So why was Wink standing on my porch right now and staring at me and looking like she wasn’t going anywhere?
Wink reached into a pocket of her overalls. It was so deep her whole arm disappeared inside. When she pulled her hand back out, it held a small book. She flipped through it, found what she was looking for, and handed it to me. It was old, and the pages were half falling out. Wink held it open at an illustration of a boy with a sword at his side. The boy was on a hill, facing a dark stone castle, grim-looking mountains in the background. He looked like he was waiting . . . waiting for something to come out and kill him.
“That’s Thief,” Wink said, pointing one of her short freckled fingers at the boy. “He fights and kills The Thing in the Deep with the sword his father left him.” She tapped her fingertip on the page. “See his brown curly hair? And his sad blue eyes? You look like him.”
I glanced at the illustration again, and then back at Wink. “Thanks,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it was a compliment.
She nodded, kind of gravely, and put the book back in her deep pocket. “Have you read The Thing in the Deep?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve read it to the Orphans many times. The Orphans is what I call all my sisters and brothers, because there are so many of them and because we don’t have a father anymore. We do have a mother, so they’re not real orphans, but she’s always busy reading people’s leaves and cards and we’re left to ourselves, mostly.”
Wink paused.
“That’s why you’ll see a lot of strange cars in our driveway. A strange car means someone is here, and she’s reading their cards.”
Wink paused. Again. She was in no hurry.
“Mim read my leaves and she said you and I were going to have a story together. I was wondering if our story was going to be like The Thing in the Deep, because you look like Thief.”
Wink took a big breath, let it out, put her hands in her pockets, and stopped talking. A breeze floated by and lifted her thick hair off her shoulders. After her long speech, she now seemed content to just let us stand in silence.
I didn’t quite know how to talk to Wink yet. That would come later. But I already found her sort of relaxing. The seconds ticked by and I listened to the trickling of the creek down by the apple orchard and the rustling sounds of my dad unpacking inside. I felt my shoulders ease downward and my posture soften. Being with Wink was somehow like being alone, except not, you know, lonely.
And eventually I realized that the reason I felt so peaceful was because Wink wasn’t taking stock. She wasn’t trying to figure out if I was sexy, or cool, or funny, or popular. She just stood in front of me and let me keep on being whoever I really was. And no one had ever done that for me before, except maybe my parents, and Alabama.
“So what happens in the book?” I asked, after a few minutes of breezes and curly hair and overalls and not-judging and soft, peaceful quiet. “What happens to Thief?”
“There’s a monster in the shape of a beautiful woman. She kills people. Children, old people, everyone. She tries to kill the girl that Thief loves. He fights the monster, and he kills her, because he’s the hero. There is a great victory. And a descent into darkness. There are clues and riddles to solve, and trials of strength and wit. There’s redemption, and consequences, and ever after.”
I’ve read a lot of books too. More than I let anyone know, except my dad. I read a lot in the last year especially. My days had been shuffling from class to class, driving all my damn friends away with my mood swings, and my nonstop Poppy-this-and-Poppy-that-spewing, and my love, love, love, love, always my love for this blond-haired girl who sometimes held my hand between classes and sometimes kissed me on the lips when people weren’t looking, but mostly, mostly ignored me, leaving me following behind, calling her name and her refusing to turn around.
But my nights, the ones where Poppy didn’t knock on my window, were spent with my books. I read a lot of science fiction and way more high dragon fantasy than is probably good for a person. I read the classics, like Dickens and Animal Farm and Where the Red Fern Grows. I even read some historical romance and some murder mysteries and horse-and-gun Westerns. I didn’t care. I read it all. Alabama was basketball and cross-country and leaning on things and jumping off things and all the girls liking him. But I was the reader brother who liked to swim in rivers and hike in the rain and sit under the stars but never, ever play organized sports. And I supposed I was all right with this.
Wink and I kept staring at each other. She was running this conversation, and I let her call the shots. She turned, and looked down at the books in the box I’d been carrying, so I got a chance to notice the soft-looking batch of freckles on her inner arms, and how small her nose was, like it belonged on a doll, and her short, stubby, faded-red eyelashes, and her pointed chin.
My dad walked by us at one point, tall, thick brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses, easy, soft stride. He liked to run, when he wasn’t reading or selling rare books to people in faraway places, and his running meant he moved like a cat. He reached in and got a lamp from the moving van, strode quietly back, smiled, and carried the lamp inside, letting us get on with our silence.
“Midnight.”
A girl’s voice shredded the breezy stillness. I jerked my head toward the sound.
Poppy.
She was standing at the edge of the woods, on the other side of the lane, at the edge of the Bells’ rambling farm.
I guess two miles wasn’t far enough after all.
Damn.
Poppy passed by the red barn, the four Bell outbuildings, and their old farmhouse with its red slouchy roof and tall windows with black shutters. She crossed the road that was really just gravel and weeds, wove between our four bright green apple trees, walked up the wooden porch steps, and stood in front of Wink as if she weren’t there. She was wearing a white loose dress that still managed to hug her body in a way that whispered I paid too much for this. Poppy was the spoiled only child of two busy doctors who raked in money from the snowboarding celebrities-with-a-death-wish that bombarded Broken Bridge every winter. Her house was one of the biggest around, including the endless second homes owned by film stars and aging musicians.
She ran her hand through her hair and smiled at me. “Do you know how long it took me to walk here? I can’t believe I bothered.”
I didn’t look at her. I watched Wink walk down the steps, turn, and go back to her farm across the road without another word, quiet as a nap in the sun.
“My parents won’t get me another car until I graduate.” Poppy squeezed her perfect lips into a pout, oblivious to Wink’s departure, as if she were a ghost. “Just because I took the new Lexus without asking and then totaled it by the bridge. Fuck. They should have expected that.”
I ignored her. I stared off at the Bell farmyard, distracted by a bit of green and brown and red that was climbing a ladder attached to the big barn that stood off to the right of the white ramshackle farmhouse.
Wink disappeared into the dark square of the hayloft opening.
I’d known Wink all my life, but really, for all practical purposes, I’d only just met her.
Poppy snapped her fingers in my face, and my eyes clicked back on her. She looked annoyed and beautiful, as usual, but I wasn’t really noticing for once. I was wondering what Wink was going to do up in that hayloft. I wondered if she was going to reread The Thing in the Deep to the Orphans.
I wondered what it was going to be like, living next to a girl like that instead of a girl like Poppy.
I suddenly wished, with my whole damn heart, that I’d always lived in this old house, across the road from Wink and the Orphans.
“Midnight, Midnight, Midnight . . .”
Poppy was saying my name over and over in the drippy sweet voice that had once set me on fire and now just made me feel cold.
I yanked myself out of
the peaceful, surreal feeling that Wink had cast, and finally focused on the girl in front of me. “Go home, Poppy.”
Poppy blinked her tart gray eyes. Slowly. She played with the expensive pockets on her expensive dress, and smiled at me—her gentle, sad smile that, with very little effort, she could make seem sincere. “We’re not over, Midnight. We’re not over until I say we’re over.”
I couldn’t even look at her. The peaceful Wink feeling was gone now, entirely gone. All I felt was anger. And melancholy.
Poppy reached up and put her hand on my cheek. Her eyes hooked into my skin and pulled my face down, toward hers, like a fish on a line.
I fought her. But not nearly as hard as I wanted to.
Poppy was used to getting what she wanted. That was the thing about Poppy.
She won. She always won.
LEAF DIDN’T TALK in school, he didn’t stand around and yak about boy things with other stupid boys, none of the Bell kids talked, really, which is one of the things that made them so weird. Leaf was eerie and still and quiet, and he always looked bemused or angry. And when he didn’t look bemused or angry, he looked blank and distant and removed, like he wasn’t seeing anything or anyone else around him at all.
Bridget Rise was a pants pee-er. Her older brother had been a pants pee-er too. I guess it ran in the family, a genetic pants-peeing gene, like having bad eyesight or dry skin or thin hair, something that evolution should have bred out, Darwin style. The last time Bridget peed her pants was at recess in third grade. Some of the kids called her gross and started throwing dirt at her, little tight handfuls of it that got in her hair and down her shirt.
I might have thrown some of the dirt. I might have given the other kids the idea. Bridget was crying, sobbing, sobbing, and then out of nowhere Leaf was there. He was eleven or twelve, but he had the temper, even then.
He picked Bridget up, soaked jeans and dirt and everything, and carried her into school.
And then he came back outside and kicked the shit out of every last one of us, everyone with dirt on their hands, literally, me included. He shoved my face into the ground, right into the mud I’d been throwing, and told me that if I teased Bridget again he’d break my nose.
He meant it, we all knew he meant it. And when I forgot anyway and called Bridget The Tinkler two weeks later at lunchtime, Leaf found me after school, one hand, one punch, that’s all it took, my eyes crossing as his fist hit my face, crack, snap, blood, scream.
My nose was still crooked from it. Even my doctor parents couldn’t fix it, not perfectly. Midnight said it made me even more beautiful, the tiny imperfection, but he read poetry and his mind was soft, like his heart. I stopped listening to him years ago.
I didn’t let Leaf’s laughter deter me that day in the hayloft. I was confused because I’d never lost at anything before, but I was high on the challenge, and I wanted to try at something for once, really try. That’s how I felt, at first.
The day I turned sixteen I walked up to Leaf between classes. I leaned my body against his gray locker, back arched. I was wearing the shortest skirt I owned, the one that made my legs look ten feet long, the one that made Briggs start drooling at Zoe’s party the other night, he actually drooled, and had to wipe his mouth with his hand. I’d left my bra sitting on my bed, and I knew my nipples were showing through my black slub T.
“Hi, Leaf,” I said, using the low, breathy voice that brought boys to their knees.
And he looked at me. Not with lust, or craving, or greed. He looked at me in the same way I looked at the band nerds in their marching uniforms as they bumbled down the hall carrying their stupid shiny instruments. The same way I looked at the spineless boys in my class with their panting eagerness and pathetic over-confidence and wispy arms and spindly legs.
“Move.”
That’s all Leaf said. He stood there, tall and skinny and red-haired and barely caring and all he said was move.
I never cried, not even as a baby. My parents said it was because I was such a sweet little angel, but my parents are fools. I never cried because there are only two reasons people cry, one is empathy and the other is self-pity, and I never had any of either. I cried over that move, though, I cried, cried, cried.
REVENGE.
Justice.
Love.
They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It’s the trifecta. It’s like if you’re making soup for a bunch of Orphans. You have to start with onions, and celery, and carrots. You cut them up and toss them in and cook them down. Everything that comes after this is just other. Stories are that way too.
I told the Hero about the Orphans, and The Thing in the Deep.
I liked his eyes.
POPPY FOLLOWED ME through my new house, across the creaking hardwood floor, around jumbled-up furniture, under spiderwebs, over boxes, up the stairs, hands sliding over the smooth dark wood of the banister, down the narrow, dark hallway, to the high-ceilinged bedroom that I’d taken as my own, last door on the left.
There weren’t sheets on the bed, but the frame and mattress were up. I stepped over two boxes and then moved around the room and opened all the windows. All four had faded yellow curtains that smelled like dust.
I went back to the door and closed it. Dad wouldn’t bother me if my door was closed. He respected privacy. Privacy was like gold to him, as in worth-its-weight. He wanted it, and so he gave it to others freely and without question.
I had to push the door shut the last few inches, so it would latch. This house seemed to be leaning on its side, like an old woman with one hand on her hip, and it made everything off kilter. Later on, I would come to like it. Later on I would hear the creaks and moans and feel welcome, and comforted, like the house was speaking to me in its own gasping, rickety voice. I would be able to tell where Dad was, down to which corner of the room, just by the series of pops and shudders and squeaks that echoed down to me like the refrain of a song I knew by heart.
But back then, it was just an old house, two miles away from Poppy, across the road from the Bell farm.
I turned around.
Poppy stood in the dusty sunshine of my bedroom, wearing nothing but a thin white summer dress and the skin she was born in.
How could something so soft and supple and flawless as Poppy’s skin hide a heart as black as hers? How could it show none of what was underneath, not one trace?
I’d read The Picture of Dorian Gray. I wondered if Poppy had a painting of herself locked in an attic . . . a painting that was growing old and evil and ugly and rotten, while she stayed young and beautiful and rosy-cheeked.
I sat on the bare mattress with a sigh. Poppy crawled into my lap. She kissed my neck. Her hands were on my shoulders, chest, stomach, down down down . . .
“No,” I whispered. And then louder. “No.”
I picked up Poppy by her hips and moved her onto the bed beside me. Her dress was pushed up to her thighs, and she crossed her naked legs, looked up, and smiled. “So never again? Is that it? You’re done with me now? You move out to this rat-hole farmhouse and suddenly it’s over?”
I met her eyes. “Yes.”
She laughed. She laughed, and it was hard and slick and cold, like chewing on ice. She got up from the bed and went to one of the two big windows on the east wall that faced the road, and the Bell farm.
“You’re going to be living next to her now.” Poppy glanced at me over her shoulder, her eyes mean and sly. “Feral Bell. That should prove interesting for you.”
“Don’t call her that.” I got up off the bed and joined her at the window. I looked past the three lilac bushes, past the old well, past the rope swing on the ancient oak tree, past the pine trees, past the fields of corn on the left that were rented out to a neighboring farm, past the apple orchard, across the road.
Our houses were close, even with the gravel lane between th
em. I could see everything. I saw chickens running around, following a rooster, and two goats in a white pen, and three kids playing with a dog, and another climbing the ladder of the red barn. I could hear shouts and laughter and crowing and clucking and barking. I could even smell gingerbread in the oven—the dark, sweet, spicy smell drifted right over the road straight to my nose.
It seemed so much nicer over there, in Wink’s world. Much, much nicer than being in this empty, foreign bedroom with a red-blooded Poppy.
“Don’t call her what? Feral? It’s better than Wink. Wink is like something from a children’s book. And then Wink and her pink horse, Caramel, rode off to Fairyland on a path made of clouds.”
Poppy was watching the farm, closely, almost as if she’d forgotten I was there. “Look at all those kids running around. Why should Wink get so many siblings while I have none? Leaf said once that I would have been a better person, if only I’d had a sibling or two. He said I’d be ‘less selfish by half.’ As if I—”
“Leaf?” I said. “Leaf Bell? You used to know him? People at school said he’s down in the Amazon searching for a cure for cancer. They said he sleeps on the ground and eats nothing but nuts and berries and he speaks their Mura language like a local—”
“Shut up.” Her eyes were back on mine. “Just shut up, Midnight.”
She went to the door, opened it, left.
Came back.
She sidled up to me and put two fingertips on my heart. Pressed.
“You and the Bell girl . . . you looked good together.”
I said nothing, waiting for the punch line.
“I mean it, Midnight. You should get to know her better.” She moved her fingers to my cheek, and ran them down, over my jawbone, across my neck. “Wink is weird and quiet and so are you. You two should be friends.”
I flinched. “What are you up to, Poppy?”
“Nothing. I’m just trying to be a better person. I’m bored with being mean, bored, bored, bored. So I’m attempting to improve myself. I’m setting you up with the weird girl across the road. I want you to be happy.”
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