Wink Poppy Midnight(3)

I hoped the Hero would like it in his new house. Lucy hadn’t liked it. She’d been a mean, superstitious old woman who called us witches and clutched her rosary whenever she saw us. And she threw apples at the Orphans if they played too close to her lawn. Her husband had been nice, he was always smiling at us from across the road, but he died three years ago. Felix thinks Lucy poisoned him, but I don’t know. Old people die all the time without the help of poison.





I LOOKED UP, and there she was suddenly, standing at the bottom of the front steps, wearing a little green button-down shirt and a pair of baggy brown overalls with huge strawberry buttons on the straps. It was an outfit a kid would wear, not a seventeen-year-old girl. The overalls were dirty and too big for her little body.

Wink was one of the infamous Bell kids. They never seemed to end and who knew how many there really were in the first place.

But now I lived next to them and so maybe I would be able to find out. Maybe that would be my second goal of the summer, like this:

1. Get over Poppy. For good.

2. Count the Bell kids.

In elementary school, Wink Bell had been called Feral Bell behind her back because her hair was messy and her clothes were always kind of dirty. Feral was a big word for little kids, which, looking back, makes me think some bitter teacher gave her the nickname first. People still called her Feral sometimes, and she didn’t seem to notice really, let alone mind.

All the Bell kids had weird names, just like me and Alabama, and I’d always felt drawn to them for that, if nothing else.

I shifted the box of books I was carrying to my other arm, and stared at Wink. Her red hair curled into long, tight spirals that draped over her thin shoulders and she had freckles on her nose and cheeks and just about everywhere else. Her eyes were big and green and . . . innocent. No one’s eyes looked like that anymore. No one my age, at least. Our eyes grew up and stopped believing in magic and started caring about sex. But Feral’s . . . they still had a faraway, puzzled, lost-in-an-enchanted-forest gleam to them.

“You look like someone,” Wink said.

I put the box of books down on the porch and Wink must have taken that as an invitation, because she walked right up the steps and stood in front of me. Her head barely reached my shoulder.

“You look like someone,” she repeated.

People in school thought Wink was strange. Beyond strange. If a person was just a little weird, that person could be made fun of. Maybe they knew too many Star Wars quotes, or maybe they talked to themselves, or lived in a one-room mountain shack, or smelled like basement, or did magic tricks in school every chance they got because they wanted to be magicians. These people could be teased. Laughed at. Made to cry. But not Wink. The bullies had given up on Wink and her siblings years ago. The Bells were impossible to ridicule—they were never, ever embarrassed. Or scared. Eventually the bullies got bored and moved on to easier prey.

Wink had an older brother named Leaf. He graduated last year, but when he’d been in school everyone, everyone, had been afraid of him. Leaf had calm green eyes and dark red hair, as straight as Wink’s was curly. He was tall and lean and you’d never think he’d be able to beat the hell out of anyone. But he did. All the time. He had a temper on him that no one, not even the teachers, took for granted.

Everyone said the Bell kids were witches and weirdoes. And people left them alone. And they seemed to like it that way, for the most part.

So why was Wink standing on my porch right now and staring at me and looking like she wasn’t going anywhere?

Wink reached into a pocket of her overalls. It was so deep her whole arm disappeared inside. When she pulled her hand back out, it held a small book. She flipped through it, found what she was looking for, and handed it to me. It was old, and the pages were half falling out. Wink held it open at an illustration of a boy with a sword at his side. The boy was on a hill, facing a dark stone castle, grim-looking mountains in the background. He looked like he was waiting . . . waiting for something to come out and kill him.

“That’s Thief,” Wink said, pointing one of her short freckled fingers at the boy. “He fights and kills The Thing in the Deep with the sword his father left him.” She tapped her fingertip on the page. “See his brown curly hair? And his sad blue eyes? You look like him.”

I glanced at the illustration again, and then back at Wink. “Thanks,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it was a compliment.

She nodded, kind of gravely, and put the book back in her deep pocket. “Have you read The Thing in the Deep?”

I shook my head.

“I’ve read it to the Orphans many times. The Orphans is what I call all my sisters and brothers, because there are so many of them and because we don’t have a father anymore. We do have a mother, so they’re not real orphans, but she’s always busy reading people’s leaves and cards and we’re left to ourselves, mostly.”

Wink paused.

“That’s why you’ll see a lot of strange cars in our driveway. A strange car means someone is here, and she’s reading their cards.”

Wink paused. Again. She was in no hurry.

“Mim read my leaves and she said you and I were going to have a story together. I was wondering if our story was going to be like The Thing in the Deep, because you look like Thief.”

Wink took a big breath, let it out, put her hands in her pockets, and stopped talking. A breeze floated by and lifted her thick hair off her shoulders. After her long speech, she now seemed content to just let us stand in silence.