But he shakes his head, looking down at his white Converse high-tops. “I don’t want anything from you.”
He’s thinking of the tulips—the only thing of value I really have—the tulips that swept through town and broke the minds of everyone who possessed one. He wants nothing to do with them. Or me. He doesn’t know that the tulips are long gone anyway.
“Please,” I beg, stepping closer. “I need to know…” I hesitate, unsure what I really want. “I need to know that there’s something better waiting for me outside of this town. I need to know that my past won’t follow me wherever I go, that the curse is broken, that the tulips are really gone.”
Jude’s pale eyes soften, and he looks at me with a flicker of sadness. But he pushes the paper origami into the front pocket of his slacks, out of sight. “Fate is like a river…,” he breathes, cheeks hollowed. “Always pushing us toward something we can’t escape.” He tilts his chin to his shoes again, yet watches me through the length of his blond eyelashes. “Whatever fortune I give you won’t alter what’s to come. Maybe it’s better not to know. Maybe you need to stop looking for fate to show you the way. You make your own way, Lark Goode.”
He doesn’t smile, but there is a softness in his eyes, a gentleness that can’t be conveyed in words. He turns away from me before I can ask anything else.
Behind me, a bell rings, and someone yells that the ten p.m. train is now arriving. Jude and his friends have already made their way up the sidewalk, laughing, safe and buoyant, like their lives haven’t been twisted and bent by a curse since the day they were born. As if they have nothing to fear.
I board the train and settle into a seat by myself, peering out at the town I’ve only ever wanted to escape. I’m leaving behind the carcass of the girl I used to be. My home is gone. The garden destroyed. And if I’m lucky, the curse was carried away with it.
“You make your own way, Lark Goode,” Jude said.
And maybe he’s right. I’ve spent most of my life trying to run from who I am. Maybe now I need to run toward something.
The girl I’m supposed to be.
I make my own fate now.
Because I have nothing more to lose.
The train lurches into motion, clattering forward over the tracks, and I know—I know—I’ll never see this town again. Once I leave, there’s no going back.
A “summer thing.”
A thing we couldn’t trust from the start.
The train picks up speed, vibrating, a metal monster thundering through the dense evergreens, and I think of Oak, sitting in his truckwhen I said goodbye, the vacant look in his eyes. The hurt that rose inside me, and the pain I could see in him.
Both of us damaged.
I think of the cold water that rose beneath the floorboards of my house.
Maybe it was just a force of nature, violent enough to finally break the house free from the dirt, to upend the tulips. Or maybe it was something else.
The end of a story written long ago by Fern Goode.
My tears swelling the banks of the creek, the blood in my veins possessed by a sorcery passed from one Goode to the next. My heartache capturing the storm and thrusting it down to destroy the source of all my pain.
Whatever the cause, I’m leaving it all behind.
This is the fate I make for myself.
I want the history of the tulips, of our name, to be lost with time… and forgotten. Until no one remembers the Goodes or the madness that overtook the town one summer.
I tip my head against the window, the soft spray of rain covering the glass. I’ve spent so many nights atop the abandoned train car in the woods, dreaming of this, the sway and motion of a train carrying me, mile by mile, away from this wretched place.
This is the feeling I couldn’t name when I sat in Oak’s truck and stared at the empty land where my house and the garden once sat:
Freedom.
SIXTEEN
The sea is darker than I imagined, waves thundering against the rocky shoreline.
I walk along the stormy waterfront, past cafés and taffy shops and bed-and-breakfasts, the rain soaking my hair. I feel adrift, with nothing more than the clothes I’m wearing and the hope of starting over.
