Wink Poppy Midnight

by April Genevieve Tucholke

  I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t stand looking at her. I didn’t want to see what her eyes would say, once they opened . . .

  I turned away and stared at the fluttering red curtains instead.

  “Midnight.”

  The red curtains fluttered and fluttered. You could really see how dirty they were, in the dawn light. Sun-bleached, faded to pink in places and teeming with dust and grime. Flutter, flutter.

  “You didn’t come back,” she said. “You left me here, and you didn’t come back.”

  I didn’t look at Poppy. I didn’t look at Wink. I just stared and stared at the red flutter flutter.

  Flutter. Flutter.

  I ran.

  Down the hall and out the door and down the steps and into the woods.

  I ran away.

  Heroes didn’t run away.

  I wasn’t a hero.

  I turned and looked over my shoulder, and there was Wink, coming right after me, acorn skirt and freckles and saucer-green eyes.

  She was fast. She caught up. She grabbed me and held me.

  Her skin melted into mine, blood to blood, bone to bone. We hugged and melted into each other as the sun burst into the sky and the birds started singing.

  “I have to go,” Wink said. “I helped Poppy to the green sofa, but she’s not well, Midnight. She didn’t want me to leave her alone. You need to go back to her. Stay with her. I’m going to get Mim.”

  THE WOLF DIDN’T look like the Wolf anymore, tied to the piano with dried blood on her face.

  She just looked like a girl named Poppy.

  I DID IT. I went back.

  The green sofa was a mess of blond hair and black skirt and long legs. I kneeled down. Her eyes were closed and I didn’t know what to do at first, so I just took the corner of my shirt and wiped at the blood around her mouth.

  “I can’t move my arms,” she said.

  Her voice was hoarse, and raw, and soft. Her cheeks were pale and waxy, and her skin was cold, snow-cold, ice-cold.

  “My hands are numb, so numb, Midnight. I can’t move them at all.”

  I wanted to turn away and stare at the curtains again.

  I wanted to run.

  But I didn’t. This time I didn’t.

  I started to rub her arms from shoulder to fingertips. I rubbed until my fingers ached, over and over and up and down, and please move your arms again, Poppy.

  Finally, finally, her right hand twitched. And then her whole arm. And then she sat up and screamed. She cradled one arm in the other and just screamed.

  Sometimes when I was a kid I’d lie the wrong way in bed and my legs would go to sleep. I’d wake up in a panic, unable to move, convinced I’d lost my legs in a horrible accident. I’d shout out and Alabama would come running. He’d sit by me and tell me I was all right, just hang on, just hang on, until boom, the blood came roaring back. And it hurt, god, it hurt. I’d sit there and shake and pound my legs with my fists and Alabama would stay calm and cool and just keep telling me the pain was good, it meant everything was all right. He’d do this until I could move again. Until I could sleep again.

  Poppy screamed and shook on the ratty green Roman sofa and I just kept telling her she was going to be all right, over and over again, like Alabama.

  If I’d felt bad before, it was nothing to how bad I felt now.

  “You’re going to be all right,” I said. “You’re going to be all right.”

  Finally, finally, her arms went slack in her lap, and she went still.

  Poppy opened her eyes.

  I looked into them. I made myself do it.

  They were scared.

  And hurt. So hurt. I hadn’t known a person could look so hurt.

  “You must all really hate me,” she whispered, her voice quiet and scratchy like it was being dragged over gravel. “You must really, really hate me.”

  I didn’t deny it. I couldn’t.

  It was true.

  I’d hated her.

  I felt sick suddenly. Sick like the flu, mixed with too little sleep and cold, clammy fear. The room started blurring at the edges, and I started seeing spots . . .

  “Just leave me alone,” Poppy whispered. “Go away, Midnight, and leave me alone.”

  And I did.

  I ran out of the house. I ran out and left her there. Again, again, all over again.

  I found Wink and Mim on the path.

  Mim’s red hair was in thick, tied-up braids and her long red skirt was swinging across the muddy path, turning the hem black.

  They stopped walking and looked at me.

  Mim was serene. Not anxious. Not confused. Not uneasy. Just serene. “You’re very pale,” she said, and gave me a mothering side eye.

  “I left Poppy. I just left her in the house. I couldn’t stand the look in her eyes. I . . .”

  I blinked. Hard. I’m not going to cry, I’m not going to let Wink see me cry, damn it.

  Mim just nodded. “Wink gave me a few details. A very few. How did this girl end up tied to the piano all night?”

  Wink glanced at me and I glanced at her. I blinked again. And again.

  “She just did,” Wink said, finally.

  Mim stared at us, sharp and wary now. She took her hands off her hips and held one out to me and the other out to Wink. “Give me your palms. Quick. Both of you.”

  I slid my fist onto Mim’s strong, callused fingers, and opened it. Wink did the same. Mim leaned over my hand.

  “Enough,” she said, a second later, and dropped my palm.

  She read Wink’s next. Ten seconds. Twenty.

  Wink looked up at her mother, and their eyes met, green to green. Something passed between them . . . a flicker—

  “You went too far,” Mim said, so quiet I almost didn’t hear. She stared at Wink for another long second, dropped her hand, and started walking toward the Roman Luck house.

  We followed behind.

  Through the front door, down the hall, into the music room.

  But we were too late.

  Poppy was gone.

  MIM MOVED ABOUT the kitchen and made golden turmeric milk and never said a word.

  I stood in the corner and watched her, but she never looked at me. Not once.

  She was angry.

  And Poppy was missing.

  There was a hayloft book called The Wolf Without a Howl. It was about a white wolf that lost her entire pack to starvation one long, cold winter. Afterward, she was too sad and lonely to howl. It was a forlorn tale and I didn’t read it to the Orphans very often.

  We’d killed the monster, Midnight and I.

  We’d taken the howl out of Poppy.

  WINK SAT ON a hay bale, and I sat on the hayloft floor, my head against her skinny knees, her hands in my hair.

  “Do you think Poppy just went home? I’m worried about her, Wink.”

  Wink made her little hmmm sound. “In The Fairy Evil, Jennie Slaughter was cast off by the Tree Fay and wandered the moors for three years, not remembering who she was or where she belonged. Maybe Poppy lost her mind and is wandering the woods like Jennie.”

  I moved my head, and her hands slid away. “I’ll never forget seeing her there, with her wrists tied to the piano leg and the dried blood on her face and the bright blue veins running down her white arms. It’s burned into my brain. Forever.”

  “I know what a dead person looks like,” Wink said, after a while. “I know what a dead person feels like. I held Alexander, that day in the fog. Poppy was close to dying when we found her, Midnight. Her skin was cold and blue-tinted . . . she was clammy and stiff . . .”

  “Who’s Alexander?”

  “No one.”

  “What day in the fog?”

  Silence.

  I got up and went to the hayloft opening.
I stared down at the farm below, and watched Hops and Moon trying to climb the side of Wink’s house using nothing but their hands and feet, like monkeys, while Peach alternately yelled out encouragement and criticism.

  I sat back down and Wink ran her fingertips over my scalp. She smelled like cinnamon. “Mim knows we did it. She knows we tied her up and left her there.”

  Wink’s fingers stopped moving. “Yes.”

  “Is she angry?”

  “Yes.”

  I turned, so I could see her face.

  The summer sun was bringing out Wink’s freckles. They were darker than they had been just a few days ago. Her freckled skin was so different from Poppy’s perfect milky white. And I liked it. I liked it so much it hurt.

  “Wink, I’m scared that the night in the Roman Luck house damaged Poppy in some deep way. I don’t think we did the right thing. I don’t feel, in my heart, that it was right.”

  “She would have done the same to me, if you hadn’t stopped her. Sometimes the only way to fight evil is with evil.”

  But I’d seen Poppy shivering and shivering and I’d still tied her up and left her in the Roman Luck house. And then I’d fallen asleep and not gone back to free her until dawn.

  “You destroyed the monster, Midnight. That’s what the hero does.”

  After Poppy, after all her lying and lying, I didn’t believe anyone about much of anything anymore. Except Alabama, and he was in France.

  But I wanted to believe Wink.

  Her eyes met mine, and I saw a cloud pass over them, like she knew. Like she’d just read the doubt in my mind.

  And then she hugged me, tight, her arms around my neck, her cheek in its hollow, her skin nuzzling into mine. She wound her fingers in my hair, and her freckles flowed around me like a scarf and she was whispering things in my ear, hero things, Thief things . . .

  Bee Lee started climbing up the hayloft ladder. I knew it was her because she was singing a little song to herself about chickadees and werewolves. When she got inside she went right up to me, like she sensed something. She ran sticky fingers over the back of my hand and smiled at me.

  “Are you okay, Midnight?”

  I shook my head.

  “I have bad days too.” She pulled a strawberry out of her pocket, plucked the green stem off, and gave it to me. “But tomorrow will be better. That’s what Mim always says. You just have to eat a strawberry and then wait for tomorrow.”

  I WENT TO Poppy’s house. I stood at the door for ten minutes, and never rang the bell.

  It wasn’t until I finally turned to leave that I saw Thomas lurking in the shadows near the lilac bushes, watching me.

  He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything.

  I ate supper with my dad, late, which he liked. Tomato, mozzarella, and pesto sandwiches, sitting on our front steps, facing the orchard and the creek and the Bell farm.

  There were fireflies.

  If I was extra silent and he knew something was wrong, he didn’t ask me about it.

  My bedroom smelled like jasmine. It hung on the air, thick and humid. I threw off my clothes and fell on the bed and closed my eyes and told myself it wasn’t real. Poppy wasn’t in my room. She’d never be in my room again. I’d seen to that.

  I’d made my choice. I’d gotten my wish.

  My mom used to make pumpkin hot chocolate every fall. She’d put milk, vanilla, cinnamon, maple syrup, and chocolate in a pan, and then when it was hot she’d whisk in a can of pumpkin puree. Alabama and I could drink whole mason jars of the stuff, and did. And now just the sound of my feet crunching on fallen leaves conjures up the smell of it, crystal clear, like I had a mug of it right in front of me.

  The jasmine . . . it was like the pumpkin hot chocolate. It was all in my head.

  But I dreamed of her anyway. I dreamed she came in through the window and lay down next to me, her silky blond hair spreading across my chest.

  THE STORY HAD started in earnest now.

  The threads were spinning.

  Midnight was shook up. He destroyed the monster. That was always a turning point on the Hero’s journey, like when Peter kills the wolf on the other side of the Wardrobe and the Lion tells him to clean his sword. Like when Elsbeth cuts out Jacob’s heart, and roasts it on a spit, and feeds it to his lover, in Elsbeth Ink and the Seven Forests.

  There are Scottish folktales that tell of people who go off into the Highlands, and disappear into the mist, and are never seen again.

  That’s what happened to Roman Luck.

  That’s what happened to my father. He disappeared into the mist. I thought he was the Hero, but he was just a man.

  I told Midnight that I’d held Alexander in the fog the day he died. Alexander was the Hero in A Cloak, A Dagger, A Journey—but he’d been alone when the poison reached his heart, at the end. He fell down on the road, his hands clutching the golden penny whistle that the black-haired princess gave him the day he saved her life.

  I’d imagined what it would have been like, imagined it so clearly, with the cold mist on my neck and his eyes going dark and his body going stiff in my arms. It was real. It happened.

  Mim came into my room, later that night, after the Orphans were asleep. She asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell her.

  I just shook my head and kept quiet.

  I WAS STRETCHED out in my bed and staring at the windows. It was raining again. I stayed there so long Dad knocked on my door, a cup of green tea in his hand. I got up, took it, and slid back under my covers.

  Her body, slumped and blue in the gray light.

  The look in her eyes.

  Her screams when the blood came rushing back.

  I threw on a jacket and walked in the rain, into town. I went the long way around. I didn’t want to go by the Roman Luck place. I couldn’t.

  I stood on her doorstep. Didn’t ring the bell.

  I’d done this the last two mornings.

  “She’s not there.” Thomas stepped out of the shadows by the lilac bushes, wet blond hair sticking to his forehead. “She’s missing. Her parents are gone at a medical conference and she’s missing and no one is going to answer that door, Midnight.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Thomas hadn’t seen Poppy either? I thought she’d been avoiding me, just me. “I need to talk to her, Thomas. Badly. I’m sure she’s around somewhere. She’s probably just down by the river. She likes to have picnics in the rain, bread and cheese and a bottle of wine and cold, fat raindrops on her cheeks.”

  “That was the first place I looked.”

  “She could be at the coffee shop, the one with the high ceilings and the caramel-colored lattes.”

  He shook his head.

  “Or at the church—she likes to sit in a back pew and listen to the organist practice.”

  Thomas’s eyes were red and he looked . . . smaller, somehow. Almost fragile. “She’s gone. Disappeared. I was scared something like this might happen. That’s why I’ve been watching her house.”

  “Something like what?” And my voice started high and went even higher at the end.

  “Poppy’s been sad lately. Really sad. Didn’t you notice?”

  “Poppy’s not sad. She’s never sad. She laughs at everything. That’s the first thing I knew about her. She always just laughs.”

  This was a lie.

  I’d seen her crying her eyes out, three nights ago.

  Thomas shook his head, wet hair flying. “If you can’t see past all that, past the way she brushes everything off to protect herself, then you don’t deserve to know her.

  “It’s all an act, Midnight. It’s an act. She’s been perfecting it since she was a kid, and so she’s really good at it, but it’s just an act.”

  Poppy, sobbing and screaming when she realized I was really going to leave her, all alone, in that house
. . .

  How well had I known the girl I’d been sharing my bed with for a year?

  Thomas started talking again. He was staring off toward the gazebo and rambling, like I wasn’t even there.

  “. . . Briggs and his temper, the things he said, that last time he caught me and her together. Poppy just laughed them off, like always, but they were so mean, so mean. He said she was a liar and a spoiled brat. He said no one would ever really love her, and she didn’t deserve love, she deserved to die alone. But no one deserves that, no one . . .”

  Thomas put his hands over his eyes, and pressed. The rain started up again, and the drops hit his fingers and ran down his wrists and forearms. I zipped my jacket shut, and waited.

  He moved his hands away from his face and looked at me, red, red eyes. “I’m scared Poppy might have run away. She did that once, last year. She was gone for three days. Did you know that?”

  I did.

  “We have to find her. We have to help her, Midnight.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, Thomas.”

  “So you’ll help me? You’ll help me look? I don’t trust Briggs. I don’t trust any of the other Yellows. I don’t want them to know. They hate her. They follow her around, and do what she says, but they all hate her.”

  I looked at the wet grass, and the edges of the lawn blurred, a blurry green swirl. I felt sick again for a second. I put my hand on my heart and took deep breaths.

  Was Thomas right?

  You must all really hate me, she’d whispered to me there on the sofa in the Roman Luck house. You must really, really hate me.

  “What don’t you want the Yellows to know? That she’s missing?”

  “No, they already know she’s missing. I don’t want them to know about the letter.” Thomas reached into the pocket of his hoodie and pulled out a black piece of paper. “I found this last night in our hiding spot. Mine and Poppy’s. It was in the hollow of one of the Green William Cemetery trees. No one knows about it except us.”

  He handed it to me, and his eyes were kind of pleading.

  I opened the letter, shielding it from the rain with my arm.