Wink Poppy Midnight(39)
“Or she’s dead, and she’s haunting us.” Thomas said it kind of defiantly, chin up, like he expected us to start laughing.
Which Briggs did. “So she’s writing letters from beyond the grave? That’s so stupid. Poppy is a fighter, like me. She’s not a quitter.”
“Poppy is a lot of things,” I said. And meant it. “Look, Wink and I started this. Whatever happened in the Roman Luck house, whatever Poppy went through, it led to her going missing. I’m to blame.”
Buttercup turned suddenly and gave me a hug. Her arms were long and warm.
My mom had always said that fear brought out the truth in people. She based entire books on it. I guess Buttercup’s truth was better than I’d thought.
“I’m worried about Poppy,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m scared for her.”
“Me too,” I said.
“I’m going home.” Thomas started walking away, talking to us over his shoulder. “I’m going to study my letter and then I’m going to search every damn nook and cranny until I find her.”
“We’ll help you,” Buttercup said. And Zoe nodded. And Briggs followed behind.
THE THING ABOUT Briggs, the secret thing, was that he’d never hurt a fly. He was a bully, and like most bullies, like all bullies but me, he was a baby underneath it all. At least Midnight was a baby straight up, there was something to respect in that, there was. I said before that Thomas was the sad one, the sensitive one, but Briggs . . . I’d once seen Briggs cry over a spotted owl in the park that had broken its wing and kept hopping around because he couldn’t fly. Briggs tried to hide his tears but I saw them, and heard the way he was sniffling too, on his knees in the grass, and his voice was thick and choked and he kept asking me over and over what he should do, as if I was some sort of spotted owl wing-healer.
And right before the bird, Briggs had been taunting a nerdy little kid about his thick glasses and the soccer ball he couldn’t kick worth a damn, and the whole time it never occurred to him, the contradiction.
I used to meet the Yellows in the morning, not too early, at Lone Tree Joe. In the summer it was filled with wealthy, weasel-faced hipsters on break from school and staying in their parents’ vacation homes until September, but I was Poppy and had to have the best even if it meant rubbing elbows with the non-local trust-fund brat packs.
It seems like a million years ago, getting expensive lattes, shaken with ice, just the right combination of espresso to milk, just the right toffee color or I’d complain.
I once convinced Buttercup and Zoe to help me dig my own grave. We were bored and I was in a macabre mood and I wanted to see what it was like, to lie in the dirt six feet under like a dead person. We tromped out to the woods with shovels stolen from outside Loren’s Hardware store. They whined and whined but eventually we got a good trench dug out between two trees. I plopped down inside and crossed my arms over my chest like Wednesday Addams, and Zoe leaned over the edge and said something about worms and spiders, but I didn’t care, I stayed there for twenty minutes with my eyes closed. I wasn’t scared, it didn’t even feel that morbid, it just felt sort of peaceful, really.
Briggs caught me watching him in the woods.
He called out my name, kind of sad and desperate, but by then I was already gone, flitting through the night like one of Wink’s fairies.
Briggs had been digging in the dirt and muttering about a golden marble like some half-crazed, sweating farm laborer, and I couldn’t figure out why, not for a while. I had to sink down and lie on the dirt in the forest and put some pieces together before I got to the bottom of it.
I SAW BUTTERCUP and Zoe on Midnight’s steps.
Buttercup, sleek as a selkie, smooth black hair and olive skin like the taciturn enchantress in Lost Lies and Runaway Sighs.
Zoe, sparkly hazel eyes and thick black lashes and a small, pointed nose like the fay in Rat Hall and the Broom Girls. When she smiled at Midnight, her smile was as sparkly as her eyes.
All three talked for a while and then walked right through my farm, right into the forest, and down the path.
I got the Orphans out of bed and took them into town to get ice cream for breakfast. I did this sometimes in the summer, when Mim had her readings. We went to the little place by the library that was run by a witchie lady with long white hair. She opened the shop at ten in the morning because she believed that ice cream was sometimes for breakfast too. Bee Lee got strawberry, she always got strawberry, but you never could tell about Peach and the twins. Felix went for the pistachio, and so did I.
We were all sitting on the green benches in the park, eating in the sun, when I saw her, standing in a brick alley across the road, the shadows surrounding her like a pack of wolves.
No one else could see her. I knew they couldn’t. Just me.
I gave the rest of my waffle cone to Hops and walked across the street without another thought, like she was the blond, bloodthirsty siren in Three Songs for a Drowning.
I walked into the alley, bravely, right into the pack of wolf-shadows . . . but she was already gone.
I STOOD IN the kitchen and listened. Dad was upstairs in his attic, on the phone. His voice drifted down through the cracks in the floorboards and settled on my ears like dust. He was speaking German with the occasional Latin phrase thrown in. I only spoke a bit of French, but Alabama was fluent in it, like our mom. My dad spoke four languages, if you counted Latin, which I did.