Wink Poppy Midnight (20 page)

I
WATCHED
M
IDNIGHT
walk down the road, and I knew where he was going.

He didn't see me. I was good at hiding. I'd learned how, from the book
Sneaks and Shadows.

I taught Poppy how to hide too. She was a quick learner.

The Wolf first came to our door on the arm of my brother Leaf. She liked him for his being so savage and wild. She had that in her too, though mostly it was all buttoned up and locked in like the drugged woman in
Blood Red and White.
The Wolf was younger then. She was still just Poppy. She
was still just a girl, like the rest of us. And Leaf could handle Poppy. He knew what he was up against. He didn't have a big, soft heart like Midnight, with all its wide-open windows and doors and easy ways of entering. Leaf's heart had barbed wire and alarms and vicious, barking dogs. He was safe from her teeth.

Outside the hayloft, I was invisible. I was a ghost.

But inside the hayloft, it was different.

The first time Poppy found me up there, reading to the Orphans, she was with Leaf. Later she started coming up there just to find me. She said she wanted to hear my stories. She said she liked the way I read. And the way my hair curled. And the way my freckles reminded her of my brother.

The Wolf called me Feral outside the hayloft, but inside she called me Wink. She taught me how to keep my lips soft when I kissed. She taught me how to stroke skin with my fingertips, until the goose bumps came.

The White Witch gave Edmund Turkish Delight and convinced him to betray his brother and sisters. The Wolf kissed me and asked to be my friend. But unlike Edmund, I knew there were strings attached. I knew all the time. I knew what she wanted. I didn't fall under her spell, like the rest, like magic words and a wand waved over a head.

I
JUMPED IN
the Blue Twist. I thought I might want to drown, like Virginia Woolf, even though that wasn't the plan, had never been the plan. But I didn't fill my pockets with stones, so maybe I wasn't truly committed. The water turned me round and round and just when I was about to open my mouth and let it fill my lungs, the river threw me against a dead old tree and I came to a stop.

I crawled out, black dress sticking to my body like glue. I fell on the riverbank and looked up, and never felt so alive.

After that it was just me and the Bell horses and the old Gold Apple Mine by Gold Apple Creek. I slept on hay and ate wild plums. I sang my heart out in the woods, all alone, like Leaf did that one day.

I thought I might be too spoiled and princess-and-the-pea to make it alone, so much had happened since that time I'd run off to my grandpa's cabin. But Wink had faith in me and that gave me faith in myself, and faith was something I never knew I needed until I got it from her.

I caught Wink copying my handwriting once. I figured
she was up to no good, but then, I was never up to any good either, so who was I to judge.

She visited every day, and night, and brought me a fishing rod, and coffee beans, and hardboiled eggs and fruit and sandwiches and cheese and books to read. And I read all her fairy books, every last one, I read them over and over, I read them until they started making sense.

I liked to make people dance. I liked shaking their strings and making them march up and down the stage to my own distinct Poppy tune.

But Wink did too.

More than me, even.

She promised.

She knew where he was. Leaf.

I had to be the wolf, she said. It was her idea, her plan, the unicorn underwear and the kissing contest and the calling her names and the vile Roman Luck house and the making Midnight into a hero. I had to get tied up to the piano and stay there all night and then disappear for a while and then she'd fetch him. She'd fetch him back. And I agreed, I agreed just like that, no hesitation, it was easy for me, as easy as the sun setting, as easy as thunderstorms, and rivers rising, and boys leaving, and two girls reading together in a hayloft.

I
SPREAD THE
rumor that Leaf was finding cures in the Amazon, but he really ran down to California, to the Red Woods. He was living in the forest with some other Heroes, sleeping in tents during the night and fighting the Loggers during the day.

Poppy wanted Leaf. She wanted him so badly that she risked cuddling up to me in the hayloft to find out where he was. The Temptress, gentle words and deliberate gestures. I was supposed to be flattered and shy and overwhelmed, and I was. But not enough.

She left the Temptress behind, eventually. She started using her normal voice. She talked about Leaf, but she talked about other things too. She told me about the Yellows. She told me that she wanted to scream every time her parents called her
their little angel
. She told me that she'd read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books six times through in secret and she fantasized about cutting off Mary's blond ringlets, right to the skull. She told me that she'd wished she had a younger brother or sister. She told me that she hated the way that
everyone at school looked at her like she had all the answers.

She told me how she sometimes stayed up all night just to hear the birds start singing their hearts out come dawn.

I
HAD THIS
idea that maybe they'd all be better off without me anyway, at least for a while. Buttercup and Zoe, and Briggs and Thomas, and Midnight. Like, maybe if I disappeared everyone would be happier, and I'd be happier too, and it wasn't just my self-destructive streak talking. Some people needed to be alone, Thoreau and Emily Dickinson and me. Leaf said that once, and then followed it by saying Thoreau and Emily were better people, way better, even though they were long dead and he'd never met either in person, only read their writing, and yet that still didn't stop him from going on about their supposed shining characters, as compared to me, black and rotten to the core.

When Midnight finally found me at the Gold Apple Mine, I was wearing a kerchief in my hair, a blue one, and washing my clothes in the cold stream, my calves moonlight-white in the water. I know what I looked like, like a wholesome dairymaid or something from a pastel-hued painting, pink
cheeks, slightly crooked button nose, working cheerfully in the sunlight. Midnight had been there for a while, I think, just watching me slap a soapy old shirt against a rock.

“You saved my life,” he said, when my eyes met his.

“I did,” I said back, cool as you please.

And he smiled.

O
NCE UPON A
time I thought I could change stories, make them go the way I wanted, instead of where they actually went. Leaf warned me against it. He told me I wouldn't find my own story until I stopped messing with everyone else's.

I planned to bring Midnight and the Yellows together at the Roman Luck house. I planned it all along. It was the Final Chapter.

The clues . . . the Yellows would have figured them out soon enough. Together they would have figured it all out, like when Percival Rust gathers the Orphan Bandits and together they crack the code and find the missing girl in
The Grisly Kidnap.

But the clues were for Midnight, not the Yellows. They were for him alone.

The jasmine. I filled the dip of each candle with the oil, and then, when I lit the wick, the heat spread the smell throughout the room, easy, easy, easy.

I climbed through Midnight's window every day and sprinkled the oil over his bed, easy, easy, easy.

Playing Poppy . . . that was easy too. I'd watched her. I knew her inside and out. I'd read her cover to cover, like
The Thing in the Deep.

I
SPENT THE
day with Poppy.

I listened to her.

She listened to me.

I aged about twenty years.

Afterward, I found Wink in the hayloft. Just standing there at the edge of the opening, waiting for me, like she knew.

“You lied,” I said, the words out of my mouth before my feet left the ladder. “You plotted with the one person I wanted to leave behind. You manipulated me . . .”

Wink backed up, one step, two.

“You dangled Leaf in front of Poppy and then pushed her over the edge. You let people think she'd
killed
herself. And she almost did. How could you do it? How could you do it, Wink?” I put my hands on the floor and pulled myself inside. I stood. I towered over her, but she didn't flinch this time, didn't turn away. “Did you think that if you created a fairy tale and made all of us play along, made me defeat a monster and become a hero . . . you'd have a happy ending, like a princess in a hayloft story?”

Her red hair hugged her cheeks, long curls covering all the freckles, and the only thing I could see was her damn green eyes, beaming at me, innocent as ever.

She still didn't move. Didn't apologize.

I'd expected lies from Poppy.

But not Wink.

I put my hand to my heart, closed my eyes, tilted my head back . . .

I'd never yelled in my whole life. Never yelled at Alabama, or my parents, not even Mom when she said she was taking my brother and moving to France. Never raised my voice in anger. But I felt it building now. I was going to yell. I was going to yell until my heart burst open, blood spraying everywhere. I was going to yell until there was nothing left inside me, not one damn thing. The sound came, up my throat, buzzing at the back of my teeth . . .

I opened my mouth—

And roared.

It was shaky, and hoarse, and raw.

But it was a roar.

Three seconds and I was done. Spent. I sunk down to the hayloft floor and stayed there.

Wink came over to me after a while. She sat in the hay, knees tucked under her chin, red hair everywhere.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked.

I shrugged, and didn't look at her.

The yelling had left me dark inside.

Empty.

Hollow.

“Pa was tall and lean, with deep brown hair and eyes,” she said.

I didn't move. I didn't say anything.

“He was beautiful. I knew this even when I was little. I used to weave my fingers through his hair when he read to me. I'd marvel at the smooth, olive skin of his cheeks next to my own pale, freckled hands. I remember running my thumb over his long eyelashes and liking how they tickled my skin.”

She paused.

I sighed.

She kept going.

“Pa first read
The Thing in the Deep
to me when I was
Bee Lee's age. Mim was doing someone's cards and Felix was sleeping next to her and Leaf was off wandering in the woods, which he started doing as soon as he could walk.
Some people are like that,
Pa said. They have the roaming in their blood. He was a roamer at heart too, and came from a long line of them. Bee Lee is the only one of us that looks like him, though Leaf takes after him in all else.
There's no keeping a roamer,
Pa used to whisper in my ear, long before I knew how much he meant it.
You can tie them down, cage them up like a bird, and it will work for a while, but eventually they will break free. And then they'll run until they die.

“I thought he was the hero. I pictured him in my head when he read the fairy stories to me. He was the adventurer, the explorer, the swashbuckler, the champion. He was Calvino, King of the Thirteenth, and Paolo, the lost heir of World's End. He was Redmayne, singer to the gods, and he was Gabriel the shepherd, and Nathaniel, the builder of cities.”

She stopped talking for a long time and just stared at the hay.

Wink was telling the truth. I could feel it.

No fairy tales this time. No lies.

And I was back in, just like that, hook, line, sinker.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He left the morning Peach was born. I remember . . . I remember how the mists drifted down from the mountaintops and gave the sun an eerie light. Leaf called it a fairy kind of day and I thought so too. Mim checked herself out of the hospital early and picked us up from Beatrice Comb, who lived off by herself at the foot of Three Death Jack. She watched us sometimes, before she died in her sleep a few winters ago. We got home, and he was gone.”

She looked at me, green, green eyes.

“Three months later, I was playing Follow the Screams with Leaf in the woods and I saw something in the Roman Luck house, saw someone moving. I got closer. I peeked in the bay window and there he was, sitting on the green sofa in the music room, reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee, a pile of clothes in the corner, dirty plates on the floor. Pa had been living there, the whole time.
The whole time
. He hadn't even come home to see his new baby.”

Long pause.

“And then . . . ?” I asked softly.

“And then he saw me at the window, on my tiptoes, my eyes looking over the sill. He didn't smile at me. Didn't say my name.
Run along
. That's all he said.
Run along.

“I told Leaf about him. And Leaf told Mim. Pa left after that, left like Roman Luck, gone in the night. Gone for real. Gone for good. Autumn and Martin Lind and the murder,
that was storytelling, all storytelling. But I did see a man in the Roman Luck house. I didn't lie. Not about that.”

Wink got to her feet, slowly, and walked over to the hayloft opening. I followed. She looked out into the dusky evening light. The twins were on the roof of the farmhouse again, throwing apples at Peach on the ground, who easily dodged them even though she was laughing her head off.

W
INK READ T
HE
last chapter of
The Thing in the Deep
that night, and I stayed to watch her do it. I needed her to finish the book. I needed the end. When she was done she closed the book and went over to the far wall. She reached up on her tiptoes and set it on one of the dusty wooden crossbeams.

“I'm not going to read that story again,” she said. “I'm done with it, Midnight. Forever.”

Dad once told me that the most honorable thing you can do in life is forgive. I didn't believe him at the time, and maybe I still don't. Honor came from defeating foes in battle. From going on long, noble journeys to help those in need. From vanquishing evil and protecting the innocent.

Didn't it?

I left. I walked to the Blue Twist. Alone. I stripped and jumped in naked.

Night sky above.

Cold, dark water below.

I let myself sink down, down, down to the smooth river stones, down into the blackness, until the river ran over my head, and my hair fanned out like flames.

Wink wasn't a villain.

She wasn't a hero.

People aren't just one thing. They never, ever are.

Wink was flesh and blood.

She was bad.

And she was good.

She was real.

And at least I was finally going to get to know her now. The real her.

The real living and breathing and thinking Wink.