Wink Poppy Midnight(46)

I liked to make people dance. I liked shaking their strings and making them march up and down the stage to my own distinct Poppy tune.

But Wink did too.

More than me, even.

She promised.

She knew where he was. Leaf.

I had to be the wolf, she said. It was her idea, her plan, the unicorn underwear and the kissing contest and the calling her names and the vile Roman Luck house and the making Midnight into a hero. I had to get tied up to the piano and stay there all night and then disappear for a while and then she’d fetch him. She’d fetch him back. And I agreed, I agreed just like that, no hesitation, it was easy for me, as easy as the sun setting, as easy as thunderstorms, and rivers rising, and boys leaving, and two girls reading together in a hayloft.





I SPREAD THE rumor that Leaf was finding cures in the Amazon, but he really ran down to California, to the Red Woods. He was living in the forest with some other Heroes, sleeping in tents during the night and fighting the Loggers during the day.

Poppy wanted Leaf. She wanted him so badly that she risked cuddling up to me in the hayloft to find out where he was. The Temptress, gentle words and deliberate gestures. I was supposed to be flattered and shy and overwhelmed, and I was. But not enough.

She left the Temptress behind, eventually. She started using her normal voice. She talked about Leaf, but she talked about other things too. She told me about the Yellows. She told me that she wanted to scream every time her parents called her their little angel. She told me that she’d read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books six times through in secret and she fantasized about cutting off Mary’s blond ringlets, right to the skull. She told me that she’d wished she had a younger brother or sister. She told me that she hated the way that everyone at school looked at her like she had all the answers.

She told me how she sometimes stayed up all night just to hear the birds start singing their hearts out come dawn.





I HAD THIS idea that maybe they’d all be better off without me anyway, at least for a while. Buttercup and Zoe, and Briggs and Thomas, and Midnight. Like, maybe if I disappeared everyone would be happier, and I’d be happier too, and it wasn’t just my self-destructive streak talking. Some people needed to be alone, Thoreau and Emily Dickinson and me. Leaf said that once, and then followed it by saying Thoreau and Emily were better people, way better, even though they were long dead and he’d never met either in person, only read their writing, and yet that still didn’t stop him from going on about their supposed shining characters, as compared to me, black and rotten to the core.

When Midnight finally found me at the Gold Apple Mine, I was wearing a kerchief in my hair, a blue one, and washing my clothes in the cold stream, my calves moonlight-white in the water. I know what I looked like, like a wholesome dairymaid or something from a pastel-hued painting, pink cheeks, slightly crooked button nose, working cheerfully in the sunlight. Midnight had been there for a while, I think, just watching me slap a soapy old shirt against a rock.

“You saved my life,” he said, when my eyes met his.

“I did,” I said back, cool as you please.

And he smiled.





ONCE UPON A time I thought I could change stories, make them go the way I wanted, instead of where they actually went. Leaf warned me against it. He told me I wouldn’t find my own story until I stopped messing with everyone else’s.

I planned to bring Midnight and the Yellows together at the Roman Luck house. I planned it all along. It was the Final Chapter.

The clues . . . the Yellows would have figured them out soon enough. Together they would have figured it all out, like when Percival Rust gathers the Orphan Bandits and together they crack the code and find the missing girl in The Grisly Kidnap.

But the clues were for Midnight, not the Yellows. They were for him alone.

The jasmine. I filled the dip of each candle with the oil, and then, when I lit the wick, the heat spread the smell throughout the room, easy, easy, easy.

I climbed through Midnight’s window every day and sprinkled the oil over his bed, easy, easy, easy.

Playing Poppy . . . that was easy too. I’d watched her. I knew her inside and out. I’d read her cover to cover, like The Thing in the Deep.





I SPENT THE day with Poppy.

I listened to her.

She listened to me.

I aged about twenty years.

Afterward, I found Wink in the hayloft. Just standing there at the edge of the opening, waiting for me, like she knew.

“You lied,” I said, the words out of my mouth before my feet left the ladder. “You plotted with the one person I wanted to leave behind. You manipulated me . . .”

Wink backed up, one step, two.

“You dangled Leaf in front of Poppy and then pushed her over the edge. You let people think she’d killed herself. And she almost did. How could you do it? How could you do it, Wink?” I put my hands on the floor and pulled myself inside. I stood. I towered over her, but she didn’t flinch this time, didn’t turn away. “Did you think that if you created a fairy tale and made all of us play along, made me defeat a monster and become a hero . . . you’d have a happy ending, like a princess in a hayloft story?”

Her red hair hugged her cheeks, long curls covering all the freckles, and the only thing I could see was her damn green eyes, beaming at me, innocent as ever.