down at the creek rushing below the house, tracking the path it makes through the center of the tulip garden before it disappears into the woods beyond, eventually joining with Rabbit Cross River and running all the way to the sea. “Doubt I’ll graduate,” he answers bluntly, elbows pressed against the railing. “I’ve missed too many classes.”
“Then why bother staying in town at all?” My brother has always behaved as if his own life bored him, as if he were indifferent to the outcome. As if life weren’t unfurling rapidly before us—and if we don’t grab ahold of it, if we don’t alter its course, we’ll be doomed to the fate of every Goode who came before.
My brother grins, cheeks still flushed from the girl. “Why would I leave? I can do whatever I want in Cutwater.”
He’s never felt a lump-in-the-throat desperation to escape this town like I have. He’ll probably live in this sorrowful, old house for the rest of his life. Maybe he’ll even marry a local girl, have babies—children who will be just as ill-fated by the Goode name as we are now. Somehow he’ll be satisfied to never see what waits beyond this shithole town.
I feel Archer looking at me. “You really think you’re getting out of here, don’t you?” he asks. I shrug, refusing to meet his eyes, and he snorts, lips curled down, holding back a laugh. “How? You don’t even have money for bus fare.”
I dig my thumbnail into one of the porch posts—the soft wood starting to rot, like everything else, the creek slowly taking back the house and the land.
“It’s not like you can get a job,” he adds. “You can’t scoop ice cream at the Tasty Swirl, or shelve books at the Cutwater Library, or run the cash register at Al’s Hardware. All the customers will fall in love with you.”
I dig my nail in deeper, making a half-moon shape in the wood, a marker that I was here—Lark Goode lived in this awful house. But he’s right. Any job won’t last. I’ve seen how quickly love can spiral into devotion and then obsession: I’ve seen the girls at school tattoo Archer’s name onto their forearms and wrists; and the boy who once sang a song to Archer during an assembly our freshman year, belting out “I Will Always Love You” in front of the whole school. But no one laughed, no one snickered at how lovesick and foolish it was. Because they all felt it too—a strange yearning to be near Archer.To me.
“If you just used our talent, instead of hiding from it, you’d have everything you want.”
“It’s stealing,” I say, dropping my hand from the post.
“It’s not stealing when they hand it over.”
“They don’t realize what they’re doing. They’re delirious.” I raise my eyebrows at him. “Remember Maisie Lee?”
Archer smiles so wide, his eyes gleam, the memory flicking through him. “She was alittledelirious,” he admits. “But I only winked at her.”
“During tulip season,” I point out.
Maisie Leeusedto work at the Square Mart gas station. Her father owned it—owns it still—but last summer Archer convinced her to sell him a six-pack of beer, and instead of making him pay for it, she gave him all the cash in the register. Over $400. All becausehe winked at her. The next day her father stomped up to our front porch in his muddy rain boots, arms crossed, hair oily and slicked back as if he’d just been crouched beneath a car engine in the repair shop beside the gas station, and demanded all the money back. Archer handed it over, with his apologies, but swore he hadn’t “stolen” it. Thankfully, Maisie’s father didn’t go to the local police. But Archer still manages to come home with cash in his pockets, an extra twenty-dollar bill handed back to him at the movie theater up in Favorville when he paid with a ten. Free ice cream at the Tasty Swirl by the baseball field, free soda and fries at Maple’s Burger Stop. He never pays for anything.
I suspect he could even get a free bus ride out of here if he tried.
But hewantsto stay. This small, backwoods town gives him everything he needs. He stays because of the tulips, because if he left, his charm, his magnetism, might wear off. He needs the tulips.
But our mother managed to leave—without a word, without an explanation. She slipped out the front door and strode down the driveway as if she had already forgotten about the children she was leaving behind. And after three years she hasn’t so much as sent a postcard. She’s good and gone.Long gone.Never even glances over her shoulder, gone.
“You might as well stay,” Archer says, turning toward the screen door. “Nothing for us outside of Cutwater. Better just to get used to the place.” He steps back into the house, screen door slamming shut, and the thud is like a brick cracking against the hope growing inside me.Better just to get used to the place.But I have no intention of sticking it out here.
In a few days I’ll graduate, and I won’t die here, old and bitter beside that god-awful cursed garden of tulips.
Archer doesn’t know it yet, doesn’t know the plans I’m already making.
But I’m getting out of this town.
