Wink Poppy Midnight(15)

Deep as a dark, misty forest path.

One that led to blood, and love, and death, and monsters.

She kissed with yearning.

I’d felt that yearning before. I’d yearned at Poppy all year, so hard I thought I might burst into flames, spontaneous yearning combustion. But I’d never felt any yearning back.

I stretched into the fresh air bouncing through my window, and smiled.

Who knew there was so much going on inside a small, red-haired girl with strawberry-buttoned overalls.

Alabama dated a lot of girls. A lot of girls. Girls went to him like flies to honey, like kids to puddles, like cats to shafts of sun.

I once asked him if he liked any over the others. If any of them meant anything. We were walking home from a late-night horror movie. I remembered Alabama’s boot heels click-clacking on the cobblestone street that led to our old house. My brother stopped walking and looked at me. He always wore his hair long, past his shoulders. He sometimes tied it back with a thin strap of leather, but not that night. It was blowing free in the summer breeze, flickering black then blue then black again in the yellow streetlight.

“Midnight, do you know Talley Jasper?”

I did. Talley was a puzzle. She had waist-long brown hair and played the cello—she was always lugging that big instrument around. She sat by herself at lunch, reading a book while she ate an apple. She was always eating apples. Her parents owned some overpriced clothing company, but she never acted like the other rich kids, spoiled and aggressive and entitled and loud. She was nice to the unpopular kids, and prickly with the popular ones. She once smiled sweetly at me when I accidentally stepped on her foot in the cafeteria. She said, “It’s okay, Midnight,” and then walked away, and I remembered being really pleased that she knew my name.

“Talley has more going on inside her head than anyone I’ve ever met. And someday I’m going to find out what. Meanwhile I’m just biding my time.”

We started walking again, turned down our block. We reached Poppy’s big house, perfect grassy lawn, perfect white pillars, perfect gazebo off to the side. I slowed down. Alabama slowed too.

“How do you know that, about Talley? How can you tell?”

“I just have a feeling.” Alabama smiled. “Plus there was the time I ran into her late one night near the Blue Twist River, where it curves at the edge of town. She was just standing at the edge, watching the stars. She turned, caught me watching her, and then . . .” Alabama’s eyes flashed the same way our mom’s did when she was talking about a new idea for a book. “And then she grabbed me with both hands, clenched my shirt in her fists, reached up, and kissed me. And she never said a word. Still hasn’t said a word to me. I once passed her in the hall at school, and I brushed her arm as I walked by. She looked up at me, and smiled, but kept on walking. That’s it. So I wait.”

Alabama chuckled, cool and lazy, and then mom called down from the upstairs window, wanting him to come help her with a bit in her story. He opened the door and went to her.

I was still full of Poppy-love when Alabama told me about Talley. It was last summer and I was caught up in her like a soft, white cloud in a black thunderstorm. I’d no idea what my brother was talking about.

Now I knew, though.

I wondered if Alabama missed Talley, in France. I wondered how long he was going to wait for her.



I FOUND MY dad in the attic. He’d taken it as his new office/library, which meant that he’d had to move six million heavy boxes of books up two creaking flights of stairs the day before.

Dad liked to collect things, like Mom and Alabama did, but collecting was his business, so he had the excuse.

I gave him a mug of green tea. Mom and Alabama drank coffee and nothing else. And my dad drank green tea, and nothing else. I wasn’t sure what I drank yet.

Dad took the tea, and sipped, and smiled. He was unloading old wrinkled-looking books and auction catalogs. Everything was a mess, which drove me kind of crazy. I liked things clean.

The angled ceiling meant my dad had to duck whenever he walked to the corners of the narrow, rectangular room. Exposed beams and dust. But he seemed to like it.

I noticed that he’d put up his wedding picture on his antique desk. My dad wasn’t giving anything away about his true feelings regarding my mom leaving with my brother. So I looked for hints where I could.

I put my palms on the polished wood and leaned in closer.

My dad in a brown suit, looking big-eyed, deer-in-headlights. But my mom was wearing her wide, beautiful smile, the one that made her eyes go soft and twinkly.

And if sometimes I thought her smile in that picture looked genuine, but a bit strained, well, I was probably just reading into it.

“So you were talking to the oldest Bell girl yesterday,” Dad said, not looking at me, his eyes on the green leather book in his hands.

“Yeah.”

“I like her,” he added.

But what he meant was, I like her better than Poppy.

My dad knew what Poppy was the moment she first walked through our door. He would have put her on the List of Forbiddens if he could have. Eli Hunt respected maturity like he respected privacy. He let us, both me and Alabama, make our own rules after we turned sixteen. For better or worse, I was in charge of my own life now.





THERE WAS A big thunderstorm a few years ago, it knocked down trees and houses and flooded the Blue Twist River, and everyone was super into it, it was exciting, destruction is exciting, no matter what they say. I went down to the river just to watch it rising, and to see what had been picked up in its stormy path, patio furniture, toys, dead animals.