Chapter One ONE Their eyes stab my flesh, the back of my skull, watching as I rise from my seat at the front of the bus and escape out into the cool spring air, drawing it into my lungs. They fear me. They should. I don''t turn. I don''t glance back at the faces of my Cutwater High classmates, gaping out at me through the dirty square windows of the school bus, relief in their eyes, glad to be rid of me. Poor Lark Goode, they think, eyes skipping past me to the awful, slack-roofed little house at the end of the driveway. The only house on this sad stretch of backwoods road that sits half-perched on wooden stilts to keep the wet, swampy ground from swallowing it up. To keep the creek from spilling through the floorboards.
Poor cursed Lark, who has to wake up in that shithole house each morning and return to it every day after school. With no way out. No other option. A life handed to her by fate--cruel and snickering, with fingers crossed behind a back. The bus spews out black smoke, sputtering on up the road--taking their awful glaring eyes with it. I know their pity is fleeting, because it''s mostly fear that occupies their small minds. A wariness of getting too close. Lark Goode will snatch out your heart and bury it in the garden behind her house.
If only that were true. If only I could. I slide the headphones down around my neck, pressing stop on the ancient Walkman--Cyndi Lauper''s "All through the Night" ceasing to vibrate in my ears. The Walkman belonged to my mom when she was a teenager. The stack of cassette tapes beside my bed was hers too. But the clunky Walkman isn''t a token of my retro coolness, it''s just the only option I have. It''s one of the few things Mom left behind the day she dragged her suitcase out the front door, the broken wheels thumping down each step, while the early-morning sun speared through the elm trees beside the driveway, making her dark hair glisten like raven feathers. She never looked back.
Not once. I yank open the tiny metal door of the mailbox--overstuffed, always --letters spilling out. Lipstick marks crisscross the envelopes, pastel hearts sketched with marker and eye pencil beside the address, 114 Swamp Wells Road, followed by tiny sunflowers and daisies trailing up from the o ''s and the s ''s. As if these symbols were a part of our address--the post office unable to deliver our mail unless these hieroglyphs of love have been properly accounted for. Unable to deliver as addressed; more hearts required. I scoop up the fallen letters, irritated--Archer didn''t even bother to get the mail--and I make the long march up our driveway, stepping wide over the cold creek that cuts in front of our slanted porch. I wrestle with the front door--always stuck, always hanging wrongly from its hinges--and finally push inside. "You got more letters," I shout to Archer, tossing the envelopes onto the kitchen table, knowing tomorrow there''ll be even more.
And more the day after that, jammed into our mailbox until the postman has to leave a stack in the dirt, neatly tied with string. Archer is perched against the kitchen counter, spooning a mouthful of sugared cereal into his mouth. He smiles crookedly, impishly. "It''ll only get worse," he answers, still chewing. "Did you see the garden?" Dropping my canvas bag onto the wood floor--damp from the creek roaring below, moisture stuck to everything--I move past him to the sink, fill a glass with cold water, then down the whole thing. The bus ride home is always too warm, humid and thick, the windows all stuck shut, so we sweat and breathe in fumes and one another''s teenage stench, arriving home like animals sent to market. "Haven''t noticed," I lie, because in truth, I can see the whole god-awful garden from my back bedroom window. I wake to it each morning, the sea of green stalks teetering in the sharp morning air.
Taunting me, cloying and malevolent. Archer chews loudly, noisily--on purpose, just to annoy me--then drops his empty bowl into the sink, spoon clanking against the drain. Our kitchen cupboards are poorly stocked with boxed cereal, dried rice, canned beans, and a few jars of peanut butter. A sad assortment. Dad sends us grocery money from time to time, he pays the utility bills online--thankfully--but it rarely seems like enough. If it weren''t for Archer''s flirting, for the jars of homemade jam, baked strawberry pies, dusted sugar cookies, and casseroles that adoring girls leave on our front porch for him, we''d never have a proper meal. "End of May, just like clockwork," he adds, walking to the screen door at the back of the house and resting a hand against the doorframe, the wind stirring his black T-shirt and his dark hair. My twin is comfortable in his own skin, cool and calm, a sanguine ease in every move he makes--a nonchalance that came easy to him right after birth.
While I have tiptoed carefully around in my skin, certain I was born in the wrong house, in the wrong town, in a place meant for someone else. My self-assured brother has never once stumbled, never woken with hair that wasn''t perfectly tousled or with clothes that were damp and wrinkled. He strides through town with his wicked, cloying smile that can charm the skirt off any girl or boy who has the unfortunate luck to happen across his path, never again able to look away. He is a twin that casts a shadow, long and lean, a shadow that''s nearly impossible to crawl out from under. But to be honest, I like it in the dark. In the shade of invisibility. Because I''ve felt the opposite: the madness that comes from standing in the light. The way others contort themselves to be closer to a Goode.
Then run screaming when the seasons change. It''s safer in the dark. And that''s where I''ll stay. "You missed school again," I point out, uncoiling my hair from its braid, letting the auburn waves spill down my shoulders and using my fingers to work out the spiderweb knots. "Like I said"--he nods through the screen door at the garden beyond--"they''re almost in bloom." I stand beside my brother, gazing out at the acre of dark, ruddy soil. He''s right: the tall green shoots--wide leaves peeled open, with closed buds shaped like teardrops--will soon crack apart and reveal their strange, unnatural petals to the sky. Scarlet and vermilion, like dark red wine.
Like blood. Like a sacrifice. This season''s crop. is about to bloom. "You should stay home too," he adds, gray eyes cutting over me as he pulls the blue guitar pick from his pocket and flips it easily through his fingers. He claims that it''s his lucky guitar pick. But luck in this family doesn''t come from guitar picks. Our fate is determined by that acre of flowers.
"No point going to school now. You''ll only make it harder on yourself." My throat tightens. The afternoon breeze rolls throughs the garden of tulips, their weighted heads like babies unable to hold up their own skulls, as if they''re a little drunk--chugged too many beers at one of Roy Potts''s infamous lakefront-cabin parties during midsummer. "There''s only a week left," I answer, holding strong to the promise I make to myself every year: Stick it out, suffer through these last few days before summer break. Finish school, graduate this year, because even if I can''t afford college, at least I''ll have something. A high school diploma. At least I won''t repeat the same mistakes my mother made: dropping out when she was only seventeen.
Pregnant and alone. Archer shrugs, raising a perfectly framed eyebrow, then walks to the kitchen table to rip open one of the letters. "Soon enough you''ll be getting as much mail as me." "I don''t encourage it like you do." He flashes me a smug look, the guitar pick now perched between his lips. "It''s more fun this way. Might as well use our fate for something." I feel my teeth clamp together, hating the self-satisfied way he brushes everything off like it''s nothing at all, like our lives aren''t some cruel, inescapable joke.
In a few days'' time, late one night, the tulips will break open, unfurling their rare, curse-ridden petals toward the stars. But Archer''s never cared what any of it means, he only cares what it does --the side effect bestowed on him. On both of us. Because when the tulips finally bloom, love and madness knot themselves together, and your heart is no longer your own. It belongs to us. To the Goode family. The sun rises into a gray, rain-weighted sky--the tulips still not yet bloomed--and I board the bus to Cutwater High while Archer sleeps in. He''s no longer interested in attending the last week of our senior year.
I sit at the back of the bus, headphones on, listening to the Counting Crows August and Everything After album, imagining Mom playing this same cassette, on this same ride to the same awful school. Lives repeated. Inescapable. Destined. I feel the eyes of Abby Reece, seated across the aisle, skip over me once, twice, until the bus stops to pick up Mia Churchill, and Abby bolts from her seat and moves three seats away, unwilling to take the risk any longer. To live in the town of Cutwater is to know countless stories about the Goodes--fables of heartbreak and madness and desire. But to understand the truth of our past, one must go back to the middle. Because the beginning is too far away and too troublesome, wrought with lies and riddles that I''ve still never quite picked apart.
Lies are that way: sticky, honeylike, melted into the.