“What if you have a bad dream?” Tom says.
“That’s the chance you take,” Clodine tells him, marching back toward the house, the zucchini gripped in one hand like a wand.
“Vegetables don’t count!” Starletta calls after her. But Clodine ignores her, going inside and letting the screen door slam behind her.
“Stubborn old woman,” Starletta says, then goes off to another part of the yard, presumably in search of more flowers.
“Can we do it too?” Tom asks me.
I hesitate. The Grands’ magic doesn’t always work the way you—or they—think it will. But Tom seems excited by the idea, so I say, “Why not?”
I get two flashlights from the kitchen, and we start hunting for flowers. Pretty quickly I find an iris and a hydrangea right along the side of the house, and a tiger lily from the clump that grows beside the mailbox. In the field that grows wild behind the house there are daisies and black-eyed Susans. But I need one more.
Growing along one side of the old barn where we store the 1957 Rambler Six my father and I are going to restore together one of these days, I find some foxgloves. I pick one, then return to the front yard. Starletta and Hank are standing by the porch steps, where I join them. Tom arrives a moment later.
“I’ve got six,” he says. “That wasn’t so hard. And smell this rose. It’s amazing.”
I look at Starletta and Hank, who are looking at each other.
“Where did you find that?” I ask Tom, although I’m afraid I already know the answer.
“There’s a bush on the other side of the house,” he says. “Right under one of the windows. It’s covered with flowers.”
The window is the one to Clodine’s bedroom. And the rosebush marks the spot where my great-great-grandfather Wild Ruckus is buried. Well, the part of him the bear didn’t eat, which was mostly his left hand. They identified it because of the wedding band, which he’d only worn for nine days. Also, the tattoo on the back, which was of a rose.
Wild Ruckus was the first victim of the curse. Clodine too, of course, but I think Wild Ruckus got the worst of it. Clodine, who was only sixteen, insisted on burying the hand beneath her window. She said it would keep his ghost near her so he could protect her and the baby she was carrying, who turned out to be Starletta. When the rosebush grew there, almost overnight, and the roses were the same color as the one Wild Ruckus had tattooed on his hand, she said it just proved that she was right.
Only Clodine is allowed to pick the Wild Ruckus roses. But now Tom Swift has one in his hand.
“Well, he can’t put it back, and he can’t throw it away. Ruckus wouldn’t take to that,” Starletta says. “So I guess he’ll have to use it.”
“This should be interesting,” Hank adds.
“Interesting?” says Tom Swift, who doesn’t know what we’re talking about. “Interesting how?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Starletta tells him, putting her arm around him. “I’m sure it will be fine. You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you?”
We enter the house. Clodine is sitting at the kitchen table with her flowers spread out in front of her. She looks at us, sees what Tom is carrying, and lifts one eyebrow. “Brave boy,” she says. I’m just relieved she isn’t angry.
Hank tells us we can put the flowers in bags so that they don’t make a mess under our pillows. She gives me and Tom plastic grocery sacks from the Bi-Rite, and we stick our flowers inside. The bags remind me of Anna-Lynn, and I wonder if Tom is thinking about her too.
Once we’re back in my room, Tom says, “What was all that about the rose? Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” I assure him. Then I tell him about Clodine, Wild Ruckus, and the bear.
“What happened to the bear?” he asks when I’m finished.
“Some guys wanted to find it and kill it,” I say. “But Clodine told them to leave it alone. She said any bear that could best a man who had killed seven Nazis with a pistol during World War II had to be pretty special.”
Tom shakes his head. “Great-great-grandfather killed by a bear. Grandfather drowned fishing in a creek. Do I want to know what happened to your great-grandfather?”
I tell him about Sam and the fireworks.
“The men in your family don’t seem to be too lucky,” he says. “Is your father worried something might happen to him?”
“It already did,” I say. What I don’t add is that my father doesn’t have to worry about being the one to die. The curse doesn’t kill Weywards. Just the people we love.
“And what about you?” Tom says.
I could tell him that as long as I make it to seventeen without falling in love, I’ll be okay. But the whole thing already seems completely ridiculous, so I just say, “I think my mother leaving is about as bad as it can get.”
“I wondered about that,” Tom says. “So your parents are divorced?”
“No,” I say. “She just left. And they never actually married, because my father thought that if they didn’t, it would break the—because they didn’t believe in it. We don’t even know where she is.” This is not entirely true. There’s another little piece of information about the situation that I don’t share with him.
“Ouch,” Tom says. “That’s rough.”
“It’s hard to get too upset about it,” I tell him. “She left when I was three days old. I never knew her.”
“If it helps any, having both parents around isn’t always the greeting-card experience people want you to think it is,” Tom says.
“So I hear,” I say. “I guess everybody has their hard stuff to deal with.”
We talk for a little while longer, and then it’s time to go to sleep. There’s just the one bed in my room, and I offer it to Tom, but he says we can share. “If that doesn’t freak you out or anything,” he adds.
“It’s a big bed,” I tell him. “I think I can handle it.”
I do take some precautions, though. I usually sleep in just my boxers, but I feel weird doing that, so I put on a pair of shorts. This has nothing to do with Tom, and everything to do with the fact that I frequently wake up with a boner, and I don’t want to accidentally introduce him to it.
I expect Tom to want to change in the bathroom, but he surprises me by doing it right there. He takes a pair of sweat shorts and a T-shirt out of his backpack. He seems fine with changing in front of me, but I look away while he dresses. When I look back, I see that he’s put on a T-shirt featuring Optimus Prime.
“Transformer,” I say. “Nice one.”
“Thanks,” says Tom. “It’s kind of my personal in-joke with myself.”
Before we get into bed, we put the bags with the flowers in them under our pillows.
“So, whatever we dream comes true, right?” Tom says.
“Supposedly,” I tell him as I slip under the quilt. Tom gets in on the other side. I can tell we’re both trying not to touch each other, and I wonder if for him it’s about being a straight guy sleeping in a bed with a gay guy, or just general awkwardness.
“In that case, sweet dreams,” he says.