Wink Poppy Midnight (5 page)

I joined Wink in staring up at the house. Big and gray and going to ruin. The bay windows were broken, and I could see the shadow of the decaying grand piano that I knew was inside. We'd all explored the Luck house when we were younger. Dared each other to go in, to put our fingers on the chipped ivory keys, to climb up the wobbly, creaking stairs, to lie down on the dusty, rat-chewed quilt that still covered the master bed.

I'd been surprised that Poppy wanted to have her party here. Fearless Poppy, who wasn't afraid of anything . . . except this, the Roman Luck house. Not even the Yellows
knew how much she hated the place. Just me. I'd been with her last summer, right beside her as she'd climbed the porch steps and then refused to go past the doorway, like a dog catching a bad scent. She laughed and said haunted houses were stupid. But her perfectly painted toes in their delicate, expensive sandals never crossed the rotting threshold.

Roman Luck's disappearance was our town's greatest mystery. He'd been young, and single, a doctor at the hospital where Poppy's parents worked now. And when he bought a grand house outside of town, in the middle of the woods, and filled it with grand things, people thought he was going to marry some pretty girl and live happily ever after. But he never did. He lived in the house for two years, and he never threw a party, or invited people over for supper. And then, one morning, he didn't show up for work. Days went by. When the police finally broke down the front door they found the inside frozen in time, as if Roman had just stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. There was a coffeepot on the table, stone cold, and a plate with a moldy, half-eaten sandwich. The milk had curdled in the fridge. The radio was even still on, playing sad old Delta blues songs . . . or so went the rumors.

“If I told you what happened to Roman, you wouldn't believe me,” Wink said out of nowhere, like she could read
my mind. Her shoulders shrugged up and disappeared into her messy red hair.

I took the bait. “Yes I would, Wink. I'd believe you.”

Wink shook her head, but she was smiling.

“Let me guess. Ghosts drove Roman Luck screaming into the night, and now he's off in an asylum somewhere, stark raving mad.”

She shook her head again. “The house is haunted, but that's not why Roman left. Sometimes people just leave, Midnight. They realize they are on the wrong path, or that they are in the wrong story, and they just go off in the middle of the night and leave.”

Here was my chance. Here was the opportunity for me to say that I knew all about people leaving, that my mom took my brother and left, not in the middle of the night, but she left all the same.

The moment was slipping by, slipping, and I was letting it . . .

Wink gave me a searching kind of look, like she knew what I was thinking anyway. “Mim once read cards for a very, very old woman who used to live in Paris. She told my mother that she had an apartment there, on the Right Bank, still filled with her furniture and dresses and everything. She hadn't been back since World War II. She said that one day she decided she was done with Paris, and the war, and she never went there again.”

“Is that true, Wink?”

“Of course it's true. All the strangest stories are true.”

And then we both abruptly stopped talking. We just stood next to each other and didn't talk.

It was coming back, the feeling from earlier, the calm, peaceful feeling . . .

Laughter.

I looked up.

The Yellows were staring at us. Poppy too. She said something and they laughed again. And then she repeated it. Louder.

“I bet Feral Bell has little-girl underwear on. I bet she still wears white cotton panties with polka dots or butterflies. What do you say, Yellows? Should we find out?”

“Shut up, Poppy.” And I tried to say it cool, say it how Alabama would say it, but I must have done it wrong, because Poppy just smirked at me, long and slow.

I looked at Wink and her face was serene. Calm.

“Grab them,” Poppy said.

And the Yellows were on us. The guys held my arms and I couldn't move. Buttercup and Zoe went for Wink, and she didn't budge, didn't even flinch. Just stood there, looking peaceful. Almost like she'd been expecting this all along, and was glad to get it over with.

The non-Yellows gathered around. Watching. Waiting to
see what Poppy would do next. Tonisha and Guillermo and Finn and Della and Sung. Rich shiny hair. Rich shiny clothes. Rich shiny faces.

“Don't,” I said. “Don't, Poppy. Please.” I didn't even try to sound like my brother this time.

But her arms shot out and grabbed the edge of Wink's green dress, and yanked it up.

Wink's skinny white legs, red socks to her knobby knees.

Wink's underwear. White, with little unicorns on them.

Just as Poppy had predicted.

Poppy pointed. “See?” she said.

And laughed.

And laughed.

L
EAF
GRADUATED AND
left. I was sixteen and I wasn't sure I had a heart, until it fucking broke in two, ripped shreds and veins and blood everywhere. He didn't even tell me where he went, just up and off and I even saw him the day after graduation, standing on the road at the end of my street, waiting for the bus, the sun setting behind him, green duffel bag over his shoulder. I would have thought he did it on purpose, caught
the bus where I was bound to see him, except that would have meant Leaf thought about me, and I knew he didn't.

He gave me a nod as he climbed the steps, that's it, like I was a fucking postman or a stranger in the street. I tried to reach him, ran all the way, I was as good at running as I was at everything else. I tore, strained, but the doors shut, and the bus pulled away, and that was the last time I saw him.

I'd sworn that I'd never let a boy steal me, steal my heart, my mind, any single part of me. I'd sworn it over and over since I was old enough to know the difference.

But my knees hit the pavement with a crack anyway, and I lost it, I totally lost it, one second, two seconds, head hanging, eyes gushing, but people could see, they might be watching. I got back up, and left two bloody scrapes on the sidewalk where my kneecaps had been.

I thought about finding Zoe and Buttercup and spilling my guts and telling them my secrets. I could see them in my head, black dresses and striped socks, patting my shoulders and graciously tolerating my new vulnerability while losing respect for me with every tear that slid down my face.

I went over to the Hunt house instead and lost my virginity to Midnight.

I
BARELY EVEN
noticed when the Wolf did what she did at the Roman Luck house. My head was all caught up in the unforgivables, who were bothering me, even with the sugar, so I'd started thinking up a plan to get rid of them for good.

I decided to show Midnight the hayloft. The hayloft is where events happen and plots unfold and I wanted events to happen and plots to unfold.

W
IN
K DIDN'T CRY
or anything. I don't know why I thought she would. The Bells never cried. That's one of the reasons they were impossible to bully.

She was quiet as I walked her back home, but then, she'd been pretty quiet the whole night. And I didn't know her well enough to know if that's how she usually was anyway. She didn't talk in school, but neither did I, and it didn't prove a thing.

“Do you want to see the hayloft, Midnight?”

We stepped out of the trees and back onto her farm. Two of the dogs got up from where they were sleeping in the long grass near the chicken coop. They shook themselves and came over to greet us, soft, warm tongues on my cold hands.

“Yes I do, Wink.”

And she smiled, lips parting slightly, eyes bright. Just like that. Like she'd already forgotten that her dress had been pulled up and her unicorn underwear seen by a dozen kids from school.

How did she do it? How did she not care?

I was in awe of her, all of a sudden.

I used to be in awe of Poppy. All those years ago, laughing at her blood-dripping knees at the edge of my driveway, her bicycle in a heap beside her.

That's how I used to be.

Wink's farmhouse was dark and I figured it must be around eleven. The lights were still on in my house across the road, though, which was typical. Dad often read and worked until deep into the night. We were both night owls. Mom and Alabama were morning people.

I walked over to the ladder I'd seen Wink on earlier. I put my hand on a rung, and started climbing. I'd never been a guy for heights—that was my brother, who used to go cliff-jumping at the alpine lake near Kill Devil Peak. But I'd
never seen the point of risking your life for one good fall.

Up and up. My hands were sweaty and my right palm slipped. I looked down at Wink's red head, coming up beneath me, and felt all right again. I got to the top of the ladder and put one knee in the square opening, and then the other, and I was inside the hayloft.

Watery white moonlight streamed between the cracks in the boards, so I could see pretty well. Wink crawled in behind me, quick and easy like she'd done it a million times, which I guess she had.

The hay smelled nice. Kind of sweet and dry like sawdust. There were square bales of it everywhere, all over the big, airy, angled-ceiling room. Most were piled up against one wall, but the floor was covered in a thick carpet of hay too.

Wink picked up something from the ground, and then reached into her pocket with her free hand. I heard a
fzzt
sound, and then a flame cut through the darkness. She lit the lantern she was holding, and set it back down. The hayloft filled with shadows.

“Isn't that dangerous?” I asked. “A lantern with all this hay?”

Wink fluttered the fingers of both hands in a sweet-ish dismissive gesture. “We haven't set fire to anything yet.”

I thought about Mrs. Bell, and how she let all her kids do whatever they wanted, and how they all were still alive and thriving, somehow. My own father was gentle and
compassionate but his List of Forbiddens had been a mile long when Alabama and I were kids. He took full responsibility for our staying alive and we hadn't been allowed to go ice-skating on Troll Lake, or sledding down Alabaster Hill, or hike any lonely forest trails that might be hiding cougars or bears. It bothered Alabama more than me, since he was born with a death wish.

Sometimes I wondered if that's why my mother preferred Alabama, because he took risks and liked to put himself in danger and was cool and didn't care about things that didn't matter. Alabama had his dad's silk-black hair and high cheekbones and narrow black eyes. And even though neither of us had ever met him, I had a feeling that Alabama's father was cool, and full of death wishes, just like my brother.

I suppose that's why my mother fell in love with him.

“It's for the horses,” Wink said. She sank down on top of a two-foot pile of the thin blond sticks, heaved a great sigh, and looked . . . happy. “The hay, I mean.”

“You have horses?” I saw a small, beaten-up table with two short stools at one end of the barn. There were toys everywhere, balls and dolls and jump ropes and a scattered pack of playing cards and books and an old wooden rocking horse missing his tail.

Wink nodded and tucked her arms behind her head. “They live in a large fenced-in area near the old Gold Apple
Mine. Mim bought them off a man in Sleepy Peak—he said they were too old to ride. So now we just let them run wild back there in the summer. Some of the mine's buildings are still standing, and there's a little creek, but there's no road to it and no one ever goes back there. The horses have the run of the place. We round them up and keep them warm in here in the winter. Mim's got a soft heart for animals.”

I sat down beside her and leaned back, just like she did, putting my arms behind my head. I thought the hay would be itchy, but it wasn't. “Why do you call your mother Mim?” I asked, since I was really starting to wonder.

Wink turned her head until her cheek rested on her upper arm. Her red eyebrows tilted toward each other. “Why, what do you call yours?”

Her face was two feet from mine but her hair was so big it spread out between us and tickled my chin. “I don't call her anything right now. She took my older brother, Alabama, and went to France a few months ago. She's a mystery writer and is setting a series there, something historical about the Cathars.”

I let out a sigh of relief. That hadn't been as hard as I'd thought it would be.

Wink was the first person I'd told.

“When is she coming back?”

I shrugged. Wink reached out and put her fingers on my
right wrist, on the tender inner side. She moved her fingertips back and forth, kind of gentle and soft, sort of like how she petted the dogs earlier, right between their ears. Her hand felt small and warm and really, really nice.

“Why were you named Wink?” I asked, out of the blue.

She looked at me in that sweet, staring way she had. “I don't know. Why were you named Midnight?”

“My mom said it's because I was born at midnight, right at the stroke of twelve. But my dad says I was born near dawn, just as the sun was coming up. So who knows.”

Wink just nodded, and went back to brushing her fingers across my wrist.

She was doing that thing again, that no-talking thing that made me feel dreamy and peaceful.

“I'm sorry,” I said, after a while. “I'm so sorry, Wink. Poppy's got you on her radar now and it's my fault.”

“It's all right,” Wink said, whispery voiced. “She was just trying to embarrass you through me. She wanted to make you feel helpless.”

Wink. For a girl with a lost-in-an-enchanted-forest look in her eyes, she didn't seem to miss much.

“Don't let her win, Midnight. Don't feel embarrassed or helpless. Then she'll have no power over you.”

“Easier said than done.” Wink had a heart-shaped freckle, right above the inner elbow hollow of her left arm. It matched
her heart-shaped face. I wanted to touch it. I wanted to put the fleshy part of my thumb right on it.

She smiled at me, big, and it made her ears stick out until they looked elvish.

“So everyone saw my unicorn underwear, Midnight. So what. Repeat after me.
So everyone saw Wink's unicorn underwear. Who cares
.”

I grinned, and did it.
“So everyone saw Wink's unicorn underwear. Who cares.”

“There,” she said, and laughed, and her laugh was full and high and chinkled like the keys on the toy piano I'd had as a kid. “In a hundred years, who will care about my unicorn underwear? Who cares right now? There are bigger things to think about.”

“Bigger things like what?”

“Battles and wars. Lost causes and lost loves. Unsolved mysteries and magical rings and Here Be Dragons. Fairy paths. Child-eating witches and child-saving witches. Tinderboxes and saucer-eyed dogs.”

It was the longest she'd talked so far and her voice got quieter and quieter toward the end until her words were almost a lullaby.

“I'm using my Putting the Orphans to Sleep voice,” Wink said.

“I could go to sleep right here in the hay,” I said. And yawned.

“Midnight?”

“Yeah?”

“What do you want to be?”

“You mean, what do I want to do, like whether I want to be a writer like my mom, or a rare book dealer like my dad?”

“Yes.”

A breeze blew through the opening to the hayloft and rattled the lantern. The flame flickered and the shadows in the barn jumped.

“I want to be a treasure hunter.”

I probably should have said something realistic and normal. Something like “professional soccer player” or “film director” or “private investigator.”

I waited for her to laugh. Poppy would have laughed. But Wink just looked at me.

“I don't want to find relics, though, like the Arc of the Covenant. I want to find music, and art. I want to find lost Bach compositions in German monasteries. I want to track down the missing paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt, and the lost plays of Shakespeare. I want to crawl through castles and dig through attics and search through cellars.”

“You would be good at that,” Wink said.

And I wasn't ashamed of my confession anymore, not a bit, even though I've never admitted my treasure-hunting dreams to anyone except Alabama.

Wink smiled at me, and her ears popped out again.

“What do
you
want to be?”

She made a soft
hmmm
sound. “I want to be a Sandman. I want to crawl in children's windows and blow softly on their necks and sprinkle sand in their eyes. I want to make up stories and whisper them in the children's ears and give them good dreams.” She breathed in, and out, her skinny ribs rising in her strange green dress. “Sometimes I do this for the Orphans. When there's a thunderstorm and they're tossing and turning. I sit beside them and whisper until they sleep deep and quiet.”

She was looking at the hayloft ceiling and I was looking at her. “What kind of stories do you make up?”

“Well, I have a story about a cruel, selfish witch girl named Fell Rose. She casts a spell on an entire village, and makes them all her slaves, makes them dance to her wishes like puppets on strings . . . all except a dark-haired boy named Isaac who figures out her weakness and takes away her powers.”

“What happens?” I asked, all caught up already. “What happens to Fell Rose and Isaac?”

She turned her head to the side, and met my eyes. “They become friends.” She paused. “The Orphans always fall asleep before I get to the end. But I think they become friends.”

We both stopped talking for a while, and I soaked up the comfortable silence.

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked a little while later.

Wink didn't answer me, just made a
hmmm
sound again.

“What happened to your dad? Do you read tarot cards like your mother? Did your older brother Leaf really run off to the Amazon?”

I was spewing questions suddenly, but didn't feel embarrassed, not at all.

Wink just laughed, chinkle, chinkle. She stared at the high barn ceiling, stretched her arms above her head, and sighed. “There are five Orphans,” she said, “not counting the one that left.”

I found out later that there was pretty much no way of getting the direct truth out of Wink when she didn't want to give it. So that was all I got in response.

A few minutes went by and I watched Wink's profile in the shadowy barn light, her small doll nose and her pointed chin.

That morning I'd been standing next to my new home and looking at the farmhouse across the road and wondering if I'd finally managed to leave Poppy behind.

And now here I was, in a hayloft with Wink Bell, and more content than I'd been since Mom and Alabama and France.

“Are you going to get revenge?” Wink asked in her sleepy voice, out of the blue. “You picked the Three of Swords and I think it means that you plan to get revenge. I think you
want to punish Poppy, like Thief punished The Thing in the Deep when he lured her out of the castle and into the open, so he could fight her under the blue sky, in the sun.”

“Revenge on Poppy? No. All I want to do is get away from her.”

“But heroes get revenge. That's what they do.”

“I thought heroes saved people and brought about happy endings.”

“Yes, but first comes the revenge and the making-wrong-things-right.”

And I thought Wink was going to whisper something in my ear when she leaned in then, something else about heroes and thieves and vengeance and Fell Rose and the boy . . .

. . . so when she put her lips on mine, I jerked.

She held still for a second, and then tried again.

If I'd thought about it, I would have guessed that Wink would kiss like a little girl, since she still kind of looked like one. Sweet and tender and shy. Two quick pecks and then running away.