Wink Poppy Midnight(13)

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.

But her kisses were . . . hunger, and experience, and skill, and want.

She grabbed my arms and then my hair and brought my face down to hers and when my lips touched her neck, her skin was sweet as sugar.





I HAD ACQUIRED the Yellows my sophomore year because people of my caliber need an entourage.

Thomas was so wounded and sad all the time, broken home and a dead baby sister and he was one of those people who felt things deeply, deeply, and Briggs was the opposite, feisty and temperamental and jaunty like the ankle-biting Pomeranians that live across the street. I drove Thomas and Briggs batshit crazy all year and they were just the icing on the cake, after Midnight.

I was the center, the sun, and they were all spinning around me . . .

No Poppy, you’re nothing. You’re nothing at all.

Leaf’s voice in the back of my head, back of my heart, creeping up on me like a wolf in the woods. I liked to brag to him that I wasn’t scared of anything, but he knew. He knew that deep down I’m terrified I’ll get old and ugly and it will all catch up to me, and my cruelty will echo through my wrinkles and liver spots and everyone will stop doing what I want or listening to me or even worse, forget about me altogether.

But I plan on dying when I’m still young and beautiful like Marilyn Monroe, just watch me.

Buttercup was the daughter of a martial arts movie star who was never around. He left her here in Broken Bridge along with his wife, and only came back for holidays, and Buttercup’s mother was tall and beautiful and elegant, long swinging black hair, like mother, like daughter. I’d seen her once at the farmers’ market and once in the bookstore, but I don’t think she spoke English, not very well.

Zoe was the leader of the two, even though Buttercup did all the talking. Zoe liked to stand in her shadow publicly, but secretly she made all the decisions, called all the shots, people can surprise you that way, if you pay attention, which mostly I don’t. Zoe came from a loving family, her parents were loaded and liberal, and let her do and be whatever she wanted, as in, if she turned to them one day and said, Mom, Dad, I’ve decided that I want to be a banana, that’s who I am, they’d be like, We’ll pick up some yellow fabric in town.

I half hated Zoe most the time for this, but sometimes I was just kind of enraptured with her too, like how people fawn over the UK royals, scrambling after each tiny golden tidbit of glittering personal info like starving dogs. I basked in her sunshiny life and daydreamed about being a tiny pixie girl with brown curls and parents that didn’t give a damn in all the right ways.

Once upon a time Zoe and Buttercup and I were rubbing gravestones in the Green William Cemetery because that’s what they wanted to do and I was trying to be more charitable and let them get their way sometimes. The weather had turned and the sun was gone and Leaf found me as I was scraping my charcoal piece over my thousandth Here lies the body of, the dark clouds bounding in.

He told me to follow him and I did, dropping the tracing paper and the charcoal without another word to Zoe and Buttercup, I didn’t even think of them, they didn’t even exist anymore. We went to the woods and I told Leaf how I was trying to be better, how I wasn’t so bad, not really, not in my inner deeps, I was only bad when I wanted to be at least, I could help it, I could stop anytime. He laughed and said I was hopeless and sad. But when I pressed myself into his bony ribs he pressed back. He put his palms on my cheeks and his lips on my forehead and he just held me and held me and held me until the sky cracked and the rain started pouring.