Archer sinks into one of the two lawn chairs that he carried down from the porch. “I guess we’ll find out,” he says with a wink. He’s confident. And I hope he’s right.
Because this feels like redemption.
If we can find all the stolen tulips, if we can recover the flowers that should never have left the garden, maybe it will set something right. Like turning back the clock, to before Clementine and herfriends snuck into the garden, stuffing their pockets full of tulips. Back before Oak left a book on my windowsill.
Maybe if we can undo what’s happened, it will right all the wrongs.
It’ll repair this wound beneath my ribs.
We sit like this for an hour, Archer flipping the guitar pick through his fingers while he tells me stories about the time he got locked inside the library up in Favorville with a girl named Shelly Shellington. He tells me about the time he fell into the rosebush outside Layla Black’s bedroom window, and how he was picking thorns from his backside for two days after. We laugh, and I almost forget why every part of me hurts.
“Thank you,” I tell him. “For helping me with this.” I nod to the flowers. “Even if it doesn’t work.” My brother—who has always felt like a passing shadow I happen to share a cursed home with—now won’t leave my side. And I think: maybe this is the only way to survive—with those who understand what it feels like to be crushed by love.
A few cars pass on the road, slowing down to read our sign, but always they keep going. “They don’t trust us,” I say. “Maybe because anyone who tried to get close to the house in the last couple of weeks was met with a shotgun.” I give my brother a teasing look. “They probably think this is a trick.”
Archer shrugs. “Maybe. But they’re also desperate.”
Only a minute later he’s proved right.
A blue SUV pulls off onto the side of the road, and Cole Campbell jumps out, something held in his closed fist. He doesn’t say a word, but when he reaches us, he opens his palm, revealing aflattened, dead tulip. “Can I get a new one?” His mouth is tensed, a look of fever in his eyes.
“Help yourself,” Archer replies, and Cole quickly drops the lifeless tulip to the dirt, then yanks a new one from the wheelbarrow. He scurries away to his car as if he’s afraid we’ll change our minds and ask for the tulip back.
Cole has just pulled back onto the road when another car veers off into the driveway, slamming on its brakes. Olive Montagu gets out of the white Honda, nearly tripping over her leather sandals to reach us. She drops three flattened tulips into my lap, her eyes wide and wild and red at the edges like she’s been crying. “You swear it won’t cost me anything?”
“Not a penny,” Archer answers, but I stare up at her, thinking of the night at the quarry when she came after me, begging for a tulip. I think about Oak witnessing the madness in her eyes as we sped away in the truck.
But now she only eyes me briefly before swiping three tulips from the wheelbarrow, then making her way back to her Honda.
Within minutes the end of our driveway is crowded with cars left running while our classmates dispose of their old, wrecked tulips, then greedily grab new ones.
Word has gotten out, and now they’ve all come to replenish their supply of tulip-induced love.
What they don’t seem to notice, what none of them point out, is that the new tulips look nothing like the Goode tulips. The wheelbarrow is filled with an assortment of bright sunshine-yellow, pale pink, brazen red, and even a few stark-white blooms.
They are clearly not Goode tulips. But maybe it’s the desperationthey feel, the greed—they want to believe these are the real thing. And what do they really know of Goode tulips? They’ve never seen the crop behind our house until this summer. Maybe the blooms in the wheelbarrow are a different variety, a slightly different color, sure, but a Goode tulip nonetheless. Because if the Goode twins are handing them over, they must be real.
It’s only Lulu Yen—when she stands in front of us, holding out a few worthless, torn tulip petals, asking if she can still get a new tulip—who frowns down at us and asks, “Why are you doing this? Giving them away?”
“Figured we should get rid of them,” Archer says with a shrug. “No use keeping them to ourselves.”
She hands over the petals, then takes a bright pink tulip from the wheelbarrow. “You could sell these, you know, make a lot of money.”
For a moment Archer blinks at the tulip in her hand, like he’s considering it, then clears his throat. “We’re just spreading the love,” he answers stupidly, as if we’re giving away friendship bracelets at a summer fair.
Lulu nods, clasping the fresh tulip in her fingers, before striding away.
After another hour the crowd starts to thin, the last of the stolen tulips having made their way back to us, until we’re left with a few dozen dead and dried Goode tulips.
Our classmates don’t realize they’ve just swapped genuine, curse-laced tulips for useless ones.
The delirium they felt, the lovesickness, will not return.
They will feel nothing.
Archer steers the wheelbarrow back to the house, while I gather the old, dead Goode tulips from the dirt.
I thought I would feel different, knowing we’ve retrieved the stolen flowers—we’ve taken back what should never have been stolen.
