Bloodred.
Angry red.
Lyingred.
Oak’s mouth stalls against mine. “What’s wrong?”
I reach out—Oak’s hands pressed against my ribs—and I grasp the silky petals. It’s flattened from the book, dried a little, lost its weight and moisture. But it’s still intact, verdant—ready for its next victim.
Time squeezes against me, and the air falls from my lungs.
“Lark…,” he begins, his dark eyebrows pinched, his full lips still hovering so close to me, I could sink into them again.
But no,no, no, no.
I push back from him, across the wide truck seat, until my back hits the cold door. “How long have you had this?”
“Lark, I just… It’s not what—”
“How long have you had it?” I demand, feeling like my voice is going to cave in. My throat a desert.
He tries to reach for me again, but I shake my head. “Oak, where did you get this?”
I can see the breath held in his throat, see his mouth slacken. “It was just on the road…. It was there and I picked it up. I didn’t think anything of it.”
“When?” I sputter, the word tangled against my teeth.
“I—I don’t know. A month ago, in the spring.”
My vision shifts out of focus, then snaps back. “Where on the road?”
“In front of your house. I was walking by.” His eyes are pleading, I can see he wants to move closer to me, but he resists. “I heard voices, girls whispering, it was late, and I saw them leaving from your house. They were carrying flowers, and they dropped one.”
Clementine,I think,and her friends.It was probably the first night they raided the garden and stole the tulips. “You were walking by my house that night?”
He nods, breathing through his nostrils.
I try to imagine it, Oak striding up Swamp Wells Road that same night—maybe he’d been walking by every night for weeks, curious about the Goodes, about the family who broke his—until one nighthe saw a group of girls squealing and laughing as they sprinted away from the garden, dropping tulips behind them as they ran up the road toward town.
“I told you someone broke into the garden,” I press. “I told you that someone stole the flowers, but you never said anything?”
“I didn’t know who they were.” He shakes his head. “And I didn’t think it mattered, they were just flowers, I didn’t know… I didn’t realize it was so important to you back then.”
My hand is trembling, my lungs are heaving in and out. “But you kept it,” I say. “You found this tulip and you kept it in each new book you read…. Why?”
“I…” His eyes slope down. “I held on to it because I thought, I don’t know, it reminded me of you. That’s all. It wasn’t… I didn’t know…” He’s grasping at his own thoughts, unable to pinpoint it exactly. But I know why: he kept it because of how it made him feel. Just like everyone else who’s possessed a tulip—he couldn’t part with it, couldn’t let it go.
But this isn’t the worst of it.
This isn’t what makes my head start to whirl and crack.
If he’s possessed a tulip—hidden in a book, tucked in his back pocket—this whole time, since the night Clementine and the others stole our flowers… If he’s had it since the day he saved me from the mob in front of the school, since we lay on our backs on the train, since he held my hand while thousands of lightning bugs swarmed around us…
Then maybe…
It’s not his heart I should have been worried about.
Maybe he never felt entranced, charmed, bewitched by LarkGoode. Maybe he wasn’t lured closer to me by a family curse that grew behind our house.
